NEWSWEEK Contributor Robert Cox files this report from the Super Bowl:
 

...I will be totally stoked to be in Arizona for the big game.

Early tomorrow morning I board a plane bound for Sky Harbor Airport and a week of fun and sun in the Grand Canyon State where Tom Brady and his juggernaut New England Patriots offense is expected to smash open another gaping hole--this one in the New York Giants secondary. We’ll see. The Giants are on a roll, playing like the old Parcells teams over the past month, and if they gave a darn about meeting expectations their season would have ended in Florida three weeks ago.

I have to admit that last summer, when I accepted an invitation to attend the Super Bowl, it never occurred to me as a lifelong Giants fan that my team would actually be playing in the game. So it was with absolute and unmitigated joy that I watched spellbound as yet another Lawrence Tynes field goal try first sailed aimlessly into the frigid Wisconsin night and then just as quickly righted itself and veered towards the center of the uprights, sending the Giants on one more miraculous road trip.

Still I’m worried. All throughout their improbable play-off run, the Giants have been like my guilty little secret. Now the secret is out: The Giants are a very good football team.  No one among the legion of football analysts and talking heads on the cable sports networks gave the Giants the slightest chance to win the NFC Championship. Even the most loyal of Giants fans would be lying if they told you they expected the Giants to be playing this weekend. They were picked to lose in Tampa Bay, lose in Dallas and lose in Green Bay. At each stop I’ve wondered, “Could it be that the Giants could somehow put together a streak and be there when I get to Glendale?”--and then pushed that thought right out of my mind as being utterly absurd. And yet, here we are.

The cherry on top was being offered the opportunity to contribute to Mark Starr’s blog over the next few days here at Newsweek.com. As the President of the Media Bloggers Association, I've been working with the folks at Newsweek for several months developing The Ruckus, a political blog covering the Presidential campaign.  Since I was going anyway, I offered to contribute to Newsweek.com's coverage of the big game and to my great pleasure they agreed. Mark is an experienced reporter who has been covering major sporting events for years so I am not even going to pretend I am “covering” the Super Bowl the way a guy like Mark can. What I can do is share my experiences with the overall spectacle of the Super Bowl from a fan’s perspective. I am going to do my best to get around town, attend various events, talk to fans and--if possible--current and former players as well as some of the other myriad celebrities and overall interesting folks who attend an event like the Super Bowl.

This will be my fourth--and third with the Giants. I was at Pasadena when the Giants won their first championship behind Phil Simms. I was in San Diego when John Elway led the Broncos in a huge upset over Brett Favre’s Packers. And, sadly, I was in Tampa when the Giants had their heads handed to them by Ray Lewis and the Baltimore Ravens. At those Super Bowls I met people like Warren Moon, Marv Levy, Chris Berman, Marty Schottenheimer, Chris O’Donnell (the actor), Denny Hastert (the then-Speaker of the House), John Fox, Sean Peyton, Bart Starr, Lester Hayes, Merlin Olson, Daryl Strawberry and many others. There are so many interesting people at this game that it is less like a sporting event and more like some psychedelic "happening" from the Summer of Love - even some of the bands performing are the same.

You just never know who you are going to bump into during a week like this and I plan on being ready so I’ve got my Nikon D-80 camera, my Apple Powerbook, iPhone and a letter from Newsweek saying I really am covering the Super Bowl for them. Cool!

More importantly, I’ve got my official NFC Champions Locker Room Hat, my Giants flag for the car and, since it can get cold at night in the desert, my blue and red Giants flannel pajamas which always bring good luck for the G-Men.  Next stop, Phoenix baby! Super Bowl XLII here I come.

There's no doubt that there is a significant point-spread factor in the growing conviction that New York is going to make a game of it Sunday against New England and quite possibly pull of a giant upset. During the first half of the season, the Pats were every bit as perfect against the spread as they were against the opposition. But over the second half of the regular season, it was a slightly different story. The Pats still won all the games, but they had to come from behind four separate times in the fourth quarter and the team covered the spread just twice. Moreover, it has failed to cover in either of the two playoff games. Despite that iffy performance for bettors of late, the Pats, a team that eked out a three-point victory over the Giants last month, have once again been established as a huge favorite--12 points in Super Bowl XLII.

It is the psychology of those recent point-spread shortfalls that has fed the notion that the Pats could be ripe for the picking. Never mind that the second-half spreads were seriously inflated by unsophisticated bettors leaping on the Patriots bandwagon. The betting result has pretty much obscured what the Pats accomplished in their two playoff games. They defeated two very good and very hot teams, Jacksonville and San Diego, in totally different fashion--one with a precision--indeed record-breaking--short passing game, the other with a smashmouth running attack. And though the Pats were challenged early in each game by strong performances by young quarterbacks, neither victory seemed in doubt by the fourth quarter and the Pats won both games by comfortable, two-score margins. Yet somehow the failure to cover made those victories seem disappointing rather than dominant or daunting.

The other nervous-making factor, especially for Patriots fans, is that they, of course, remember: the Pats were the last Super Bowl team to come in as a double-digit underdog, 14 points to St. Louis in 2002, before the Super Bowl XXXVI upset that launched the New England dynasty. And the previous time before that, in 1998, defending champion Green Bay was a 12-point favorite before losing to John Elway's Denver Broncos 31-24.

Rather remarkably, this will be the 14th time in 42 Super Bowls--fully one-third of them--that there has been a double-digit favorite. The first four games, back before the contests were yet "Super" and were simply called the AFL-NFL World Championship Games, all featured double-digit spreads in favor of the long-established National Football League champ. In the first two, the Packers walloped the AFL's Kansas City and Oakland, by huge margins. But in the final two years before the two leagues merged, bettors failed to grasp that the AFL had caught up and maybe even surpassed the stodgier NFL. First Joe Namath's New York Jets stunned the Baltimore Colts, regarded as a juggernaut, 16-7. A year later Len Dawson and the Kansas City Chiefs kicked the Minnesota Vikings 23-7.

Despite those notable upsets, more double-digit favorites have won and covered the spread to boot than bombed in the Super Bowl. In those 13 Super Bowls with a spread of at least 10 points, the favorite boasts a 9-4 record in the games and is 7-5-1 against the spread.