Something struck me when I read the beginning of Jay’s column yesterday:

“Other than Google vs. the world, the Road Runner vs. Wile E. Coyote and Rosie O’Donnell vs. her next celebrity victim, I can think of no greater mismatch than Peyton Manning vs. Rex Grossman. This is especially true after Manning finally flicked away King Kong and finished a postseason comeback for the ages over Tom Brady, who almost always wins the game and gets the lingerie model.”

No, it wasn’t that he apparently watches “The View.” That’s hardly shocking.  But I thought the implication that a victory over the Patriots somehow means the proverbial monkey is off Peyton Manning’s back was way off base.

Last week’s standout second half notwithstanding, Peyton is still a sure-thing Hall of Famer with a penchant for coming up short in big games and a gaping hole in his resume that only the Lombardi Trophy can fill. Just because he finally got the best of Brady and the Belichick in a playoff game doesn’t change that.

Rex, meanwhile, is in his first season starting and has already exceeded everyone’s expectations except possibly his own. His performances have been so all over the place that it’s impossible to have high expectations for him.  Or expectations of any kind.  If he falters, the national media will hardly bat an eyelash.

If Peyton fails, the “Will He Ever Get One” sharks will begin circling even closer.

If you think being known as the guy whose big talent vanishes in big games doesn’t weigh on people, look how many times Phil Mickelson collapsed with a major within his reach before he finally broke through.

Even though Peyton finally got his team to the Super Bowl this season, his playoff performance hasn’t exactly set the world on fire.  Rex actually has a better rating through the playoffs this year.  And with his history of being a big game head case, Peyton now has two weeks to be reminded of hundreds of fun little details.

Like how he could never beat Florida, alma mater of Grossman, Alex Brown, Todd Johnson and Ian Scott.

Or how Dan Marino has to take crap from the likes of Boomer Esiason for his lack of a ring.

Or how foster children across Indiana will be sold into slavery if the Colts lose.

(Note:  Let’s start this rumor ... every little bit of pressure helps.)

I’m not saying Rex is immune to the pressure of a city hungry for a championship, but it terms of the national media spotlight the heat is on Peyton.

Peyton played one good half of football against a Patriots team that is a shadow of what it once was.  He hasn’t convinced me the heat won’t get to him yet again. 

As I watched the final seconds tick off the clock Sunday and realized the Bears would actually be playing in the Super Bowl, I could hardly keep a single thought in my head.

I wondered how much my plane ticket back to Chicago would cost ($148 it turns out ... I’m temporarily in DC and couldn’t live with the thought of watching the Game in any other city).

I wondered how drunk my friends back home would be (turns out ... very).

I wondered how the volatile combination of breakfast sandwich, summer sausage, onion dip and Miller Lite would settle in my stomach (turns out not so well).

And of course I wondered who their opponents would be, knowing I’d have plenty of family and friends to talk trash with regardless of the outcome.

Not once did I wonder “What is Jay going to write tomorrow?”

Maybe my lack of interest was partly from his painfully predictable and comically inevitable “No one believed in these guys, including me, but now I will hop on the bandwagon but do so in the most backhanded way possible” column, most recently seen with the 2005 White Sox.

But it was more than that.

No circumstance highlights Jay’s complete inadequacy as a writer more than a win like that.  How does a guy whose total lack of insight is matched only by his absence of a soul, whose style is smarmy on the days he’s feeling charitable and downright cruel when he’s cranky, whose metrosexuality and pride in being loathed by an entire city was profiled in Chicago Magazine, capture the spirit of a total team win in the face of a national media that had all but buried them?

Basically, he doesn’t.  If not for my feelings of obligation to monitor the man’s output I probably wouldn’t even have skimmed it.

I couldn’t be more excited about the upcoming two weeks of constant media hype.  Normally I get tired of the Super Bowl machine, but with the Bears involved I think I’ll have an insatiable appetite.

How many more writers will do some variation on the “Lovie and Tony:  They’re Black, They’re Buddies and They’re Beating on History’s Door” story?  Has any pair of Super Bowl quarterbacks ever faced anything close to the amount of scrutiny Peyton Manning and Rex Grossman are headed for?  Have the Colts realized that Devin Hester will actually be able to plant his feet in Miami and that resistance against his inevitable three-touchdown performance is futile?

So many questions.

And I know Jay doesn’t have an answer or even an amusing thought about any of them.

Sure, I’ll read what he has to say these next two weeks, since I’m going to read just about every last one of the five million cranked out by the hype machine.

Let’s just say Jay isn’t that high on the pecking order.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have some ESPN insta-polls that require my participation.

A classically smug prediction from the Sunday edition of the Sun-Times, hours before the Bears spanked the Saints:

I’m picking the Saints, 38-31, which suggests I think Rex can have an OK day keeping up in a shootout.
But he’ll ultimately make more mistakes than Brees while McAllister pounds away as Shaun Alexander did.

He couldn’t possibly have been more wrong.

Two days back from a medical crisis, two popular locals bashed.  Yesterday it was Mike Ditka, today: Barack Obama.  Jay’s jealousy truly knows no bounds.

Jay is a terrible sports columnist.  We’ve documented this.  But it’s not too late for him to get a second chance in life.  A second chance in politics.  Jay has absolutely no conviction.  We’ve seen that he says one thing one day, only to pretend like he never said it the next.  We’ve come to realize that he is a slimy, hateful little man, desperately searching for power in a world where he has none.  Yes, in retrospect, politics seem like the obvious answer. 

Recently, Barack Obama had the nerve to say this:

The Bears are going to the Super Bowl.  I am happy for New Orleans. It’s a wonderful story for their city, but this fairy tale ends when they come to Chicago.

I know.  I couldn’t believe it either.  How dare he?!  You see, Barack, cheering for the Bears makes you “insensitive.” It also makes one thing clear: you hate black people.  Wait, what?  Oh.  Hmm.  Regardless, in what seems like the first step towards making a life in politics happen, Jay gives Obama some free political advice:

Excuse me, Mr. Teflon Candidate Sir, but if I were your campaign adviser, I’d say you screwed up and talked trash when sensitivity called for a higher road. A man pursuing the Democratic presidential nomination always should see the bigger picture and never underplay the greater fairy tale.

You can almost see Jay saying, “No charge for that,” making his hands into guns, shooting them at Barack and winking. 

Jay’s right, though, in stating that Barack shouldn’t publicly say he wants the Bears to beat the Saints.  I mean, surely that is going to come up at almost every presidential debate.  I can see it now.  “Is it true, Mr. Obama, that you rooted for your local team over the New Orleans Saints?” Barack would then meekly nod his head.  “Mr. Obama, you are a shame to this country.  You are the worst thing to happen to New Orleans since Hurricane Katrina.”

Certainly Jay is dead-on when he suggests that rooting for the Saints will do more for New Orleans than any policy or money Obama could ever direct towards the city.  Winning the Super Bowl is obviously the first step to building stronger levees, convincing people to move back and reducing the crime rate.

Okay, on second thought, maybe Jay is a little off target in his first bit of political advice.

We all understand that the city of New Orleans could use something to cheer about.  I think most Bears fans would admit that if they had to lose to someone in the NFC Championship, they’d much rather it be the Saints than say, the Eagles.  We understand that this game could bring a little happiness to their city, but let’s not be overly sentimental about it, all right? 

Let’s leave overly dramatic sentences like:

I just want Bears fans to recognize the Saints as more than a football team.

to third graders. 

It seems that Jay’s column today was simply an excuse to tell Chicago that the rest of America is rooting against us.  Well, Jay, we never thought you were alone.  Most sports fans tend to root for the underdog or the Cinderella story.  We understand that the Bears are not going to be the most popular team this weekend, but we don’t care.  We’d still love to see them absolutely dominate the Saints.

Does it mean we have no compassion for the people of New Orleans?  Does it mean we are bad people?  Does that mean we’re racists? 

No.  It means we’re sports fans. We understand that when all is said and done, it’s just a game.

Well, he’s baaaaaaack.  After surviving God’s attempt to take him out, Jay is back to being the same ol’ Jay we all love to hate: overly critical and misinformed.  But today, things take an unexpected twist.

The column is nothing new.  Jay’s hatred has been simmering for over a week without release in the form of an always-eloquent newspaper column.  The cheap shots he takes today are to be expected.  However, seeing as I am the world’s foremost expert on the enigma that is Jay Mariotti, I will dig deeper to show you the cause of anger in this column.

He starts in the first paragraph, calling it pathetic that:

...Intelligent human beings in this large, Olympics-seeking town still are obsessed with Mike Ditka.

Wow.  That’s a pretty serious shot at Da Coach, a fairly revered Chicago icon.  This might not seem like much, dear readers, but I ask you to look a little deeper.  I point you to this New York Times article from 1988, titled “Chicago Suffers Along With Ditka.” The article was written shortly after Iron Mike suffered a heart attack, and it detailed the affection and attention Ditka received from the people of this city while recovering from his ailment:

On television and in the local newspapers, the story of the coach’s chest pains and his recovery was treated in minute detail. Readers and viewers learned that Ditka spent his afternoon watching television game shows in a private room with a sliding glass door. The room was guarded by a husky employee of the hospital’s engineering department who was pressed temporarily into service as a bodyguard.

The author clearly understood why the people of Chicago were so enthralled:

Ditka and his team are the embodiment of a kind of mythical Chicago, a place that is both bare-knuckled and plain-spoken, a town that gets by on guts rather than finesse.

So to review, Ditka’s heart ailment had an entire city holding its breath, and Jay’s… well… I believe it was mentioned in the Sun-Times… maybe.  Yep, that’s why Jay is so bitter today, because he has finally realized that nobody gives a crap about him!  The vast majority of this city would breathe a sigh of relief if Jay decided he wasn’t able to write his column anymore. 

Ditka, the champion of blue-collar Chicago, still has hero status fourteen years after being fired by the Bears.  Jay, the supposedly well-educated sports columnist, is universally hated! 

Jay is jealous!

Don’t believe me?  Read this:

Why pay attention if Ditka still views Michael McCaskey as a weenie who consulted with Dave Wannstedt before firing Ditka for such sins as climbing into the stands after a fan while his trusty wife, Diana, hurled crushed paper cups at the taunter? Why has anyone given him a thought since Limp Ditka hawked Levitra?

“Why do you guys care so much about that mustached man?  Why don’t you appreciate me?”

You can almost see the tears welling up in Jay’s eyes. 

Editor’s Note:  Please don’t miss Matt’s stellar column below.  It was posted last night, before we knew Jay was coming back.