So I'm going over all of the week's quotes one last time looking for something mildly interesting, and somehow I missed the best quotes of the week: Eli Manning talking in minute detail about how Peyton used to torture him as a kid.
And I knew I'd found the perfect lead item to today's Super Bowl potpourri.
Enjoy:
"His most popular move, he would pin me down and take his knuckles and knock on my chest and make me name the 12 schools in the SEC (Southeastern Conference)," Eli said. "I didn't know them all at the time, but I quickly learned them. It was a great learning technique. I don't suggest anyone else try it out, but it definitely made me learn the schools of the SEC.
"Once I figured those out, he moved on. There were 28 teams in the NFL at that point, so all teams in the NFL. I had to get my studying on for that. Then once I figured that out – the one I never got was the 10 brands of cigarettes. When he really wanted to torture me and knew I had no shot of ever getting it, that's when I just started screaming for my mom or dad to come save me, or maybe Cooper. That was his go-to move."
* Because he's Bill Belichick and he never misses a detail,he's had the Patriots actually practicing halftime this week -- i.e., making them take a break that roughly coincides with the 30-minute Super Bowl halftime.
"I think it really gets into a whole restarting mentality," he said this week. "It's not like taking a break and coming out in the second half. It's like starting the game all over again. It's like playing a game, stopping, and then playing a second game. It's like a double-header in baseball, if you will.
"I think that makes it a little bit different and we tried to simulate that in practice on Wednesday where we had the players go through that process of restarting. I just felt that it was beneficial for our team this year to actually put them through that. Go out there and warm up, practice, take a break, shut it down for a half hour, go into the locker room, simulate what a half time would be in terms of corrections, adjustments and restarting our bodies, both mentally and physically to restart the game with 'Here's how we are going to start the second half, here's the plays we're going to run, here's the things they did to hurt us, here's the things we have to be ready for', things like that."
* Like everyone else, NFL commissioner Roger Goodell has been impressed with the job Indianapolis has done putting on Super Bowl Week.
"They are doing a fantastic job," Goodell said in his Super Bowl news conference this week. "I have said it repeatedly this week. I said yesterday (we're) in the second quarter, maybe we are in the third quarter today, but we've got a weekend still to go and a game to put on. I know everybody in Indianapolis is focused on the future, but we want to make sure that this week turns out to be what everyone has worked so hard for. I believe it is going to be a great week.
"I believe the community here could not have done a better job of organizing this week's events or embracing this. I think that it is great that Indianapolis is on the global stage."
* And finally ... today's Question That Lets You Know We've All Run Out Of Questions: Someone asked Giants coach Tom Coughlin what his strategy was for the coin flip.
“I’m out of that one," he said. "We have our captains and they decide who’s going to make that call. We do keep track of who wins and losses, thank you very much. That’s basically up to the captains. We’ll make a decision going forward. I won’t say exactly what we’ll do, but you can check the record as to how we usually go.”
For record, how they usually go works pretty well. The Giants represent the NFC, and the NFC has won the Super Bowl coin flip 14 times in a row.
