SHOULD BIG BEN HAVE BEEN THE SUPER BOWL MVP?

The disclosure that Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlisberger played the Super Bowl with two broken ribs raises an important, yet fundamentally irrelevant, point. Would widespread knowledge of Roethlisberger’s condition have prompted the folks who vote on the Super Bowl MVP to have been more likely to vote for Roethlisberger? (We’d like to claim credit for thinking of this, but it didn’t occur to us -- though it should have -- until we heard Chris Myers and Peter King talking about it on FOX Sports Radio earlier today.) In our view, it was a toss-up between Roethlisberger and receiver Santonio Holmes for the MVP award. If it had been generally known that Roethlisberger did what he did with two broken ribs, the Willis Reed quality to the moment would have rammed the pendulum in his favor. We can hear what you’re saying -- if Roethlisberger generally is viewed as a drama queen, why didn’t he find a way to get this information out to the media before the game? The answer is easy. The X-ray taken of his midsection prior to the game didn’t reveal the fractures, so he didn’t know that he had broken ribs until having an MRI last week. If he’d known, we all surely would have known, too. Indeed, it was Roethlisberger who broke ranks to acknowledge to Andrea Kremer of NBC that, indeed, he underwent an X-ray “somewhere.” And it was Roethlisberger who ultimately blabbed about the fact that his ribs were broken. So, yeah, he’s still a drama queen. But, yeah, he also should have been the Super Bowl MVP.