Who Would Win If the Dallas Cowboys Dynasty of the 90s faced the Colts Big Three of the 2000s in the Super Bowl?
Dungy being too conservative is the reason why they would lose a game like this. On top of that he was afraid to punt to Deion so he decided to throw for it on 3rd and 10 however, he paid the price. Don't worry I got the Saints version of this coming soon. They will be facing a really good team from the 80s.
Yeah Dallas usually had an elite secondary all through the 90's. Their defense was their strength in the later years after Novacek retired and Troy Aikman's back injuries had declined his play. The Cowboys still owned Green Bay back then. When Brett Favre was the best QB in the league, Dallas was the one team that gave him the most problems. Favre never won in Texas Stadium in his entire career.
Dungy gets the blame for a lot of their playoff losses, but he made the best with what he had. The Colts never had the talent on defense that his Tampa Bay teams had and that falls under Polian.
The Colts under Polian ignored their problems and needs on defense, just like he did in Buffalo. After the Bills' secondary got exposed to Washington in the 1991 SB, Polian did nothing to fix the problem. Those Bills teams essentially had the same secondaries in all of their SB losses. When the Colts lost the SB to us, Polian famously blamed it on the o-line, ignoring the fact that Brees shredded their defense up in that game.
Those Colts teams essentially had just 3 elite players on defense (Robert Mathis, Dwight Freeney and Bob Sanders) and then a bunch of average to mediocre players. It really showed when they would get housed by the Chargers in the playoffs. San Diego had built a team that countered everything and could expose their weaknesses.
The Broncos teams that Manning was on were built so much better than those Colts teams. They focused on defense more and more every year. After getting embarrassed in the SB to Seattle, they changed their approach and went to stacking their defense. If Polian would've done that with the Colts, they'd probably be looking at a dynasty.