“We have had this thing circled all year long, there’s just no way around it,” play-by-play announcer Joe Tessitore said on a conference call this week. “... We were always looking forward to this Monday night. Now you look at the stats and you look at how it sizes up with the dueling 9-1 records and what it means in terms of the AFC and the NFC and the No. 1 (playoff) seed and this is definitely the game that we had been looking forward to, that’s for sure.”
“I speak and believe much like many people out there that this may be an early Super Bowl preview,” he said.