Bears’ basic training will be the difference

It’s not that some people are picking the Indianapolis Colts to win the Super Bowl, it’s the extent of this phenomenon. Everyone from novices to experts such as Cris Carter and Ron Jaworski. An ESPN online poll showed Illinois was the only state in which more people believed the Chicago Bears would win.

This is surprising because it goes against the basics of sports. It’s better to go with defense and disrespect, which is why I’m going with the Bears.

In eight of the last 10 Super Bowls, the winner has had a defense ranked among the top 10 in the NFL. The Bears were fifth in the league during the regular season; the Colts were 21st.

And don’t get fooled by the sudden reversal of fortune in the playoffs, where the Colts have the top-ranked defense and the Bears are seventh. To illustrate the dangers of such a small sample set, Rex Grossman has a higher passer rating in the playoffs than Peyton Manning ... and we know who will have the check next to his name in every matchup box this morning.

The Bears have the more consistent defense, running game and special teams. People still cling to the belief that winning Super Bowls starts with the quarterback, even though the trend is going the other way. Five of the first six Super Bowl most valuable players were quarterbacks, but the last six MVP trophies have been divided equally among quarterbacks, receivers and defensive players.

While awaiting the new batch of Super Bowl ads, please don’t forget the old adages.

“They say great pitching beats great hitting, and I think, usually, great defense beats great offense,” Bears linebacker Hunter Hillenmeyer said. “They’re not an offense that we’re going to shut down. We’re not going to hold them to 150 yards total offense or anything like that. But we’ve got the ability, we’ve got the D-line, to get the pressure, we’ve got the back seven to cover up. We can control what they do. We always tend to get our big plays, and that’s a way to neutralize a guy like Peyton.

“They’re touchdown favorites because people love to think that the great quarterback is just going to slice us up. But I don’t think that’s necessarily the case.”

Now that Sunday’s here, we finally can discuss football.

There’s the Super Bowl and then there’s the game.

The Super Bowl is a guy keeping a straight face as he tells you it will cost $50 to park your car. The Super Bowl is walking from Grandmaster Flash working the turntables inside to where the Black Eyed Peas are performing outside. The Super Bowl is a definitive “yes” every time you see someone and wonder, “Is that ... ?” -- be it Lil Jon or John Elway.

The game gets lost amid all the noise. The teams spent five days this week talking. Just out of curiosity -- and because I’d hate to think that acres of Amazon rain forest died in vain -- I compiled every news release and quote sheet the NFL produced from the week’s media availability sessions.

As of Saturday they totaled 367 pages and formed a stack twice as thick as my laptop computer. I tried to get all the way through, but by Page 248 I wanted to borrow one of Tank Johnson’s guns and shoot myself. The same things over and over and over.

The questions about the matchup were few and far between, but a few insights did emerge.

The Bears plan to get physical with the Colts’ receivers and their undersized defenders.

“I think that I would be able to overpower most of [the linebackers],” Bears fullback Jason McKie said. “But they are smart so they are rarely out of position.”

The Colts will sacrifice yardage to avoid the turnovers the Bears feast upon.

“You see a lot of forced fumbles and it’s scary,” Colts tight end Dallas Clark said. “But when you have the ball you’ve got to make sure you are focused on holding that thing and not trying to gain that extra two yards that in the long run probably really doesn’t help you very much.”

The Colts also think they can rattle Grossman.

“Once we get it going by stopping the run game, I think if our defensive line can supply pressure then we can try to rattle Rex a little bit,” linebacker Cato June said.

In the course of gleaning those tidbits, I also learned of Bears defensive back Danieal Manning’s love for the underrated Jamie Foxx stand-up special “I Need Security;” the difference between “down south grass” and “Midwest grass” courtesy of Bears wide receiver Muhsin Muhammad (“It’s a little bit thicker.... The ground is a little softer”); Colts safety Bob Sanders reports his height as “Five-eight ... and a half”; and that Bears linebacker Brian Urlacher enjoys Manning’s commercials, fishing shows and chocolate chip cookies.

Things got so far off topic that Bears cornerback Charles Tillman actually felt the need to detail the essence of the Super Bowl: “The best team from the AFC takes on the best team from the NFC and whoever wins -- that’s the champion.”

Thanks for the reminder. That champion will be the Bears.

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J.A. Adande can be reached at j.a.adande@latimes.com. To read more by Adande go to latimes.com/adandeblog.