Here’s everything you wanted to know about today’s NFL conference championship games, but won’t be able to discern from the pre-game shows between Shannon Sharpe and Bill Cowher’s mumbling, the random, raucous laughter and ill-fitting comedy routines:

• It’s cold. We get it. Just like we get it when there’s an inch of white powder on the windshield in the morning and the people with the pearly-white, chattering choppers on our TV spend an hour telling us it’s snowing.

• Chargers coach/babysitter Norv Turner has always looked like Al Gore. His behavior and body language surrounding last week’s win at Indianapolis evoked Howard Dean in his post-2004 Iowa Caucus state of bizarre euphoria. And after today, Turner’s qualifications to lead a powerful entity will most closely parallel those of Dennis Kucinich.

• Why does football get a pass on HGH and steroids while baseball keeps lawmakers tied up for days in a time of war and recession? To wit: Has anybody this week acknowledged that two of the defensive stars in today’s AFC Championship – one for each side – have served suspensions for performance-enhancing drug use in the last 15 months? Or that another San Diego starter was apprehended in college with a related product during a routine traffic stop in this very state?

• Let’s forever expunge “meaningless game” from the football lexicon. The Patriots and Giants clearly were better prepared for January (and possibly February) after beating the hell out of each other when they weren’t supposed to. Green Bay and San Diego took the lumber to their holiday opponents even though a chorus of chicken-poo analysts chirped that they had nothing to gain but catastrophic injuries. Meanwhile, those poor, sore, aging veterans from Tampa and Indy get to stay home today and remain intimately acquainted with the hot tubs that became such an enormous part of their lives in December. Nice job.

• Most unfortunate fallout from this postseason: Prolonging the myth that Brett Favre is one of history’s elite quarterbacks. Hall of Famer? Sure. The Cal Ripken parallels are obvious. Good guy. Plays hurt. Reached most of his milestones because he showed up for work. But putting him in the pantheon of Montana, Unitas, Elway and Brady, to name the bare minimum, is absurd.

• Wide receiver used to be the dime-a-dozen position on a pro football field. In this day of continually evolving offenses, that designation now goes to tailback. Your starters in the NFC title game: The anonymous Brandon Jacobs and Ryan Grant. For all his obvious talent, Laurence Maroney is infinitely less important to the Patriots’ offense than Kevin Faulk. And the Chargers not only survived but thrived when the almighty LaDainian Tomlinson retreated to the sideline last week.

• We’re often guilty of over-deifying athletes when they make a play or two and excessively demonizing them when they do something stupid. In the case of Philip Rivers, we’re right on the money. At least when Terrell Owens, Chad Johnson, Jeremy Shockey or Ray Lewis mouth off, there is an outside chance they’ll back it up with something spectacular. When the fair-to-middlin’ Rivers does it, he simply looks like a punk.

• Not sure whether Randy Moss or his alleged victim was the first to bring up “six figures” as hush money. Given Tom Brady’s penchant for winning Super Bowls with David Givens, Deion Branch and Troy Brown, however, the Patriots should soak whatever greatness they can out of Moss for two more games and then think long and hard before committing seven figures to No. 81 in anything longer than another one-year deal.

• Much as I’m rooting for the Giants (and much as that gives me shooting pains in the temple), the Packers will parlay their huge home field advantage into a 24-17 win. Before you buy into two weeks of suffocating Brady-Favre hype and 289 live interviews with Desmond Howard, just remember this is a team that lost to the Bears. Twice. Convincingly.

• As has become the custom over the last six weeks, the Patriots will stick and move and allow San Diego to swirl around like gnats, tied 14-14 or perhaps even on top 14-10 at the half. Two people – your fair-weather, drunk uncle who watches two football games a year, and Cowher – will predict certain doom for New England, which will promptly score touchdowns on its first three possessions of the second half. And leave Norv Turner and Philip Rivers directing primal screams at nobody in particular.

Kalle Oakes is a staff writer. His e-mail is [email protected].