NEW ORLEANS (AP) -- Only a Super Bowl victory parade could upstage Mardi Gras in New Orleans.

Carnival floats carrying Saints players, coaches and team owner Tom Benson rolled past tens of thousands of jubilant fans in downtown New Orleans on Tuesday, two days after the 43-year-old franchise won its first NFL championship.

Players, wearing team jerseys instead of traditional Carnival masks and costumes, tossed beads into the crowd and signed autographs for throngs of screaming fans. Benson shouted "Who Dat!" into a microphone from his perch atop a float. Head coach Sean Payton blew kisses and held the Lombardi Trophy over his head.

"This is wilder than Mardi Gras," said Frank V. Smith, 55, a lifelong New Orleans resident who shot photographs of players from the rear of a pickup truck. "I've never seen so many people out here like this. This is beautiful, man."

Peyton Manning not only is responsible for losing the Super Bowl, he apparently contributed to the death of sportsmanship after the Super Bowl.

His crime: Not shaking hands with the winner.

According to the overnight TV ratings, there were 106.5 million witnesses. The worry is that millions of impressionable kids might start emulating Manning.

Please allow me to calm your fears. There are a lot of things to criticize about Manning's performance. Not shaking hands with Drew Brees isn't one of them.

"Peyton is a class guy," Brees said.

If he doesn't have a problem with Manning's quick exit, why should we?

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla.-- We saw Drew Brees on Sunday night hold his son Baylen on the field and whisper to him after winning Super Bowl XLIV and the game's most valuable player award. There was a twinkle in his eyes that set everything around him aglow

And then on Monday morning in his news conference here, Brees cradled his MVP trophy much like he had his son. The glow from the silver prize illuminated his face. The stars on the trophy reflected to form a line of stars on the ceiling above him.

Saint Brees.

That is how New Orleans Saints fans now regard him. It is how his coach, Sean Payton, in some ways considers him. And for Brees, the feeling is mutual.

Brees and Payton reminded every NFL team that if you want to get where they just reached, you had better develop an encompassing head coach/quarterback relationship that colors your team. The head coach and quarterback garner much of the credit and much of the blame in any NFL city. That duo's aura -- or lack of it -- sets the template for the entire roster.

You are going nowhere in this league if first you do not have a franchise quarterback. And accompanying it a quarterback/head coach relationship that sets the standard for team-wide relationships.

"With Sean, it's like ESP,'' Brees said. "We have trust, faith and confidence. I feel like I know the play that's going to be called.''

Brees said that this Saints team "will walk together forever'' even though there certainly will be roster changes next season.

But this Brees-Payton connection looks solid for the next few seasons. And that is great news for both. And for Saints teams to follow.

NEW ORLEANS -- Why wait until Tuesday for a parade? After all, you can create an impromptu one with two simple ingredients -- a mass of people lining each side of the street and moving vehicles.

And so New Orleans Saints fans gathered on Veterans Memorial Boulevard by the Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport, waiting for the team to fly back from Miami in order to give them a champion's welcome. Though the tradition is nothing new; Saints fans have lined this same stretch of road to greet the team after every road game this season.

For a mile and a half, bodies lined the street, nulling any other traffic. Some partied through the night and made it to the airport early in the morning to get a good spot, even though the team didn't arrive until about 3 p.m. On an overpass above the road, drivers turned a highway into a parking lot, getting out of their cars and standing on the overpass in order to look down on the action.

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As opposed to almost every other week this year, this is going to be pretty easy. Sunday night's game between the Colts and the Saints was very well officiated. I was most pleased with the fact that the crew let the teams play, as there were only eight assessed penalties for 64 yards.

There are a few plays we'll examine, starting with the one controversial call -- the Saints' two-point conversion to go up 24-17.

On the play, Lance Moore appeared to bobble the football while going to the ground and then completely lose control once he hit. The initial ruling on the field was an incomplete pass. As we have seen all season -- since Louis Murphy's non-catch in Week 1 -- a receiver must control the ball through the ground when he's falling to the ground as he makes a catch. Thus, it would appear the incomplete call was the correct one. Instead, the call was overturned. Why?

MIAMI -- The more the seconds turn into minutes along the way to hours, days and years after the most improbable victory in the history of sports, the more the New Orleans Saints become a living testimony for a higher power.

If you haven't gone to church in a while, you might consider it now. For one, there have been more references to God and faith regarding what the Saints did to the Indianapolis Colts on Sunday at Sun Life Stadium than during the previous 43 Super Bowls combined. And for another, well, this wasn't supposed to happen.

Here's something else to consider: no more alibis, please. Just like that, those in charge of traditionally lousy pro franchises and major college programs -- ranging from the Los Angeles Clippers and Vanderbilt football to the Detroit Lions and any baseball team that dares to play in the nation's capital -- have lost the ability forever to blame this or that while ending another season in purgatory.

I mean, the Saints won the Super Bowl.

Sunday evening's Super Bowl between the Colts and Saints -- which the Saints won 31-17 -- has been declared the most watched TV program of all-time. The overnight rating, according to the Los Angeles Times, was a whopping 46.4, which is the largest overnight figure since the Giants and Broncos played Super Bowl XXI all the way back in 1987. Last season's game between the Steelers and Cardinals scored an overnight rating of 42.1, but once the final numbers were released it was revealed to be the most watched game in history -- with 98.7 million viewers.

Now that the final count is in, however, we've learned that Super Bowl XLIV was much more than simply the highest rated Super Bowl. The series finale of M*A*S*H, long-standing record-holder of the most watched program in TV history, drew 105.97 million viewers. The Nielsen ratings have revealed that Sunday's Super Bowl drew 106.5 million viewers.

As is this isn't insane enough, CBS has released a statement with more details on the event. In the final 15 minutes of the game, the rating score was 50.6, meaning that more than half of the households in the entire country were tuned in. This number also had a 71 share for the audience. Translation: an incredible 71 percent of the televisions in the entire nation were set to the Super Bowl.

New Orleans topped the list in terms of ratings, with an estimated 82 percent of TVs on the game. Washington, Nashville, Indianapolis and Columbus followed.

The feat is much more impressive when you consider all the alternatives. Back in the 1980s, it was pretty easy for major sporting events to garner gargantuan ratings, but nowadays there are literally hundreds of other channels from which viewers can choose -- not to mention the options the Internet provides. The fact that there are so many people watching one game in 2010 shows the NFL is truly a monster company.

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. -- With confetti and congratulations pouring down on him after Sunday's 31-17 Super Bowl XLIV ambush of the favored Indianapolis Colts, New Orleans Saints coach Sean Payton – a guy who likes to celebrate -- said he wasn't sure he would make it to the traditional Monday morning winners' news conference.

He showed up, hair uncombed, bleary eyed, looking every bit like someone who had just spent a sleepless night. Except that Payton did get some shut-eye, with some interesting company at his side.

Holding the Lombardi Trophy in his hands as he faced the cameras one last time before heading back to the Crescent City for what promises to be an epic "Who Dat" victory parade, Payton doesn't sound like a guy who's eager to let it go anytime soon.

"This thing laid in my bed next to me last night," Payton said, holding the NFL's championship hardware like it was a much-loved teddy bear. "I rolled over a couple of times. I probably drooled on it. But man, there's nothing like it."

The sterling silver Lombardi Trophy has a special connection to the Saints' organization. It is named for Vince Lombardi, the legendary Green Bay Packers coach. And Lombardi's grandson, Joe, is the Saints quarterback coach.

NEW ORLEANS -- They didn't need to wait until the clock hit 0:00.

When Tracy Porter took off with a Peyton Manning pass meant for Reggie Wayne, pushing the Saints' lead to 31-17 with just over three minutes left in the fourth quarter of this year's Super Bowl, the city of New Orleans took off, too, to a state of euphoria and overwhelming emotion.

There was an initial surge of joy in the Bourbon Street bar I watched the game in -- people leaping into each other's arms, falling over, jumping up and down with no concern for what happened to the contents of their cups. And then, after a minute, everybody looked at the scoreboard and the moment sunk in. The mood turned from festive to reflective.

That's when a twenty-something guy in an LSU T-shirt made eye contact with me and broke down.

MIAMI -- Contrary to what you'll be hearing for the next few years, Sean Payton isn't that smart. If he were, he would have waited a little longer before dropping a bomb on his kicker.

"Hey, we're running it," he told Thomas Morstead.

It was the Onside Kick Heard 'Round The World. The only thing wrong with the call was that there were still 20 minutes left in halftime.

"I wish he'd told me at the end," Morstead said.

Instead, Morstead had an entire performance by The Who to get nervous. But like almost everything else Payton did Sunday night, it worked to near perfection.