Super Bowl Thoughts
Posted on February 4, 2013
I didn’t watch the whole six hours of Super Bowl pre-game.
I have a life and, you know, it’s a football game.
I did catch Roger Goodell on the Face the Nation. He was surrounded by the CBS football analysts that he basically employs and they all pretty much said the same thing.
The most dangerous sport in America is not football, by the way. It’s girl’s soccer. Who knew?
I was kind of rooting for the Ravens over the 49’s. Part of that was sibling rivalry. John Harbaugh was coaching against his younger brother Jim Harbaugh. My name, as you may know, is John and my brother is Jim. John Harbaugh is about 2 years older than his brother, and I am about 2 years older than my brother. Older brothers have to stick together.
You had the family dynamic with the Harbaughs, and then you had the redemption motif of Ray Lewis.
Lewis is a cultural icon. He stars in commercials selling sporting equipment and looks like a pretty tough dude in those ads. Of course, he also murdered two people in Atlanta several years ago, but somehow was able to escape conviction.
Rumor has it that he paid off the families of the guys he killed to keep them quiet. He’s got a lot of money, so it probably wasn’t that hard for him.
It is kind of hard to make Ray Lewis a hero, but for the NFL, no challenge is too difficult to overcome. The best thing about him is that he likes to quote God. If God is with you, he likes to say, then nobody can be against you. Especially the two guys he may or may not have killed.
Apparently, God likes close games, because as the Ravens were ready to run away with the game in blowout, the electricity inexplicably turned off. It could have been God, it could have been a system overloaded by Beyonce’s performance (she sure sang her heart out, didn’t she?), or it could have been a New Orleans' Super Dome that isn’t quite ready for prime time.
Whatever it was, it was embarrassing to the NFL, to CBS, and to America. The Super Bowl is America’s gift to the world, and this how we showcase our gift.
The Ravens are the world champions, which would be quite a feat, if anybody else in the world played football. But they don't. But they do watch the Super Bowl at least once a year.
I wonder if the rest of the world caught the new commercial from “Go-Daddy”. It featured a very lovely young lady making out with a very unlovely fat kid. I was personally offended by the commercial, mostly because nobody needs to see a close-up shot of anybody swapping spit, especially in a big screen television format. The fact that the mis-match between the two participants was so clearly evident made it worse, not better.
I will now specifically never use a “Go-Daddy” product because of that ad. It was memorable but for all the wrong reasons. It was so memorable that it has crowded out the memories of every other commercial that appeared during the Super Bowl. It was that disgusting.
Just like the only thing that people will really remember from this Super Bowl is the black-out. Not the redemption of the killer. Not the heart-warming family story. Just the fact that my son got to bed 40 minutes later than he had to, because the lights went out in the city. Unless, of course, you actually made the trip to NOLA. Then you probably have tons of fun memories.
I had some friends who traveled to New Orleans to watch the game in person. They are Ravens fans, and they had a blast. And that is why the NFL will prosper into the future. Fans love it, despite all of its problems.
And, hey, it’s safer than girls soccer.