Peyton Manning’s Sloppy Seconds Super Bowl

Okay, people. It’s time again to talk about football. Like a dependable locust, arriving once every 12 months to devour all the snack food in your local grocery store, the Super Bowl arrived as predicted this past Sunday. And it was messy. (And before you tune out completely, don’t panic non-sports fans. I’m going to talk about the halftime show as well.)

Football! Now even 50-ier!

Before I get to the mess that actually unfolded on the field, here’s the obligatory background: This years’ teams were the Denver Broncos, led by quarterback and commercial star Peyton Manning, against the Carolina Panthers, led by one-man self-hype squad Cam Newton. If these names sound familiar to you, non-sports fan, it’s because Cam Newton got a lot of press for being the first person ever to win a Heisman trophy, a national championship, and be a first round draft pick in one year. Peyton Manning you know because there’s not a product on TV he hasn’t considering filming a promo for. Manning is also the oldest son of former NFL quarterback Archie Manning and the older brother of current New York Giants QB Eli Manning. The Mannings are sort of like the Lannisters of the NFL.

Google Image searching "Lannisters and Mannings" actually returns a surprising number of results

Look, I could write a doctoral thesis on the oedipal dynamics of the Manning family. Suffice it to say the comparison to the Game of Thrones dynasty is important because at age 39, Peyton Manning is an old man in pro football terms and one seen as desperate to claim his place in the family glory. When he stepped on the field for this Super Bowl, he was officially the oldest QB ever to play in the game. He’s also been somewhat eclipsed by his younger brother who has won two Super Bowl rings. When Peyton played in the Super Bowl two years ago, it was seen as his last chance to win a second ring for himself so that he could retire on top. When the Broncos lost spectacularly that year to the upstart Seattle Seahawks, Peyton was on shaky ground. This game was his for real last last chance. And, like two years ago, he would be facing an upstart team fronted by a young, fresh face that had no qualms about strutting wherever he walked.

So what drama did we actually see in the game? Well, put it this way: I’ve had to consult a thesaurus when writing this to make sure I didn’t overuse the words “sloppy” and “messy.” And not to bury the lede anymore than I already have, but Denver eventually emerged as the winner. And though the score makes that win look decisive, let me show you exactly how not the case that was.

The thing is, Super Bowl 50 was a record breaker. Not in a good way. Denver made only 11 first downs and gained less than 200 total yards in the entire game. That’s the lowest for any Super Bowl winner ever. Over at the Carolina side, Cam Newton only had 18 of his 44 passes reach their targets, about a 44% success rate. Newton was also sacked (tackled to the ground by the opposing team before he could throw the ball) seven times, which ties him for first place in the number of sacks in the Super Bowl. Between the two teams there were 18 penalties for a total of 153 lost yards. Carolina had four turnovers (unintentionally losing the ball to the other team) and Denver had two. Both sides literally were tripping over themselves trying to run the ball. There was so much fumbling, you’d be forgiven for thinking this was actually a basketball game.

One of the more dignified examples of utterly shitting the bed, professionally speaking.

It was also a relatively low-scoring game. Denver won 24-10, which by pro football standards is a very modest end result. It also doesn’t really reflect the reality of how those scores were won. Denver’s first touchdown came quickly at the start of the game, but only because Carolina somehow fumbled their own ball and Denver recovered it in the Carolina end zone. Which is sort of like when Wile E. Coyote would try to kill the Road Runner with a bazooka only to have the bazooka blow up in his own face. You can’t exactly say that the Road Runner won that exchange.

Carolina itself didn’t even score until about a third of the way through the second quarter. Denver came into the game with the highest ranked defense in the country, but Carolina didn’t exactly make them use it much. This is doubly surprising given that Carolina had a remarkable season, coming almost out of nowhere. In fact, Carolina was favored over Denver going into the game, a prediction that probably made for some fun times in Vegas on Sunday night.  

It’s tempting to see an analogy here: the upstart, anti-establishment team comes roaring out of relative obscurity to capture the media’s attention, which initially ridicules said team before taking more note of them, predicting their demise, becomes dismayed when team continues to rise, and finally all but preparing the coronation before the older, establishment team delivers the crushing blow. Not sure where else I could have seen that story.

I'll tell you what, it would be YUGE.

I’ve just been reminded by Maggie Cats that I am obligated at this point to talk about Beyoncé and, specifically, that I must use the word “fierce.”

Look, I’m not convinced that Beyoncé is an actual person. I think she’s a next-generation hologram precision-designed in a corporate lab somewhere in Heidelberg to give the world something to care about. I’m also pretty sure that Beyoncé Corporate has formed a contractual agreement with the Internet that the Internet must at all times speak of Beyoncé^TM in only exaggerated, breathless terms. The Pepsi commercial halftime show kind of underscores that. In the parlance of the Internet, she “slayed.” Which, I guess? I mean, when your competition is Bruno Mars wearing a hefty bag and that one guy who Gwyneth Paltrow contentiously uncoupled from it’s not that hard to land, is it? I do think Beyoncé Corporate was smart to schedule their product’s performance literally hours after dropping another stealth song and video as a lead in to her World Tour/Adele Assassination Strategy. Well done, team! Take a long lunch today for coming up with that creative synergy.

For me, the halftime show is more notable for what happened afterwards. Which is to say, horrible people on the Internet continued to be horrible. Did you realize that all those psychedelic colors and outfits were actually secret number generators that were beaming stealth messages DIRECTLY INTO YOUR BRAIN and that Nobama knows about it and it’s all part of his plot to replace your guns with gay people? IT’S TRUE! Behold:

Your voters, America.

So, yeah. That was pretty much the halftime show.

As I say every year when I write this post, the Super Bowl is not about excellent sportsmanship or athletic prowess. It is about showmanship. The Super Bowl is event television where the only unforgivable sin is to be boring. In that sense, Super Bowl 50 lived up. Disheveled as it may have been, it was entertaining to watch the players messing all over themselves in the same way that it is entertaining to watch Japanese game shows, albeit with less crushing pain in this case. It also should give lots of support to struggling junior high school football players out there. “You see?” their parents will say to them, “It doesn’t matter if you fumbled into your own end zone. It was good enough for Cam Newton!”

Always next year?

It's Time For The Annual Super Bowl Post You Won't Read!

Welcome back, everyone!  Let me just say that this is the Super Bowl post that I didn’t want to write.  I was going to boycott the game this year due to the heinous, heinous I say, miscall during the final seconds of the first round playoff game between the Detroit Lions and the Dallas Cowboys that effectively stole the game away from Detroit, depriving my home team of their rightful chance to compete in the Big Game.  (I managed to come back around after almost the exact same call went the opposite direction for the Cowboys the following week, eliminating them and proving that he who lives by the pass interference call dies by the pass interference call.)  But then Deflategate happened and then it was the Seahawks defending their title against the Patriots, the douche-bro-est team in the country and, frankly, there just wasn’t a lot else on TV that Sunday night so I decided to watch.  Plus, I heard that Katy Perry was going to BURN Taylor Swift in the halftime show, and even though I don’t care much about either one of those people, I’ve always liked effigies.

Having watched the game, with its first 30 minutes mind-numbingly dull and its second an exercise in athletic what-the-fuckery, I’m not sure I made the right decision.  But I get ahead of myself. 

Go...home team? 

As I’ve said many times before, Super Bowls are all about spectacle.  They are not stunning examples of amazing athleticism or daring competition.  For that, we have the Olympics and Dance Moms.  It’s for that reason that the entire first half of the game was such a letdown.  This Super Bowl pitted the Seattle Seahawks, who won last year’s Super Bowl so decisively over Payton Manning and the Denver Broncos, against the powerhouse coach/quarterback/douche-nozzle combination of Bill Belichick and Tom Brady of the New England Patriots. 

To give a sense of the match-up, going into the game both teams had exactly the same record (14-4) and throughout the first half played with almost identical statistics such that going into halftime, the score was tied.  And not even an energetic tie.  It was a relatively anemic 14-14.  Ho hum.  It was so boring that even Bob Costas had to come on just before the second half and deliver a three-minute commentary on how everyone needed to shut up on Twitter about how bored they were and remember that Super Bowls are often decided in the second half, they’re not meant to be exciting, and for God’s sake stop posting pictures of your food all the time.

Needs more pinkeye.

Then the second half started (actually, there was a halftime show in between, but I’ll get to that in a second) and things finally started to pick up. Seattle started putting points on the board, scoring 10 during the third quarter and shutting out New England.  Moving into the fourth, New England began to rebound, scoring a touchdown and putting themselves within three points of a tie.  Then Patriots Quarterback and human equivalent of crashing your uncle’s Porsche into the pond at the country club after you drank too much Boones Farm  Tom Brady threw a touchdown pass with two minute left in the game that put New England up by four points, 28-24. 

And now, finally, we had, as they say, a football game as Seattle took possession of the ball and drove it fearlessly down the field.  Things got tense for folk from the Emerald City when Seattle managed to somehow both fumble and catch a critical pass at the right time, almost losing out on their chance to score.  Nevertheless, they eventually found themselves on New England’s 1 yard line, literally three feet from victory.  And that’s when they shit the bed.

Not photshopped.  This is an actual picture showing what it looks like to fuck everything up.

Here’s the thing.  Seattle was on the 1 yard line.  They could have tripped and fell into the end zone and won the game as long as whoever tripped was holding the ball when he fell and managed to cross the line before his knee hit the ground.  But for some reason, Seattle called what has been referred to as the worst play call in the history of the Super Bowl.  They decided to pass.  And that pass was intercepted.  For those of you not familiar with what happens in football (and for the smaller number of you for whom that’s the case and still decided to read this post), that was a very bad thing for Seattle.  To make matters worse, Seattle has arguably the best running back in the country in Marshawn Lynch.  Hand Lynch the ball, and even if every New England player is ready to pounce on him he’s still going to cross the line and make it in.   Alas, none of that happened and Tom Brady, who is in fact that guy you knew in high school who started bum fights in the basement and never got in trouble for it because his dad was on the school board, got another thing aside from his super model wife and multimillion dollar per year job to brag about.

And yes, that’s all Seattle’s fault.  New England didn’t win; Seattle just lost spectacularly.  Seattle won the Super Bowl last year and they haven’t shut up about it since.  They’ve been on constant news reports talking up their greatness, which makes them the sports equivalent of that weird guy who once drunkenly made out with a model in a bar and now believes that it means he’s way hotter than he is.  Winning the Super Bowl once actually is not that difficult.  There are plenty of teams that win once and then either not again or not routinely.  Like so many things, it’s performance over time that counts.  Seattle wanted to be thought of as the new powerhouse and instead handed those accolades over to New England, the team that’s self-importance is so inflated it could float a zeppelin despite being a team that has employed, shall we say, questionable practices to get what it needs.

Factual?  No.  Representative?  Definitely.

What happens next, however, is what may be the most interesting thing yet.  The NFL entered this game in a state of turmoil due to the news-making events with Baltimore Ravens’ Ray Rice’s videotaped beating of his then fiancée, Miami Dolphins’ Richie Incognito’s racially-motivated harassment of his fellow players and staff members, and Arizona Cardinals’ Jonathan Dwyer beating his wife and son.  As such, it wasn’t a surprise to see many, many commercials in this Super Bowl that sounded more like “The More You Know” style PSAs about what it means to be a “real man” and encouraging men to maybe, like, not beat up women or something.  The last thing the NFL is looking for is more evidence that the ship that Commissioner Roger Goodell is sailing may not be so shipshape after all.  And now the league will have to contend with the evidence that the Super Bowl winning team, in theory the best team of the year, only got there because they cheated in an earlier game, deflating their own footballs to make their passes easier to throw and catch.

So yes, there are a lot of things that disappointed me about this year’s Super Bowl, but perhaps one of the biggest ones is the cruel twist of fate whereby one of the two competitors this year wasn’t New York if only for the reason that now I can’t legitimately make a Sharks vs. Jets joke.  This year, the Pepsi Halftime show gave America the public figure it has craved more than anyone else; a figure of style and beauty, of hope and inspiration, of talent and verve.  I refer, of course, to Left Shark.

No discussion of this year’s Super Bowl would be complete without considering the cultural icon that is Left Shark, seen here with his backup singer, a young woman who was not identified at press time:

 Since his emergence onto the national stage, Left Shark has inspired artwork, lawsuits challenging that artwork, historical retrospectives, and thrilling investigative journalism. There is at least a little bit of Left Shark in all of us, and yet none of us can every truly be Left Shark.  Except for Left Shark himself, of course.

No matter who plays in the game, Left Shark wins.  Left Shark always wins. 

#JeSuisLeftShark

As American as shopping on a national holiday.

It's the Fourth of July! To me, this usually means stuffing myself at a family BBQ and then going to bed early after flipping between A Capitol Fourth and the Boston Pops Fireworks show on tv. What I'm trying to say is, I don't usually go out for the holiday since it's just too much of a hassle. Especially in the DC area.

But this year I am not in DC for the Fourth--I'm in Los Angeles! So while I still over-ate at a family BBQ (well, really a block party), I also hit the beach for a fireworks display. But none of this means that I have forgotten my blogging duties. Oh, no. I haven't forgotten my wonderful minions, I mean readers. I've got new content for you even on the most American of holidays.

Instead of my usual "you should totally watch 1776 and Gettysburg on the Fourth of July" type of post, I figured I would cover something outside my usual oeuvre and talk about...

...SPORTS.

Yes, you read that right. I am going to talk about sports. The person who has never attended a professional sporting event, usually skips the Super Bowl, and only follows the performance of DC teams so I can impress dudes I meet at bars (true story), is going to write about the World Cup. But as usual, it's not so much about the sports as it is about my favorite topic. I am of course referring to me. And how the World Cup affects me.

Despite my unimpressive sporting resume, I found myself coming down with World Cup Fever this year. After all, it only comes around every four years (like the Olympics!) and the rest of the world is pretty much obsessed with it. Add to that some friends who also futball-obsessed (shout out to Tito and Matt!), and I figured I should find out what all the fuss is about. I watched three matches and each one was its own unique viewing experience.

Game 1: US vs. Ghana.

As is in my nature, I didn't want to go into a World Cup viewing experience a complete noob. So I did my homework. I read some online newspaper articles prior to viewing and learned a bit about the history between the US and Ghana in the World Cup. I also perused the wikipedia article on soccer so I would have some basic understanding of the rules. The first game was airing while I would be working, so I DVRed it and then watched it later in the evening (avoiding spoilers).

Perhaps watching my first game in my living room by myself wasn't the best way to get introduced, but I was able to follow what was going on. I was also pretty invested--especially since we scored right off the bat in the first two minutes! Sure, things didn't get really exciting until nearer the end of the game after that (...and I might have spent about an hour of game play wandering around my condo doing chores), but I got the gist. And I definitely appreciated the lack of commercial breaks and the non-stop clock. Why can't American football be played like that??

Game 2: Spain vs. Chile

For this game, I took to the bar! Unfortunately, it was a 3:00PM game so the bar was basically empty, but I had the benefit of my friend Tito's vast World Cup knowledge to answer my questions. Now like I said, I'm not a soccer expert, but even I knew that Spain was playing pretty poorly. They basically imploded, which was all the more surprising considering their past performance and the expectations on the team coming into this World Cup.

See, I told you I did my homework.

Watching the game with others was definitely more enjoyable, but since the bar wasn't that full and I hadn't hung out with the people I was watching the game with in a while, I spent more time chatting and catching up than actually watching. It was nice having someone around to answer all my questions though.

Game 3: US vs. Belgium

And for my last game (so far), I did everything the way you are supposed to. I watched the game in a packed bar surrounded by strangers who were really into it. I didn't know anyone around me (my friends were all running late), but the energy of the crowd was infectious. I found myself gasping, shouting, and reacting to every movement of the ball almost in spite of myself. The tension was palpable....until the overtime play when of course Belgium scored two goals and knocked us out. There was disappointment sure, but there was also pleasure in a game well played and pride for our team. Especially for Tim Howard, "the human wall."

Will I keep watching now that the US is out of the tournament? I'm not sure--probably the later games when the stakes get really high. And if I am around people who have the game on. I'm not sure you could call me a true soccer fan, but I definitely have a new found appreciation for the game and the athletes. And I think that's a step in the right direction!

Bonus pictures: some of the things that Tim Howard could save...

 The dinosaurs.

Nipple-gate

Luke's arm

 Ned Stark...actually nevermind. I don't think even Tim Howard could save Sean Bean from dying at the end of a show. 

The Superb Owl

Hey, did you know that Super Bowl XLVIII was last week? Yeah, neither did Denver, apparently.

Look, no one thought that this game was going to be some down-to-the-wire, last minute Hail Mary kind of game, but it’s safe to say that no one also expected…that. A game that should have at least been a bit of a give and take quickly descended into a lopsided three and a half-hour long slugfest where Denver could barely manage to find its footing and Seattle somehow came out looking like an actual pro football team. 

Some games are won not because the underdog team did better, but because the favored team just couldn’t pull it together. This was not one of those games. Right from the start, Seattle ran roughshod all over Denver.  It’s worth mentioning that Seattle were the Super Bowl virgins in this game – not only has the franchise never been to the Super Bowl, but no individual member of the current Seattle Seahawks roster has ever played on a team that’s competed in the Big Game. Compare that with Denver, the older more experienced team that has not only a franchise history but also individual players with several rings in their possession. In Elite parlance, “It wasn’t supposed to go this way.”

Ouch...

To wit: the final score was a crushing Seattle 43 to Denver 8. Denver couldn’t even manage to get on the board until the end of the third quarter, quite the feat considering that Denver’s quarterback is the much ballyhooed Peyton Manning, a man who by himself has five MVPs and a Super Bowl win under his belt coming into the game to say noting of the fact that his family is genetically incapable of producing failures. (See: Manning, Eli; Manning, Taryn; and Manning, Archie; to say nothing of Manning, Cooper.) And yet, somehow during Denver’s opening drive, we got this:

Whaaaaaa?

That was essentially the first play of the game - a miscue whereby the QB fails to connect with his own snap leading to a ball flying so far over his shoulder that the first score of the game came less than 12 seconds in and was a safety awarded to Seattle on Denver's drive. It’s fair to say that Denver never truly recovered. In fact, by the first play of the second half where Seattle, already significantly ahead, managed a return from its own territory to secure yet another touchdown, the majority of the country was ready to turn off the Super Bowl to see what was going on over at Downtown Abbey. You hear that, England? America has given up its national pastime in order to see what your turgid melodrama is up to. Clearly, we’ve ceded the culture war to you. Well done, Queen Elizabeth. Regardless of how bored viewers were with the rapidly descending thrill of the game, you have to at least credit Denver with trying to put together something that would qualify as entertaining. They finally managed to score at the end of the third quarter, thus by at least ensuring that they wouldn’t be completely shut out of a game against a bunch of neophytes led by a Quarterback that is barely old enough to buy beer legally.

"Mom says if throw for more than 100 yards I get an ice cream before we go home."

As I’ve written about several times before, the Super Bowl is far less about sports than it is about entertainment. It is to the regular season what Glee is to a Ken Burns documentary on PBS. That’s part of the reason why advertisers pay so much to get an overblown commercial on that airtime – it is, in theory at least, one of the most entertainment-driven nights on television of the year. The worst sin that a Super Bowl can commit is to be boring and, unfortunately, that’s what we got this year, though I suspect Seattle folk found that boredom more bearable than their Denver counterparts did. Still, the job of the Super Bowl is to keep people watching and to provide a active night of television. To quote a tweet from a friend of mine, “Sucks to be the company that bought a fourth quarter ad this year.”

As it is, the most entertaining thing about Super Bowl 48 is the aftermath. There are so many pundits at the “What It All Means For Peyton Manning” Club that they’re going to start running out of beer soon. If it’s a truism that the Super Bowl needs to be entertaining, it’s equally true that for all the love that we as a country generally have for the Manning family, there’s nothing we like more than watching giants fall.  Whether or not Super Bowl 48 marks the end of a long and celebrated career for Manning (personally I think we’ve still got him around for a few years, but he’s veering dangerously toward Brett Favre territory here), the most exciting thing to see right now in this Super Bowl aftermath is the talking about it. 

Careful, Peyton - the Manning family eats their own weak in order to purify their powers. 

The Night the Lights Went Out in New Orleans: Super Bowl XLVII Reviewed

Okay, seriously, so was that a Super Bowl or was that a Super Bowl? Amirite?! Fresh off the news, confirmed this morning by CBS, that Super Bowl XLVII was the most watch Super Bowl in history (which, frankly, owes part of its distinction to the fact that the power outage which I’ll talk more about in a second pushed the airing into Prime Time on the west coast) this was honestly several hours of good television.

For those not inclined to read about football, you can jump ahead four paragraphs where I talk about the commercials. See you there.

It didn’t look like it was always going to be thus. The Baltimore Ravens dominated the game for the entire first half, going into the halftime show up 21-6 over the San Francisco 49ers. San Francisco’s only points came from kicks, not even making it into the end zone until more than midway through the third quarter. The second half began with Baltimore receiving the opening kick and then instantly running the return down the field for 109 yards into the end zone and bringing the score to 28-6. For a game that was not supposed to be a route, it was shaping up to be one.

And then! AND THEN! Even folk who don’t watch football know what happened next – a power outage caused the field to go “dark” for more than 30 minutes. While TV stations vamped, players tried to throw the ball around just to stay loose and Twitter utterly exploded, someone somewhere was likely having a major coronary just trying to figure out how to get the power back on. All the progress that the city of New Orleans was hoping to show they had made since the last time the entire country stared breathlessly at the Superdome under much different circumstances suddenly was in danger of being brought out for another round of collective cultural hand-wringing.

The Good Times, they did not roll.

Nonetheless, come back on it did, but it may as well have illuminated an entirely different game. “Momentum”, that frankly mythical yet somehow strangely present fuel that every game seems to run on had completely shifted. Baltimore was no longer running literal rings around San Francisco and the 49ers delivered 17 un-answered points to bring the game to 28-23 at the end of the third quarter. With only 15 minutes of play left, we suddenly had a real game.

I’ve written before that the point of the Super Bowl is to be flashy – it’s not about grinding away on the gears of good ball, it’s about dazzling all the corporate sponsors and creating some pizzazz. In that way, the final quarter lived up to its hype. The score was tight, the plays energetic. Each drive literally could change the outcome of the game and with the clock dwindling, it seemed like anything could happen. In the final minute and a half of play, Baltimore managed to stop San Francisco from getting into the end zone and retained their lead only barely, 34-29 despite a block that many 49ers fans saw as an illegal hold. With few tactical options, Baltimore allowed San Francisco to score an additional three points (complication reason – for the uninitiated, let’s just say it was because the move ate up valuable time) in the hopes of punting a final return with only 8 seconds left, believing that their defense would be able to stop San Francisco from accomplishing what Baltimore themselves did only two quarters earlier. It was a gamble that paid off and Baltimore won the Super Bowl for only the second time, defeating a team that had yet to lose a Super Bowl game it played in.

ATTENTION NON-FOOTBALL FANS! YOU CAN START READING HERE!

So yes, the game was exciting, but we all know that the commercials are a vital component. (Oh yeah, Beyoncé was there for something, too.) It was the usual mixed bag, of course, with a surprisingly touching Clydesdale commercial forming among the best of the offering and unfortunately having to mix it up with the insulting, juvenile worst. (I’m speaking of pretty much anything put together by the GoDaddy.com team.) 

However, the most effective advertisement for a product wasn’t any of the glossy, high concept live action clips that interrupted the game every few minutes – it was this pitch-perfect, utterly timely Oreo ad that you would have only seen if you happened to be on Twitter or Facebook while the game was playing. Or you are now like the rest of the world and have seen retweeted and liked a million times over.

Simple in design, epic in scope. Also, damn. Now I'm hungry.

Whole marketing graduate theses are going to be written about how Oreo got their ad up and into the public consciousness without even paying money for it and in such a way as to make everyone remember the product. And don’t laugh – that’s pretty hard to do. Think about all the commercials you saw last night – how many of them do you remember what they were schilling for?

The blackout alone will ensure that this Super Bowl gets mentioned in highlight reels for the next fifty years, but even if you weren't the type of person to enjoy watching the game, you still likely found something that was entertaining beyond talking with fellow party-goers over the crab dip. Until next year, then! Only 212 days until the start of football season!

Conservatives Are From CBS, Liberals Are From the BBC

Ah, the final days of August in an election year. We’ve just finished with the Republican National Convention and I’ve avoided writing about it, even though it is a piece of television, largely because I probably won’t be able to write about the Democratic National Convention and I really feel that if we’re going to mock, er…um, talk about one party, we should do the same for the other. As such, our political content here remains relatively low.

Nevertheless, we’re about to head into a time of increased politics on television as we gear up for the election in November. So in honor of the quadrennial event, here’s a potentially probing question as we head into the full election season: Does the kind of television you watch have any relationship to your political identity?  A new article in the Washington Post suggests that perhaps it does.

One of these men influenced the other, but it's not entirely clear which is which.

Some politics on television is obviously not a novel thing. It doesn’t take much more than a cursory look to realize that The West Wing is pretty much written by liberals, for liberals whereas 24 was a neo-conservative’s dream for how the War on Terror should be fought. Likewise, that The Daily Show with John Stewart and The Colbert Report are the two shows that rank the highest amongst the ultra-left viewers shouldn’t come as a galloping shock to anybody. But what’s interesting is the shows that find themselves weirdly stuck in the electoral middle.

A&E’s Storage Wars and BBC’s Top Gear are both reality shows that feature a similar set up and are thus political brothers despite being slightly more preferred by Republicans and Democrats, respectively. Somewhat conversely, American Dad ranks only as “On-The-Fence Liberal” which may come as a surprise to fans of Seth MacFarlane’s other shows which tend to be more straight up left-wing. Also surprising (to me, anyway) was that ESPN’s college football coverage is ranked Ultra-Conservative. Given the right-wing claim that liberals vastly outnumber conservatives in American colleges, you’d think so many of them wouldn’t just stop watching all sports once they got their diplomas.

 "Can you believe amongst all our liberal arts degrees not a one of us thinks that Keynesian economics is a viable solution to modern financial problems? Crazy!"

The reality, I suspect, is that most shows are comfortably in the political center in terms of viewership, for the simple reason that most shows want (and need) to garner as large of an audience as possible in order to stay on the air. None of the shows that are covered in the WaPo article have any particular political bent, so the only information we can really glean is that people tend to watch a lot of mainstream shows on well-established networks.  Candidates may be tempted to mine these data for some kind of insight (President Obama not too long ago remarked that Omar from The Wire was one of his favorite television characters), but to breathe too much into them is obviously going to be folly to pretty much everyone who isn’t a marketing director looking for a big name endorsement.

"Super" Bowl?

In terms of epic-ness, it should have hit its mark. Two storied teams fighting for the top position both managed to outlast other upstarts throughout the season in order to make it to the final game. If that wasn’t enough, the same two teams met four years previously, the added value of a rematch potentially permeated the air. Plus you had the New York Giants squaring off against the New England Patriots, two teams with fan bases so devoted they could form de facto religious sects. So with all that promise, why was this year’s Super Bowl so, well, boring?

It could...go...all...the... oh, who are we kidding - no, it couldn't.

From the ridiculously lopsided first quarter (the Giants kept possession of the ball for almost the entire time, giving it to the Patriots for only one play before a technical error ended up costing New England a two-point safety in the end zone), this game looked hard fought, but frankly no more astonishing than a typical Sunday game. The fans in the stadium didn’t even really seem all that into it. New York gave a solid, and ultimately winning, performance but it wasn’t one that seemed especially inspired. And the Patriots, with the exception of a record-breaking 98-yard long drive from their own two-yard line into the opposing end zone, pretty much only got by with short, 10-yard passes and the occasional run up the middle.

Unfortunately for Boston, much of the fault for the low-excitement game likely lies with the Patriots. That failed Hail Mary drive in the final moments of the game aside, none of the team’s playing was exactly dramatic. That’s not to say that the Patriot’s short play style wasn’t strong. As my father used to say, if every play you run gets you three yards, that’s always going to be enough for a first down and that’s how you move down the field. Given that the only thing that counts at the end of the game is the final score, that style is the basis for solid, winning football. It’s just that when compared with the Giants’ muscular, relatively angrier playing style, the Pats just came out looking a little worn.

I’m typically the last person to fault a team for a solid playing style that doesn’t look that flashy. I come from the world of Big Ten college football, where the knock on the entire conference for years has been that the low-scoring games and lack of relative flash makes for bad ball. Of course, that’s because the Big Ten’s stock in trade is defensive playing, which by definition exists to shut down football plays. Compared with other conferences, such as perennial chart-toppers in the SEC, the Big Ten often looks slower, putting a larger emphasis on the size of players and their ability to break apart offensive lines. Meanwhile, those whiz-bang Heisman trophy winners in the SEC can put the football wherever they like it, rack up a combined total of over 100 points per game from both teams and have heard about defensive players and secretly have made plans for what they might say to a D-line if they ever meet one.

Right. Now, which one of us runs and which one of us blocks again?

The difference between my crabby defense of reliable, if not glittering, football and my boredom at this year’s game is actually the game itself. This was the Super Bowl. For all that I’d prefer to watch an actual game where the low score means higher stakes per touchdown, the reason we watch the Super Bowl is for the big plays, the explosions and the twirls and twists. The Super Bowl is all about spectacle and special effects and as such it is far more akin to entertainment than sports; it’s the Glee to the rest of the regular season’s CBS Nightly News. This year the league ended up with a game that lacked the pizzazz that it needed for such a night of event television. It didn’t feel fake or overcooked like some other Super Bowls in recent memory, but it didn’t exactly live up as the sheer entertainment machine that it’s designed to be either.

But as they say in the game, there’s always next year. Detroit Lions for XLVII, baby!