A Late Super Bowl Review

Note:  This post isn’t actually finished, but I’m sick as a dog right now, so I figured I’d at least publish what I did finish.  More to come later.

I meant to post this last night, but I fell asleep before I even got around to writing it.  So hopefully I’m not all late and wrong here.

Now let me just start out by saying that I feel the pain of the Seahawks fans.  You wait and wait and wait to get to the big one, and then you’re there and you’re beaten by a team that’s won it before.  Granted, the Steelers hadn’t won in about 30 years, but it still stings to lose to a franchise with such a “rich history”, and all that garbage.  

It’s all been well documented how the Steelers outplayed the Seahawks on Sunday, and how Pittsburgh also had a ton of calls go their way en route to their victory.  The refs were awful for sure.  Not only did they screw up calls, but they screwed up huge calls in the biggest game in all of American sports.  But you know what?  As a fan of neither team, I’m not as outraged about the Seahawks getting screwed.  Sure they got screwed, but they still could have overcome the bad calls with better play.  They looked awful.  It looked like the only guys playing on offense were Hasselbeck and the offensive line (who did a fantastic job against Pittsburgh’s blitz, by the way.  The Steelers dropped into coverage instead of bringing more heat, and Seattle’s receivers couldn’t take it.  The league MVP, Shaun Alexander, was all but invisible even with 95 yards rushing (I don’t know whether that’s his fault or whoever was calling the plays).  That tight end, Stevens, pulled a choke job for the ages.  And I’m sorry, but as beautifully run as the trick play was, it should never have worked.  Seattle’s defense should have seen it coming a mile away.  If I saw it coming, there’s no excuse for them not to have done as much.  But enough of that.  You know who got screwed by the refs in this one?  Me.  And you.  And everyone else that watched the Super Bowl hoping and expecting to see a good game.

How much more competitive would the game have been if the Seahawks don’t get the touchdown in the first half taken away by a phantom offensive pass interference call?  Or the non-existent hold on a play that would have taken Seattle to Pittsburgh’s 1-yard line?  Every time they started driving, I’d think to myself, “Here we go!  Now we get to see who steps up when it’s close!”  Of course, the game was pretty close the whole time, but it was close in a non-competitive kind of way, if that makes any sense.  So that’s what made me mad.  Yeah, I’d be fuming about the refs if I were a Seahawks fan, and I still feel their pain, but I’m mostly disappointed because I could have seen a better game, and they took it away from me.  

While I’m on the subject of the Super Bowl, I’ll address the halftime show.  Yes, it sucked.  But you know what?  Who cares?  I don’t watch the Super Bowl for a concert.  I watch it for football and commercials (which also sucked this year, by the way).  Some people are saying that the format is bad because the NFL is scared of another Janet Jackson incident.  So am I to assume those people want to bring back the clusterhumps (word edited for profanity) that MTV used to produce?  Those were unwatchable.  The music was bad, the choreography was bad—everything was bad about them.  There were way too many artists involved, and it was a mess.  You want to see an example of a good Super Bowl halftime show?  Check out U2 from 2002.  That was great.  Of course it helped that it was a tribute to those who died in the World Trade Center attacks, but the idea is the same.  If you put an act out there that everyone can enjoy (and no, not everyone enjoys the Stones anymore), give them the stage to themselves, and let them put on a show for a few minutes, it will be fine.  Try to do too much and you end up with the ADD fests that MTV put on.