Oops. The Super Bowl wasn’t very super, not even medium.
Unlike professional wrestling, the one thing the every-second-sponsored league can’t control is how good or bad the game is.
A check back reveals that Denver is no stranger to not only losing Super Bowl games, but losing them badly. In 1987, 1988, and 1990, the Broncos lost by 19, 32, and 45 points respectively.
There were a few other blowout games around those years as well. In the normal NFL game, momentum will often change two or three times. But often in a game with the magnitude of the Super Bowl – all the hype and scrutiny and waiting two weeks for it to finally start – if one teams gets a break and goes on a roll, sometimes it just quickly gets out of control and turns into a nightmare.
Besides the game, this year’s commercials were equally lousy. I conceded early in the third quarter when Denver again came up empty on its first possession of the second half, and turned on re-run of The Mentalist.
Up until then, only the Tim Tebow/no contract commercial even halfway appealed to me. Everything else ranged from bland to outright foolish. The one I was waiting for – the Full House reunion – hadn’t aired yet, so I still haven’t seen it.
Halftime went from rock stars with walkers to at least someone who is currently popular with someone. It was deflating to learn later that Bruno Mars will be in a movie later this year, which tells me his Super Bowl appearance was simply an arranged marketing campaign.
This was confirmed when the game analyst panel spent about a minute talking about Mars and how good the halftime show was. Anything more than a “Yeah, that was good” means it was also paid-for, and that the commentators were forced to comment as such – just another piece in the marketing toolkit.
Best tweet I came across referred to the NFL's tight copyright hold on the words Super Bowl, so that it has to be referred to as "big game," etc.: at least we don't have to call the World Series the "Grand Sequence of Games."
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