The Super Bowl I Watched
Posted on: February 13, 2024
- In: Current Events | Perspective | Reviews
- 1 Comment
The Super Bowl I watched apparently wasn’t the same as the one you watched. I could’ve viewed the Univision version with 3 million Spanish-language fans, or the Nickelodeon version with 1.75 million kid-language fans. But I didn’t. I saw the same CBS version as everybody else. Add ’em all up and you’ve got 123.7 million fans replete with big screens and guacamole and pizza. 7% more viewers than the previous-high Super Bowl, and more viewers than for any previous TV broadcast — including the moon landing!
After all the under-dog, over-hype, GOAT, Swifties puffery, I was set for a really good, evenly-matched competition. What I got was dull, dull, dull.
The cross-tabs haven’t been published yet, so I don’t yet know how (or if) the viewership rose and fell with the swells of the game. No score after the first quarter? 10-3 at the half? 13-10 after the third? Which Pop Warner teams had been suckered into playing this game? By the beginning of the fourth, I was so disappointed that even my second-favorite play-by-play team was sounding stupid to me. In my imagination, network honchos were pulling their toupées off and rending their garments as they watched ratings dropping into their onion dip. It was even hard for me to muster a 3-point pulse increase with the scrapping in the fourth which resulted in overtime. It all came down to a last-moment score which was so blown by the announce team that it was hard to know if the officials had raised their arms. Was the game over?
Nope. To add insult to injury, Patrick Mahomes was named MVP. What? Mind you, Mahomes is probably my favorite NFL player. I know he can never be counted out and he certainly did pull that climactic rabbit out of his helmet. But “most valuable” seems more meritorious to me, and on that score my vote went to 49ers WR Jauan Jenson who both caught a TD pass and threw a TD pass. Not valuable enough? How about 9ers WR Christian McCaffrey who caught 8 for 8 and a touchdown against a smothering Chiefs defense? I know the MVP usually goes to the victor, but it sure would be nice if — once in a while — the final score didn’t cloud the extraordinary efforts of the vanquished.
Post-game headlines have us believing that this was among the more epic contests ever. And the right team won, IMHO. So why am I still unhappy? Because coaching failed to send in plays that write Super Bowl history. Because the much-vaunted “star power” pretty much didn’t show up. Because it should have been a much better game. Because I ran out of guac at halftime.
1 Response to "The Super Bowl I Watched"
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Sunlight Shining Through Cloud 
February 15, 2024 at 2:49 am
We grew up at a time when football was stellar. It’s hard to be impressed anymore by the wimpy game they play now days.
Face it, 49ers didn’t sail to Santa Clara to begin their epic search for gold. There’s no winning when you start out from the wrong port of entry. They even chose “tails”. Geez.
It was a boring game and I only watched because my husband watched. I gave up football and other sports when players kneeled to false rhetoric. Sports doesn’t have the same macho it had when stars like Brodie, Plunkett, Montana, and Young were playing, and that’s just SF quarterbacks (where’s Fridge Perry when you need him? or Butkus, Joe Greene, Gale Sayers, Emmitt Smith, Elway, Marino, Unitas, Jim Brown, Rice, Tom Brady – football when football was great and the SF 49ers were in SAN FRANCISCO.