For the first time in about nine years, I didn't make it all the way through the Super Bowl. Despite winning a whopping $12.50 on a no-skills-required randomly selected gambling grid at the end of the half, I went home at the beginning of the fourth quarter to finish some reading, my interest expired. So why was this XL game so boring? It wasn't that the teams involved didn't have compelling stories or competitive skills, which is why I'm left wondering why the alliterative Steelers-Seahawks Super Bowl left so much to be desired.
You can't say that the game was boring because it was too defensive - if we had just been watching closer, we could have been picking up on the intrica-cies of strategy. It simply wasn't. There was plenty of scoring, but none of it was exciting. No build up, no anticipation, and some of it shouldn't even have counted.
A recap: The first touchdown, a run by Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlisberger, probably wasn't even a touchdown. The second touchdown, Willie Parker's 75-yard run, was over in eight seconds. The third touchdown? Seahawks finally get a significant number on the board after blowing seven straight drives in an anti-climatic 20-yard pass to tight end Jerramy Stevens.
Perhaps the only truly exciting scoring came on the Steelers' decisive final touchdown, a wide receiver pass by Antwaan Randle El to Hines Ward. I should have just done all my history reading in the first three quarters.
You can't say that the game was boring because the refs couldn't keep their eyes open or their flags in their pockets. There were plenty of penalties, but not enough to make the game slow-paced, and some of the calls, though questionable, were not so atrociously bad as to be game-deciding (as many Seattle fans would like you to believe). Touchdown number one, for example, was a genuinely difficult call to make, one that couldn't even be accurately decided after watching playbacks. Although they didn't help things, the officials were simply not the reason this game dragged on.
As far as stories went, the Seahawks had the traditionally compelling "We've Never Won a Super Bowl But We'd Sure Like To" spin, while the Steelers had their "Underdog Comes Out on Top" twist. The players were interesting. Big Ben Roethlisberger and Jerome Bettis were guys with heart and grit, and if that wasn't enough, the New York Times even did a story on the Steelers' "link forged by tragedy," citing the Sept. 11, 2005 attacks and recent coal miners' catastrophe. There were definitely stories, so what made this game so dull?
My theory? The enter-tainment. One, the sleepy commercials, and two, the sleepier halftime show.
There was no Terry Tate, Office Linebacker. No 1984. No Mean Joe Green. No memorably hilarious or even poignantly quotable commercials to be re-enacted at the water cooler on Monday. Bud Light did the typical, "Dude, guys like beer. ... No, no, we don't think you understand. ... Guys REALLY like beer. ... Some guys even like beer more than women. ... Isn't that hilarious!?" approach.
These commercials, while always fun, may be just a little played out. Diet Pepsi and Toyota attempted to appeal to minority groups by having a soda can star in a hip-hop video and Jackie Chan flick and a bilingual father explaining in a terribly acted exchange with a young child the value of driving a Hybrid. Overall, I was shocked by how many ads I'd seen before (Alka Seltzer, Capital One, Westin) and how many ads were just plain unimaginative and insignificant. As one of my fellow viewers shouted at the TV: "Why are we watching something about Overstock.com?" It got so bad, I started taking bathroom and beer breaks during the commercials.
The halftime show was even more uninspired, though no less sold out, than the advertising. Surprisingly, the nearly dead Rolling Stones, even Mick Jagger, appeared to have more energy than either of the teams actually competing in the game.
To be honest, I don't know when a halftime show has ever actually been that good, so I'm unsure why I keep expecting them to captivate me. Despite the costume snafus of recent performers, the event is always an over-promoted, over-done, made-for-television, barely live and often lip-synched performance. Really, all we ever have to hope for is that someone in management forgets to turn on the five-second delay and suddenly one of the performers is topless on live national television. But that would never happen, and in live shows Jagger's shirt comes off easier than Kobe's bad boy reputation, and who wants to see that anyway?
The long and the short of it? You could have probably gotten up and walked to the refrigerator enough times to finish a 30-rack, cooked yourself some chili, invented more random grid structures (number of times Bill Cowher makes inexplicable angry face versus number of bad calls in his favor) and topics to bet on (most valuable acronym for Emerald Nuts), read at least three chapters of Tocqueville's "Democracy in America" and even had time to relieve yourself - all without missing a thing.
Thank God pitchers and catchers report in two weeks.
Kate Klonick '06 never re-members to turn on the five-second delay.
