Tag: Football

Super Bowl Summary

Who knows? For the first time in history, I didn’t watch it. The cheaters Patriots won, apparently on a really stupid play call. If the play would have worked, it would have been a brilliant play call. So it goes.

This is the first Super Bowl in ages where I didn’t watch any of it on TV. I didn’t see the game, I didn’t see the commercials, I didn’t see Katy Perry. I did clean four or five hours worth of shows off the DVR with the Spousal Unit and the PsychoPuppies.

I don’t feel unfulfilled.

One of my friends complained that the US wastes an incredible amount of time on the game, and then confessed he would watch. That’s when I decided I didn’t really care. I don’t have any ties to the Seahawks and I hate the Patriots, so why waste the time?

I have a feeling it’s people like me that cause advertisers to leak their commercials on the Internet before the game.

To all those who are hung-over this morning, drunk with victory or defeat, did your lives actually change?Did the fact forty-five guys you don’t know ran into another forty-five guys over four or five hours really make you feel that much better today? How many people heard, “Hey, the Patriots won! Everybody gets a bonus!” (Other than the team.)

We waste a lot of time on sports. Sometimes, I choose not to waste time on sports, and I don’t feel I’ve missed that much. Yesterday was one of those times.

Now, can we start counting down to Spring Training?

Super Bowl vs World Series

This is an ode to four hours of my life I will never get back.

The Super Bowl is one game, winner-take-all. Sure, it’s at the very end of the season, and the two teams have survived the rest of the playoffs, but it’s still only one game, so it’s sudden-death. So, occasionally, you get one team that appears to be completely unprepared and they get massacred. The 2014 Super Bowl was over about 12 seconds in – if you’re in the championship game, and you can’t get the center and the quarterback on the same page at the beginning of the first play, you’re gonna lose. This means a lot of people just tune out – what’s the point in watching? Once one team has a certain margin with a certain amount of time left, the game is pretty much over.  It isn’t over ’till it’s over, but sometimes it is.

Now, consider the World Series, whether or not you consider the “World” part a valid claim. You start your ace pitcher in Game 1. He strides confidently to the mound, and promptly gets shelled. Nothing works. He’s walking people, he’s giving up hits. Runs are coming in. You pull him in the third inning. Embarrassing. Fatal? Not by a long shot. Either your offense rallies, your relievers stop the bleeding, or you just write off the game, and start planning for the next night, when you have another pitcher to send to the mound. It isn’t over ’till it’s over, and you have to lose four games to really lose. Sure, you can get swept, but at least you don’t lose hope 3/4ths of the way through the game. In baseball, you can always win in the ninth. Or the tenth. Or the sixteenth. No matter how many runs they score, you’re going to get your chance to swing for the fences.

Which do you prefer?

If you’re a sports widow, I’m sure you prefer the Super Bowl, since there is only four hours of screaming and gnashing of teeth. Well, maybe only four hours. Of course, the pre-game was another four hours. 

If you were cheering for the Broncos yesterday, which do you prefer?

Super Bowl. Meh.

The Super Bowl is this afternoon – actually, this evening, so it can bleed into prime time. It’s our annual “once in a lifetime” event. A lifetime event that 30/32nds of the universe don’t really care about, because their team isn’t playing. So, why is everyone so whipped up? (Besides the ones who actually went to Vegas or online and have money riding on the outcome.)

The pre-game show is four hours long. The game itself is four hours long. This shows immediately that something is amiss. A football game is one hour in length. So, you expand that by 300% just because it’s on TV? The weekly NFL games are three hours long on TV, but this one is an hour longer. What takes that extra hour? Hmm. Perhaps the commercials are the reason to watch the Super Bowl. Why does it take four hours of pre-game to set the stage? There are only two teams. Are you going to do a biography of each player? Does it really take four hours to remind people who the team with the most points wins?

I don’t get it.

I admit, if I start watching, I will get dragged into it, because there’s just something about watching competition – it’s the same reason people (including me) watch chefs try to make something edible from a mystery basket. But at the same time, it’s a bit silly. One game. For everything. Until next year.

Maybe instead of the pre-game “banter” and “reporting”, they should just re-run last year’s Super Bowl, since nobody remembers who played in it. (Quick! Who won last year? Was it the team in your city? Did you lose money on one of them?) You know who remembers last year? 2/32nds of the universe. And half of them are still pissed.

Enjoy the game. Or the commercials.

Time to think

Attendance seems lower at the AirHogs games this year – not a lot, but noticeable. Part of the issue is their schedule sucks – the season started with a three-game home stand and then they left town for ten days. Not exactly a momentum builder. 

Perhaps the reason baseball is being touted as “going away” or “fading” is that in order to enjoy a game, you have to think. This is contrary to football (big guys hitting each other), basketball (tall guys in shorts running around) and hockey (figure skaters with sticks.) 

Baseball does not have a time limit. You play nine innings, no matter how long it takes, unless it rains. You can’t run out the clock. 

There actually is strategy in baseball, even though at first glance, it’s just a guy swinging a bat at a ball. You can change pitchers. You can change hitters. You can change runners. You can try to steal. You can bunt or swing away. You have to think about it. If you can’t think, the manager or coach will tell you what to do. 

Baseball is a statistician’s dream because everything is a number. How many pitches have been thrown? What’s the pitcher’s ERA? What’s the batter’s batting average? slugging average? 

I’m surprised baseball isn’t more popular just because there are so many items you can wager on. 

The AirHogs played two seven-inning games in less than five hours last night. The Super Bowl can take longer than that. 

I’ve never seen the point of basketball – it was invented to have something to do on a rainy day, and it shows. The winner is the team that shoots the best because you basically just tramp up and down the court, trading shots. 

Hockey would probably be more enticing if we had ice around here. Since I never skated, I never saw the point. 

I was rattling off statistics to a guy next to me last night, and he asked if I had played baseball growing up. I think he was surprised I didn’t (I played soccer – which is great exercise, but is also tramping up and down the field, shooting and missing. I played soccer for eight years, but I don’t really like watching it.) 

You can get into baseball without having played it. You can progress from watching to scoring to keeping statistics and doing predictive modeling in less than a 100-game season. 

There’s just one problem with baseball – you have to think. Strategy, statistics and math require the use of your brain. 

That may be baseball’s problem. Perhaps it’s really our problem. 

So glad that’s over

Congratulations to the Green Bay Packers, the winners of the Metroplex’s first Super Bowl. The national anthem sucked, the halftime show really sucked, but the game was actually pretty good – which is how it should be.

I poked around Wikipedia (so double-check the facts), and this was actually the third Super Bowl in Texas – Houston has had two – Super Bowl VIII (Miami’s second consecutive win, the year after the perfect season) and Super Bowl XXXVIII (Patriots over the Panthers.)

Given how incredibly bad many people (including me) think JerryWorld’s halftime show was yesterday, I looked at the halftime shows for the Houston games. 1974? The UT Longhorn Band (which would piss off Aggies, but at least it’s within the State.) 2004? Nipplegate.

I must have zoned out on this, because I never realized Nipplegate was in the Great State of Texas.

So, we didn’t get anyone local (Kelly Clarkson? Willie Nelson? ZZ Top? Jack Ingram? The Robison Boys? Any number of thousands of Texas bands?) and we didn’t get any fun and excitement.

Note to future Super Bowl planners – if you ask a group to do a 15-minute set and they say they need two guest stars to pull it off, get another group.

Super Bowls in your town are a lot like weddings – there is a dull drumbeat that starts a year or two before the event, which grows louder and louder until it eclipses everything else, and then after a few hours, it’s over.(I am very grateful Lotusphere was last week, so I missed much of the hype.)

Was it really worth all the pain?

I’ll wait to see the local financial numbers for a final answer, but I would have to say “No” at this point.

Some of the issues I see:

  • The home team was from Wisconsin, over 1,000 miles from JerryWorld. As I said on the Bleacher Report yesterday, that’s not really a home team.
  • Dallas got blamed for having winter weather. In February. May I remind people NYC can’t shovel snow, either, and they get this every freakin’ year?
  • The weather kept any number of people away, so a lot of stores, bars and restaurants probably have extra stocks today. Anyone having a Jack Daniels sale today?
  • A number of people with tickets didn’t actually have seats. They weren’t oversold – the seats didn’t exist. It’s not that they paid for outside, standing, watching TV “seats” (who were those idiots?), it’s that the Fire Marshal didn’t approve the temporary seating that was still being installed at game time. WTF?
  • Jerry didn’t set the Super Bowl attendance record – while it would have been perfect to have the record missed by the exact number of people denied seating, it was missed by more than that.
  • Wasn’t our last big snowstorm when Jerry had the NBA All-Star Game at the DeathStar? Who did he piss off?

I am probably in the minority on this, but after years of reading about Super Bowls and Olympics that barely break after the locals being promised a huge windfall, I’m really not sure what we got out of this, other than Jerry’s ego is probably larger now than ever, if that were even possible.

I wonder what happened to the guy with two nosebleed seats for $57,000 EACH on StubHub?