Super Bowl 2025: it was awful

I realize that you, dear reader, can hardly believe that the Super Bowl is over until you hear about it from me. So, here we go. I'll say something about the game today -- I may say a few words about the ads that played during its run, later this week.

The only point I want to make is: yes that was an awful game. The Chiefs never even seemed to show up until near the end when the cause was lost.

That long pass into the end zone near the end of the fourth quarter, and then the two-point conversion to make it an 8 point touchdown -- THAT was a bit of derring do that made the final score seem less lopsided and less ugly. But it also raised the question: since the Chiefs are capable of such explosive play as that, WHERE HAD THOSE CHIEFS BEEN?

There were no omens of disaster in the very early going. The Eagles received the opening kickoff routinely, so that the first play from scrimmage took place at the 30 yard line. That first play got them four yards. If those facts spelled anything, it was a foretaste of a grind-it-out game between equally matched opponents. It did not keep looking like that for long.

Since for all I know you are ignorant of the final score, or have been until this moment, I will convey it. Philadelphia Eagles 40. Kansas City Chiefs 22. Thaat score does not convey the one-sidedness of the whole.

The problem throughout, for the Chiefs, was as the cliche goes "in the trenches". Their offensive line could not protect their QB worth a damn. On the other side of the football, their defensive line could not establish any pressure.

It was awful. Not a superb owl at all. A nasty owl. Phooey.

Comments

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a maj...

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere. At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak...

The Lyrics of "Live Like You Were Dying"

Back in 2004 Tim McGraw recorded the song "Live Like You were Dying." As a way of marking the one-decade anniversary of this song, I'd like to admit that a couple of the lines have confused me for years. I could use your help understanding them. In the first couple of verses, the song seems easy to follow. Two men are talking, and one tells the other about his diagnosis. The doctors have (recently? or a long time ago and mistakenly? that isn't clear) given him the news that he would die soon. "I spent most of the next days/Looking at the X-rays." Then we get a couple of lines about a man crossing items off of his bucket list. "I went sky diving, I went rocky mountain climbing, I went two point seven seconds on a bull named Fu Man Chu." Then the speaker -- presumably still the old man -- shifts to the more characterological consequences of the news. As he was doing those things, he found he was loving deeper and speaking sweeter, and givin...

Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

Search This Blog