The story of the first half was: Both teams had great defenses. The Patriots had no offense at all because the offensive line was remarkably weak. So nobody could score touchdowns, but the Seahawks could score field goals. In the second half, the Patriots offense made some efforts to rally, without much effect. Indeed, in the game as a whole, Patriots quarterback Drake Maye was sacked SIX times. [If the Seahawks had been able to sack him one more time they would have tied the Super Bowl record.] Of course each sack has a penumbra. For every sack in a game, that is, there are plays in which the QB was about to be sacked but got off a hurried pass, inevitably incomplete, to avoid it. The dominance of the Seahawks' defensive line against the Pats offensive line could hardly have been more complete. Congrats to the Pacific Northwest, which has its regional champion. My understanding is that the gamblers' spread was 4.5 points. If you gave up those points in or...
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Yes, Brady kicked butt. The Greatest of All Time in professional football, the Tiger Woods or Ken Jennings of his sport put on a demonstration of what a GOAT looks like in action. Though he is now sailing under the piratical banner of the Tampa Bay Buccs, whenever I hear an announcer calling a Brady pass to Gronkowski I naturally think I'm watching a Patriots game. This was fun. The half time show, less so. Maybe the symbolism of the ranks and files of masked up (bandaged up?) faces escaped me. I fear that, like my contemporaries in general, I'm out of touch with youth culture, so I certainly didn't recognize the music. Some of the ads were clever. I enjoyed the Paramount ads, in which Patrick Stewart, unseen, was urging various pop culture figures to keep climbing a mountain. Beavis and Butthead were involved. Huh huh, nhuh huh. There was also a gig-economy ad for a service that helps you create a website for your own gig-economy business. The ad involved ...
It was a fascinating nail-biter of a football game. I was hoping for a Patriots win, out of boring old predictable regional loyalty. But I can't be all that unhappy. The game was hard fought on both sides, and the Eagles eked it out the old-fashioned way, by winning the war in the trenches. Until very near the end of the game neither quarterback had been sacked. I haven't looked into it, but I'm pretty sure that is rare, for football games generally or Super Bowl games in particular, for there only to be one sack and for that to come as the decisive end-of-game event. When one refers in football terms to "the trenches" one refers to the front lines of offense and defense, where soldiers of each team stand literally shoulder to shoulder. In this game the offensive lines held up bravely against everything their opponents could throw at them, giving their QBs time to do their thing. Thus the significance of the absence of sacks, and of that one final exce...