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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The Super Bowl went off as advertised again this year. The New England Patriots were back in the Big Game, after an absence and rebuilding efforts given the departure of Tom Brady after the 2019 season. Patriots fans will have to take what solace they can from the fact of their participation in their first Super Bowl since Brady's departure. They are back to the big stage, though not yet back to victorious form there. I will discuss the game itself tomorrow. Today, the spectacle. There were, as there always are. lots of expensively produced television ads. As usual, these ads mirror American obsessions, especially the obsession as of late with artificial intelligence and whether it is destined to replace the natural human sort. There were a couple of commercials plugging Anthropic's AI system, Claude, and Anthropic's promise to keep Claude ad free. These, for me, were the stand outs of the show. Good nerdy humor, right up my alley, and the humor was pertinent to the pro...
Even the ads did not live up to the hype this year. One of the first was a Coca-Cola ad that began with a 2025 argument over artificial intelligence and how AI was going to take over the world. Two young hotheads were engaged in this dispute, and an older woman smiles benignly at them and says, "I think we're going to be just fine." Then we see an event in 1975 -- a memory of hers. She was then as a young woman a participant in a similar argument, except that the key word was "computers" rather than "AI". Someone or other ar that earlier moment had apparently said, "I think we're going to be just fine" in the same benign way. Only after all of this does one see the logo and realize that it was all a Coca-Cola commercial. Meaning what? That "it" has been "just fine" for fifty years despite worries about digital technology because we've had coke? And it will continue to be just fine because we still have it? ...
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 fac...
In case you are one of the few to whom the news has not yet come: The Kansas City Chiefs defeated the San Francisco 49ers in overtime, 25 to 22. And yes, Taylor Swift was there. She had taken her private jet to Las Vegas from a concert in Japan. A bit of conversation during a post-game hub was captured by a mike. Her love interest, Travis Kelce, also known as the tight end for the victorious Chiefs, whispered to Swift, "How are you not jet lagged?" She responded, "Jet lag is a choice." A lot might be said about that cheerful exchange, but I choose not to say it. Instead, I will define Kelce's job title. A tight end is an offensive player who lines up close to the tackle and is used alternatively for two purposes. Sometimes -- on running plays -- he is a blocker. At other times he runs a pattern in anticipation of a pass. The name of the position suggests a distinction between the TE and the WR, or wide receiver, who is too far from the "action in the ...
This year, the Super Bowl featured a match-up between the Kansas City Chiefs and the San Francisco Forty-Niners. I'll discuss that tomorrow. Today, I'd like to say a few words about the ads, which have long been a hallmark of the Super Bowl as entertainment and pop cultural event. The Super Bowl is guaranteed a massive audience, and the ads are expensively created with that audience in mind, at a cost of about $7 million per second of air time. That isn't what the ads cost to produce, ut is only the cost of airing them. Production costs of course vary wildly but there is no reason to try to cut corners on this. This year what stands out in my minds were ads for Homes.com and Apartment.com., featuring Jeff Goldblum and Dan Levy. I think of them as ONE series of ads because the two websites they advertise are both parts of the portfolio of CoStar group. Of course Goldblum -- famous among much else for his park in the Jurassic Park franchise -- ha...
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 ...
There is little to be said about this year's Super Bowl. But I'll say the following anyway, simply to achieve a sense of closure. Congrats to the Patriots. Congrats, too, to the Rams for an amazing season. They'll almost certainly be back to the post-season, and perhaps back to flying with the Superb Owl, next year. CBS' opening bit, where we witness what purports to be a boardroom debate about how the CBS coverage of the Super Bowl ought to begin, was clever, but everything seems to have gone downhill from there. Lackluster game, boring halftime show, sub-par commercials. Props to Gladys Knight.
Big companies and big advertising agencies see the Super Bowl as a chance to break through the fog and set themselves apart. So the event has seen some very creative ads over the years. This year the ads seemed mostly ... meh. The best of them was one of the first: Sprint had a very expensive looking ad with an 'artificial intelligence' theme. That's a still from it above. The robots who have come to full sentience mock their human inventor for the fact that he isn't smart enough to switch to Sprint. Well ... if you didn't see it, I can only say, you gotta be there. It is funny. What makes it stick in my mind even more than its intrinsic humor is that two of its competitors in the wireless phone market ... dropped the ball, no pun intended. Verizon, at half time, wrapped itself in a saccharine way around the nobility of 'first responders.' And near the end of the third quarter, T-Mobile tried to make a point about human equality by showing us a lot...
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...
The bettors' line usually fluctuates in the days prior to the Super Bowl, as money comes into the market first from one side then from the other. The line serves as a "price," and responds to the forces of supply and demand. The fluctuation didn't happen this year. The line was 3 pts, with the New England Patriots favored, from the start and it stayed that way right up to kick off. What lesson if any can be derived from that: I don't know. First story: ads. Scarlett Johansson in "Ghost in the Shell," an upcoming movie I had never heard of. Wild footage in the ad, though. Japanese anime thing? See images above. Later, good Buick ad. "If that's a Buick, then my kid is Cam Newton." Near the end of the first half there's a clever ad about how the "half time bathroom break is coming," so it is good to have FEBREZE around. Yuck yuck. Also, T-Mobile has a couple (more?) of spoofs of the FIFTY SHADES movie franchise. Lat...
I know that some of my readers don't really understand that the Superbowl has come and gone for another year until they read what I have to say on the subject. So this one's for you. The Broncos/Panthers matchup was widely anticipated. Neither of the two teams comes from a really huge consumer marker (no New York, Chicago, or southern California team was involved) but the comparisons were intriguing. A great offense, Carolina's, would be going head to head with a great defense, Denver's. Things went Denver's way, almost from the start, more consistently than anyone had expected. Another big item: the standout commercial in the first half was a Marilyn Monroe take on the Snickers bar series, "you're not you when you're hungry." The stand-out for the second half involved a herd of running hot dogs, and the tagline "Meet the Ketchups." The evolution of the game One much watched player: Michael Oher, the inspiration for the huma...
This year the New England Patriots returned to the Super Bowl, led by coach Bill Belichick and dogged (for at least the second time in Belichick's time with the Patriots) by a cheating scandal coming in. Heck, even Bill Nye the science guy got into the act, demonstrating for his fans that a certain temperature change cannot deflate footballs. The Patriots were there to take the title away from the defending champions, the Seattle Seahawks. Never mind the stylized "seahawk" of the team's logo, I've posted a photo of an actual seahawk here for my discerning readers to admire. The game took place this year in Glendale, Arizona, University of Phoenix Stadium. The air in Arizona was dry (as always) and windless; the temperature got up to a high of 69 degrees that afternoon. This contrasted with both the northwest and northeast corners of the country, where the two contending teams come from. Super Bowl Sunday was a rainy day in Seattle, with a high of 48. and a ...
I inscribe here my miscellaneous thoughts on this year's Super Bowl, a shockingly lopsided 43 to 8 Seahawks' victory. Queen Latifah started things off vigorously with her take on America the Beautiful . Then Renée Fleming did an awesome job with the Star Spangled Banner. Opera fans know her as a great diva. If you don't think you're likely to catch her performing in that capacity on stage, you might take a pick from this very partial discography. She is featured in each of the following CDs: Handel Arias Decca 2003/2004 Requiem (Verdi) Philips 2004 Haunted Heart Decca 2005 Sacred Songs Decca 2005 Homage – The Age of the Diva Decca 2006 Strauss: Daphne Decca Four Last Songs by Richard Strauss Decca 2008 Verismo – Arias of Puccini, Mascagni, Cilea, Giordano, Leoncavallo Decca 2009 Dark Hope Decca Records 2010 Poèmes – French songs, Decca 2012 But back to the game. The best thing you can say about the Denver Broncos is that they were rig...
I attended a Super Bowl party this year and jotted some notes on a napkin. There is nothing especially original or perceptive about the game or the sport of football to be found on my napkin, but it would be unusual for any blogger working out of the US and with a Y chromosome not to mention the Super Bowl. So ... the below italicized material in all its pointless immediacy consists of the notes I took at the time. Enjoy. The usual pre-game hype was somewhat complicated this year by a Ray Lewis substance abuse controversy. An early Audi commercial drew a big response. It had a senior prom, kiss-the-Prom-Queen theme. By the end of the first half, it looked like the Ravens were running away with the game. They were up 21 to 6. Then they scored quickly at the start of the second half, a more-than-100 yard run on a kickoff return, to make that 28 to 6. Even worse. The standout ad in the third quarter was Century 21's, "My groom is not crazy about moving in with my mo...