Up With PeopleHello Everyone:
So we’ve had a fairly entertaining game so far. Nice and close.
Thought America the Beautiful and the National Anthem were performed admirably. Not quite sure why the powers that be thought having the Rock out there was necessary, but someone did, so there he was.
Odell Beckham Jr. scoring the game’s first TD must have given Giants fans fits. Seeing him limp off the field was more of what they were used to.
Chris Collinsworth called a Rams receiver “an excellent receiver of the football” I heard Phil Mushnick screaming all the way from his house.
Also, the Bengals getting a penalty for taunting after picking off Matthew Stafford, I mean you can’t make that $h-t up, right?
I liked Arnold and Salma Hayek singing Eddie Grant’s Electric Avenue, none of the other commercials so far have done anything for me.
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So I know I'm coming off sounding like a broken record here, but I still think it's ridiculous that we are playing the Super Bowl on February 13.
February 13 happens to be my dad's birthday. I asked him earlier last week if he ever thought they would be deciding the champion of the NFL on his birthday, and of course he said no.
I also asked him what his first memory of watching (or listening to) an NFL Championship game was. I had thought maybe he remembered the great Giants-Colts 1958 game at Yankee Stadium, the NFL's first ever OT game, labeled "The Greatest Game Ever Played" That game was a bit before he started watching football, but the Giants and Packers played for the NFL Championship in 1961 at what would be renamed Lambeau Field a couple years later. The same two teams played again the next year, this time at Yankee Stadium.
The Packers won both times. More to my point, the games were played December 31, 1961 and December 30, 1962* The 1958 game was played on December 28.
OK, that was the old NFL, before the merger with the AFL, pre-Super Bowl. Let's get to that era...
The first AFL-NFL World Championship game (as it was called that day) was played in Los Angeles on January 15, 1967. The Jets lone appearance in the Super Bowl was January 12, 1969. In the Super Bowl era, the earliest the game was played in January was Super Bowl XI on January 9, 1977. That was John Madden's lone Super Bowl win a 32-14 win for his Raiders over the Vikings at the Rose Bowl.
Super Bowls XIII and XIV were played on the third Sunday in January. Super Bowl XVII was played on the last Sunday in January, owing to the 1982 NFL Players Strike. From Super Bowl XX, wear the Bears destroyed the Patriots at the Superdome, all the way to Super Bowl XXXV, where the Ravens beat up on our Giants in Tampa, all those games were played on the last Sunday in January.
The next year, the Super Bowl was played in February for the first time. This was due to the NFL deciding (correctly) not to play games on September 16, 2001, less than a week after the 9/11/2001 terrorist attacks.
Super Bowl XXXVII would be the last one played in January. Since then, they have all been the first Sunday in February. But with the NFL's awful decision to go to a 17 game schedule, we are now two weeks into February.
Several years ago, Mike Francesca stated that the NFL's ultimate goal was to get the Super Bowl to President's Day weekend, that way many people would have the next day off. Here's one of the problem's I see with that... the Sunday of President's Day Weekend is usually the Daytona 500. Now that don't mean much to me, but NASCAR in most of America is right behind football as Americas favorite spectator sport. Might the NFL and NASCAR work something out? I have a hard time seeing that.
And we have another issue with the late Super Bowl date..and I realize this is being considered an aberration, but the weather in Los Angeles this week has been unseasonably warm. It was 60 degrees at one point Saturday here in NYC, but out in LA, they had temp in the high 80's. The temp at game time tonight was 80, and for all the luxurious amenities SoFi Stadium has for it's $5 billion price tag, air conditioning apparently wasn't one of them.
SoFi Stadium is closed on three sides, the other side is open to le the breeze from the nearby Pacific Ocean flow through the building. The previous warmest Super Bowl was also in Los Angeles, Super Bowl VII between the Dolphins and Redskins at the LA Coliseum.
I realize I'm fighting against windmills here, if anything the NFL will look to push this even later into February. The NFL is already a 24/7/365 operation, they will look to add more days to the Gregorian calendar so they could put more football on. There is no such thing as an offseason.
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Also interesting to note that this is the 2nd year in a row that a team is getting to play in their home stadium for the Super Bowl. I don't know what is more mind blowing-that it's happened twice in a row, or that it had never happened in 55 years previous.
If this becomes an issue that they want to avoid, might I suggest they play the next few years at Met Life Stadium. You sure as hell don't have to worry about either one of that stadium's tenants playing in the Super Bowl anytime soon. Yes, you run the risk of playing the game in a blizzard, (seeing that snow this morning made me once again rue the fact that didn’t happen here in 2014) but we thought they'd be playing in a sauna today, and when you think of football, you think of snow and ice, or breezes off the Pacific Ocean?
Not that I'm looking to host another Super Bowl, the one we had here wasn't anything to write home about. I'm just saying Met Life would at least guarantee two neutral teams playing for the Lombardi trophy.
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Forgot to mention last night (and overshadowed by the Brian Flores saga) was the retirement of Tom Brady after 22 years of torture.
And I'm with Gronk on this, I don't think he's really done either. He may take a year or two off, or he may pull a Brett Favre maneuver and sign with another team right before training camp (not likely), but I really don't think his ego will allow him to leave under any other circumstance than with another Super Bowl win. That, and the fact that I can't really see him doing anything else. As amazing an athlete as he is, he doesn't have the personality for the booth, or the temperament to be a coach. And I mean how many Hertz or Subway commercials can you do? Peyton Manning, by the end of his football career was a commercial actor playing football rather than a football player doing commercials.
Brady was the best to ever do it, by far, as much as I couldn't stand him. If this is really it, and again, I'm quite certain it's not, we'll not likely ever see the likes of him again. If we do, I just hope he plays for my team. Now I'm really dreaming.
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Not sure this was a Super Bowl ad, but this might be my favorite commercial of all time.
Enjoy the rest of the game
*According to David Maraniss biography of Vince Lombardi “When Pride Still Mattered” a couple of Packers who played in both games claimed the 1962 Championship Game was colder than the Ice Bowl
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