My observations on the commercials shown during the Super Bowl. My top five are at the bottom.
I’ve moved the entire work below the break.
Tag: football
Three and a half hours of pre-game coverage wasn’t enough time to get through all of the crap leading up to this game that you had to waste the first ten minutes of the “official” start of game coverage with the introduction of the MVPs from the previous thirty-nine Super Bowls?
Regarding the National Anthem: why do great singers feel compelled to remind us they’re great singers when they get up to sing “The Star Spangled Banner”? (I’m looking at you, Mr. Neville.) Just sing the song and show it some respect. (Side note to ABC and the NFL: you’re having a big enough spectacle at half time. There’s no need to make our National Anthem one, too.)
Did the Seattle Seahawks pick “Bittersweet Symphony” as the song to play when they were introduced? Dudes. Bad song to pick for a football game for the name alone. Bad song to pick for a football game for the music. (And I like the song.)
Then again, at least I recognized “Bittersweet Symphony”. The same cannot be said for the song which played when the Steelers were introduced.
Though the Steelers are the “road” team, they certainly appear to be the fans-in-the-stands favorite. Not surprising, given Detroit homeboy Jerome Bettis leading Pittsburgh on to the field.
Above is the proposed billboard to be placed in a high-traffic area near the USC campus.
LSU grads in the Dallas area, annoyed by the media coverage over USC’s attempt at “a third-straight national championship”, have raised the necessary $10,000 for the proposed billboard, and are working with a Mobile firm in scouting for a suitable location. As you would imagine, even the Bruins are happy about it.
The message here, people, is that the Bowl Championship Series was created for the sole purpose of providing the means, in lieu of a playoff system, to determine the one, true national champion of Division I-A college football. God knows I have my myriad issues with the BCS, but it is, despite its faults, the system in place, and it should be respected. This is the vein of the message from Onepeat.com.
[Via Hugh via Xon.]
Unlike the Tigers, the other SEC team that played yesterday apparently didn’t show up to play the whole game. South Carolina put up 21 unanswered points, then it was nearly all-Missouri the rest of the way. The Gamecocks managed to wake up in the fourth quarter, and tied the game at 31 aside before succumbing to Mizzou.
Steve Spurrier becomes the first SEC coach to lose at the Independence Bowl in thirteen straight appearances, ending the conference’s streak. As if we needed another reason to dislike Spurrier.
A new head coach. A devastating hurricane. Opening season games rescheduled. A heartbreaking overtime loss in what became the home opener, played on a Monday night rather than the traditional Saturday night due to another hurricane.
Then ten straight weeks of games. Ten straight wins. Then the eleventh game, in the eleventh week. For the conference championship. For a trip to the Sugar Bowl. For a chance to contend for the BCS National Championship crown, should one of the other favorites stumble.
But the hurricanes and the eleven weeks of practice, preparation, and playing take their toll, and the worst loss of the season is suffered. Adding injury to insult, the star quarterback is lost.
Cast down, sentenced to the next rung below the hallowed Bowl Championship Series.
Ranked number ten, facing number nine. The second-team quarterback is at the helm, in his first college career start. All of the pundits pick the number nine opponent. The fans pick the number nine opponent. On the same turf as the crushing loss three weeks before…
Oh, there were a few souls outside of Louisiana who picked the Tigers to beat Miami. Lou Holtz, God bless him, appears to be the only soul inside the USC-crazed ESPN crew without Trojan-emblazoned blinders on; he picks LSU as the winner of the 2005 Chick-Fil-A Peach Bowl. By the end of the night, Lou is vindicated.
Things went great for the Miami Hurricanes.
For about five minutes.
On their first possession, they drove solidly down the field. The LSU defense, which collapsed against Georgia in the SEC Championship, held the Hurricanes to a field goal. It would be the only points Miami would score for the entire game.
It would be a game of few penalties, and fewer turnovers. Only one, an interception by the LSU defense against Miami’s freshman quarterback, put in the last four minutes of the game. It would be a game where many different words would be used to describe the play of the Fighting Tigers, of what happened to Miami, but it all keeps coming back to one word in particular.
Domination.
LSU dominated the line of scrimmage, on both sides, from their first offensive series onward. The Tigers would score on eight straight possessions, beginning with the series that tied the game at three apiece.
Miami managed a mere 153 yards of total offense. Three of those yards was their total for the second half. The number-one pass defense in the country would give up 196 airborne yards and two touchdowns, without netting a single interception. The third-ranked overall Miami defense would give up a total of 468 yards, the most it has given up all season. The Miami offense would manage only six first downs. None of those were in the second half. The 37-point loss would be their worst bowl loss in school history.
This was the LSU team many expected to see this season. The team was disciplined, poised. The team was supportive of their new quarterback, and bent over backwards to take as much burden off of him as possible. The team was confident with Matt Flynn at the helm.
JaMarcus Russell is an incredible athlete. His play this year has been light-years better than last season. Yet Coach Les Miles may have to take a serious look at the position in the off-season. The better man for the job may have just led his team to a 40-3 victory over the last Hurricanes of the year.
Speaking of college football, I have the Music City Bowl on in the background, and I noticed a few moments ago a commercial on behalf of the Football Bowl Association. Clearly, this is an opening salvo to maintain the status quo and not allow a playoff system for NCAA Division I-A football, the only level of any major college sport to not have a playoff system.
Jonathan Chait weighs in on why USC is overrated, noting how ESPN is leading the sports media in a frothing charge to bestow on the Trojans their–ahem–“third-straight” national championship.
[Thanks to my sweet for the Slate link.]
Apparently, all common sense has left NCAA Divison I-A football rankings. Like we didn’t know that already.
Let me see if I get this straight: LSU begins the year with a new head coach; overcomes the fallout of Hurricane Katrina; has its season opener rescheduled to an off-week later in the season; has its second game, originally scheduled as a home game, played on the road, with a spectacular fourth-down play to win the game as time expires; has its third scheduled game of the year, now the first actual home game of the season, moved from Saturday night to Monday night, thanks to Hurricane Rita; loses said game to Tennessee in overtime, sloppily giving up a 21-point lead and allowing the Volunteers to tie the game; then wins every single game for the rest of the season, including beating Auburn, Alabama, and Florida, to clinch the SEC West.
The Tigers lose–and rightfully so, given the way they played–to Georgia in the SEC title game. So going in, LSU is the #3 or #4 team in the country, the #1 team in the SEC, but fails to clinch the championship. So this means a drop in the rankings for the Tigers, and they become the #2 team in the SEC, with the same record as Georgia, right?
That would be a no.
Not only did LSU fall out of the Top 10, to the likes of Notre Dame, Oregon, and Miami, because the loss–in the championship game–to Georgia gives them two conference losses, somehow Auburn–you remember Auburn, the team LSU defeated earlier in the season?–becomes the #2 team in the SEC and gets the bid for the Capital One Bowl. LSU goes to the Peach Bowl instead.
Not that I have anything against the Peach Bowl, seeing as how it’s sponsored by my favorite fast food chain. But it’s no Capital One Bowl. (NCAA football trivia: give the name of the Capital One Bowl before it was co-opted by corporate interests.)
So the trend continues. The Tigers got little respect, if any, in 2003 when they won the national championship, and given all they have been through this season, they get none at the end of the season either. Michael, Eric, my empathy with you deepens every year.
Let’s see: renewing the Patriot Act, the Senate needing to confirm Bush’s judicial nominees, as well as a Supreme Court nominee, et cetera, et cetera.
So what do they turn their attention to? Why, the Bowl Championship Series, of course.
Pay attention, because this is likely one of the few political issues Lawson and I will agree on: Representative Barton, you’re wasting your time, your colleagues’ time, the time of BCS board members, and taxpayer dollars. Congress has no business sticking its nose in to the BCS mess.
I wouldn’t go as far as Barton in saying the BCS is “deeply flawed,” though it has made some whoppers in the past few years: picking Oklahoma over USC to face LSU in 2003, and picking Oklahoma over Auburn to face USC in 2004 immediately spring to mind.
The solution to the problems of the BCS is not a Congressional investigation. Rather, the football bigwigs at the NCAA need to get together with the various bowl organizers and sponsors and develop a playoff system for Division I-A football where the championship game will be rotated among the bigger bowls. As the ESPN article notes, there’s a lot of money in the bowl games, particularly the BCS bowls, and a playoff system would theoretically kill off some of those dollars. I don’t believe that would happen; look at March Madness with NCAA Division I-A basketball.
Nevertheless, the overriding issue is money. If it wasn’t, then the cadets and midshipmen wouldn’t be crammed into the corners of the stadium for the annual Army-Navy game, but would be seated, out of respect, directly behind their teams’ benches. (We wouldn’t see that awful swoosh logo on those classically minimalist uniforms, either.)
Until the NCAA and the bowls figure out a way to not lose money, we won’t see the much-needed playoff system–for the only sport in Division I-A without a playoff system–for college football, and we will continue to have controversy over whom should play for the championship, and which team is truly number one.
It rains nine months out of the year in Seattle. So why oh why would you replace an aging dome with an open-air stadium? Collective stupidity?