The Super Bowl

I dunno. Kinda boring. Anticlimactic, almost.

Had a very busy weekend traveling down to our nation’s capital (which I’ll go into tomorrow), and me and the girls wound up racing north on I-95 to get home before kickoff. I stocked the freezer with lots of football foods the Friday before – potato skins, mozzarella sticks, bagel bites – that the little ones like to eat during the game. Patch spilled tomato soup in the Pilot somewhere around exit 8 on the New Jersey Turnpike (I’ll go into the tomato soup tomorrow) and we rushed to get everything cleaned up and out of the car before the coin toss.

We were rooting for Peyton. As longtime Eli fans, we also like his older brother, and I felt it would be nice if he could ride off into the sunset with a second Super Bowl win. But we also are big fans of “Blind Side” Michael Oher, offensive lineman for the Panthers. So if they won it would be nice, too, for his sake. Cam Newton … well, the more I’ve learned about him the less I like of him. I like my sports heroes humble, not showboats.

Bottom line is the game would be a win-win here at Casa Hopper, just as long as Peyton wasn’t blown out like he was two years ago.

Then, the game happened. Boring. Bad. Found myself watching the clock on the DVR, and wondering if it would finish up early enough so I could put away a chapter or two of my new paperback.

The commercials annoyed me, too. Each and every year I get more and more anti-consumerist, and the Super Bowl is basically Our Culture’s Annual Epic Commercial Lollapalooza with a football game thrown in. I found the commercials – I watched about half of them, unfortunately (I cooked all the appetizers and did some emergency laundry during the game – I found them stupid, unfunny, tasteless, and preachy.

There was only one commercial that the wife and I both laughed at. Probably because it was so unexpected, as we merely chuckled at it watching it later on the youtube. But this is the type of humor I like: humor where it’s truly unexpected and doesn’t cower in fear to any whiff of cultural insensitivity.

Seriously thinking about skipping the game next year.

Despite this dissatisfaction, right after it ended, I made a prediction for Super Bowl LI (or is it Super Bowl 51?): Carolina 31, New England 14. That is, if Newton can take this experience and mature into a true leader.