So what did you think of the Super Bowl?
For me, this game kind of personified everything that is wrong with the Super Bowl itself. You have two teams that have perservered through 4 months of playing a savage, brutal sport, then who beat at least 2 of the best teams in the league to earn the right to play for the league championship.
But when they get to that league championship, it’s barely recognizable as a football game. It’s more like a six hour long circus where they happen to include a football game for sixty minutes. Between all the Harrison Ford hoop earrings and Mick Jagger hip huggers and commercials with monkeys and people getting the crap knocked out of them or monkeys and people getting the crap knocked out of them, it’s like the game itself is secondary if not tertiary or even further down the line than that (Quadrerary? Is that a word?).
And the result of that is what you got last Sunday. The Pittsburgh Steelers are World Champions because they managed to play a merely bad game instead of playing a completely awful game like the Seahawks did. When’s the last time you saw a team win ANY game with a quarterback posting a rating in the 20’s, let alone a Super Bowl? At least now we won’t be hearing, “The Ravens won a Super Bowl with Trent Dilfer” ad nauseum, or at least we shouldn’t. The Steelers have now won a Super Bowl with someone that made Dilfer’s performance in Super Bowl XXXV look like something Joe Montana would have done in the late 80s.
Hines Ward may have been named the MVP, but in reality the real MVP of the game for the Steelers wasn’t even anyone who wore their uniform. It was a toss up between the officiating crew, who seemed less impartial than a WWE special guest referee, and Seahawks receivers Darrell Jackson, who did his best impression of Madden 06 receiver by continually running pass patterns that ended up out of bounds, Jerramy “Hammer Hands” Stevens, who played like he forgot his thumbs in his locker, and Hawks coach Mike Holmgren, who saw fit to throw the ball 49 times instead of entrusting the game to the NFL MVP he had at running back.
So, in my opinion, it’s a shame that a great season for two great teams came down to this.
I guess if you really want to see a championship football game that is everything it should be these days, you’ll have to watch college football.
That’ll do it for the 2005 NFL Season. Congrats to the Steelers and their fans on a great season and an NFL Championship. Thanks to everyone who read the column. I had a lot of fun writing it, and hope you had fun reading it. Free agent season starts in March, so that’s when you’ll see me again. Until then take care!
