A few quick paragraphs about the Superbowl

For all the bitching college football fans like to do about the BCS every year, at least it presents us with an annual match-up between the consensus best team in the country and... often though not always... a team who probably deserves to play against the best team in the country for a title. This year's Superbowl, by contrast, matched up two teams who, even now, no one can argue were even in the NFL's top 5 this season. Say all you want about how a 9-7 team who lost to the Saints by 25 points before accidentally stumbling into the playoffs by virtue of Dallas' bumbling "earned it on the field." But, rest assured, if it were, say, a New Orleans rather than a New York market team who had done this, we'd be wading in a morass of 500 national sportswriters arguing that we weren't really looking at a "legitimate" champion.

But even a game between two teams "nobody thought would make it this far" can make for good television. I like an underdog story as much as the next guy. The trouble with that is, there's no way to tag either the Patriots' declining evil empire or an entitled whiny New York team as an "underdog." If you're going to have an unlikely Cinderella in the title game, it helps if she's even remotely likeable. In this case, we were presented with two unlikely participants nobody likes. It was as if the glass slipper fit two of the wicked stepsisters and their reward was they got to hang out with Gisele Bundchen and Madonna and Rush Limbaugh picking his nose at the worst ball in history while America looked on in horror.


Wicked stepsisters sharing a moment of wickedness

One nice thing we can say about the way this worked out is we're not reading any stories this week about the brilliance of allowing your opponent to score touchdowns on purpose. Although it was momentarily amusing to watch Ahmad Bradshaw become the first man in Superbowl history to cross the goal line in the manner of a tired dog turning in place to lie down, going ahead and taking those points was undoubtedly the right thing to do. Why? Well, as the Giants themselves admitted afterwards, the crappy opposition didn't merit any risky precaution.

The Giants scored with 57 seconds remaining, and Jacobs said that while quarterbacks like Green Bay’s Aaron Rodgers or New Orleans’s Drew Brees had the firepower to go the length of the field that quickly, he did not think Brady and the Patriots could do it.

They would need a lot more than 57 seconds to win the game, Jacobs said, “so I wasn’t worried about it.”

Welp, as Madonna might say, life is a mystery. The good news is now we can get on with Carnival season and try to forget any of this ever happened.