The Seattle Super Bowl and Other Thoughts

 

The Seattle Seahawks 29-13 win over the New England Patriots in Super Bowl LX has been in our rear view mirror for four days, so there is no point in going into great detail about the game at this point.  It was a game that lacked in drama.  If this same game had taken place at 1:00 on an October Sunday afternoon, it would have been noted in the rundown of scores and written off as a relatively dull and one sided affair.  However, this game took place at the Super Bowl, so it is a game of great consequences, history wise.  

The game was noteworthy for the other worldly performance of the Seahawks' defense.  They completely overwhelmed Pats' QB Drake Maye and the offensive line that was supposed to protect him.  Poor New England left tackle Will Campbell (#66).  I'd hate to be him sitting in the film room when the coaches grade that performance.

I don't know how sustainable that Seattle defense will be over the next five years or so, but this past Sunday they looked "Steelers Steel Curtain" and "1985 Bears" good.

A word about the quarterbacks.

As I watched this game unfold, I said to those watching with me that the blame for New England's performance was going to fall, unfairly, all on Drake Maye, and he has been taking a beating since that game.  No mistake, Maye played a bad game and it appeared that he was in way over his head on Sunday afternoon.  He was playing injured, so there is that, and as mentioned above, his offensive line gave him ZERO chance to succeed in this game, and he is only in his second year in the NFL cut him some slack. He finished second in the voting for league MVP this season and with good reason.  I think the Pats are set at quarterback for the foreseeable future.

The Sam Darnold Redemption Story is one of the better ones in the NFL over the last couple pf seasons.  He was a high first round draft pick, number three overall, I believe, of the Jets (where careers go to die), and he bombed there.  He was discarded by New York and went to San Francisco as a back-up, and then became free agent signee of the Vikings in 2024, where he led the team to 14 wins.  The Vikes bombed out in the playoffs where Darnold didn't play well.  He was released and then signed with Seattle this past season, where he led Seattle to a pretty good season.  Yet all season long, the talking heads kept saying that Darnold would eventually be Seattle's undoing.  Well, it didn't happen, did it?  No, Darnold didn't have a great game either in the Super Bowl (the Patriots have a pretty good defense, too), but he didn't make any mistakes, and his team, you know, WON THE GAME.  

No one is comparing Sam Arnold to Joe Montana, but I think he's earned the right to now tell the doubters to eat it.  And I wonder what the outlook would be like in Steelers Nation right now if instead of signing free agent Aaron Rodgers last year, the team had signed free agent Sam Darnold instead.

BAD BUNNY

Yes, we watched the much discussed Halftime Show featuring Bad Bunny.  Yes we were entertained, and yes, we enjoyed it.  No, we didn't understand the words sung in Spanish, but we loved the music, the dancing, and the overall spectacle of the performance.  As the days passed, and we came to learn the meaning of what was being communicated on stage to the audience, we came to appreciate the show even more. There was an actual wedding that took place during the show.  How could you not like that? And how can you possibly take a stance against  this message that was communicated:

If it wasn't so sad and pathetic, it would actually be funny watching so many of our so-called leaders in Washington twisting themselves into knots in the months leading up to the Super Bowl and in the days since over what they conceive as being "un-American", "unpatriotic", and "disgusting", even threatening deportation and FCC licensing of the TV networks.  Which prompts me to ask, Why was the leader of this rabble watching this show at his Super Bowl party down there in Berchtesgaden-by-the-Sea, aka, Mar-a-Largo?  Why wasn't HE watching his boy Kid Rock performing the All-American Alternative Halftime Show?

There is great irony here.  Super Bowl Halftime entertainment, like much of popular music, has passed me by.  I get it, and if the NFL chooses to go with what is current and popular, fine by me.  I have glanced at halftime shows over last five years or so briefly and have basically said "talented people, but not for me", and have used halftimes to get something to eat and go to the bathroom.  That would have probably been the case this year, but for all of the fuss raised by the so-called patriots who are currently in the process of destroying the America that has been built since the end of World War II. 

So I watched the Bad Bunny show, and I enjoyed it, and I'm guessing that most people did.  The TV ratings numbers show that in excess of 135 million people watched the Super Bowl halftime show.

5 million people tuned into the Kid Rock alternate show (the leader of the anti-Bad Bunny forces, as noted, did not).

12.5 million people tuned into the Puppy Bowl Halftime show on Animal Planet.

Super Bowl Commercials

Four days after the fact, the commercial that sticks with me most was for Dunkin' that featured Ben Affleck and actors in character from '90s sitcoms, although I wish that  Alfonso Ribeiro would have been able to do a few steps of "The Carlton" in there.    The worst commercial was for an electric razor for Manscaping that talked about keeping beards and sideburns trimmed, but was REALLY talking about men shaving....somehwere else.  Didn't need to see that.

That's it, that's the list.

FINAL NOTE:  I went down a road in this post that I usually try to avoid when writing The Grandstander.  I am going to try not to make a habit of these kinds of posts.  If you were offended, I'm not going to apologize.  I have hated seeing what has been happening in this country over the last year, THAT has been truly offensive to me, and sometimes you just have to say something about it.