In Retrospect, Superb Owl Sunday Would Have Been Better: Worst Super Bowl Ever.

By Alexander Joenks | TV | February 3, 2014 |

By Alexander Joenks | TV | February 3, 2014 |

I have watched every Super Bowl for the last twenty-seven years, since I watched Montana beat the Bengals for a second time. It was like having sex for the first time. I didn’t really know what was going on, three hours of awkward fumbling preceded two minutes of joy, and it was all followed by decades of nostalgia-tinged frustration. And last night was the worst Super Bowl I’ve ever watched. It’s not just that my 49ers lost last week, not to humblebrag on behalf of my team, but when you play in the championship game as often as we do, you learn to let go in order to watch the Super Bowl two weeks later.

But what a lackluster game. It felt like game nine of the regular season when one of the teams just doesn’t show up because they were looking forward to the next week on the schedule. No urgency, no passion. It didn’t even feel like a first round playoff game. And it wasn’t simply that it was a blowout. Blowouts can be wonderful fun to watch as one team ratchets up the offense to a new scale on the world stage against the presumably second best team in the sport. This just wasn’t a good football game.

I mean at least when the game is subpar, you usually get to laugh at the commercials, but those fell flat this year too. Personally I blame the fact that the game was played in New Jersey. Because I’m comfortable blaming everything bad in this world on New Jersey and New York.

The worst parts of the worst Super Bowl I’ve ever watched:

1. The announcers. Does anyone in America like Joe Buck? He’s all teeth and smugness like a Mormon dentist. I have never met anyone with either a positive or neutral opinion and yet he is the announcer for just about every major American sporting event. And Aikman says less of interest than the average sideline reporter giving us the scoop on the coach saying that the plan for the game is to score points. He topped it off with the statement that the Broncos would need “four touchdowns and three two-point conversions” to tie the game when down by 29. Yes, his theory of scoring adds up to 31 points not 29. Don’t let the guy with more officially recorded concussions than fingers do math on live television, Fox. Hire a fourth grader for that work.

2. The commercials. Bob Dylan selling out not once but twice? For Chrysler and Chobani? Does it take prodigious greed or a prodigious coke habit to sell out that badly? Both? The realization of Budlight’s “It’s Coming” set up with Cheadle and the Terminator was so thoroughly underwhelming that it felt like they pulled the rest of them and just aired the “look at our fancy bottle” ads in their remaining spots instead of forcing us to endure Dude-bro meeting more celebrities after drinking their piss-beer.

3. Peyton Manning’s look of trying to pass a kidney stone while his season falls apart. No, sorry, that was the sole redeeming quality of the game. It’s one of my favorite parts of every playoff season with the NFL. And I actually like the guy, I just hope someday he passes that spiked nugget, preferably surrounded my medical personnel. But I will say, that after seventeen straight wide receiver screens go for two yards, maybe you shouldn’t bother throwing an eighteenth one once you’re down four touchdowns.

4. I can’t quite account for how the Seahawks scored all those points since Russell Wilson only seemed to throw the ball about a dozen times, and I don’t think their running backs even broke a sweat. I suppose when your defense ensures that your offense has the ball for 57 minutes of the game with an average starting position of first and goal, the offense doesn’t really need to do much of note to score points.

5. The halftime show. Half the time I just mute the halftime show, but this year I was bored into lethargy and couldn’t reach the remote. The Red Hot Chili Peppers look like they escaped from an episode of Cops, and I think it’s a great injustice that women’s nipples are the Great Satan of network television but that a billion people were forcibly exposed to Anthony Kiedis’. Nobody needs that. Also, I don’t know who Bruno Mars is, but thanks buddy, now I’m old enough that these young people’s music sounds like a dog whistle and I can feel completely over the hill. It’s gratifying, I suppose, that a four-foot tall guy with a mullet, helium voice, and sweet dance moves can get the spotlight. It’s a victory for leprechauns everywhere. And while I’ve been informed that the hate crime of his hair is a pompadour and not a mullet, I reject that distinction on the basis that the pompadour is just the mullet of aristocracy and therefore as un-American as monarchs.

This was a bad Football Christmas, America, and I think we deserve a do-over. So I propose that San Francisco play New England in New Orleans next weekend.