Oh, and congrats to both squads for delivering a terrific game, worthy of its name, and a fun time had by all in the house. (Our house anyway.) Well played Pats; well deserved Eagles.
Well, I said way back on page 1 that I can’t see how Tom Brady could lose to a backup QB. It wasn’t so much that Brady lost, it’s that Foles played the game of his life. Brady racked up a lot of yards, but he was hitting receivers that didn’t have a defender within 15 yards. Foles was squeezing that ball in some seriously tight windows. Well done and congrats to Philly.
If he’d had his deep threat Cooks, and if Butler had played some CB, then wouldacouldashoulda.
So it turns out that I wasn’t the only Eagles fan at my party. My nephew, who’s been a rabid Patriots fan his whole life, decided for unknown reasons that he was going to root for the Eagles this year (possibly because the high school he’s planning on attending has the same mascot and a similar color scheme). And some friends of my sister’s family were also there, and the daughter (who doesn’t follow sports at all) was (in her words) rooting for the Phillies, by which I’m pretty sure she meant the Eagles. It also turns out that my nephew is very fun to root alongside, against a roomful of people on the other side.
We played Commercial Bingo. My brother-in-law had looked up 75 products and themes that often show up in Superbowl ads, and made up bingo cards for them (the NFL logo was the center free space). My card, for instance, included Nike, Chevrolet, Morgan Freeman or his voice, and a dad changing a diaper (along with 20 other things). So I was disappointed with the guy whose bleep doesn’t stink, when his dad smelled his diaper but didn’t change it, and was surprised when we saw Morgan Freeman but without his voice. Things counted if they were visible in anything that wasn’t visible from within the stadium, even if that’s not what the product was for (for instance, one ad showed a street scene in New York with a Chase Bank and Starbucks clearly visible, even though the ad was for something else). We also counted the DirectTV logo that showed up when the feed cut out, on basis of Rule of Funny.
Losing Cooks undoubtedly hurt, though with Brady throwing for over 500 yards even without him, I’m not sure that he would have made a big difference.
Yeah, lack of offense was not the issue. Lack of defense was decidedly a problem. would Butler himself have made the difference? It only needed to be one touchdown less…
Losing Cooks, though, brings me again to my assertion that the NFL must do something to end direct hits to a player’s helmet. First of all, in this day and age when we know that repetitive trauma to the brain causes these men to suffer degenerative brain conditions, it’s simply unconscionable that the NFL doesn’t work to end hits that will certainly add to that probability for a player. Secondly, it’s simply unfair that a DB can knock a receiver out of the game at little or no risk to himself (he’s braced for the impact). Football is violent enough, inherently, without allowing defensive players to weaponize themselves that way. 
Yeah, no kidding. I was surprised to learn that helmet to helmet hits are allowed on a runner. I thought they were banned altogether. They should be.
Cubs fan too! Originally from Parkridge, IL.
How do you stop that? The ball carrier was pivoting wildly, and spun himself right into the defender’s way. I saw the initial contact to be around the chest/shoulders, with the defender’s helmet sliding up to his the carrier’s helmet.
How do you write a rule that protects against that - without turning it into touch or flag football?
Personally, I don’t really care whether football changes or not. I’m not a fan. But I view football players - and boxers - essentially as modern day gladiators. The best would be to give a greater percentage of $ to the players.
My personal dislike is with all the video review. I’ve expressed as much before, but except for perhaps some egregious instances, I think blown calls are a part of sport.
I am dispirited by this game, and not primarily because of the results.
I have always known that my taste preferences in football are out of sync with the masses. I like a hard-fought defensive battle, and I like teams that are built primarily around defense and punting: the field position trench warfare game.
So I know my taste is on the extreme end. But I thought most fans liked a balanced game where the teams do occasionally force punts, and the final score is somewhere in the 20s for each team.
However, based on the way the announcers talked last night, and the reactions I see on Twitter and in podcasts and elsewhere in the media, this is not the case. People apparently love a track meet with no defense. :smack: I do not understand this perspective, because it pretty much makes the outcome random depending on who has the ball when time runs out. (But then I guess people like dice games, so there you go. :rolleyes:)
The bigger problem is that it makes me worry that the NFL competition committee is going to look at reactions like these, in combination with the viewership declines in recent years, and institute a bunch of rules to hobble the defense. And that would really suck.
People like to see things succeed more than they like to see them thwarted. It’s simply more exciting and rewarding to see completed passes and successful runs than it is to see them go nowhere because the defense stopped them.
Some people apparently enjoy watching basketball. For that very reason, I would guess. Which is also the main reason that I do not much care for it.
Can someone who is better with the google than I am, tell me what the Vegas odds were for Philly winning the SuperBowl when the playoffs started, and they were underdogs to 6th seed Atlanta?
Here is an espn page from 26 December (one game to go in the season) that placed the Eagles at 12:1 and the Patriots at +180 (whatever that means). It looks like the left-hand column shows the odds from when all the teams were 0-0, which put New England at 6:1 (favorites) and Philadelphia at 60:1.
Not even that. The over-under was 48.5.
I just realized there was no Budweiser Clydesdales horse commercials (except for a Tide commercial). Don’t they always have a Super Bowl commercial??
I loved it. Not only was it funny and a clever parody of other commercials, it was actually quite a “deep thought” type deal, kind of a “whoa” for me. He ends with “doesn’t that mean every Super Bowl commercial is a TIDE commercial? Watch and see.” I immediately thought “how brilliant: now people will watch these other commercials and keep thinking of how it could be a TIDE commercial–it’s like Unilever leveraged their ad budget a hundred times over.” But then the very next commercial undermined the whole thing (or maybe it’s still a win because people are thinking about it). I was eager as the commercial began to look at everyone’s clothes and think about TIDE (total win for them), but a few seconds into it Dwayne Johnson is wearing a super dirty dress shirt! Hilarious. I guess the people paying for commercial spots have no control over what commercials come after theirs, but I wonder if the person in charge of that was playing a sly prank there.
The other commercial-related thing I thought of: Did Netflix originally put in their commercial for the Cloverfield movie that it would air after the SB, but NBC nixed this due to their This is Us programming? Because I know the filmmaker complained that the commercial didn’t state that it would be streaming immediately, whereas I’m a little surprised NBC even accepted the ad at all.
This is circular reasoning, or begging the question, something like that. It can be boiled down to “People like to watch offense more because offense is more fun to watch.” This first of all misses the fact that a football team has two jobs, not just one. One job is to score points, but the other is to play defense. Success therefore also involves sacking quarterbacks, forcing fumbles, getting interceptions, and most routinely, stopping the opposition from converting third downs. So this bit about “succeeding” doesn’t really fly. It doesn’t even fly from the offense’s POV! I will illustrate why with a reductio ad absurdem thought experiment:
What would happen if there were actually no defense on the field, or the defense was a bunch of octogenerians? Would the offense draw up elaborate plays? Would there even be any passing? Why risk an incompletion? Why even hand it off? You might fumble! Just snap it to the QB, who would hug the ball and jog carefully to the end zone.
Therefore, the reverse way to look at a football game (the way I prefer, the way defensive coordinators and players look at it) is that absent any interference, it really will be a “track meet”: each team taking turns running down to the opposite end zone. That’s the natural starting condition. Then the defense’s job is to interfere with that natural condition by taking the ball away, or at least keeping the offense from successfully gaining ten yards in three (or sometimes four) attempts.
The defense actually has to be stronger than the offense in this basic condition. This is so that an unimaginative offense that just runs forward up the middle with the ball will fail to get first downs. (I assume even those who enjoy offense would find this boring, right?) Which forces the offense to get more tricky and use misdirection and complex plays. Which forces the defense to get better at recognizing what’s happening and getting tricky themselves. And on and on and on in an evolutionary duet.
So the point is, if the offense succeeds in scoring on every drive, it’s actually not “succeeding” at all. Success inherently requires a significant risk of failure. See what I mean? It may not look like “three and a half yards and a cloud of dust” on every down, but if offenses can reliably score every time without risk of punting just by using a variety of plays, you’re really just watching the equivalent of a Globetrotters exhibition (except that there are two Globetrotters teams that only play offense, and two Generals teams that only play “defense”). Which I suppose some people enjoy, but the NFL up to this point has been far more popular than that.
Speaking of basketball:
I used to like basketball quite well, although I have drifted away from the game in recent years. In any case, though, this is not really a fair critique of basketball, as the defense succeeds (by stealing the ball or, much more often, successfully forcing a missed shot and then retrieving the rebound) about as often as the offense scores. And scoring “runs” are famously common in basketball, which would not be possible without defense (it would just be back and forth with neither team ever getting a significant lead).
There were three commercials with Clydesdales in them (we were paying attention to that because some of the bingo cards included a space for Clydesdales). I think one of them must have been a Budweiser commercial, because it showed the wagon in it, but I can’t remember.
But I still miss the commercials with the 'Dales playing football.
SlackerIncI’m not saying that defense doesn’t play an important role in the game, it’s just that it’s not as exciting to watch. In the same way, game plans are important too, but who wants to sit for three hours and watch coaches talk X’s and O’s?
Oh, and yeah, I would have liked to see more defense in this game, too. Sure, scores are exciting, but then, so are sacks and turnovers, and this game had less than its fair share of those.