sports

Not Sour Grapes

Fandango8 Comments

I have one last observation to make about last night’s Super Bowl game. It’s not sour grapes. The Kansas City Chiefs beat the San Francisco 49ers and they deserved to win. So congratulations to the Chiefs, their fans, and to Taylor Swift.

That said, I believe that the 49ers loss came down to one small, but hugely costly mistake.

Almost three-and-a-half minutes into the fourth quarter, the 49ers culminated a 75-yard drive with a touchdown. That gave the Niners a three-point lead, 16-13 before the point-after-touchdown conversion attempt.

In the NFL, after a team earns six points, they have the opportunity to earn an extra point, known as the point- after-touchdown or PAT. The ball is placed at the 15-yard line and the kicker comes in and kicks the extra point. The overall NFL success rate for the PAT is around 95%, so it’s all but a gimme. For the San Francisco 49ers, prior to last night’s game, only one PAT was missed all season.

But in last night’s all-important Super Bowl game, the extra-point kick was blocked.

Big deal, you say. It’s only one point, you say. But missing that PAT was a huge deal. And, arguably, it may have cost the 49ers a Super Bowl victory. If the kicker had made the extra point, the Niners would have had a four point lead and the Chiefs wouldn’t have been able to tie the game with a three-point field goal.

The next three scores in the fourth quarter were field goals. Two by the Chiefs and one by the Niners. So, had the kicker made the PAT earlier in the fourth quarter, the Niners might have won, 20-16 at the end regulation play.

I’m not suggesting that both teams would have played exactly the same way if the Niners had a four-point lead versus a three-point lead. Instead of kicking a 29-yard 3-point field goal with six seconds left in the fourth quarter to tie the game and send it into overtime, the Chiefs would have been four points down and needed a touchdown. Maybe they would have scored a TD and won the game, just as they did in overtime. But if the Chiefs didn’t make it into the end zone at the end of the fourth quarter, the San Francisco 49ers would be the Super Bowl champs instead of the Super Bowl chumps.

I’m just sayin’

Super Bowl Sunday

Fandango9 Comments

Today is Super Bowl Sunday in the United States. I will be watching the game today because my home boys, the San Francisco 49ers are playing in it today. Their opponents are the Taylor Swift Kansas City Chiefs. Go Niners.

I thought I’d share with you my reaction to Super Bowl XLV, which was played on February 6, 2011. I posted what follows at 8:02 pm Pacific time on February 11, 2011, exactly 13 years ago to the day, but six days after Super Bowl XLV.

If you’re not an American football fan or have never experienced watching a Super Bowl game, you may want to skip this post because it probably won’t resonate with you. Further, being a 13-year-old post, many of the references herein are dated. But if you’ve got nothing better to do over next few minutes, read on.

Super Blah

What a disappointment this year’s Super Bowl was. I’m not talking about the game itself. That actually turned out to be a pretty decent, kind of exciting game that wasn’t decided until the last minute of the 4th quarter. I’m talking about what many of us really tune in to see on Super Bowl Sunday. The commercials.

I was intending to write something about the Super Bowl and its commercials and post it to my blog, but by this point I would probably have been the millionth blogger to do so. Maybe the 10 millionth blogger.

And not to worry.  I am also not going to slam Christina Aguilera for screwing up the words to the national anthem. Hell, I have listened to the “Star Spangled Banner” for decades and I still don’t know all the words to that utterly ridiculous (for a national anthem) song, much less what it is supposed to mean.

“Spangled”? Seriously, when was the last time you heard that word used in a sentence? His head hit the ground so hard his brains got spangled. 

What is the definition of the word “spangled”? I had to look it up. A “spangle” is “a small, thin, often circular piece of glittering metal or other material, used especially for decorating garments.” So Francis Scott Key described our American flag as a glittery, adorned garment? And that’s the song some geniuses decided we should use as our country’s national anthem? I think we should start a movement to change our national anthem to “America the Beautiful” or “America (My Country ‘Tis of Thee).” How about “Born in the USA?” Who’s with me on this?

But I digress.

This year’s Super Bowl pitted the Green Bay Packers against the Pittsburgh Steelers. I will admit that, since I didn’t have a horse in this race, metaphorically speaking, I really didn’t care all that much about which team won and which team lost the game. I watched the event for the commercials…and for the possibility of another Janet Jacksonesque half-time show wardrobe malfunction.

Interesting fact: a 30-second spot during Super Bowl XLV cost $3 million. And that’s just the cost to air  a 30-second spot, not to produce one. Yet, with a few notable exceptions, this year’s crop of multimillion dollar Super Bowl ads fell way short of expectations. Mine, anyway. Most of the Budweiser ads were Buddumber.  (Yeah, okay, that was pretty lame, I know). The Pepsi Max ads were hit (literally) and miss, as were, more figurativley speaking, the Doritos ads.

Some commercials were downright awful — Timothy Hutton, what were you thinking? And after all these years of Super Bowl advertising, I still have no idea what godaddy.com is. Most of the ads were just blah, but there were a few standouts among the overall mediocrity.  The VW commercial with the little Darth Vader was attention getting and effective.  Hey, I remembered it was for Volkswagen.

The Eminem commercial for Chrysler was intriguing and, yes, even inspiring. But I still would never buy another American car, even if it had been “imported from Detroit.”

Bridgestone had a pair of decent commercials…one with the “reply all” e-mail (who hasn’t had that scary moment?) and one with the return-a-good-deed beaver.  I kind of liked the Coca Cola commercial with the two border guards, but I’m reasonably sure my son preferred the animated “World of Warcraft” Coke commercial. Or was it “Dungeons and Dragons”?

Okay, enough about the plethora of so-so Super Bowl ads. How about the half-time show? What was that all about? The Black Eyed Peas meet Tron? And to think at one point I thought Fergie could sing. Even Usher and Slash couldn’t do much to salvage that fiasco.

In the end, though, I decided not to write a blog post about the Super Bowl commercials because (1) as I already noted, I’d be at least the millionth blogger to do so, and (2) the game was actually more entertaining and exciting than the commercials. Go figure.

WDP — Favorite Sport

Fandango10 Comments
Bloganuary writing prompt
What are your favorite sports to watch and play?
View all responses

I’m at the age where playing a sport is a thing of the past. As to watching sports, I am rarely glued in front of the TV anymore to watch my favorite teams play. I have an app on my iPhone, “The Score,” that keeps tabs on my favorite teams and shoots me updated notifications on their games and the scores.

I do typically watch the “Big Games,” like baseball’s World Series, the NFL’s Super Bowl, and the NBA Championship Series, especially if one of my favorite teams is playing. But if I don’t have any skin in the game (i.e., none of my favorite teams is participating), I’m unlikely to watch the games live.

My hometown boys, the San Francisco 49ers beat the Detroit Lions yesterday to earn their way into the Super Bowl against the Kansas City Chiefs on February 11th. You can bet your sweet bippy I’ll be watching that game.

I Couldn’t Watch It Live

Fandango15 Comments

I decided that I wasn’t going to watch yesterday’s National Football Conference (NFC) championship game between my hometown San Francisco 49ers and the Detroit Lions on TV. I somehow had convinced myself that the Lions were going to handily defeat my Niners. This was based on my assessment of how the Niners barely managed to beat the Green Bay Packers the week before. The Lions are a much better team than the Packers. And I thought watching live as the 49ers went down in flames to the Lions would be depressing.

I did, however, check a sports scores app I have on my iPhone at what I figured would be around halftime. The score was Detroit 24, San Francisco 7. I congratulated myself on my wise decision to not watch the game and I knew there was no way the 49ers would be able to erase a 17-point deficit against a team as strong as the Lions in the second half.

I said to my wife, who was sitting next to me on the sofa as we were binge-watching a British detective series, “Looks like the Niners arent going to make it to the Super Bowl this year. They’re getting creamed at the half.”

“Wait,” my wife said. “Didn’t they move the team to Las Vegas?”

“No, dear,” I said. “That was the Oakland Raiders.”

About an hour later I took a quick look at the sports scores app on my iPhone. “Holy crap,” I said. “The Niners have tied it up at 24-24.” But it was still early in the 4th quarter.

My wife said, “No, we’re not switching to the game.”

At that point, I started checking my app every few minutes. My next check-in showed the Niners up 27-24 with about ten minutes left in the game. Then, with about three minutes left, the Niners had scored again and were up by 10 points. But the Lions had the ball and seemed to be moving it downfield into Niners territory. And with one minute left in the game, the Lions scored a touchdown, making it a 34-31 game.

The Lions, in a desperation move, attempted an onside kick. Had it been successful, the Lions would have maintained possession of the ball, giving them an opportunity to kick a field goal and tie the game. But the onside kick attempt was unsuccessful, and, voila, the Niners won the game and are going to the Super Bowl on February 11th. They will face off against the defending Super Bowl champs, the Kansas City Chiefs.

Or maybe I should say that the 49ers will be facing off against Taylor Swift and the Kansas City Chiefs.