Altork: My Super Bowl soapbox
Once again the Super Bowl has come and gone. And once again my attempts to ignore the ubiquitous hype failed miserably.
It’s estimated that over 86 million Americans watched the Super Bowl this past Sunday. It’s also estimated that 23 percent of them tuned in “just to see the commercials.” This is down from 29 percent last year and 32 percent the year before when the Bud Bowl made its final appearance. (Okay, I made all that up. Except for the 86 million part.)
Is it just me or has the quality of the Super Bowl commercials dropped severely? Or maybe they’ve just stayed the same and my expectations have increased. Was I laughing at the commercials five years ago because of the novelty of them trying to be funny or because they actually were funny? Correct me if I’m wrong, but the “Whassup?” commercials for Budweiser and the Jordan/Bird “Nothing but net” H-O-R-S-E games for McDonald’s became social phenomena.
Was there any chance of that happening for any of this year’s commercials? The concepts were stale, the sales pitches had no point, and the attempts at humor fell flatter than Ashlee Simpson’s notes at the Orange Bowl.
Advertisers paid an average of $2.4 million for 30 seconds of ad space, they spent as much as 20 times that much to make some of the commercials, and the best they could come up with was a scantily-clad woman testifying before Congress? Give me a break.
But that’s not my biggest beef with this whole Super Bowl experience. I’m sure I’ve said this somewhere before, but how do you begin coverage of a game that hasn’t been played yet eight hours before it starts? One of these years I’m going to have to actually watch this nonsense to find out what exactly they do to fill up that time.
But I think I have a pretty good guess about how it went this year. Probably something like this: “Terrell Owens’s ankle, Terrell Owens’s ankle, Terrell Owens’s ankle, Terrell Owens’s ankle, Terrell Owens’s ankle, Patriots dynasty, Terrell Owens’s ankle, Terrell Owens’s ankle, Terrell Owens’s ankle, Terrell Owens’s ankle, Terrell Owens’s ankle, Token heartwarming story, Terrell Owens’s ankle, Terrell Owens’s ankle, Terrell Owens’s ankle, etc.”
Man. T.O.’s ankle. You would think they would come up with something else to talk about. It got to the point where I just wanted to take a bat to his leg Tanya Harding-style just to end all the speculation.
It’s bad enough that these people spend eight hours before the game talking about this stuff. So why do we have to put two whole weeks between the conference championships and the Super Bowl? Outside of Christmas I’d say Super Bowl Sunday is the most hyped day of the year.
And as you can probably tell by now, I am not entertained by hype. I am annoyed by hype. It’s like the Super Bowl starts whining two weeks before it starts, and doesn’t shut up until game time.
Ahhh, game time. Up until it actually started, I had no idea what time the Super Bowl was going to start. All I heard was how the “coverage” began at 4:00 a.m. or whatever ridiculously early time it was.
But the Super Bowl did actually start at some point. And Terrell Owens played. (Man, I’m glad I got to hear everyone’s “expert” opinion for two weeks leading up to that one.) And the Patriots won, which is what everyone predicted regardless of whether T.O. played or not, which, in turn, makes all the speculation about it that much more ridiculous. (If the Eagles were going to lose whether he played or not, who cares if he plays?)
But that exemplifies the mantra of the over-saturated sports media market. If there’s nothing worth talking about, just talk about something.
