fling93 loves fishies

An Unforgettable Super Bowl XXXVIII

I think that Super Bowl commercial from H & R Block with the Willie Nelson advice doll was a lot like the Super Bowl itself. It started out boring enough, but had an ending that made it special (if you missed the ad, you can watch it here. You had to have seen last year’s ALCS between the Yankees and Red Sox to get the last reference, but it’s hilarious).

And I have my usual rambling reactions. I’ll try to organize them as best I can…

CBS’s Coverage

It seems that every year, the Super Bowl tries to use some flashy new way of showing the players, since just showing their name and picture apparently doesn’t cut it. Well this year, they introduced the offenses and defenses by showing a cut-together string of the players walking towards the camera and introducing themselves. Well, it looks better than some I’ve seen in the past where the players look really awkward and unsure of what to do (and Antowain Smith’s mugging was hella funny), but the odd timing was rather distracting.

The Matrix-style replays were, as always, useless. They just don’t show you any additional information as regular replays, and they generally didn’t do a good job picking interesting angles to switch to and from in the first place (not surprising because the nature of the effect severely limits the number of available angles to choose from). The rotation between angles was less crudely animated than it has been in the past, but the only purpose of the whole exercise is just to look cool, and the effect is still too crude (and too dated anyway) to look cool. So just lose it already!

By far, the best innovation was just a subtle addition: the virtual blue line marking on the field how far the Patriots had to go to get within field goal range to win the game — an excellent idea that’s long overdue (I mean, they’ve had the virtual first-down line for years now).

As for the commentary, I typically don’t hear much of it because I fast-forward between plays on the TiVo, and I’ve never been that fond of CBS anyway. Except Phil Simms. He rules (okay, I’m a biased Giants fan)! And he obviously made one of the best in-game observations on how Fox should have chosen to kick the extra point instead of going for two — a choice that did come back to haunt him.

Simms also correctly identified a pick (where one receiver interferes with the path of a defender for another receiver) — but he failed to point out that it is illegal in the NFL (what, is he biased because he used to play on offense?). He also made a good call pointing out that an apparent intentional grounding by Delhomme wasn’t a penalty because he threw the ball at the feet of #86. Of course, he probably could have elaborated that #86 was a tight end, and thus a legal receiver, especially since Carolina was flagged for having an illegal receiver downfield on that exact same play. But I guess that’s nitpicking.

However, I was thoroughly unimpressed by Greg Gumbel. There was his premature first down call on the fourth down conversion that Antowain Smith just barely got (and I think it was a bad spot and he was actually short). And Gumbel said Foster’s touchdown mirrored the one he scored against Philadelphia in the AFC Championship — when it was actually the NFC Championship.

And this leads me to…

Difference Between the End-Around and the Reverse

This has been bugging me for a while. Why is it that even professional football announcers like Greg Gumbel (and Chris Berman) seem to always confuse the end-around play with the reverse? In a reverse, the quarter back (QB) hands off to the running back (RB) who runs towards the strong side (the side with the tight end) as if the play is a sweep, but the RB immediately hands it off to a wide receiver (WR) running in the opposite direction (towards the weak side). Thus the name. The ball actually reverses direction, and the idea, of course, is to fake the defense into running in one direction when you end up going in the other direction (I would guess 90% of all plays are designed to take advantage of the fact that it takes longer for a defensive player to react and change directions than it does for an offensive player to just change directions). A double reverse would be when the WR hands it off again to another WR running the same direction the RB was.

In an end-around, the QB instead fakes the handoff to a RB going strong side and then the QB himself hands it off to the WR streaking towards the weak side. You’re still trying to fake out the defense, but the ball itself never reverses direction (the ball actually changes directions more in a simple counter play than in an end-around).

It’s not that hard to spot the difference: pay attention to who hands off the ball to the WR. Indeed, you see end-arounds much more often than reverses because the handoff in the reverse has a much higher risk of a fumble: RBs aren’t nearly as used to handing off the ball as the QB, and a handoff between two players running in opposite directions is much trickier than a handoff between a stationary player and a running player. The reverse is also slower to develop, which runs a greater risk of a defensive player penetrating the line and disrupting the handoff.

But so many people get this wrong that it’s probably going to end up right, just like how nobody seems to remember that it’s actually champing at the bit, not chomping on the bit.

But of course, nobody else is talking about any of that. They’re all talking about…

Janet’s Breast

Well, I’d actually skipped through the entire halftime show with the TiVo, but once I checked online and heard about all the controversy, I did, of course, rewind to see it (and apparently, I was far from the only one) — but just to find out what all the hubbub was about and figure out if it was intentional (honest! if I wanted to see boobs, I can just watch The L-Word — Mia Kirshner is way hotter than Janet anyway). Anyway, it certainly seemed scripted and planned to me, at least between Janet and Justin. Why else would she have been wearing a pasty? Her look of “shock” looked staged as well. Can’t believe they initially tried to pass it off as a “wardrobe malfunction,” but I guess they were surprised by the backlash. You’ve probably heard by now that Jackson has since admitted that the stunt was planned (well, duh!).

Whatever. I don’t see what the big deal is anyway. There isn’t anything inherently sexual or obscene about the female breast. It’s just a body part intended for baby feeding, and there’s no reason to get so squeamish about it. The taboo on breast exposure is artificially created by our society. Our “rules” on what you can and cannot show are so stupid. Women are allowed to wear low-cut dresses that show off cleavage as long as the nipple doesn’t show — yet the nipple is the part that looks pretty much the same on a man as a woman.

Sometimes I really wish that this country didn’t have such Puritanical roots — but then I guess us guys wouldn’t enjoy breasts and nipples so much and Star Wars: Episode II would have been so much more boring.

The Commercials

A pretty weak year again. As I mentioned before, I thought the H & R Block commercial with the Willie Nelson advice doll was hilarious (Don Zimmer: “Willie, should I give this kid a shellacking?”). My next favorite was the Simpson’s take on the ol’ Mastercard “priceless” schtick. I also liked the Subway one after the game (“…it’s okay to occasionally eat bad, not be bad… Sorry, Wang Chung!”) and the Bud Light one with the dogs (“So uh… what can your dog do?” Chomp!).

I thought the rest of them were stupid. And AIG one was a little unfortunate. “This game’s about over…”? It’s a tie game. I don’t think so. Stupid ad anyway. The razor ads were also uninspired. And what was with the Ford GT commercial? The one that showed the car making its way around a track, and at one point, in fine print at the bottom, said, “Clearly a professional driver on a closed track,” which would’ve been cute… if the driver knew what the hell he was doing. He completely blows those last two right-handers (right before the narrator said, “Introducing the Ford GT…”). He enters the first one with way too much speed and barely stays on the track by using tons of oversteer but ends up going way wide of the second turn’s apex (and since we have a birds-eye view, we can clearly see all the rubber clearly marking the line he should’ve been taking). In a real race, this guy’d be passed left and right… well actually, just on the right because he went too wide left.

Of course, I probably shouldn’t be one to criticize, being a guy who drives a ‘93 Saturn and does all his racing in video games.

And I guess the person who buys a Ford sports car is going to be more of the NASCAR crowd than Formula One crowd, so they probably won’t notice any of the above. And heck, I bet the director told the driver to use tons of oversteer to make it look more dramatic. But it was still a blah commercial either way.

MoveOn.org

Of course, the commercial that was the biggest news (well, at least in my opinion anyway) was the one that wasn’t even aired at all. I’ll get this from CBS News, to be fair:

With 90 million viewers at stake, sometimes the competition between commercials is better than the competition on the field, but, as CBS News Correspondent Lee Cowan reports, this year it’s gotten nasty.

“I think it basically amounts to censorship.”

CBS refused airtime to at least three Super Bowl hopefuls: the animal rights group PETA for one.

Turning down advertisers is nothing new. But this year one jilted suitor is turning up the heat.

“What’s at the core of it is, where in the national discourse can you speak freely, and CBS is saying, not here,” says Eli Pariser, Campaigns Director for MoveOn.org.

It’s a short, pointed ad questioning President George W. Bush’s budget policies. It depicts children wearily working adult jobs, and ends with this simple question: “Guess who’s going to pay off President Bush’s $1 trillion deficit?”

CBS says the sponsor, an online activist group called MoveOn.org, crossed the line by attempting to use Super Bowl airtime as a platform for public debate: something CBS and other networks have banned for years.

“The network simply does not accept any advocacy advertising of any kind,” says CBS Executive Vice President Martin Franks.

But CBS does plan to air anti-drug ads sponsored by the White House.

The difference?

“There isn’t a group out there advocating drug abuse,”

In other words, stopping drug abuse is not controversial — so the White House spot isn’t an advocacy ad.

Not controversial? While the ads were a big improvement over those making specious claims of linking drugs and terrorism, I would say the drug war itself is very much controversial, and the ad’s implicit claim that any usage of marijuana automatically constitutes abuse is definitely controversial.

I’ll blog more on the topic later, but as a primer, a must-read is the Economist’s ten-part survey on the drug war. Suffice to say, the issue is not nearly as simple as the government would like you to believe.

As for CBS’s decision, David Kurtz puts it most eloquently (and his whole post is well worth reading):

CBS is, after all, unlikely to air a spot that directly criticizes an administration that just saved them 10% of their national broadcast market. Television stations deny ads all the time for a variety of reasons, though coming on the heels of this most recent gift and in the larger context of media monopolies increasingly indebted to politicians, the denial of this forceful but entirely reasonable 30 seconds of political criticism seems to me partisan and not at all a matter of public interest, as described in the Telecom Act of 1996.

Two years ago, Fox aired the White House’s Office of National Drug Control Policy’s Super Bowl advertisements linking pot smoking with international terrorism, an intellectually sloppy but attention-grabbing campaign. CBS is set to air more White House ads this year during the Super Bowl, but it will not allow an ad that criticizes the White House…. CBS’s denial of the MoveOn ad may not be a violation of the First Amendment, but in a country where only a handful of companies control everything you see on television, it is a real blow to free speech.

MoveOn has a petition you can sign to express your disapproval of CBS’s decision to reject MoveOn’s ad. CBS has a list of local affiliates as well.

Yes, CBS is a private entity and did nothing illegal. The point he’s making is that, legal or not, there’s something seriously wrong with this picture.

Oh Yeah, Wasn’t There a Game?

And what a game it was between two pretty evenly matched teams.

Of course, I mentioned my stance on the salary cap in the comments section of this post, so I wasn’t surprised to see more special teams gaffes. Two botched short field goals by Vinatieri (the blocked one was his fault), a bounced long snap for a punt as well as another shanked punt, and of course Kasay’s kickoff out of bounds at the end of the game. What is surprising is that Vinatieri and Kasay are actually two of the better kickers in the league. At least, they were back when I paid closer attention to football, so maybe that’s changed. But to me, while the game was great, I wasn’t convinced that either of these teams played solid enough football to be a playoff caliber team in the 80’s.

Anyway, it also seemed that everybody got burned by blitzing. The big pass to Givens and Carolina’s long tying TD to Proehl with 1:08 left were both against the blitz, which goes to show you what poise both Brady and Delhomme had. I think the edge had to be the great work by New England offensive line, which did a great job against Carolina’s tough front four both in protecting Brady and giving Smith and Faulk just enough room to do a little damage.

As for the MVP, Brady again played smart, taking what the defense gave him and not forcing things — until that boneheaded endzone interception in the 4th quarter where a field goal would have stretched the lead to 8 (and given Carolina’s performance with two-point conversions, might have put the game away). It seemed eerily similar to his boneheaded pick in the AFC Championship (where just a field goal would have made it a two-score game) but ultimately had similar results. Oh well. My pick for MVP would have been Delhomme in a losing cause, especially since he pretty much had to do it all on his own with Stephen Davis effectively contained. But I guess that wouldn’t have worked too well in the Disneyland commercial (are they still doing those?).

Well, that’s it for now. I’ll be getting back to Janet’s brea… er, some important reading. Yeah. Reading.