Monday, February 04, 2008

Superbowl nearly a super disappointment

A couple thoughts and then I have to work on an opinion. Well, for 56 minutes or so, last night's game was quite possibly the most boring one ever. And, in a span of about 50 seconds, the Giants relegated the Patriots to a footnote in football history and left Miami as the only truly undefeated team in football history. See Giants Upset Patriots to Win Superbowl XLII. Good for the Manning family though - bad for those who would have liked to see a team go undefeated. Instead, the Patriots now join the 1942 and 1934 Chicago Bears as the third team to fall just one game short.

Do I think that you must win the superbowl to validate your season? Yes. Look at the Steelers from a couple of years ago - a six seed wins the whole thing. Who did they beat to get there? Exactly. Nobody remembers and nobody cares. I recognize that going undefeated in the regular season is impressive, but I'm of the mindset that only one game really counts, and that is the championship one. Nobody remembers who finishes second, and while that, perhaps, may not completely hold true for a couple years, in another decade, the Dolphins will be remembered for going the distance, and the Patriots, unless they actually pull it off, will not.

I want to talk a second about the superbowl ads, and I'm probably going to write something more about it later today as I gather my tax materials for the accountant. The top commercial (in my mind) was the Career Builder.com "Follow your heart" spot. I also liked the Planter's Unibrow one, the Charlie Brown Coke one, and the Bud Light Cheese Wheel one. Runners up were the Night at the Roxbury Pepsi one, the Bud Light Fire Breather one, and the Tide Talking Stain one. There were a couple others, but obviously my lack of remembering them right now shows how un-memorable they actually were. There were plenty of bad ones though - particularly the cartoon sales rep one and several of the car commercials. And when are they going to realize that the Clydesdale horses are just about as good as the budweiser frogs? Time to retire them into greener pasteurs. The Doritos one with the mouse wins the award for the most random, and the other doritos one with the singer wins the one for "most likely to lead to brand confusion."

More on that later, and for now I will simply provide the link to USA Today's Ad Meter with their annual magical rankings of all the ads. And, by ranking the moronic "dog and pony" spot as the best, that should go to show how out of touch their unscientific response is. Of course, when their front page is sponsored by said beer company, the rankings shouldn't be that surprising.

As I said, more on the commercials later.

2 comments:

ECL said...

I appear to be in the minority in our office as far as what I thought was a funny commercial. So far, it's nearly unanimous that the best commercial was, in fact, what USA Today reported (the Clydesdale-Dalmatian one).

Of course, Yahoo said that the car commercial that spun off the scene from the Godfather was the best, but we all were in agreement that that one was stupid.

Apparently the e-Trade baby talking ones were funny too, but I had to catch them online since I must not have been paying attention by the time they aired.

ECL said...

College Humor did a funny job of summarizing the 2008 Superbowl ads. See Super Bowl Ad Superlatives.

I also note that Geico apparently heard my suggestion that their Cavemen icons be used in a Superbowl commercial. See Cavemen comment as part of my Fall 2007 TV Preview Review. Unfortunately, they must have overlooked my implicit call for the commercial to be funny. Perhaps that's why I have yet to receive a residual check for this idea.