Super Bowl Tomorrow

The Super Bowl is tomorrow, with the favored Indianapolis Colts matched up against the New Orleans Saints down in "Miami" (actually, the stadium is near the Dade/Broward county line just a couple of miles from where I grew up in Hollywood). Why the Colts are listed as a five and a half point favorite is beyond me; the teams look very evenly matched.

I am still rooting for the Saints, and for that one main reason I have alluded to before: The Indianapolis Colts let their potentially perfect season go by the wayside when, in their 15th game, they benched their star players for "rest" and allowed the NY Jets to beat them. This also allowed the Jets to get a free pass into the playoffs over other teams like Houston or Pittsburgh that may have been more qualified. So go New Orleans!

I don't know that I will watch the whole game, though, as exciting as it may be. The hype and controversy about all of those overly-frequent, tedious, and expensive commercials is one major drawback. Another is the excessive analysis from the announcers. Yuck!

One more gripe, although it's not all that important. It is the way that the Super Bowls are named from year to year. Designating them by Roman numerals is simply pure bull hype. This year's game is Super Bowl XLIV. Does anyone actually care about that or recall past games by their Roman numerals? Also, if you're like me and want to use ordinary Arabic numerals for denoting years and then try to recall games of the past, they screw things up there as well. For example, this year's game is called the 2010 Super Bowl. But it is the proper culmination of the 2009 season, although it is technically held in 2010; it actually is the 2009 championship game. This can get to be quite confusing, especially if one goes back a few years and...say, speaks of the 2000 champion. Are we talking about the winner of the game held in 2000 between the St. Louis Rams and the Tennessee Titans at the close of the 1999 season, or are we talking about the winner of the game held in 2001 for the 2000 season that matched the Baltimore Ravens up against the New York Giants? This confusion all helps to ensure that, assuming it isn't your pet team playing in this game, this year's Super Bowl will be largely forgotten in five or six years.

So here's my prediction for tomorrow's game, for what it's worth (not a whole lot, I imagine):

New Orleans 34, Indianapolis 31