All things sporting [2]

Pumped up for the NFC Championship Game between



and

As a Washingtonian, it's really weird not being an underdog.
It just feels wrong!  

Just think: if Seattle wins the Super Bowl, we won't be able to call them the "Seachickens" anymore.  Do we really want to live in that kind of world?

What a horrible thought, Eldo!  
The SuperSonics won the NBA title once, so we had to banish them to Oklahoma.    
Fortunately the Mariners have never threatened to get uppity like that!

Take that Brady! Good luck Broncos!

    !!!HAWKS!!!    

City in the final, shame about manure

Hopefully this will clear things up for our NAB members before Super Bowl Sunday.

From the related videos:



I miss Tebow.

Is today not the day when you UShobbits hold your pretend world final for your kids game?   

I do hope we will be getting a Forumshire running commentary   (like dear much missed Ally used to give for the tennis    )

Super Bowl in five hours.

My manager is from Seattle so she took a moment this morning to talk to everyone about the Seahawks.

I have to work tonight. Fuck.

Hope you enjoy the game, Eldo.

In attempt to get the atmosphere right I have got in a stack of meat products, nibbles, a huge bowl with 6 packs of crisps in it (equivalent to 1 US chip bag you greedy bastards!) and I 'borrowed' some buckets from Daves farm for folk to eat from in classic American style (why dont you just go the whole bloody hog and get a couple of troughs in).
I've invited several people who nothing about the game so they get everything wrong, and a couple of racists to berate any black players on either side and some right wing religious nutjobs who can point out how its all a Zionist plot and why gays have ruined the game.
And the only bits we are watching for are the cheerleaders, the half time advertisements and the hope of becoming mock outraged at the glimpse of a nipple in the half time show.

Am I doing it right for that authentic US experience?

Sounds about right, Petty.

One good thing about missing the game is that I won't have to sit through those ungodly commercials.   

I've talked enough about football with people at work that I think they deliberately made sure not to schedule any football fans to work in the evening on the Super Bowl. I had to go in early today but I got off before noon.

Petty -- I'd like to say that's not the case, but after the response to Richard Sherman two weeks ago I'm not sure I can.

I don't know if it's just my sense of humor changing or a genuine trend, but the last few years have felt like they've had a lot of really terrible Super Bowl commercials and very little in the way of classics.

Eldorion wrote:I don't know if it's just my sense of humor changing or a genuine trend, but the last few years have felt like they've had a lot of really terrible Super Bowl commercials and very little in the way of classics.

When you try too hard to make a classic, you end up with a pile of shit.

I will say that I've liked the Budweiser commercials featuring Stevie Wonder's "Superstitious", but the Super Bowl one from last year featuring Stevie himself as some sort of voodoo god was a bit too much for me.  The best commercials don't get totally lost up their own ass and forget the product (or become incomprehensible to anyone who hasn't seen the previous commercials).

My fingers are crossed for a third Aaron Rodgers on the plane commercial, even though those are arguably subject to the same criticisms I just lobbed at Budweiser.  The first two this season have been great though.

Of course, the real biggest sporting event of the day is already on. Here's highlights from last year's Puppy Bowl.

The media has turned the Super Bowl commercials into a competition, so now we've got a bunch of try-hard marketing/advertising employees trying to one up each other.

Eldorion wrote:Of course, the real biggest sporting event of the day is already on.  Here's highlights from last year's Puppy Bowl.

  

Does anyone watch or care about the actual game bit?- or is that just there to give people time to talk about the ads?

Of course we pay attention to the game. Although there are a lot of people for whom the Super Bowl is the only football game they watch all year so they're probably not as interested in the on-field action as someone who watches games every week during the season.

One of the big storylines going into the game is Peyton Manning -- one of the best QBs to ever play the game -- and his attempt to finally quash the lingering doubts that surround him, particularly with his performance in championship games. We've also got the top seeds from each conference playing each other for the first time since 2009 and the #1 ranked offense vs. the #1 ranked defense as well. It should be a really great game.

My older brother is a Bronco fan -my Dad is a Redskins fan (or whatever pc name they come up for them, I favour letting individual fans call them only by their own colour, so Blackskins for Blacks, Whiteskins for Whites, and then only true Native Americans would be allowed to call them Redskins and everyone is happy   )

So I do actually know quite a bit about the game although Im far from an expert on it.
Ive never understood why it has to stop so often, thats just boring and seems a part of the game that exists solely to accommodate advertising.

And I still say it basically just a game where you use violence to steal someone else's land until you have possession of it all from one end to the other- and therefore fundamentally sums up the American psyche very well when it comes to other peoples land  

(And its way to easy to score points, which is why the end result tends to have a lot of digits in it- at least make the game difficult   )

Pettytyrant101 wrote:So I do actually know quite a bit about the game although Im far from an expert on it.
Ive never understood why it has to stop so often, thats just boring and seems a part of the game that exists solely to accommodate advertising.

I wasn't trying to cast aspersions on your football knowledge or anything, so I hope it didn't come off that way. As for the play stoppages, those have been around since the 1880s (it's generally considered the point at which American football stopped being just a variant of rugby and went off in its own direction), so it's not about TV, though it is convenient for advertisers. I'm kind of rusty on my early football history but my understanding is that the system of downs and the line of scrimmage was introduced because major figures in the game at that time, especially Walter Camp, wanted to make the game more about strategy and planning, which meant it the pace had to be slower and possession of the ball by one team or the other needed to be clear.

And I still say it basically just a game where you use violence to steal someone else's land until you have possession of it all from one end to the other- and therefore fundamentally sums up the American psyche very well when it comes to other peoples land  

(And its way to easy to score points, which is why the end result tends to have a lot of digits in it- at least make the game difficult   )

I've honestly never understood the whole "stealing land" thing. It's funny, but the point of the game is to get the ball to the other team's end. In that respect, it's really quite similar to all the other versions of football out there (soccer, rugby, Aussie, etc.) or, hell, most team sports in general. The most notable difference would be that the end zone stretches across the entire field rather than being centered against the back, as is the norm in most such sports. As for points, the main reason why the numbers go so high is because most scores count for more than one point. As in basketball, there are different ways to score, and some are more valuable than others. If you divide each team's score by seven, you end up with something much closer to typical scores in soccer or hockey. However, the rules of the game do favor the offense and this has gotten worse in recent years with new rules putting more and more restrictions on defensive players. I don't think that's good for the game (although some of the rule changes are about improving player safety, which should be the leagues number-one goal, but a large part of it comes down to fetishization of the offense).