Quick thoughts on the Super Bowl

• If I were putting together NBC's opening sequence, I would have made a few more changes to the opening song. For example, instead of "waiting all day", how about "waiting all year"? And how can you pass up the fact that "forty-three" rhymes with "NBC" and so could have been inserted into the song with few other changes? You won't get anything like this until Super Bowl 70!
• I hate to disagree with Roger Goodell, but this game did not top last year's game. This game does have the advantage over Super Bowl XLII, and XXXVIII, that the first half was not boring as hell. But while this game did produce some landmark, all-time Super Bowl plays, those individual marks can't really compare with a great game - this game was just like any other Super Bowl from a pre-game angle standpoint, unlike XLII, and the Cinderella team didn't win, which hurts its standing - in fact I was rooting for Pittsburgh to pull out the win just because it would have been too bizarre otherwise. There are in fact some similarities with XXXVIII, another game people wondered about being the best Super Bowl ever. One of these days I need to go over the game film, or at least the NFL Films distillations, or even compact game stories, of every Super Bowl and rank the greatest ever. FSN's "The Sports List" did a ranking probably around the time of XL, maybe even before XXXVIII. Obviously, that list needs a serious update.
• Is it too early to start talking about Ben Roethlisberger's Hall of Fame credentials? Remember, in the lead-up to the Super Bowl people were talking about Kurt Warner's Hall of Fame credentials now that he had reached three Super Bowls with two different teams. Now Roethlisberger has been to one fewer Super Bowl and won two, becoming just the tenth QB in NFL history to do so, and not completely throwing up in the second. Not to mention his leadership in the regular season. If there's a knock against him it's that he's leading a team composed of a bunch of parts that might win Super Bowls without him, but then again that was the knock against Tom Brady for a while as well. If he so far as makes one more Super Bowl, is he a shoo-in for the Hall? And is it possible that his final drive in this game, which had Steve Young positively salivating on ESPN's NFL Primetime, is the one that puts him in the Hall?
• Speaking of ESPN, and lists, about your "Top 10" Super Bowl plays: Your own analysts, who clamored for Manning-to-Tyree to beat out Roethlisberger-to-Holmes for #1, are correct. What you should have done was rank the Harrison INT return significantly further back, in the middle or even near the back, since it was one of those sideshow gimmicky plays that come out of the blue every once in a while in the Super Bowl. By ranking it #3, you forced the Holmes play to #1 to avoid consecutive plays from the same game. Probably the main reason you rated the Holmes play #1 was because it actually scored the game-winning TD, but it arguably makes Manning-to-Tyree greater that it attained such greatness without actually scoring. (Incidentially, initially I rendered "Holmes" as "Burress". What does that tell you?)
• Am I the only one who noticed that the clock briefly stopped at two minutes left in the game when Roethlisberger barely got a play off, then started again as the clock operator realized there was a play going on, and the discrepancy was never corrected? How might that have influenced Arizona's final drive? The game-ending fumble would have only occured with two seconds or so left on the clock! You think Arizona would be working a bit quicker? And am I the only one who thinks that on the play to the 5 on Pittsburgh's final drive, the main reason the Steelers called a timeout was that the receiver (I think it was Holmes) was a little lazy getting back to the line of scrimmage, as though he didn't quite realize the situation? The Steelers might have needed that timeout to set up a field goal with a few seconds left on the clock if the Cardinals had been able to get a stop. I think there was one other "Am I the only one who noticed that" in there, but damned if I can remember it now.

I have plenty to say about the ads in a later post, where I hope to hand out awards for the ads, and some comments on NBC's modified banner for the game, which is also an opportunity to talk about ESPN's new tennis banner it broke out at the Aussie Open. There were a LOT of great ads in the second half of this game. Lineal titles updated for the offseason.