February 7, 2005
Obligatory Superbowl post
Let me start off by saying that I'm not a big football fan and like many people, I watch one game all year - the big one. I think baseball is far more interesting and fun to watch, as is basketball, although I haven't followed my beloved Knicks since Patrick Ewing retired and I'm still peeved that in the current wave of re-released old-school sneakers, those Converse blue-and-orange 33s haven't made a comeback.
Anyway, I have only two comments on the Superbowl, neither of which relate to the actual game, which wasn't bad, considering my ambivalence toward the sport.
1. Despite the controversy surrounding last year's halftime show, I'm really glad that the organizers didn't shy away from controversy. Unlike last year, when the "malfunction" was unplanned and didn't serve to advance any particular agenda, the barbs to the squares in the '05 were well-thought out and deliciously subversive. First of all, what better way to sick it to the evangelicals by making the main act 25 percent of a band that was "bigger than Jesus" in its day? Take that, Dobson!
Then, we had "Hey Jude" with thousands of waving chemical glowsticks in the crowd, obviously symbolic of solidarity with the victims of Chemical Glowstick Sodomy at Abu Ghraib. Did you know that glow-in-the-dark aquamarine is the official color of CGS awareness ribbons and wristbands?
2. I cannot tell you the extent to which I hate the announcer's infatuation with Superbowl-specific statistics. It's the 39th Superbowl, which is about as much football as would be played by two teams over three seasons. So why is it such a breakthrough that this is the first time "IN SUPERBOWL HISTORY" that a game has been tied at the beginning of the third quarter? Do you have a large enough sample to start pontificating about whether or not one would expect that to have happened before? What's your confidence interval, you lazy multiply-concussed aging jock? Show me some t-tests and linear regression as to why I should give a rat's ass about the first time someone with a prime uniform number who majored in elementary education has rushed for more than 100 yards and we'll talk.
Posted by rj3 at February 7, 2005 9:30 AM
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Read about it here. Why did they have to lose? Seriously? Going to give $5 bucks to a friend named Rob because he said that the Pats would win which they did.
It was the Patriots' third Super Bowl title in four years.
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Tracked on February 7, 2005 3:30 PM
Comments
Scored tied at end of 3rd quarter for the first time in 39 games is rare. For this season's NFL week 1, out of 16 games 3 were tied after 45 min of gametime. That's 19% of week one games compared to 3% of all SuperBowls. I don't feel like it, but one could check the scores of all games for this season (around 270 games), see that way more than 3% of them would be tied going into the 4th quarter, and that would be a large enough sample to make it statistically significant.
Posted by: Av at February 7, 2005 11:33 AM