Some Guys Played Football Last Night

The Giants won the Super Bowl in almost the exact same way they won it four years ago, late in a close game against the Patriots. History may judge Eli Manning, the Giants’ victory architect in both games and the shrimpiest-looking professional athlete of the past 20 years, as a singular talent, a Hall of Famer, or it might finally decide that he’s a fluke, a good guy with a few great years and a knack for fourth-quarter comebacks. The Patriots, who have not won one of these games since 2005, will still be considered an all-time franchise, and indeed are still a great team. This will be the industry consensus, at least—that includes whatever dipshit on ESPN you might disagree with—but in the eyes of the fans, whoever they are, they’re no good, having boofed it, or at best, gone unlucky, for seven years, way too long.

The game itself, as Super Bowls go, was pretty damn must-watch—your humble correspondent only fell asleep once—a rare feat in the age of the four-hour game. Usually things are tedious, and past iterations have been borderline hot garbage – Super Bowl XXXV was worse than paint drying—but the gods of either ratings or football smiled Sunday on the billionaire/robot in charge of NBC and gifted a close, if low-scoring game. Already a best-case scenario eastern seaboard matchup, the overnight ratings should be record-breaking.

The ads were generally pretty rotten and uninspired, which puts them back in the company of advertisements in general. Ad time sold for $3.5 million for 30 seconds this year, which was a few cents per viewer, and half a mil more than last year. There appeared to be fewer crowd-sourced campaigns this year, and we were treated to simpler conceits (a lot of hard-working middle-class Americans, etc.) and epic/mosh-pIt pieces, as well as the odd piece of GoDaddy filth, which looks awfully puritan and tame in 2012.

Our party was drinking Bud Light Platinums—I believe ahead of the release date, though I’m not going to bother to find out—and though I didn’t partake, I can vouch they did for the group whatever special thing beer was supposed to do. Platinums are Bud Lights with more alcohol added, which is as winning a beer conceit as there may ever have been, and this non-MBA is shocked that a publicly-traded company took 46 Super Bowls to achieve such progress.

The football season is over, nominally anyways, with no games of import to be played until fall. Fans of other sports and people who like doing things on Sundays can rejoice, but we remain in a neckless football fugue-state. For those who hate football, there’s the draft, there’s mini-camp, there’s preseason, there’s more. It will barely go away. Thankfully, we won’t have to see Madonna for a while.