There is an AFL-NFC Championship Game today. This is its open thread.
TWO HOURS UNTIL KICKOFF! #SBLVI
— Los Angeles Rams (@RamsNFL) February 13, 2022
IT. IS. US.
LET'S DO THIS.
— Cincinnati Bengals (@Bengals) February 13, 2022
Jaybird
Jaybird is Birdmojo on Xbox Live and Jaybirdmojo on Playstation's network. He's been playing consoles since the Atari 2600 and it was Zork that taught him how to touch-type. If you've got a song for Wednesday, a commercial for Saturday, a recommendation for Tuesday, an essay for Monday, or, heck, just a handful a questions, fire off an email to AskJaybird-at-gmail.com
Back in 2014, I had been at my new job for about half a year.
One of my coworkers invited me to his Superbowl party (I declined because I had previously been invited to another one) and he excitedly told me that he was going to have a buffet table full of food and they were going to have beer available and they were going to do shots every time the Broncos got a touchdown and he had already requested the following Monday off.
I told him that I’d *LOVE* to go but, you know, I had to go over to my friend’s Dman’s (and his family had a buffet table full of food and there was no alcohol within a quarter mile of the house that wasn’t in the medicine cabinet).
I pulled up to Dman’s house a few minutes late and he met us in the driveway to help with the stuff we brought and I asked “what’s the score?” and he told me “5-0. Seattle.”
Now I don’t know much about football but I do know that there is only one way to have a score of 5-0 in the first few minutes of a football game and it wasn’t one of the good ones.
“That bad?”
“Oh yeah.”
We went in to watch the Seahawks beat the Broncos 43-8.
The following morning, I went into work and my coworker also managed to make it in.
My guess is that the Bengals win. The qb dresses snappy.Report
That was the only super bowl I’ve skipped in my adult life. A metal band I like from Sweden that for whatever reason always seemed to skip DC-Baltimore was in town so I did that instead. Every time we got a score update I felt a little better about convincing the people I went with to miss the game.Report
Who was the band?Report
Bengals defense already looking like they came to play.Report
Huh. 13-10 at the half.
The games where the next big play changes the outcome are the best ones.Report
See?Report
Report
3-0 in squares cleaned up today.Report
Daaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaang!
Oh, I thought you meant *YOU* won 3 of your squares.
Still, yeah. 3-0 got the 3rd quarter and the final.Report
Personally, I will consider the Bengals to have won that.Report
Aaron Donald is a bad, bad man.Report
Shout out to your dad?Report
Yet another one-score game. Any of the last eight teams standing could have been this year’s champs.Report
One thing that kinda sticks out this year is that “the point” of stuff like the playoffs and The Superbowl is something in the ballpark of “the best two teams meet and determine who is the best in the league”.
Throwing all of them together allows them to reduce uncertainty and we can hammer out who is The World Champion.
But as you say, there was no uncertainty reduced this year.Report
…something in the ballpark of “the best two teams meet and determine who is the best in the league”.
If that were the case, seeding would be done across conferences, division champions wouldn’t get an automatic first home game, etc. From the playoffs, the game the NFL would have liked for the Super Bowl was the Kansas City-Buffalo shootout. Possibly worth noting that this morning, the day after the big game, the sports books have Kansas City and Buffalo as the favorites to win next year’s Super Bowl, ahead of both LA and Cincinnati.Report
Heck, I’d settle for “both teams touch the ball in OT”.Report
If the Kansas City-Buffalo game had been the Super Bowl, you could be darned sure that the owners’ competition committee would be looking at overtime rule changes for next season.Report
Playoff formats rarely result in “the best two teams meet and determine who is the best in the league.” Playoff formats typically result in “the two teams who were best able to put together a string of wins.” Table systems will always more reliably present you with the best two teams in any given league, determined by consistently winning more than everyone else over the course of a season.
But playoff systems deliver uncertainty and excitement in ways that table systems will never be able to match.
I’m reminded of the University of Colorado men’s basketball team, ages ago when they were in the Big 8 (before the Big 12, which is really only 10). They weren’t going to get into the NCAA tournament unless they won the Big 8 tournament, and they went on a run and won the Big 8 tournament and received an automatic bid as a result. That’s exciting!
Were they the best team in the Big 8 that season? LOL no.Report
Amazon really missed a cue by not casting Scarlett Johannsen in their “self-aware smart-home hub” commercial.Report
The two big themes of this year’s commercials were “Electric cars” and “cryptocurrency”.
observations:
1) There were not as many ads for sports-betting websites as I had expected.
2) Between the halftime show acts and the number of mid-forties women in the ads, I’m glad to see GenX getting representation. I guess they figure we’re the only ones with any money left.
3) It was rather unfortunate timing for the yearly avocado ad.
4) Someone on Twitter pointed out that the last time they remember this many ads for Invest In Stuff it was 1999 and the stuff was “dotcom stocks”. Which makes the reappearance of the E-Trade Baby entirely appropriate.
5) There was a commercial where a horse breaks its leg, and my wife leaned over and said “oh, it’s a commercial for Elmer’s”. (turned out it was Budweiser but I was laughing too hard to notice.)
6) The GM ad told you literally nothing other than “yeah we’re gonna make some electric cars”. What cars? What models? How many? When can we buy them? No clue. (And come on, you’re not gonna bring back the EV1 brand? You’ve even got the pun right there, an EV1 with a “EV1L” license plate!)Report
There were not as many ads for sports-betting websites as I had expected.
Perhaps because it’s not legal everywhere? We were flooded with such ads during the regular season, but it’s legal in Colorado. The timing of the commercials made me suspect that they were filling many of the slots reserved for local advertising, slots traditionally filled by local car dealerships.
How long can Peyton Manning keep his gigs going?Report