Food, fun, new commercials....and a football game too!

Well, it's Super Bowl Sunday, folks. For my non-American readers, that's when we all take breaks from our New Years' Resolutions of health and exercise and whatnot to sit around eating junk food while watching the final two teams alive in the National Football League take each other on for the Super Bowl Championship, the Vince Lombardi Trophy, the right to make commercials for Disney resorts, and -- if the winners are the New England Stupid Patriots -- undying hatred from Yours Truly. O what a wonderful day!

Time for some "Super Thoughts":

:: The other day, the two hosts of one of the Buffalo sports-talk radio shows I listen to were debating on whether the Super Bowl should be moved to Saturdays in the future, or if it should be kept on Sunday. The main idea seems to be that it's hard going to work the day after the Super Bowl, or something like that. I say, Bollocks. Consider the World Series in baseball: unless that thing goes to a Game Six, it's guaranteed to end on a night preceding a work day (Game Seven falls on a Sunday), no matter when it ends (Games Four, Five or Seven). The big complaint about the World Series is that the games start ridiculously late: network coverage opens at 8:00 p.m., with the first pitch coming after lineups, the National Anthem, and so on. The Super Bowl, on the other hand, kicks off by 6:30 p.m. generally, and even with an extended halftime, the game itself is almost always over by 10:00 p.m. In fact, the Super Bowl always ends early enough that the network carrying it has time to put some show on after the game -- sometimes a highly-regarded pilot, other times a special episode of a particularly popular show. If you regularly stay up to catch the late night news, you can stay up to catch the Super Bowl. It's not that demanding.

The better argument comes from the convenience of getting all of the people actually at the Super Bowl site back home. Over the week before the game, thousands of people descend upon the Super Bowl city (this year it's Jacksonville, Florida). And then, all of those people leave again on Monday or Tuesday after the game. Moving the game to Saturday would help alleviate traffic, heavy airport use, et cetera. Or so the argument went. Having never been to a Super Bowl, I wouldn't know. But I just like having the thing on Sunday nights; I suspect that the game would suffer a bit as a "water cooler" topic if it was two days old by the time one went back to work.

(But then, for four years in a row I had to show my face around college the day after the Bills lost the Super Bowl, so there's a reverse argument to be made, too. Hmmmm.)

:: Why the StuPats will win the Super Bowl.

:: Why the Eagles will win the Super Bowl.

:: My prediction? I suppose I should offer one. I've come close, a whole bunch of times, to convincing myself that the Eagles were going to win, but I just can't pick them, much as I'd like to. I'll still be rooting for them, and if they do win, I will of course dance with great joy as the StuPats fall from "dynasty" to "another memorable team that lost the Super Bowl", much like Joe Theissman's Redskins. But I just don't think the scenarios that lead to an Eagles victory are all that likely. Sooner or later Tom Brady is going to look bad in a big game; sooner or later the StuPats' patchwork defense will let them down; sooner or later Adam Vinatieri will honk a big kick; sooner or later some head coach will figure out that Bill Belichick actually doesn't know what he's going to do. But that day isn't today. I'm not looking for a StuPat blowout -- rhetoric aside, the StuPats aren't the 1989 49ers, and the Eagles aren't the 1989 Broncos, so no StuPat 55-10 win here -- but I am expecting a fairly convincing win, something along the lines of StuPats 30, Eagles 17. And then, of course, the Archangels of Heaven will descend and elevate Bill Belichick and Tom Brady into the sky, where their spirits shall inhabit two new stars which shall shine down upon our fragile globe, thus ushering in a new era of Peace and Goodness on Earth.

Oh, Eagles, please! Make it stop!