Super Bowl 46: Grading the Super Bowl's Entertainment Value

The Super Bowl has long since become a paragon of entertainment. At its heart is an ultra-exciting championship game, but it's also a rock and roll concert and a celebration of advertising and other such decidedly American things.

To boot, it gets bigger every year.

Super Bowl XLVI is now a couple days in the past. The buzz surrounding the game is still pretty thick, but it's slowly fading away. Now is as good a time as any to take a reasoned look at what we saw on Super Sunday and to come to a few logical conclusions.

Put simply, it's time to grade the Super Bowl.

For the sake of keeping things simple, we'll focus on four categories here: host city, performances, commercials and the game itself.

Let's discuss.

Host City

For the first time in Super Bowl history, the big game was held at Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis. In the months leading up to Super Sunday, there was some speculation about whether or not Indianapolis would be able to stack up against past Super Bowl cities, especially the warm-weather ones.

This tweet from Rich Eisen of the NFL Network pretty well sums it up:

You saw a lot of tweets like this one coming from the NFL punditry in the week leading up to the Super Bowl. Anybody with an audible voice was raving about how great Indy was.

I didn't have the pleasure of being there, but it all looked pretty great on TV. Various shots of the city made it clear that Indy had gone all out to host the Super Bowl, and Lucas Oil Stadium itself looked more like a temple than a football field. 

Here's how I look at it. In watching coverage of last year's Super Bowl in Dallas, I didn't see anything that made me want to be there.

In watching coverage of this year's Super Bowl, I very much wanted to be in Indianapolis.

Grade: A

Performances

There were a lot of performances throughout the course of Super Bowl week, but only two of them are worth focusing on: Kelly Clarkson's rendition of the national anthem and Madonna's halftime show.

Clarkson's national anthem was just what we needed after watching Christina Aguilera butcher it at Super Bowl XLV. Clarkson kept it short and sweet, she didn't flub any lines, and I personally thought the drummers and the choir were a nice touch. It was not the best national anthem I've ever heard, but it was damn good.

Madonna's halftime performance, however, was utter dreck. It was a reminder that her music really hasn't aged well at all, which is a reminder none of us really needed, thank you very much. To make matters worse, she lip-synced the entire thing. 

Honestly, the best part was M.I.A. giving the camera the bird and saying, "I don't give a [bleep]." At least that part was interesting, not to mention totally honest.

Grade: C

Commercials

This year's Super Bowl commercials consisted of the same old stuff. Funny animals, hot babes, classic rock and roll songs, you name it.

You get the sense that people were pretty disappointed with the collection as a whole, but I thought the ads were just fine this year. A few of them fell flat, to be sure, but most of them were solid enough and more than a few of them had me laughing.

If I had to pinpoint my two favorites, they'd be The Avengers trailer and the Clint Eastwood Chrysler ad. The first because that movie looks freaking awesome and the second because I absolutely loved the message Chrysler was taking the time to send. 

For me, the true bummer is that I had already seen most of the commercials before they aired. Judging from the YouTube numbers, so had a few million other people out there.

So, despite the fact many of the Super Bowl ads were pretty good, most of them were old news.

Grade: C

The Game

Let's get one thing straight. Super Bowl XLII between the New York Giants and the New England Patriots was an instant classic. The same cannot be said of Super Bowl XLVI.

The game had its moments. New England's long touchdown drives were fun to watch, and New York's drive at the end was a perfect example of how a game-winning drive should be executed. Mario Manningham sweetened the deal by making an outstanding catch up against the left sideline.

As a whole, though, the Super Bowl came up a little short in terms of memorable moments. The game itself moved pretty slow, and there were a few too many stalled drives. Long periods of time passed in which neither the Giants nor the Patriots did anything.

All could have been forgiven if the game had come down to a thrilling finish, but it really didn't. It came down to a Hail Mary, and those are only fun if they're completed.

The game wasn't a complete dud, as you really can't complain about any game that is decided in the last minute. But it was certainly not an all-time great.

Grade: B-

Overall: B-

This wasn't a bad Super Bowl by any stretch of the imagination. It just wasn't a great one. It was somewhere in between.

For now, that's fine. But down the road, Super Bowl XLVI is not going to stand out from the rest of the pack.