Super Bowl XLIII Pregame in Pictures

It’s ironic that one of the writers of a column called the "Media Circus" that appears weekly on a sports Web site would go out of his way to avoid Super Bowl coverage over the past two weeks, but that’s the reality for me.

The two weeks in between the NFC/AFC Championship games have become such a bloated, hyped-up mess that it's not even enjoyable to mock, because that means you actually have to pay attention to it.

But come Sunday, it’s almost our duty as sports fans to try to put ourselves into a football frame of mind, even despite the fact the Super Bowl has become far more of a spectacle than sporting event.

And lucky for us fans, NBC dedicated five hours to pregame coverage in an effort to leverage their status as the host network like their counterparts at Fox and CBS have done in recent years.

Like Fox and CBS, it soon became clear that, while they had their share of actual analysis and football-related discussion, five hours of pregame coverage meant NBC had to stretch to fill time.

Rather than document the spectacle with the written word, it seemed much more appropriate to view NBC’s 300-minute pregame show through a pictorial tour of the somewhat questionable portions of the show along with my interpretation.

He didn’t care if it made him less of a football fan—during the Super Bowl, Jerome Bettis was sitting down in the film room with a six-pack of Busch and watching Jaws 3D.

Seriously, what the hell is the sudden fascination with 3D again?  Didn’t we try this 50 years ago, then again 25 years ago and both times determine that it was freaking stupid? 

If Jaws and Jason Voorhees can’t make a 3D movie cool, what makes anyone think that an episode of Chuck will?

Told that the winner would get to sit at Matt Lauer’s table at the NBC picnic next week, underdog Tiki Barber set out to destroy Jerome Bettis in the Top Chef-sponsored hotdog eating contest.

After Rainn Wilson proclaimed how honored he was to be on stage with the “biggest dork in the media,” Al Roker threw a wild haymaker that Wilson mistook as a fist bump.

Needless to say, Mike Holmgren and Tony Dungy struggled to maintain professionalism when Detroit Lions' president Matt Millen began explaining how he felt the Cardinals could create matchup problems by playing 10 wide receivers alongside Kurt Warner.

On live TV, there really was no way that Kevin James could politely decline Roker’s request to slow dance on their Segways.

At least when the game started, we got back to business with Al Michaels and John Madden, with Madden explaining to the audience exactly what Hines Ward means to him:

“If we were choosing to do something, I would take Hines Ward first.”

That’s the type of crystal clear analysis that means it’s gametime.