So glad that's over

Congratulations to the Green Bay Packers, the winners of the Metroplex’s first Super Bowl. The national anthem sucked, the halftime show really sucked, but the game was actually pretty good – which is how it should be.

I poked around Wikipedia (so double-check the facts), and this was actually the third Super Bowl in Texas – Houston has had two – Super Bowl VIII (Miami’s second consecutive win, the year after the perfect season) and Super Bowl XXXVIII (Patriots over the Panthers.)

Given how incredibly bad many people (including me) think JerryWorld’s halftime show was yesterday, I looked at the halftime shows for the Houston games. 1974? The UT Longhorn Band (which would piss off Aggies, but at least it’s within the State.) 2004? Nipplegate.

I must have zoned out on this, because I never realized Nipplegate was in the Great State of Texas.

So, we didn’t get anyone local (Kelly Clarkson? Willie Nelson? ZZ Top? Jack Ingram? The Robison Boys? Any number of thousands of Texas bands?) and we didn’t get any fun and excitement.

Note to future Super Bowl planners – if you ask a group to do a 15-minute set and they say they need two guest stars to pull it off, get another group.

Super Bowls in your town are a lot like weddings – there is a dull drumbeat that starts a year or two before the event, which grows louder and louder until it eclipses everything else, and then after a few hours, it’s over.(I am very grateful Lotusphere was last week, so I missed much of the hype.)

Was it really worth all the pain?

I’ll wait to see the local financial numbers for a final answer, but I would have to say “No” at this point.

Some of the issues I see:

• The home team was from Wisconsin, over 1,000 miles from JerryWorld. As I said on the Bleacher Report yesterday, that’s not really a home team.
• Dallas got blamed for having winter weather. In February. May I remind people NYC can’t shovel snow, either, and they get this every freakin’ year?
• The weather kept any number of people away, so a lot of stores, bars and restaurants probably have extra stocks today. Anyone having a Jack Daniels sale today?
• A number of people with tickets didn’t actually have seats. They weren’t oversold – the seats didn’t exist. It’s not that they paid for outside, standing, watching TV “seats” (who were those idiots?), it’s that the Fire Marshal didn’t approve the temporary seating that was still being installed at game time. WTF?
• Jerry didn’t set the Super Bowl attendance record – while it would have been perfect to have the record missed by the exact number of people denied seating, it was missed by more than that.
• Wasn’t our last big snowstorm when Jerry had the NBA All-Star Game at the DeathStar? Who did he piss off?

I am probably in the minority on this, but after years of reading about Super Bowls and Olympics that barely break after the locals being promised a huge windfall, I’m really not sure what we got out of this, other than Jerry’s ego is probably larger now than ever, if that were even possible.

I wonder what happened to the guy with two nosebleed seats for $57,000 EACH on StubHub?