Every year I take notes during the Super Bowl. It’s the only non-high school game of the year I do this. But my notes are hardly for the action on the field, but rather, the commercials (and maybe a brief comment on the halftime show and other theatrics).
What can I say about Super Bowl XV? Other than the NFL needs to allow the logo to be redesigned (it’s been a decade, Roger), the atrocious lack of balance in penalties and that about seven other Tampa Bay Buccaneers deserved the MVP over Tom Brady? It was “meh”.
I try to avoid all of the pregame hoopla. (This also goes for the regular season). I try to turn it on right at kickoff, but the NFL does this annoying thing every year where they say that kickoff is at some weird time like 5:24 p.m., but it’s actually 5:51, because they make you watch the national anthem, another song, some poetry and a highlight video. This isn’t a high school graduation — it’s a football game. In February. Less than two weeks until Spring Training begins. And March Madness is nearing. And the heavy days of the NBA and NHL. So hurry up and move aside, NFL, because more important things need our attention.
Ok, so the God Bless America rendition by H.E.R. was awesome. She shreds on the guitar. Eric Church and the national anthem? Meh. The poem and highlight video? It was probably good, but I had already checked out and my focus went back to my homemade buffalo chicken burrito.
Then kickoff (finally). After a few minutes of action, we finally got to the good stuff — the commercials.
For those of you new to this column, I rate the Super Bowl commercials on a very broad and unscientific scale. Do they make me feel emotions that I don’t dislike? Do they make me laugh? Were they clever or well-constructed? Were they at all memorable?
I kept tabs on 82 commercials using a rating scale of 1 (not good) to 5 (I absolutely loved it). There were six commercials that I rated a 5/5, two at 4.5/5, then another 20 at 4/50 and four at 3.5/5.
My six favorite commercials were:
● Will Farrell tries to get celebrities to go to Norway to prove GM has better electric vehicles
● Scott’s lawncare collected a slew of our favorite celebs, and Leslie David Baker (Stanley from The Office) says “get off my lawn”
● The two Rocket Mortgage commercials with Tracy Morgan taking potential homebuyers into alternate futures
● Tide’s commercial about a teenage boy that needs to clean his Jason Alexander hoodie
● And lastly, the best of the night, the Toyota commercial with the swimming Paralympian’s adoption backstory. Tears were shed across many American households in that moment.
Also, Doritos 3D have been back for weeks now (they were my favorite munchies as an adolescent in the 90s), but I haven’t found a single bag in Monroe. Maybe I’m looking in all of the wrong places. Someone help me out!
As for the halftime show with The Weeknd, I thought it was very, very good. I literally found out that The Weeknd a) was spelled like that, b) was a singular person and not a K-Pop band, and c) not R. Kelly, who has lyrics in a song that says “It’s the freaking weekend, ‘bout to have me some fun.” Seriously, my brain tried to “ship” those two items together, because an alarmingly high amount of rappers mention themselves in every song, and I thought that was the case here. It wasn’t.
On social media, however, The Weeknd’s show was blasted. Was it because of the maze of mirrors? The plastic surgery masks people thought looked like jockstraps? There were zero cameos of other artists, which is great for me, because I didn’t have to ask my wife or kids during the performance who everyone was. The dancers on the field were socially distanced, which, given the scale of performance showed some impressive choreography. And lastly, despite no cameos and masks and whatever else, The Weeknd sang his songs and wasn’t lip-syncing, which was refreshing to see.
Two years ago people somehow loved Maroon 5’s show, when all it did was show off a white guy’s abs and generic video game stomach tattoos. The Weeknd is just as good of a singer as Adam Levine is (I’d say better), and didn’t need to show off 75 printer cartridges of ink to keep your attention.
Overall, the halftime performance wasn’t Prince playing purple rain in a heavy downpour (or the Mighty Bombjack Show), but it was far from the Black Eyed Peas atrocity in 2011. It was at worst in the very middle of halftime performances that I can remember, and to be honest, it should probably be ranked pretty high up there. There’s been 55 now, and the past 30 have been halftime shows worth watching (and not local marching bands). Let’s rank it somewhere between 10-15.
Switching gears entirely, about the time the game ended news began breaking about longtime bilingual ESPN MLB reporter Pedro Gomez had unexpectedly died at 58. While I never met Pedro personally, as a young 20-something wannabe sportswriter, I watched him report day after day in the Barry Bonds/BALCO/HGH controversy. He showed a young kid who dreamt of being a professional sports reporter what it meant to be to be classy and fair to his subjects. He was truly “a messenger of news” that neither Bonds nor those high horses against Bonds talked down to. Pedro Gomez showed me what it meant to be a professional journalist above all things.
He was also a father, a husband and a caring man by all accounts of his colleagues.
Everyone passes on someday, but man, this one hurts a bit more, especially with pitchers and catchers schedule to begin reporting to spring training next week.
— Adam Krebs is the editor of the Monroe Times. He can be reached at editor@themonroetimes.com.
