IT WASN'T THAT BAD, AFTER ALL

"Hello, friends!” … (I will miss JIM NANTZ.) Click!

That was just about all the memory man could take of Super 

Bowl Whatever … and CBS coverage, thereof.

Whatever happened to just plain old football … when players 

played and didn’t act like a bunch of jerks … before a 

unanimous candidate for the hall of shame invented the 

sideline reporter … when all betting was illegal and, unlike 

today, with betting legal everywhere and everything 

questionable, we weren’t always left wondering if the fix was 

in … before some fool bet (legally) $100,000 the pregame 

coin toss would come up tails --- and it was heads … when

 ROGER GOODELL wasn’t commissioner pandering to the 

worst in us … before TAYLOR SWIFT … when you didn’t 

look forward to the commercials more than the game ... before

 TONY ROMO … when they could have cared less that

 REBA McINTYRE’s rendition of the National Anthem took 

95 seconds … before Goodell invitee USHER … STOP!!! 

Know what? It wasn’t so awful after all. I’m talking about 

LVIII … as seen on CBS … start to finish … and, frankly, this

 really old old-timer was prepared for the worst. Fortunately, 

Goodell did not deliver.

Some takeaways from Sunday night:

First (quite likely foremost) … all the excessive background 

noise – from the crowd as well as piped-in music that TV 

must think adds to the production – made listening to much of 

the coverage impossible for these octogenarian hearing-aid 

assisted ears … which probably was a good thing. We weren’t 

burdened with someone telling us one thing while our lying 

eyes saw something else … that has become a staple of TV … 

and not only sports.

Whatever happened to commercials cleverly designed to 

convince us to use a product with such a subtle message that 

we weren’t aware of it? In fact, most of Sunday’s left me 

wondering what they were about much less which company 

was being plugged? Like the little football-carrying kid 

actually filmed in Ghana … cute, well-done but ...

I still plan to indulge myself more often than necessary with a 

half-dozen mixed (cocoanut and Boston Creme) despite a 

terrible waste of $7 million by Dunkin’ Donuts for its 

celebrity-laden not-so-Super commercial. To think this free-

for-all ranked second from the top on USA Today’s annual 

poll of best-and-worst boggles the mind. Was that really

 JENNIFER LOPEZ, or an AI markup? … No. 1, with

 ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER and the little guy who 

does the reasonably clever sales pitch for take-out sandwiches, 

was only marginaly not as bad … At the bottom was a pitch 

for presidential candidate ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR., 

whose face was superimposed on an old-time TV ad for JFK. 

Politics and the SB have never meshed well … thank 

goodness.

At least CBS resisted the urge to cause rage at home by 

sweeping the crowd when it should have been concentrating 

on the game. A temporary oversight, no doubt. Enjoy it while 

we can.

Why didn’t the constant reminder Swift was there to cheer for 

KC’s TRAVIS KELCE bother me? I must be getting old. 

Then again, he only caught one pass (for one yard) in the first 

half, so there was no reason to show her … and, we’re told, 

draw boos from a crowd more for the 49ers than Chiefs … 

until the second half and overtime when he contributed a lot 

more than bumping his coach in apparent anger which was 

Kelce’s highlight of the first half.

(Coach ANDY REID called it a “cheap shot … but he’s done 

it before.” Kelce said he did it out of love. If you believe that 

...)

By the way … what was Kelce yelling at the podium with 

Nantz? What a jerk … Kelce, that is … Nantz, one of 

sportscasting’s good guys, was working his final SB, 

according to reports.

Finally … we really liked Usher and a high -- but not over the 

top -- energy half-time extravaganza. The roller-skating 

segment was a high. And, if he dropped f-bombs, used the n-

word and/or degraded women like many of Goodell’s invitees 

have done, we couldn’t tell. Of course, I didn’t recognize any 

of Usher’s “well-known” guest celebrities … so there was no 

danger of saying – like a guest on CBS did Monday morning 

– the appearance of LUDACRIS was among the three most 

important things in his life. I kid you not.

Until next time ...