Athlete’s Angle

The crew at Athlete’s Angle loves them some football, and although I’m sure you’ve had more than your fair share of Super Bowl chit-chat, we would like to give you the good, the bad, and the ugly from Super Bowl weekend.

The good

Obviously, the Green Bay Packers fit in the good category.

Championship teams in the NFL are supposed to be very good teams that have everything come together just in time for the Super Bowl. This hardly describes the Packers season getting to the top of the NFL.

The Packers were the final NFC team to qualify for the playoffs and were forced to play each playoff game on the road. Green Bay was also decimated by injuries all season long, and the trend continued in the Super Bowl as they lost Donald Driver, their number two receiver, and Charles Woodson, arguably the best defensive player in the NFL, before the end of the first half.

However, as good as the Packers were, there is an even better good.

Prior to every NFL season over the past decade, the people at EA Sports, makers of the popular Madden football video game franchise, simulate the full schedule on the most recent video game roster. In years past, they would stop the simulation at the end of the regular season. This season, they ran the simulation through the playoffs and the Green Bay Packers were the predicted winners. Incredible!

The bad

The halftime show was a major disappointment, easily the bad of the Super Bowl. The Black Eyed Peas’ vocals were terrible, but maybe that’s how they usually sound (I don’t know, I’m not a BEP fan). As bad as that was, it could have been worse. Lucky for us, Slash suddenly showed up on stage, guitar in hand. Fergie and Slash attempted a rendition of “Sweet Child of Mine,” a Guns and Roses classic, but the terrible vocals managed to ruin that little number as well.

Fortunately for the BEP, it was difficult to focus on the music because of the ridiculous costumes everybody was wearing. Why were the background dancers wearing giant boxes on their heads?

There was one bright spot to this horrible show. Twitter was smashing records throughout the game but peaked at halftime when they recorded between 3,000-4,000 tweets per second.

Apparently people couldn’t stop tweeting about Fergie’s inability to sing, Slash’s appearance and Christina Aguilera screwing up the lyrics to the national anthem. Twitter was easily the place to be during the show, as hilarious tweets were flying around at a rampant pace.

The ugly

We decided that the ugly had to go to Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones and his Super Bowl decision-making process. Not the decision to refuse entry to 400 fans that arrived at the stadium to discover that their seats were deemed “unsafe,” but also his decision of who to watch the big game with in his luxury box.

Numerous faux-pas were caught on camera in the box: A-Rod being hand fed popcorn by Cameron Diaz, John Madden texting/tweeting like a 14-year-old girl at a Justin Bieber concert and Ashton Kutcher pouting after getting punked by former president George Bush. Jones will have to think quite hard about who he decides to invite next time he gets to host the Super Bowl, if he ever gets that chance again after this blown opportunity.