Burning Super Bowl Questions

As you know, I am a Bills fan and have therefore endured four years of Super Bowl futility. Despite these painful memories, I continue to watch the big game every year. This year is Super Bowl 44. I have been watching since #25 so that makes this my 20th Super Bowl! This fact starts to make me feel old until my parents point out that they have watched every single Super Bowl that has ever been played!
Thinking about the big game brought some questions to my mind. This is New Orleans’ first appearance. How many possible combinations of Super Bowl new comers are there? There are only 3 possible ways to have a new comer versus another new comer (the Lions versus either the Texans, Browns, or Jaguars). There are 64 ways to have one new comer versus a team that has already appeared.
The media (and fans) love a feel-good story. How much would they love it if two teams who have never won played each other? There would be a happy ending for one fan base. How many combinations of no win vs. no win are there? Not that New Orleans has won, there are 12 teams who have never won (7 NFC: Eagles, Lions, Vikings, Cardinals, Seahawks, Panthers, and Falcons; 5 AFC: Bills, Browns, Jaguars, Texans, and Chargers) so that makes 35 possible combinations.
The ultimate emotional story would be teams who have only lost, but never won a Super Bowl meeting. The Eagles, Vikings, Cardinals, Seahawks, Panthers, Falcons, Bills, Titans, and Chargers have appeared but never won. That makes 18 possible combinations of losers. The most intriguing of these would have to be Minnesota versus Buffalo as both teams have lost four Super Bowls. The Bills have the added benefit of losing theirs consecutively. Go Buffalo!
How many different combinations of Super Bowls are there? There could be 256 different match-ups, but 40 have already been played. Why isn’t it 44 since there have been 44 Super Bowls? Well, Buffalo played Dallas twice (sadly with the same result) and Pittsburgh played Dallas three times (winning one) and the Jets can’t play Indianapolis any longer. So that leaves 216 unique combinations.
This got me thinking of other interesting Super Bowl match-ups.

The Pirate Bowl: Tampa Bay vs. Oakland - I didn’t make this one up; we saw it just seven years ago. Too bad Johnny Depp and Orlando Bloom didn’t perform the half time show.

The Purple Bowl: Minnesota vs. Baltimore - I’m a girl so I care about things like uniform colors (though Paul Lucas of Uni Watch does too). Not that there is anything wrong with men in purple, I just always thought it was a strange color choice. Though I do like how the Ravens have paired it with black.

The New Jersey Bowl: New York Giants vs. New York Jets - I say the winner should get its team name on the stadium for all games, by both teams.

The They-Used-to-Play-in-Boston Bowl: Washington vs. New England - I’m sure most people know that the Patriots used to play in Boston but were moved to Foxoboro, just 40 minutes south. But lesser known is the fact that the Redskins also called Beantown home back in 1932-1936.

The Not-In-LA-Anymore Bowl: St. Louis vs. Oakland - I was a kid when these teams moved out of La La Land. It was very strange to me that teams could just leave town. (I was only 2 when the Colts moved.) As an adult, the fact that relocation happens is an everyday concern for a Bills fan!

The Next-Door-Neighbor Bowl: San Francisco vs. Oakland - This is the closest two Super Bowl teams could be as the current National and American Conferences are arranged, other than the afore mentioned New Jersey Bowl.

The Home-Field-Advantage Bowl: It could happen, couldn’t it? What would the NFL do if a team ended up playing the Super Bowl at home???


I don’t go to my grandparents’ house in Buffalo to watch the games any more, but I always do watch. Not just the commercials, either. Football is the only sport I love enough to watch when I have no rooting interest.

How long will the party in New Orleans?

No School After the Super Bowl? Been There. Done That.

Some schools in New Orleans are going to close on the Monday after the Super Bowl. That got me thinking...

What do you think of when the Super Bowl comes around each year? Expensive commercials? The Vince Lombardi Trophy? Half-time shows? Wardrobe malfunctions? For me it will always be: no school on Monday.

On the evening of Super Bowl XXV I was a bright-eyed, happy 9 year-old girl sitting on my grandparents’ couch in Buffalo, NY. OK, I lied. I’ve never been bright-eyed, but you get the idea. I was young. I was naive. I really thought that kick would be good. By the end of the night I was hiding in the bathroom pretending I wasn’t crying. I had become a Bills fan.

I had been coming to Buffalo to visit my mother’s side of the family my entire life. I had watched my share of football games on TV. Sometimes the announcers wouldn’t be to my grandfather’s liking, so he would turn the sound down and turn the radio up. If the Bills’ opponent was the Miami Dolphins the Buffalo News would have “Squish the Fish” signs in the Sunday paper.

After the missed field goal that lead to the loss on January 27, 1991, the Bills returned to the Super Bowl year, after year, after year. No other team in NFL history has gone to four consecutive Super Bowls. Every year was the same. We would be excited. We would gather around the TV with a stuffed brown buffalo. We would have food and lots of it. (Yes, of course we had Buffalo wings!) We would watch the game, the half-time show, the commercials. And then the game would be over. The Bills lost again. We knew the game wouldn’t get done until late, so we would have planned to stay over night. I didn’t go to school on Monday. I would tell my classmates on Tuesday that I had been in morning. They were a little jealous of the day off. All I knew was that a day off from school is good. A day off from school after a Bills’ victory would have been better.

I hope the kids in New Orleans can enjoy their day off from school.

A Season in Review

It was a season of ups and downs. The boys made it to the playoffs, but no one was expecting them to go all they way. The history books suggested a victory at the beginning of the playoffs was all but guaranteed. They put the ball into the hands of the man with the proven track record in the playoffs. Sadly, he was but human and the streak was snapped and the season is over.

Oh yeah, and the same thing happened to the Patriots.

It’s just a coincidence, obviously, but it’s a darn spooky one.

The Patriots and Red Sox had uneven seasons. After starting 2-6, the Sox had an 11 game winning streak. The offense set a record with 12 runs in an inning and then scored only 1 run in the first two playoff games combined. The Pats had 3 separate 3-game winning streaks, but lost a game where they lead by 17 points in the fourth quarter. They were 6-4 against teams that finished over .500, but on Sunday they didn’t have a first down until over 6 minutes into their first-round playoff loss to Baltimore.

The Sox officially clinched a playoff spot on a day they lost a game to Toronto (and would go on to be swept at home). Dan Shaughnessy of the Boston Globe wrote that New England should be happy they made the playoffs since they won’t win more than just the first game. The mood around both teams wasn’t that of a championship-bound club. Everyone just seemed glad to be playing in the post-season.

Going into the American League Divisional Series, the Red Sox hadn’t lost a playoff series to the Angels. The Patriots hadn’t lost a home playoff game in about three decades. Neither team was resting on its laurels, but nothing suggested that this year had to be the year those streaks would end. They were wrong.

Who is more trusted in big games than Jonathan Papelbon and Tom Brady? The Sox closer had a 0.00 postseason ERA! Terrific Tom was 14-3 in the playoffs! It doesn’t get much better than that, but past successes just weren’t enough as Papelbon gave up 3 runs in the 9th (not to mention the hits that lead to the 2 runs charged to Billy Wagner in the 8^th) and Brady had 3 picks on Sunday. The Sox were down 2 games to none when Papelbon took the mound and Brady was not helped by the injury to Wes Welker or a defense that allowed 33 points. Neither man was singularly to blame, of course, but in times of struggle they had always been the ones you could look to.

Is there some cosmic significance to sports? Of course not. That’s not why we watch. We watch because we don’t know what’s going to happen. We know what we want to happen or what we think will happen, but none of us has been to 2015 and brought back Gray’s Sports Almanac so we just don’t know. After disappointments this year are going to give up on our teams? No way! We’ll be watching the offseason moves and counting down to the new season. By the way, baseball’s Opening Day is coming up in just 84 short days and football is only 244 days away! Can’t wait!