Football has never been bigger. It's not just the most popular spectator sport in America, it's the hottest thing on all of television—eight of the top ten broadcasts in 2010 were NFL games. What, you ask, is all the fuss about? She Watches Sports While I Man The Kitchen
Well, plenty. If you can't tell the difference between a flea flicker and a play-action pass, there's still something to cheer for. Like any serialized television drama, the football season features a cast of characters, and you can enjoy the playoffs—and the season finale—if you learn something about the protagonists. It wouldn't be fair to judge The Sopranos by a single episode at the end of the final season; so, too, with the NFL.
The first thing to know is that any team still alive in January has already been through plenty of fall drama. The league's 32 teams are divided into two equal conferences—think of them as two tribes on Survivor—and the past few months have already determined which six teams from each conference will get to stay on the island for another challenge or two. They now enter an elimination bracket in which a defeat means the end of the season, while a victory takes them one step closer to the Super Bowl.
In the first round of the playoffs, the lower-ranked teams slug it out for the right to play the two top dogs from each conference, whose regular-season dominance won them the immunity of a first-round bye. The four teams who make it past Week 2 of the playoffs will be competing for a chance to go to the Super Bowl.
This year, the big event will be in Dallas, Texas at the brand new Cowboy Stadium—a monument to the local NFL team, the Dallas Cowboys, whom the locals love so much they actually voted to raise taxes in order to finance this $1.2 billion behemoth. Unfortunately for them, the Cowboys stink. But if you can't have a winning football team, then the next best thing is to have a tricked-out stadium, and this one has it all—capacity for more than 100,000 people, a retractable roof, and the largest high-def television screen in the world, which is itself about half the size of the field. (One wonders what Jorge Luis Borges would make of that!)
Ever since Justin Timberlake caused Janet Jackson's wardrobe to malfunction, the NFL has chosen over-the-hill classic rock acts for the half-time show—most recently, Tom Petty, Bruce Springsteen, and The Who. This year, however, the NFL has thrown caution to the wind and enlisted the Black Eyed Peas. You can bet all 11,520 square feet of that HD video screen will be on Fergie's mind as she applies her makeup.
Finally, there is some political intrigue surrounding this Super Bowl. The event happens to fall on the birthday of Ronald Reagan, and the good ol' boys in Texas have cooked up a tribute to the messiah of modern conservatism. On the other side of the partisan divide, President Obama has agreed to sit down for a pre-game interview with Fox, which is broadcasting the game—a big deal in the political world, since the president has famously given the cold shoulder to the right-wing network. His interviewer? None other than the conservative firebrand Bill O'Reilly.
The main event, of course, is not the pre-game or half-time show but the commercials, which cost about $100,000 per second. You almost feel sorry for the players who make it to the big game—they're practically the only people in the world who won't be watching. 6 Things Men Should Know About Women
So which team's favored to win Super Bowl XLV, when it finally goes down on February 6, 2011? Betting odds favor the New England Patriots, team of star quarterback and the man lucky enough to call Gisele Bundchen his wife, Tom Brady.
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