I've harbored a childhood love of the Seahawks because my first NFL branded ball was one of those cheap white plastic ones in Seattle's expansion season ...my brother and friends always gave me trouble about that ball, but it had that awesome eagle logo on the side. (Still one of my favorite logos in sports.)
I've rooted for the Broncos in every Superbowl they have played in previously. I rooted particularly hard during the Orange Crush year, and I've always thought it was the height of marketing stupidity for the soft drink company to have squashed that moniker.
It may be notable that tickets were not selling and were available at face value as late as Thursday/Friday, from what I hear and that by itself is stunning. Reports are that Friday and Saturday the city started filling with Seattle fans, and reporters at the game are saying it was the loudest and most boisterous Superbowl crowd in memory. I must wonder if the 12th Man decided to show up for the game when it became affordable (other than the plane tickets - incidentally, still the first Superbowl where both teams had to travel more than 2,000 miles). The unexpected noise may have contributed to the first play snap, and Denver looked just plain rattled for their next several series.
That rattled bit is important, Denver looked like they threw their game plan out of the window and went into desperation mode too early. It was 2-5-8-15.... Easily reachable with a two capable drives, but by the end of the 1st quarter Denver looked like a team scrambling to recover from a 4th quarter deficit (Superbowl records for passing set by Manning and Thomas on the receiving end, notably). Seattle went man-to-man coverage and let their pass rush go...
Which turned the good game I was hoping for, into the farce that was far less enjoyable than I wanted. Even if the team I wanted came out on top. (At my house we decided that it was all because of the Kurt Russell team intros. The Seattle intro seemed better scripted and better delivered, and that clearly doomed the mountain equines.)
As for the commercials, I thought that they were largely complete flops - unimaginative, lazy, and not worth the $4M USD for 30 seconds. Sadly, many of the ones I thought were particularly horrid were getting buzz in my feeds.
The true exception was perhaps Coke's America the Beautiful ad. That made me want to go out and purchase a pallet of Coke products and hand them out to my friends. That took bravery and heart (perhaps particularly given they are a Georgia based company) to try and remind people what America really is, and not this 'Murica mythology that seems to be gaining hold of late. The web backlash and hate against them for it was notable (for examples: http://deadspin.com/dumb-people-mad-at-multilingual-america-the-beautiful-1514567876). I also heard discussed on the radio this morning, with some people quite upset and promising to switch to Pepsi over it... idiots.
So, the ones I enjoyed in no particular order: Coke, time travel machine Doritos, Cheerios, Ellen's dancing (I don't even remember the product), and the Matrix Kia. The rest was largely junk, crap, and forgettable.
The half-time show sucked. Again. To be fair, I have thought there was really only ever one good show (there were a couple of others that were okay), and that was Prince who delivered a true musical performance. I've never seen Bruno Mars perform, heck don't think I've ever even seen his picture. What I got was standard, modern, & over-produced mish-mash of noise pasted into a package of 50s pop presentation. It appears uninspired and unoriginal from concept to delivery - from the dance moves to the clothes. The musical arrangement was also poor - from the long drum solo to start and the rest of the intro setup which just ate time before the performance started. It was poorly staged and weak. And again a horrible decision to follow the energetic movement of the RHCP (who were not bad, and are obviously proud of looking very good for their age) with that slow syrup. Bad show.
So, all in all... one of the worst Superbowls in my recent memory.
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