Regarding the Super Bowl XLIII...

[magicyte]

Go Cardinals. Sorry, I couldn't resist... :D

[Snookerman]

Wow, that is so cool, I was just about to start a thread regarding the Super Bowl! I'll have to stay up all night to see the Steelers win!! By the way, did you know they used to be one team, the Card-Pitts :D

[Twey]

Remind me why this is a) called the 'super bowl' when it has nothing to do with cereal and b) so mysteriously popular?

[Nile]

Well:
1) The stadium is pretty super. ;)
2) It looks like a giant cereal bowl.

[Medyman]

Remind me why this is a) called the 'super bowl' when it has nothing to do with cereal

The first organized, post-season game was played in the Rose Bowl Stadium. It's so called because of the shape of the stadium. "Bowl" has since them become synonymous with post-season football (American) games.

[Snookerman]

I'll have to stay up all night to see the Steelers win!!
WooHoo :D

[jscheuer1]

Best superbowl I can remember, even the 1/2 time show was good this year.

[Twey]

The first organized, post-season game was played in the Rose Bowl Stadium. It's so called because of the shape of the stadium. "Bowl" has since them become synonymous with post-season football (American) games.What about the much older game of bowls?

[djr33]

It's football, Twey. It doesn't have to make sense-- people will watch it anyway. (I realized after this thread was posted that I'd missed it, though... can't say I'm a fan. I prefer hockey.)

[magicyte]

(I realized after this thread was posted that I'd missed it, though... can't say I'm a fan. I prefer hockey.)

I'm not a (American) football fan either. I much prefer REAL football (I call it soccer). I just wanted to watch the super bowl because I was born in Phoenix, AZ and the Cardinals have never been to the super bowl... Man, I thought that the Cardinals were gonna win!! Too bad the Steelers made that lucky catch at the end... :(

[Snookerman]

REAL football
Exactly! That's my man. I will never understand why Americans it football when you mostly use your hands and they call the real football soccer.

[Twey]

It is a bit daft. If you prefer something a bit more... involved, try rugby out for size.

[jscheuer1]

For us alleged nerds, it seems a bit laughable to me that we would be discussing the relative merits of various sports. I know next to nothing about any sport other than baseball, which caught my attention due to a confluence of numerous circumstances including a familial proclivity for it (as avid spectators). Even with all that, I'm no expert in the field (pun intended). I'm sure that to the devotee or even to the casual fan of a particular sport who eschews all others, that it's merits may seem superior to another or to all other sports. But the fact is that all sporting competitions hold their own intricacies known only to those who take the time to learn them. To the rest of us these sports are at best merely pleasant diversions/entertainments. But then there is the occasional crucial game. If one of these in any sport plays out in spectacular fashion, many more people can see that and be in awe of it. Unfortunately, not all crucial games in any sport rise to this level. Many are lopsided events, or even when close, not all that well played. Yet even in some of these cases there arises a play, or theme that is captivating. That is the nature of sport once it has advanced to the championship level, and for those that particularly enjoy a sport, the nature of every game.

Anyways, if you get something positive out of the sport you most admire and enjoy, who am I to argue with that?

[Schmoopy]

It is a bit daft. If you prefer something a bit more... involved, try rugby out for size.

Indeed, American Football to me is just not very manly, I mean you wear full protection and although it is a very rough sport it just doesn't make sense (at least not to me), rugby on the other hand is pure man v man, none of this helmet and ridiculously oversized shoulder pads so you don't feel anything when you hit people. Rugby's much more fluid I find, and also much more fun to watch. I used to be winger / center, you don't need to be 6-7 feet tall to play in this game, and to me it just seems much more of a skill to play rugby than to play American football.

For a start you can only tackle people with the ball, so you don't just get 10 people taking their opposite player out, it requires more tactics and the ball can only be passed backwards. I'm not sure if they play rugby that much in America, that's why I'm going in to more detail, but you should definitely try it out if you haven't, you'll soon learn that rugby > football.

[Twey]

We were really discussing the naming rather than the merits of the sports themselves. You've got football, which involves... well, a ball that's mostly kicked with the feet, and then American 'football', which is actually more like rugby — the 'ball' is picked up and carried as much as kicked, and said 'ball' isn't really much of a ball at all — it's a sort of... spheroid.

And yes... I'm hardly a violent person or one of those big burly types, and I don't much go in for violent sports, but the excessive amounts of padding used in American football seem a bit ridiculous even to me, especially in a sport which is clearly intended to revolve around contact. It's like boxing whilst wearing costumes made out of layers upon layers of pillows — it's just contradictory.

[jscheuer1]

As I said, I don't know a lot about sports other than baseball, and am no expert in it. However, football - as played in the US, started out with minimal protective gear. Even today, with all of the equipment, the career of a player is (more often than not) short due to either injury, the day in day out roughness of the game, or both. But that's not what I was talking about as regards this year's Super Bowl being so good in my opinion, and I'm not a big football fan, and I'm not a fan of how rough the sport is. There were more than the usual tight situations near goal, with just about the entire possible gamut of outcomes for them. The game was close to the very end, even when it didn't appear to be. There were stellar plays of brute force, as well as of endurance, and of athletic precision. There were also low points of excessive personal fouls, which at times appeared to dictate the outcome, but that in the end didn't seem to matter. Even the refereeing was at a high level with intelligent challenges by the Cards. I rarely watch an entire football game, let alone feel as though I cannot tear myself away, which is how I felt about this game. In fact, it was only the second football game I watched this season. I hadn't really planned to watch, and kept trying to move on, only to get pulled back into it by the compelling nature of the play.