Bad sports, good sports: Why I hate Super Bowl halftime shows
Everyone watches the Super Bowl, right? I guess I don’t need to ask. Last year’s game fell just short of 100 million viewers. That’s a big number. From the endless pregame show to the commercials to the game itself, it’s all quite a spectacle. I usually enjoy it, although I enjoy it more if I have some kind of rooting interest. Since the Eagles have only made it to the Super Bowl twice in my lifetime (I’m 41), my rooting interest is usually borne of a dislike for one of the teams, as opposed to an actual affinity for anyone. Still, I enjoy the Super Bowl as much as the next guy. You know what I don’t enjoy, though? The halftime shows.
Who came up with the idea that a concert was a good idea in the middle of a football game? I assume the roots of this phenomenon are in the marching band performances that regularly occur at halftime of high school and college football games. I don’t like those either, to be honest, but they don’t really bother me. They never make you watch that stuff when the games are televised, as the broadcasts normally switch to a studio highlights show of some kind. The Super Bowl halftime show, though, is always some kind of big deal, advertised constantly in the weeks leading up to the big game. The truly amazing part of it, though, is how often the show disappoints. This year, we had to sit through The Who. Actually, it was the half of The Who that is stil alive. Roger Daltrey and Pete Townsend, looking every bit the senior citizens that they are, mugged through a medley of their hits, the most recent of which was on the charts a mere 32 years ago. Neither of them had the range to hit some of the notes in those old songs, and Townsend’s windmill-guitar style just looks silly when performed by a 65-year old man. Teenage Wasteland, guys? I’m guessing you don’t even remember your teenage years.
Halftime itself ends up being at least twice the length of the usual halftime. The players, meanwhile, are in the locker room, waiting to get back out there. It never makes much sense to me to run the games a certain way all season long, and then, in the biggest game of the year, things are different. If there was a good reason to do so, then okay. To force us to watch the latest in Old Folks Rock, though (the average age of the last 6 acts is 60), doesn’t qualify as a good reason in my book. There has to be something better they could put on. How about the Puppy Bowl? That’s always fun.
Bad sports, continued:
2) I don’t like Lane Kiffin. This isn’t news… I have talked about him before. He is everything I don’t like about college football. OK, not everything. He’s not responsible for the lack of a playoff, which is really the main thing I don’t like about college football, but outside of that, he’s a big negative. This week, he offered a scholarship to a 13-year old kid. That’s right, an eighth grader now has a scholarship offer to USC. The kid, David Sills of Delaware, accepted. He’s a quarterback, and he does appear to be very talented. Still, there should be rules about this kind of thing. Maybe Kiffin can scout the elementary schools next.
3) Talk about awful people. A woman from Bellefonte, Pennsylvania, was arrested and charged with embezzling money from the local little league for which she served as treasurer. Amy Walk allegedly stole almost $6,000 from the Bellefonte Little League to pay her own bills. Quite a lesson for those young baseball players.
4) It’s nice when we can count on bad guys to do bad things. Former Cowboys wide receiver Michael Irvin has always been a bad guy, and it appears he’s not improving with age. He was sued this week, accused of raping a woman back in 2007. He has counter-sued, so I guess I shouldn’t assume that he is guilty. His history makes it easy to believe he is, though.
5) Continuing that theme, Warren Sapp, another former NFL player with a checkered past, was arrested and charged with domestic battery after allegedly choking his girlfriend in a Florida hotel. Granted, Sapp’s past issues were more of an obnoxious nature than a lawbreaking nature, but he was certainly never a role model. Looks like he decided to step it up a bit.
6) Rounding out the delightful stories for the week is Dennis Zeglin, of Randolph, NJ. He was arrested for shooting and killing his pet parrot with a BB gun because the parrot’s squawking was distracting him from the NASCAR race he was watching. Fantastic. It had to be NASCAR, didn’t it?
Bad Sports, Good Sports appears every Monday
Latest posts by Alan Spoll (Posts)
- Pereira comments on “Philly Special” a total waste of time - February 14, 2018
- BSGS News Brief: Tom Brady beats the NFL - September 3, 2015
- BSGS News Brief: Geno Smith gets his jaw broken by a punch - August 16, 2015
- BSGS News Brief – Oh, Vanderbilt. Really? - August 6, 2015
- BSGS News Brief – Sheldon Richardson hits the Bad Sports wire in a big way - July 31, 2015
Print This Post
I agree with you on the halftime show. Call it ageism, but the windmill guitar looked completely weird on a guy who now looks like Grandpa.
However, I thought Prince did an amazing job a few years back. That’s the best halftime show I can remember. He didn’t even play ONLY his songs…it was more of an actual show than a showcase or some kind of lifetime achievement award that the Super Bowl Halftime Show has become.
Nancy – thanks. Yes, I know I am not being entirely fair to the older folks among us, but that was just ridiculous. I am pretty sure I saw my grandmother wearing that outfit Daltrey had on back in 1985,
Jeffrey – Not surprisingly, I didn’t like Prince’s performance either. However, that was more likely caused by the fact that I don’t like Prince even a little bit and I never did. It wasn’t because he looked too old to be doing what he was doing.
I just wrote a comment to ‘Super Bowl Halftime Show: Time for Baby Boomers to release their cultural death grip,’ by Daniel Kalder and I’ll repeat part of it here:
Just don’t watch any half-time show (or the studio stuff either). Why? Because of the despicable practice of naming rights. Now, yes, you have the corporate johns (and yes they are the johns in this equation) for stadiums and college bowl games, but you have johns for half-time shows (think credit cards and auto makers and sandwich companies) too. And for the Super Bowl, you get to have a threesome, because you have a john for the studio half-time show, and you have a john for the entertainment (if you can actually them that these days) piece.
If more and more people would stop and think about what they buy, then maybe we’d have less of “this call to the bullpen is brought to you by this week’s john” stuff.
I just don’t like to be thought of as buying something because they put their name on a candy wrapper or have their name on a stadium.
/end of rant. Thanks for listening.