This past weekend was one filled with sports, testosterone and beer. It was filled with triumph and badassery, and it was also filled with boredom and disappointment.

I am referring, respectively, to the Syracuse-Duke game and the not-so-Super Bowl.

I suppose it wasn’t a fair fight from the start. For one thing, professional anything is way less interesting than watching it at the college level. You’ve got kids who can’t even legally drink turning up the pressure cooker while they head into overtime, and yet the Denver Broncos came all the way from Colorado to put on that performance? Lay off the edibles, hippies. Try harder.

The entertainment was also just super unbalanced. The Super Bowl halftime show featured Bruno Mars, the unofficial wet blanket of the music industry. His songs bring me to a strange crossroads between boredom and very real anger at being subjected to his music.

And the Syracuse-Duke game had Dick Vitale. Game, set, match.

Oh, Dick Vitale. There’s so much I want to know — like what the sh*t happened to your voice? And why are you tweeting pictures of yourself with the SU cheerleaders? You know what, don’t tell me. It’s so much more fun to keep it a mystery. Just please stay alive until the next game.

A special shout-out to the SU Marching Band, the only redeeming quality of the least exciting football game this season. On behalf of Syracuse University, I’d like to say you’re welcome, National Football League. But I digress.

Then there were the Super Bowl commercials. About 99 percent of them were mediocre at best, and not in any way memorable. The fact that one of these commercials caused viral controversy is incredible to me, due to my disbelief that anyone was able to pay attention to it for that long.

And the one that I do remember, that puppy commercial with the horse, made me so emotional I thought I was going to have to call my parents and apologize to them for not coming home more often. Or maybe call every ex I’ve ever had and ask them where things went wrong.

I felt like I needed to take a damn Prozac to make it through that ad. Budweiser? I’ll take about 20.

And since the SU-Duke game aired on ESPN instead of Time Warner Cable, there was a far smaller threat of terrible local ads. (This doesn’t apply to you, Billy Fuccillo. You’re a marketing genius.)

Then there’s Richard Sherman. What were you — asleep? Your team won the Super Bowl by a ridiculous margin and you couldn’t muster up one outlandish thing to say?

I’m not angry, Richard. I’m just disappointed.

Although if I’m being honest with myself, I could have used a little more heat between Boeheim and Coach K, but perhaps that will have to wait for the rivalry to take shape a little more in the future. Maybe the two winningest coaches in the NCAA are just too classy for that kind of behavior.

For now.

But even here there lies some great entertainment, if only in the sheer unpredictability of Boeheim’s facial expressions. Rasheed Sulaimon just beat the buzzer and the game is tied — why are you smiling Jim? Oh wait, Quinn Cook missed it, Syracuse won! Aw Jim, why don’t you look happy now? You’re just a mystery wrapped up in a riddle, you wonderful man.

To sum up: The Syracuse-Duke game was an incredible feat and a fantastic game to watch, whereas one could have attained more excitement from watching the turf in the MetLife Stadium not grow than from watching the Super Bowl.

Chelsea DeBaise is a senior writing major. Chelsea’s disappointment in the Super Bowl did not extend to the snacks she consumed that evening, which were crazy delicious. Her column appears every week in Pulp, whose content does to the rest of journalism what Syracuse did to Duke and Notre Dame this week. She can be reached via email at cedebais@syr.edu, or on Twitter @CDeBaise124.

 

 

Published on February 5, 2014 at 11:58 pm