Eagles Lose Super Bowl

The Super Bowl game last night between the Philadelphia Eagles and the Kansas City Chiefs was overall a very exciting and entertaining football game between a couple of evenly matched teams with great quarterbacks. Unfortunately the final minutes of the game was marred by a significantly controversial and suspect penalty call that determined the outcome of the contest. That was not a blatant holding penalty and that kind of call that is let go in a close championship game's final minutes. Just let the teams play. But that didn't happen last night and essentially that unnecessary penalty call gave the game to the Chiefs.

Otherwise, it was a great game and very exciting. It was also a typical super bowl with lots of stupid commercials and a few good ones. Most of the time I ignored them. Although it was my hometown team playing, I was not especially interested in the Eagles. I've never been a big fan of the team even during the years I lived in Philly. I've only been to a few of their games in my life. It was always hard to get tickets and expensive back in the old stadium. I much rather liked going to baseball, basketball and hockey games. 

The half time show was the usual mess. Rihanna was good but not really interesting to me unless she did some soul music. Most of her performance was auto-tuned hip-hop pop with lots of fancy dancing. There were on other performers which was unusual for the super bowl. 

One of the things that bothered me about the game was the ongoing and continuous commercials promoting gambling and betting on sports games and football in particular. I've been very upset about the recent laws allowing sports gambling commercials on television and in particular the NFL's embracement of gambling to the point of partnering with these betting companies. I've always been very much against all forms of gambling since the experience of seeing what gambling addiction can do to people back in my Navy days. Since then I've avoided all manners of gambling and games of chance to point of even refusing to attend a concert at a casino because I will not support them in any way. So it pisses me off to see the NFL become part of the gambling problem. It's like we can't watch any professional sports games on TV anymore without being inundated with gambling commercials. The betting commercials throughout the game last night made it feel dirty and the controversial ending has fueled the fire of conspiracy theories that the game was rigged or at least influenced by the gambling companies and their bettors. 

I had been hoping that the Bills would have made it to the super bowl to play the Eagles. That would have been an interesting experience but was not to be.