Stupor Bowl Xtra-Large

The Super Bowl is boring.

Yeah, I said it.

Too often, the NFL's championship game is a one-sided blowout. In the non-blowout years, we get closely contested but hideously played games like yesterday's Super Bowl XL.

Holy cats, that was one ugly football game.

A few random jottings...

• Speaking of ugly, who designed the Seahawks' uniforms? Anyone with even a modicum of fashion sense knows that an outfit in which the shirt and the pants are identical colors looks ridiculous. The guys from Seattle looked like they were wearing baby blue nylon pajamas.
  
  
• If you're going to have instant replay, at least have a replay official who can see the monitor with clear vision. The call on that phantom touchdown by Pittsburgh's Ben Roethlisberger was insane. Stevie Wonder, who rocked the house during the pregame show, could have seen that the ball never broke the plane of the goal line until after Roethlisberger was down.
  
  
• The NFL simply must invest the money in full-time officials. Far too many games are decided, completely or in part, on inaccurate calls by the zebras. The pass interference penalty that cost Seattle a touchdown was another grotesque example of clueless officiating. If you take away the points the Steelers were awarded on the non-existent TD, and give Seattle back all the points of which they were robbed by the referees, Seattle — as horribly as they played — would be football's world champions today.
  
  
• I didn't particularly care which team won this year, but I was happy for longtime Pittsburgh head coach Bill Cowher and his retiring superstar running back, Jerome "The Bus" Bettis, and sorry for former 49ers assistant Mike Holmgren and his quarterback coach, Jim Zorn. Zorn was the only football player whose poster ever hung in my college dorm room. I wasn't a Seattle fan — I just liked knowing that somewhere out there was a left-handed quarterback whose last name sounded like a character in a Robert E. Howard sword and sorcery novel.
  
  
• I hope when I get to be his present age in another 18 years, I have half the energy of Mick Jagger. Too bad Mick still can't get no satisfaction, but they have little blue pills for that now.
  
  
• About the Stones, though: Do we really need to see craggy-faced semi-cadavers in their sixties prancing about on a public stage? And why do we keep getting British musicians for the Super Bowl halftime show? (Paul McCartney was the headliner last year.) I'll bet they don't hire Van Halen or Springsteen to play at the English soccer or cricket finals.
  
  
• Usually the Super Bowl is all about the commercials, but I didn't see a single one that impressed me this year. The Dove Soap spot promoting positive self-image for young women offered a quietly powerful message, but to the wrong audience. They might as well have aired that ad on closed circuit TV at Hooters restaurants. I thought the costly Diet Pepsi spots with Sean "Just Call Me Diddy" Combs and Jay "Last Comic Standing" Mohr were insufferably lame.
  
  
• Speaking of Jay Mohr, how does a weaselly dweeb like that land a fiancee like Nikki Cox? She must have a jones for obnoxious comedians — her previous boyfriend was Bobcat Goldthwait.
  
  
• Tangentially related: Congratulations to Super Bowl color commentator and former Oakland Raiders head coach John Madden on his election to the Pro Football Hall of Fame. Madden and his fellow inductees Warren Moon, Troy Aikman, Harry Carson, Rayfield Wright, and the late Reggie White comprise a worthy Canton freshman class.