For All Who Watched, Super Bowl Deserved the XX-Rating It Got

It seemed so clear two weeks ago.

The vanilla New England Patriots, with no passing attack, a robot quarterback and a workmanlike but unflashy defense, didn’t stand a chance against the Chicago Bears.

The Bears were confident, tough, swaggering bullies and outlaws. The milquetoast Patriots didn’t even have their own Super Bowl video, for cripes sake.

So what happened? How did we all get talked into believing this would be a game? How did we all get sucked into donating a perfectly good Sunday to Pete Rozelle, beer commercials and a game that should have been plugged into the 3 a.m. slot on ESPN, or MTV?

Why, some of us even came to believe that the Patriots had a chance to win this thing.

Yep, we all did it again. The network (NBC), the media, the fans. We hyped another turkey.

We pumped this gobbler so full of hot air it could have floated in New York’s Macy’s Parade.

You think we all would have realized this was another year of Lucy holding the football for Charlie Brown.

Figure it out. The Super Bowl is the longest running non-event in the world of entertainment. In the 20 games, the average winning margin has been 14.5 points.

Only one game of the 20 was decided by the margin of a field goal or less.

Somebody should have realized long ago that you should handicap the participants in this event like the horses in a horse race. The Bears should have been assigned to carry 120 pounds apiece.

Either that or move the game across town to Bourbon Street, where you go with your eyes wide open, expecting to get a weak show and a watered drink.

When Jim McMahon first unveiled his “Rozelle” headband, Pete Rozelle called it “a great gag.”

That should have been the official theme of Super Bowl XX--”A Great Gag.”

How does it happen? How do we get reeled in every January like 200-million rainbow trout? How is the NFL able to pull off the same cute bunko scheme every year?

It starts with the NFL’s ability to realize that a bad game, like a good wine, needs time to age. So they give it an extra week, which gives the game an added, artificial stature.

The extra week gives the bad team time to convince itself it has a chance, and the good team time to magnify tiny worries into scenarios of disaster.

It gives the media time to explore more angles than actually exist, to pour out so many stories and radio and TV reports that reality becomes hazy.

We are blinded by the light. Buried in the blather.

A national magazine’s pro football expert wrote that the Patriots would have to come out passing. Dan Fouts, writing a daily newspaper column from this city, said the Patriots would have to pass short. Until another writer casually challenged Fouts, whereupon he wrote that the Patriots would have to throw bombs.

Certainly the experts agreed the Patriots would have to open up. Or did the experts agree?

“We were glad when they came out throwing,” Refrigerator Perry said. “They played right into our hands.”

Of course. The truth is, the Patriots were so overmatched they could have used two footballs on every play, one for running and one for passing, and they still would have got themselves stuffed under the Superdome carpet.

That didn’t stop us news folks from covering the event, though. The Chicago Tribune sent 27 staffers here to cover the story. The Boston Globe sent 23, one Globie explaining, “We figure this will be like Halley’s Comet--it’s not going to come around again for a while.”

Let’s see, who else can we blame for this miscarriage of sanity?

Corporate America, for one. The Super Bowl is the ultimate status event, the big party. Thousand-dollar tickets. Silly hats, blinking buttons and big cigars. Parking lot parties with ice sculptures melting into the caviar, champagne poured by tuxedoed waiters.

The high rollers turn this annual mismatch into a social extravaganza, helping us forget the likelihood the game itself will be a snoozer.

Blame television, too. NBC squeezed the game like a sponge, before, during and after. Unfortunately for the network, by halftime a lot folks were able to rally themselves, stagger to the TV set and switch to more edifying fare, such as (in the L.A. market) “Abbott and Costello Meet Captain Blood.”

Then there are the fans, who have an infinite capacity to be hyped, to talk themselves into believing in Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy and the Super Bowl.

Next year’s game, fortunately, could be different.

“We’ve been here now,” Patriots’ tackle Brian Holloway said minutes after the end of Sunday’s game. “We know how to get here again. We know the ropes, we’ll be back, we’ll meet again.”

Hey, listen, maybe the Patriots will be back. And maybe next time, if a couple breaks go their way early, it could be a hell of a ballgame.

Who knows, the Bears might show up complacent, overconfident. It could be a really fine football contest. Place your bets. Read all about it.

For Super Bowl XX, however, as P.T. Barnum would say: This way to the egress.