![]() That’s partly because of the dullness of the game, but more because this was a championship played at this particular moment in human history. He’ll surely be back competing for another ring next year, expanding his legend and getting on your very last nerve.īut if he is worried about that legacy, he might want to come back and win another one next year, because I have a feeling that his performance in this one, as brilliant as it was, will be the least-remembered of all his Super Bowls. Every Brady championship is a little more impressive than the last one and often more loathsome to the vast majority of people watching. If there was any doubt about his status as the greatest quarterback of all time beforehand (and there shouldn’t have been), there isn’t now. Brady was terrific, really the only thing worth watching in a dull, lifeless blowout that felt more like the old Super Bowl blowouts of the ’90s than the taut thrill rides we’ve gotten used to in recent years. 5JeT340AcZ- Michael David Smith February 8, 2021Īnd if you thought fans were angry then, just wait until they watched Tom Brady - derided by some as this generation’s Charles Lindbergh for his somewhat overstated, but never fully refuted, support of Donald Trump - win his seventh ring. The stadium is nowhere close to packed and a third of the people in the stadium are vaccinated frontline workers given free tickets by the NFL, but tweeting stuff like this is a great way to get lots of likes and retweets. So many people were angry about the packed house that the NFL had to release a statement reminding viewers that just because their televisions might not have quite been high-resolution enough to tell the fans were made of cardboard, they were, in fact, made of cardboard. But the NFL knows how to package and sell an image, and they sure did generate the illusion that there wasn’t an empty seat in the stadium. Now, I’ve been to a few sporting events with cardboard fans ( I’ve even been a cardboard fan), and generally, they look artificial and sort of silly. The reason the stadium looked full was because of the 30,000 cardboard cutouts that were placed in all the seats kept empty to enforce social distancing. There were 25,000 fans in a stadium that holds 66,000, and 7,500 of those fans were vaccinated health-care workers, who were there to be honored for their dedication, to advertise the efficacy of the vaccines, and (most important, obviously) to make the NFL look charitable and altruistic. The thing was, though - the stadium wasn’t full. ![]() Jill Biden on the Jumbotron before the game, asked for a moment of silence to honor those lost during the pandemic … it was very much not silent. How full? Well, when President Biden, speaking with First Lady Dr. This was not the first pro sporting event in the United States to have fans, but it was the first one that legitimately felt full. It was jarring, no question, to turn on Super Bowl LV, a football game held in the middle of a plague that has killed over 463,000 Americans, on a weekend when public-health officials implored Americans not to gather, and see a stadium packed with fans. And they still weren’t all that wrong to be angry. In this photo, Brady and Tyrann Mathieu can be seen exchanging a few words after a penalty was called.It is a fitting - and very 2021 thing - that for most of the pandemic Super Bowl, many people watching at home were angry about something that was not true. "You can talk about the penalties," Chiefs defensive end Frank Clark said, per USA Today. "I ain't even going to play that part. As former NFL referee and NBC sports analyst Terry McAulay tweeted, "Neither defensive hold called on KC comes close to the standard we saw the entire season for that call all season and certainly not what we saw in TB/GB." Others, however, felt like the calls were fair. Some viewers thought these calls didn't align with what fans had seen earlier in the season. In fact, NFL Research noted the Chiefs' 95 penalty yards in the first half of the game were the most penalty yards against any team in the first half of a game all season. It's no secret the penalties against the Kansas City Chiefs hurt the team. One penalty negated an interception Brady threw while a pass interference call gave the Buccaneers another opportunity to throw a touchdown pass and score.
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