What you missed ...

Pretty good game last night in SB XLIII (by the way, isn't it time to finally get away from Roman numerals? It worked fine for SB V, X, etc., but now it's time to return to the 21st century).

There's plenty of stuff out there on the game, commercials and halftime show, so no need to add anything here on those topics. For some reason I was more interested in what other channels were doing--were they seriously trying to counter-program and draw away audience or was it simply tossing in the ratings towel? What did you miss if you watched the game?

Call it throwing in the (Terrible?) towel. CBS apparently decided not to waste 60 Minutes and instead went with a bland "Road to the White House" recap of the election season. FOX pretty much went with its usual lineup of animated fare, although they could have been reruns. TBS ran an old movie ("What Women Want") that had also run on Friday and Saturday nights. Marathons of favorite shows were popular at A&E ("The Sopranos"), Hallmark ("I Love Lucy"), and WGN ("Alf"), although they weren't the kind of shows designed to pull serious audience away from the game. There were a couple of networks that tried to play off the SB theme. The worst programming along this line was something called "The Puppy Bowl" on Animal Planet, which was nothing more than cute dogs running around on a floor marked off like a football field.

Yes, the SB benefitted from a good game and an exciting ending last night. But even if it had not, there wasn't much competition from anything else. The event reaffirmed its status as a cultural icon that merits our televised attention; so much so, that an entire televised universe seemed to come to a complete standstill for an entire evening.