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Super Bowl reaction: Name-dropping Beyonce, Les Miles, Leon Sandcastle and Emily Litella
Published: 2/4/2013 11:03 AM
Last Modified: 2/4/2013 11:03 AM

Super Bowl reaction, times 12:

1, Brother beats brother in the Super Bowl.

Reaction: It was the best possible outcome for the Harbaugh family. One brother got to win a Super Bowl. The other was on the verge of getting embarrassed, but his team got off the canvas and salvaged respect by making a game of it. It was as close to a win-win situation as you can get in a win-lose situation. Think the 49ers coach will ever mention the no-call during Thanksgiving dinner with the family?

2, Which franchises gained hope from the Baltimore Ravens winning the Super Bowl?

Reaction: All of them. The Ravens lost four of five games to end the regular season. Winning a Super Bowl is an extraordinary thing. This season it was done by an ordinary team that got hot at the right time.

3, Beyonce, Ravens put a ring on it.

Reaction: LSU football coach Les Miles can come off as ultra-dry (“our team is looking forward to the competition”) when he is surrounded by microphones, but he’s actually got a very good personality and he occasionally cuts loose with it. Miles was active on Twitter during the Super Bowl and most of it was coach-speak. But, after Beyonce’s halftime gig, Miles tweeted this: “The halftime show... Wow. Very athletic!!!”

4, The no-call at the end.

Reaction: If a no-call had happened in the 2003 BCS title game, Miami would have one more national championship and Ohio State would have one less. The no-call was the right call in the Super Bowl because -- if you watch the trajectory of the ball and where it landed -- there doesn’t seem to be a way for the receiver, even if he has a clear path to the end zone, to catch the ball and still get two feet in bounds. Does an un-catchable ball have anything to do with holding? I don’t have a black-and-white striped shirt, but probably not. Still, if a flag had been thrown, it would have been a case of an official bailing out the 49ers on a play that didn’t really have a chance.

5, Jacoby Jones returned a kickoff 108 yards for a touchdown.

Reaction: He runs like a deer. Hmmmm. Incidentally, Gilda Radner’s Emily Litella character from SNL wants to know why any football player would use Dear Abby spray.

6, Chiefs draft Leon Sandcastle?

Reaction: The problem with Super Bowl commercials? Normally, we expect commercials only to try to sell us something. During the Super Bowl, we expect commercials to be entertaining and we give a thumbs-down to anything less than brilliant (and the Paul Harvey spot was brilliant). So, now we are disappointed by commercials, for the most part, instead of just being pleasantly surprised, like we used to be when Super Bowl commercials first became a “thing.” Sandcastle, by the way, was Deion Sanders in disguise. An unrelated story: When Oklahoma State basketball coach Travis Ford was a high school player, he met Sanders and Burt Reynolds on a recruiting trip to Florida State. Sanders was such a celebrity already that people were stealing his “Prime Time” vanity plates from his parked automobile on campus. Ford apparently wasn’t wowed by crossing paths with Sanders or the Bandit. He signed with Missouri.

7, The lights went out.

Reaction: Randy Moss says the Superdome’s electrical system is the greatest of all time. (Not really.) And Stephen King wrote seven horror novels by the time the game resumed. Who did the outage affect most? It wasn’t the Ravens or 49ers. It was sports journalists, who lost 34 valuable deadline minutes.

8, Joe Flacco is the MVP.

Reaction: There were other candidates, but voters tend to default to quarterbacks. My point: What’s the hurry in picking an MVP? Let voters stew on it for a day and choose the MVP after weighing the contributions of candidates. I’ve covered events where you have to turn in all-tournament or MVP ballots with five minutes remaining and, of course, you have no idea which team is going to win and you don’t know who is going to make the MVP play at the end. Let’s calm down and get it right instead, even if we have to wait a day for the verdict.

9, The Ravens are 2-0 in Super Bowls.

Reaction: The Ravens are somehow immune to the curse that strikes teams-with-wings in Super Bowls. Other winged teams (Cardinals, Seahawks, Falcons, Eagles) are 0-5 in the big game -- 1-9 if you include Buffalo wings.

10, Super Bowl in the Twitter age.

Reaction: Favorite tweets came from Frank Caliendo (So far the movie commercials have been for “The Wizard of Oz” and the “Lone Ranger.” Welcome to 1939), Tulsa author S.E. Hinton (It’s Super Bowl Sunday and I don’t care!), Zombie Studios producer Collin Moore (I bet Jim Harbaugh used to unplug the Nintendo when his brother was winning) and Doug Gottlieb (We checked every bulb, didn’t we Russ?). Of course, Gottlieb’s line was in reference to the power outage and it came from Chevy Chase's mouth in the the movie “Christmas Vacation.”

11, It’s over.

Reaction: When the Ravens led 28-6 one play into the third quarter, many people declared the game over, me included. It’s not that the “game over” people didn’t have faith in the 49ers’ ability to rally. It’s just that scars haven’t healed from watching Super Bowl blowouts in the past (sort of like kicked-dog syndrome) and this looked to be another of those. Maybe it’s time for the scars to heal. We haven’t had a truly bad Super Bowl since 2003, when the Buccaneers beat the Raiders so bad that the ex-Raiders coach has since been accused of being a saboteur.

12, The game lasted 4 hours, 14 minutes.

Reaction: Super Bowl or a Big 12 game?


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Tulsa World sports writer Jimmie Tramel is a former class president at Locust Grove High School. He graduated magna cum laude from Northeastern State University with a journalism degree and, while attending college, was sports editor of the Pryor Daily Times. He joined the Tulsa World on Oct. 17, 1989, the same day an earthquake struck the World Series. He is the OSU basketball beat writer and a columnist and feature writer during football season. In 2007, he wrote a book about Oklahoma State football with former Cowboy coach Pat Jones.

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