The Super Bowl is the yearly final game in the National Football League’s season, pitting the two best performing teams in the 18 week buildup against each other for a chance to claim the most envied victory of the sport.
All types of people tune in each year, with most being fans of American football that know the rules and have trained their attention span to be able to be focused on the game throughout the entirety of it. I am not one of those people, but I forced myself to watch it and take notes this year in order to share how an outsider views and understands the game.
This year’s Super Bowl had the New England Patriots and Seattle Seahawks competing. The first thing I saw when tuning into the broadcast was a showcase of what I believe to be past quarterbacks for each team right before the Green Day preshow began. The quarterbacks from earlier did get to line up on stage, which was pretty cool.
A slew of short player introductions played, and my notes say that out of each one, Demarcus Lawrence was the only one to show any real energy. After the intros, some celebrities who showed up to the game were shown. The only two I recognized were Chris Pratt and Jon Bon Jovi. Pratt was decked out in Seahawks merchandise, so I could immediately tell who his team was.
When Bon Jovi showed up, my dad commented, “Dang, Jon Bon Jovi looks like a super old man now!”
There were still a lot of festivities to get through before the actual game started, but some of the first advertisements interrupted them. I have two that stuck out to me in my notes. The first was the one that had Kevin from “The Office.” I cannot for the life of me remember what company the ad was for. The other ad I noted was the Manscaped ad where there were singing shaven clumps of hair, which was pretty weird.
Brandi Carlile sang “America the Beautiful” and Charlie Puth sang the national anthem before the game started, and each performance was pretty good. During the national anthem, the camera was cutting to different audience members and players, with one player looking like Jake Paul. Another fun thing that happened during the national anthem was when the pilots of one of the flyover jets did a fistbump.
After some ads announcing a new “Scream” movie and flag football coming to the 2028 summer Olympics, the coin toss occurred. The Patriots won the coin toss and decided to start on defense. That was probably a bad idea, as the Seahawks swiftly scored a field goal just a single minute into the game, making the score 3-0 Seahawks. I should probably note here that I have picked up on how basic scoring works in football, but I have never understood conversions.
Nothing else of note scorewise happened during the first quarter. It ended with the Seahawks still having a 3-0 lead. In fact, the only interesting things that happened were an appearance by Baby Yoda in an ad, the Liquid Death ad being as awesome as the company is and more celebrity appearances from Jay-Z, Justin Bieber and Adam Sandler.
During the second quarter, some notable happenings were when the ball hit someone on the back and went flying in the air, the second Seahawks field goal, and the Bud Light ad being based on the annual cheese rolling festival in Gloucestershire, England. At the end of the second quarter, the score was 6-0 Seahawks.
Now for the halftime show, which is the only reason some people tune into the Super Bowl each year. This year, Puerto Rican singer Bad Bunny performed, and I would say he did pretty well. The set was definitely my favorite part, with it being the most intricate I have seen. From the opening with a cinematic shot of a field transitioning seamlessly into the real life set, to the house Bad Bunny fell in, to the entire wedding scene, it all showed off a level of determination from Bad Bunny and his team to put on a great halftime show despite dissent from parts of the country.
Near the beginning of the third quarter, the Seahawks scored another field goal. There was a beautiful throw to player number 22 whose team I forgot to write down. Sometime after the Seahawks’ fourth field goal, I stopped paying attention almost entirely, only to regain focus when the score became 19-0 Seahawks at an unmarked period of time into the game.
About three minutes into the fourth quarter, the Patriots scored a touchdown and earned their extra point. The Seahawks followed up with another field goal just a couple minutes later, making the score 22-7 Seahawks a mere five minutes into the fourth quarter.
I stopped paying attention to the game as a whole during the last ten minutes due to external circumstances, but I did write down that some sort of flag was thrown at 47 seconds left, which is ironically my favorite number. The game ended 29-13 with a Seahawks victory, making my dad happy due to his utter disgust for the Patriots. I just hope each and every player had fun and played their hearts out.