(Sunday Paper, Year VI, Issue 6)

It’s that time of year when everyone bends over backwards to avoid lawsuits involving ‘The Big Game’.

You know the one - the Superb Owl.

That Football Game Everyone Pays Attention To.

But I don’t have any sponsorship tie-ins so I think I’m OK to say it:

Today is the Super Bowl.

And historically, Super Bowl Sunday is one of my favorite days of the year.

Allow me to remind you why.

First things first, I guess - I’m not going to tell you exactly what I told you a few years ago about my various favorite Super Bowl memories. If you want to remind yourself what I told you a few years back, you can click that link.

But I do want to show you a couple of things that I love about the Super Bowl, the first of which is the picture above.

You probably know by now that every year I’m obsessed with new matchups for the Super Bowl (and the World Series, but it started with the Super Bowl).

That picture is a grid I created years ago (early 2000s, maybe) after I got tired of thinking about new matchups every year and decided instead to visualize how many matchups it would take to fill up an AFC-by-NFC grid.

It’s not going to happen in my lifetime, but every new matchup (like this year’s Tampa Bay-Kansas City one) helps.

(Yes, above the Super Bowl grid is one for the World Series and this piece of paper with these grids has hung permanently in my home for about two decades.)

The other thing is this page at left from the 1992 Pro & College Football Almanac. (You can see what the book itself looks like in the picture at the end of this post.)

I wasn’t sure I still had this book but I found it amidst a bunch of books I probably should have thrown away years ago.

The book came free with my Sports Illustrated subscription and I memorized this page. The next year, you can see, I updated the Super Bowl XXVII information. I’m pretty sure I didn’t write down Super Bowl XXVIII because I was disappointed it was the exact same matchup.

But I continued memorizing Super Bowl outcomes and MVPs for a few more years, until I lost track somewhere in the mid-to-late 2000s.

This book is a big part of why I love the Super Bowl.

It has gotten harder and harder over the years to even like - let alone love - the NFL.

But I still love the Super Bowl….which I can’t say has exactly been passed on to my kids.

This week I asked my daughters for any predictions for Sunday.

One of my daughters responded, “I think Team Ruff will win.”

And that’s kind of enough for me - I look forward to the Super Bowl for a number of reasons, one of which is the day itself and hanging out with the family in one place at the same time.

Truth be told, by halftime of the game the family time is winding down.

But that’s because the game comes at the end of a long day of stuffing our faces with junky food and watching lots of TV - starting with the Puppy Bowl, which my daughter predicts will be won by Team Ruff.

If that’s what my kids think of when I’m singing the praises of the Super Bowl, that works for me.

It’s part of what I love about Super Bowl Sunday.

Notes

*Also probably worth mentioning I do have some square numbers for this year’s Super Bowl, but I don’t have my usual other post-season pools. The pandemic has affected my sports fandom in a number of ways, one of which is probably a positive in that I haven’t participated in as many pools this year.

*I alluded last week to the fact that there are elements of the new Mets owner that might make him hard to root for. At least this week Mets fans dodged a bullet in not having to root for a pitcher with questionable behavior. I know this falls under the ‘not many people care’ department but it is something I’m spending a lot of time thinking about. I am liking the team that will be taking the field whenever baseball starts up - I’m glad they didn’t add a potential distraction this week.

*If you want more baseball insights (they happen more as the season gets closer) you can follow me on Twitter. I also tweet other, funnier stuff. If you don’t already Like the Facebook page, you can do that here.

*I think I’ve written in the past about how much I like to watch the snow melt. (Funny enough, it’s part of the previous Super Bowl post I linked to above.) I like seeing the measurable progress as the snow decreases its footprint in the driveway or on the roof or what have you. Last week we had a big storm that dropped about a foot (probably more) of snow…but in the week before that storm we had a nuisance snowfall that was just enough to freeze over clumps of snow under the new snowfall. I tell you all of this because it has been satisfying to watch not just the new snowfall melt away, but even the icy layer under that go away. As long as we avoid frigid temperatures I can handle the occasional foot of snow.