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Greetings and salutations to all of you 12th Men (and women) who are gloating with justifiable glee this AM in the wake of what went down in the San Francisco suburbs last night. THE ATHLETIC’s Matt Barrows captured the moment succinctly:
The bullies are back. The Seattle Seahawks, who rode a dominant defense to their first Super Bowl title 12 years ago, did it again Sunday, suffocating Drake Maye and the New England Patriots in a decidedly defensive 29-13 win at Levi’s Stadium.
Egged on by a raucous, pro-Seattle crowd, the Seahawks sacked Maye six times and picked him off twice, one of which was returned 45 yards for a touchdown by defensive lineman Uchenna Nwosu. The Patriots did not score until the fourth quarter, and Seattle also forced a fumble.
The win gives the Seahawks their second Super Bowl title and avenges their agonizing Super Bowl loss to the Patriots 11 years ago. That game ended with an instantly controversial play call from the 1-yard line — a throw into the crowded middle of the defense instead of a handoff to tailback Marshawn Lynch, who had rushed for 102 yards to that point. The ball was intercepted with 20 seconds remaining, an abrupt, stinging defeat felt in Seattle for the last decade.
The Seahawks didn’t need any last-second scores in this one. They forced eight punts and allowed the Patriots to cross the 50-yard line just three times — on their opening drive and twice in the fourth quarter.
Yeah, it was a decisive beatdown of Patriots. Just like what happened at halftime, and I suspect once the actual results are in that will be seen as an even more decisive victory. At least by people intelligent enough to grasp it. We apparently don’t have a lot of them out there in positions of influence.
The “battle” for supremacy between Benito Nation and MAGA was never a fair fight to begin with. The real battle was with the hundred-plus million domestic viewers of what at least in the first half was a fairly boring game devoid of even a touchdown and their willingness to change the channel or break out a second screen to get a glimpse of what was happening on a nondescript and substantially darker soundstage. Naturally, THE NEW YORK POST’s Caitlin McCormack felt it it was a moral obligation to her core readers to issue this near real-time recap even before the final gun was blasted at Levi’s Stadium:
Millions tuned into Turning Point USA’s “All-American” halftime show headlined by Kid Rock and held in honor of its slain founder Charlie Kirk — which was streamed as a rival to the official Super Bowl halftime show featuring Spanish-speaking singer Bad Bunny.
The conservative nonprofit’s hour-long spectacle, which started minutes before the Super Bowl LX halftime show, was backed by the Trump administration and scores of conservative hubs that cross-aired the performance. TPUSA scrambled to organize a rival halftime concert in October after Bad Bunny remarked that anyone peeved by his selection as Super Bowl headliner had “four months to learn Spanish” and understand his music.
Based on nothing else that their ability to accurately report media math, it’s all the more understandable that learning Spanish was far too much to ask in the first place. Witness this “insight”:
More than 5 million viewers tuned into TPUSA’s YouTube livestream at one point during the performances.
No, schmucks, that’s about as true as any other narrative you choose to buy into surrounding your wholly unfounded fears of ‘Merica somehow being corrupted.
Let’s put our petty misoygny and overt racism to the side of the road for a second, shall we? Maybe you could have bothered to Google exactly what information you may thought you were seeing. I did, and Marketing Scoop provided a definitive answer:
Turning Point USA announced that it will not be able to stream The All-American Halftime Show on X due to licensing rules. The organization shared the update in a post on Sunday, just hours before the show was expected to air.
On X, Turning Point USA tweeted, “Due to licensing restrictions, we are unable to stream The All-American Halftime Show on X. Head on over to our YouTube channel tonight around 8PM ET to watch the full show.
Sure seems like the same sort of quality control and attention to detail that the current administration exercises when it comes to ridding our cities of “the worse of the worst” and determining what memes get posted to their official accounts were at work in this case. Would it be too much to ask the geniuses who humble-bragged about that TP performance how many of those “5 million” may have come over from X?
Did anyone even bother to factor in the plethora of linear outlets that were dual-illuminating the bro-fest? THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER’s Asher Notheis at least noted which ones were:
The event will air on a variety of television broadcasting channels, including Real America’s Voice, Trinity Broadcasting Network, Charge!, The National News Desk, NTD Television, and One America News Network. The event will also be streamed on DailyWire+.
You might be inclined to snark as I was about to that virtually none of those channels are ones that anyone has heard of, except Nielsen actually rates CHARGE!, a diginet conveniently owned by Sinclair, and they typically draw more than 100,000 viewers with a lineup of off-network procedurals including THE DISTRICT and a couple of iterations of CSI. I’m at least open enough to think that a handful of them might have been inclined to watch Kid Rock. Don’t ever say this “libtard” wasn’t at least willing to offer help.
And yeah, I got a glimpse of the show myself. But before any of you rant or unfriend me, I was indeed one of those who chose not to make a choice and I specifically chose to “watch” TP on my DIRECTV feed of TBN (the only one available) for which I am not measured (nor, for that matter is TBN). Whatever viewing I did that counted was on Peacock, as it was for the game itself. I know what actually counts, unlike those who are so desperate to advance a false narrative that attempts to please the thin-skinned rants of the most outsized couch potato of all.
Furthermore, please be aware that my prostate and sensitive stomach that couldn’t quite handle my specially constructed Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles pizza won out soon after I snapped this, which I confess means that a goodly amount of whatever bipartisan set tuning I attempted both fell into the “tuning without viewing” column. But at least I’m admitting I was multitasking. I wonder how many of those 4.7 million VIEWS NOT VIEWERS were done in a similar setting by folks allowing nature to take its timely course after some beer and wings, perhaps being reinforced by the literal sh-tshow that was being provided as “alternative entertainment”?
Based on both the relatively lackluster game and the lack of both Taylor Swift and her fiance to draw in lighter viewers I’m gonna go out on a limb and predict that Super Bowl LX won’t be the most-viewed of all time, and that Bad Bunny and company won’t set any records, either. But the score’s gonna be a lot more decisively in his favor that even what the World Champion Seahawks will be able to tout. 100-plus to 4.7-minus millions of anything covers even the most liberal spread imaginable.
Maybe at some point someone somewhere will be capable of offering an unbiased narrative and an informed take on what we actually watch and why. For at least the Patriots of New England, there’s always next year. Time will soon tell if all of the others will still have similar opportunities.