Super Bowl XLVII will be starting soon. It’s time to make my annual predictions about the event. Here goes:
1. A fading female performer will expose one or more of her breasts before a large Super Bowl TV audience. This will be reported copiously on evening news broadcasts in coming weeks, pushing aside less important topics such as war in the Middle East, economic upheavals, et. al.
2. Much of the commentary during the actual game will focus on the fact that two brothers are the coaches of the teams on the field. Absolutely no one care about this fact. But there has to be something that passes for color coverage and this is this year’s designated soporific.
3. The action on the field will be indistinguishable from the action in hundreds of other games played during this football season. There will be some good plays, some bad ones, maybe one or two truly outstanding ones — if we’re lucky. The one thing we must all hope is that this is a close game and not a runaway, otherwise we will hear a lot more about the two teams’ coaches, who in case you haven’t heard, are bothers.
4. As many others have predicted, the commercials for Super Bowl XLVII will be more entertaining than the game itself. What no one else will point out is that this only highlights how utterly devoid of innovation or imagination is the actual programming on network TV, suggesting that it might be more entertaining if we got rid of this programming altogether and just ran commercials.
5. Finally, it comes time for me to pick a winner of Super Bowl XLVII. Here I’m going out on a limb. I’m picking the Philadelphia Eagles. A long shot? Sure. But if the Eagles do in fact win this bowl game, remember — you read it here first.
(Mike Silverstein’s new novel, The Bellman’s Revenge, about toilet seat-borne venereal disease and excessive parking ticketing, is available on Amazon)