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Some thoughts on the Super Bowl.

Or has the internet rendered Superbowl commercials irrelevant? In the past few days car* companies everywhere have been “leaking” their commercials (along with many others). The average price for a commercial is now $3.5 million (not to mention production costs). In America alone, 1 out of every 3 people watch the game. Not a bad price to get almost guaranteed attention of that many people. But for that much money couldn’t you market an internet video and get over 100 million views (the amount of U.S. viewers of the game)? You could, but that’s not the only value in a Superbowl spot. Brands ensure that they are talked about as much of the game itself for days to come. The internet has actually exacerbated this. I can guarantee that Monday morning my Twitter and Facebook feeds will be cluttered by people sharing videos of their favorite commercials. Stephen Dubner from Freakanomics examines the topic in this interesting clip. Definitely worth a watch.

There is an old joke about trying to look up what time the game actually starts. The network covering the game wants you to tune in early and watch their coverage, so they aren’t reliable. Then a bunch of sneaky marketing people decided to write up a bunch of specific web content to get to the top of the results. These stories never answered the question either. They would be so key word laden that they made you even more confused. Seems like someone (Google?) finally fixed it this year. The game starts at 5:30/6:30 EST if the official Super Bowl site is to be believed (I’m still skeptical).

One final thought. It’s disturbing that the week before the NFL is finally going to stream the big game on the internet that the FBI conveniently decides to conduct a major operation and shut down most of the sports streaming sites out there? Nothing like a big corporation getting the government to eliminate its competition right before the big day, right? Yes, I realize these sites are doing something illegal, but these raids are just as shady.

Ok…one more quick thought: this is so dumb.

*What a sellout

When someone says “Japanese Spiderman,” I think of that Japanese guy who gets arrested for climbing tall buildings in a spiderman suit. Apparently the term is also a baseball player’s nickname.

You definitely need to have the volume turned up for this one, otherwise you’re missing the humor. People have been complaining that Sportscenter has really gone downhill. The show has been more interested in rumors about athlete’s personal lives than actual sports news lately. Well, maybe we need more commentary like this in the future.

If you’re following the NCAA Tournament closely, you know that #1 seed and tournament favorite Kansas lost last night. Here is a breakdown of exactly how many people picked Kansas and the other teams for that matter.

Via ESPN, click to enlarge.

As regular readers should know, my years of living in Kentucky turned me into a UK Basketball fan. I knew the John Wall dance had gotten big, but I didn’t realize it was this big.

via The Economist

Baseball season has started. I ran across this really cool map. It looks like this is from a Nike ad. I’m curious is there is something like this for other sports.

Normally I try to leave the Sports Blogs to other, more qualified people. I’ve been watching this page all day hoping twitter would be the way I found out the news. Of course, the news had to break while I was on the phone so Hamby was the first person to inform me. Here is the buzz from twitter right now:

Pretty cool stuff. Rumor has it Donovan is coming to UK, but only time will tell.

Some NSFW language and I am not sure if this is a joke or what.