Football

According to Sports Illustrated's Peter King, Tom Brady:

Last week, in a blog post titled, "Super Bowl City Leads on Energy Efficient Forefront," the Energy Department touted the Superdome's lights. The Superdome, in New Orleans, is hosting tonight's Super Bowl, where a power outage stopped play for more than half an hour.

The Super Bowl is, as everyone knows, the biggest thing in sports.  And television.  Which are, increasingly, indistinguishable.  The game is routinely the highest rated program of the year.  Any year.  In fact, three of the four most highly rated shows of all time are Super Bowls.  And those would be the last three games.  The trend, then, is for this year’s game to become the highest rated ever.  For a year, anyway.

In an interview with the New Republic, President Barack Obama is asked, "I'm wondering if you, as a fan, take less pleasure in watching football, knowing the impact that the game takes on its players."

Tonight, the 15th BCS National Championship Game will cap yet another extraordinary college football season.  College football is the only major American sport that emphasizes the regular season over the postseason, like baseball did in its glory days (when the two league champions went directly to the World Series).  Correspondingly, it’s the only sport that sufficiently rewards teams for season-long excellence, rather than for a brief flourish of postseason glory (on the heels of regular-season mediocrity), of the kind now routinely celebrated in Major League Baseball and the NFL.

I'm as thrilled as every other red-blooded Washington-area resident by the Redskins' victory yesterday. Yes, I did "predict" a Cowboys victory on Fox News Sunday. But that was, as I said on the show, a prediction contrary to my hopes, and of course was really made in order to avert the evil eye (or, as I put it on the panel in a way more suitable for public consumption, because I err on the side of pessimism). So, Go 'Skins! And no more predictions.

The end does not appear to be nigh as the Mayans would have it. And what a relief. But Tim Tebow's career (if it could be called that) with the New York Jets is evidently over.

Those who doubt the possibility of comebacks (Republicans, for instance) can take heart from the revival of Notre Dame's football fortunes, this morning's number one college team.

Whatever the reason for holding elections in November, it works out as a merciful thing. If your party loses, you’ve still got football to remind you of what is truly important in life. There is nothing like college football—not even politics—for passionate, irrational affections and loyalties. A Texas Republican, for instance, would rather vote Democratic than switch over to Oklahoma. He might even rather die. This is true despite the fact

On the evening before the big game, both candidates showed up on ESPN's Monday Night Football.  And why not?  You hunt where the ducks are.  And on Monday night, that's where they are.

Sports fans in some important swing states this weekend will get a last-minute dose of politics with their football. Bankrupting America, a campaign project of the conservative group Public Notice, will be flying two banners over the fields at college and professional football games with messages about the national debt. Check out the banners below:

What to watch tonight?  There is the debate, of course, upon which hangs the fate of the nation if not the world.  That's important.  And, then, there is the seventh game of the National League playoffs, with the winner going to the World Series.  And, on Monday Night Football we have the Chicago Bears vs. the Detroit Lions, a tough divisional match-up.