After Sunday's amazing game between the Pittsburgh Steelers and the Arizona Cardinals there can be no doubt that football is America's sport. The Super Bowl is consistently the most-watched television event of the year, pitting the top two teams in a climactic showdown featuring more hoopla than the Olympics. Yet with the great potential viewing power of the Super Bowl comes a whole bunch of trash that clutters this great event.
There's the Lingerie Bowl, which pits teams of models against each other in a gridiron battle more suited for the bedroom than the playing field. There's the over-the-top halftime shows, which this year featured an over-the-hill Bruce Springsteen trying to re-live his Glory Days"" glory days with a high-kicking, stage-sliding performance. And finally, there's the Puppy Bowl.
The Puppy Bowl, for those of you unfamiliar with it, is an Animal Planet program that pits a pack of puppies against one another in a hodge-podge game of ""football."" In truth, the event is a thinly veiled playtime for the puppies, as there appear to be very few rules and not much direction in the action. Each regular football action is annoyingly branded, from a ""puppy penalty"" to a ""puppy touchdown."" Each of the canines has a biography, with supposedly fun facts like ""actually scared of cats"" or ""loves milk bones.""
This may seem like innocent fun, but the Puppy Bowl has a sinister plan. They start with the undeniable fact that everyone loves puppies. By programming the most appealing show possible (even scheduling a kitty halftime show), Animal Planet seeks to undermine and divert viewers from the real athletes, instead preferring to hype athletes like Candy Corn and Gypsy.
The Super Bowl has given us so many great memories, from Bart Starr and the legendary Vince Lombardi winning the first two Super Bowls for the Packers to Big Ben and the Steelers winning a record sixth championship for the Steelers. Football has remained at the forefront of the American consciousness for years, as the hard-nosed play of its athletes mirrors the Puritan work ethic of our citizens. And I'll be damned if a bunch of flea-bitten mongrels is going to try to take away the glory that those players deserve. As Michael Vick has already shown us, football and dogs don't mix, and the Puppy Bowl is no exception.
