I have to admit, it feels weird writing about Super Bowl XLVI because it feels like I've already done it. Dunno about the rest of you, but I was getting a serious case of deja vu throughout game; it was getting downright spooky just how similar this game was to the Super Bowl from four years ago, and it wasn't just because the teams were the same, and they were wearing the same uniforms, and they were playing in a dome like before, or that the Patriots were favored again. Both games were duller than dishwater for the first three quarters; both games had significantly less scoring than people anticipated; both games were defined by a key injury to a New England Patriot; both games ended with Eli Manning going on a game-winning drive, helped by a miracle catch by one of his receivers; in both games, the Giant who came with away with the game-winning score was someone who had been completely invisible to that point.

The similarities were so striking that when it got to Tom Brady's final possession, and the Pats were at fourth-and-16 deep in their own territory, I seriously began to question whether I was watching an exact replicate of Super Bowl XLII. However, Brady at least completed a pass to Deion Branch to extend the game, so it wasn't entirely the same.

Anywho, let's get to the records. The convenient thing -- for me anyway -- is that because there haven't even been 50 Super Bowls, it's virtually impossible for there to not be a dozen records set in every single Super Bowl. It's like with baseball, where over a hundred years of seven-game series have made it rare for there to be a record-setting anything -- not that this latest World Series wasn't historical. I guess that was a bad example. Anyway…

Tom Coughlin, at age 65, is now the oldest Super Bowl winning coach in history. It's funny how reactionary our praise is in sports. When Tom Coughlin took over as the Giants' coach, there wasn't a single writer who stood up and wrote, "Wow, look at him coach. This is guy is going to be a Hall of Famer." It's only after he's won two rings that people are praising him as an all-time great, but the funny aspect with Coughlin is that the Giants have been itching to can him for years. Had the Giants lost their season-finale to the Cowboys, Coughlin might be out of a job right now. He'd be the exact same coach that is today, but no one would be praising him as amazing.

Now that Tom Brady has lost two Super Bowls, what does that make of him historically? I think as sports fans, we've been utterly spoiled in every aspect by Michael Jordan. Jordan had a perfect, spotless, storybook career, and he ruined what it means to be great for every other player. In truth, even the greatest of all time face defeat constantly. John Elway might be the best quarterback ever, and he lost three times in the Super Bowl in games that were never even close; Brady on the other hand has won three of his five Super Bowl appearances, and his two losses were at least competitive. In a way, Brady is a lot like Kobe Bryant: both are one of the all-time greats of their sport, both have lost twice in the championship, both are looking for one more championship to put them at an elite historical plateau -- Kobe would have as many rings as Jordan, and Brady would have as many rings as Joe Montana and Terry Bradshaw.

At one point, Tom Brady completed 16 consecutive passes, setting a new Super Bowl record. In the end, key drops from Wes Welker and Branch, not to mention the ineffectiveness of Rob Gronkowski, will deflect much of the blame away from Brady. By no means will he be looked at as the reason they lost.

Super Bowl XLVI was the most watched television event EVER. 111.3 million people tuned in, which was slightly more than the 111 million people who watched last year's game between the Packers and the Steelers. And how did NBC capitalize on their sudden ratings boom? By unveiling a horribly-derivative American Idol rip-off that has less chance of becoming a hit show than Newt Gingrich does of putting a colony on the moon. There's nothing that'll get me to flip the channel faster than fake-outrage from B-grade judges who none of us care about. Also, the chairs are way too big.

And speaking of flipping, how about that half-time show? It was the most-watched halftime show in history, and guest singer M.I.A. took advantage of the spotlight by giving the audience a big middle finger. Lovely. Here's where I'm confused. I realize that we all want the game live and everything, but why can't the halftime show have like a five second delay? Would it really be that big of a deal? Most of us just complain about the half-time show as a joke anyway -- why does it have to be a live joke, especially if there's the possibility of something like that happening? Also, if the NFL is so concerned about performers doing controversial stuff on live TV, why was M.I.A. allowed to go on stage anyway? Why is there a loophole where the main performer can't be young or potentially risque, but the side performers can dress as half-naked 300 rejects?

It's hard to rationalize why Ryan Braun should be allowed to keep the National League MVP trophy. Braun was found to have taken performance-enhancing drugs, an act that he has since denied, but one that will nonetheless cost him $1.87 million of his $6 million salary and keep him out of work for 50 games. But... he's somehow allowed to keep the MVP. Guffaw??? This would be like if you counted cards at a casino, won a poker tournament that netted you a Coupe de Ville, got busted, went to jail, and had to pay a fine... but you still got to keep the Coupe de Ville. Kinda seems like an oversight, huh?

And what's especially weird is that this has become common for Major League Baseball, a league that used to be millitant in its preservation of statistical canonology. It was baseball, after all, that put an asterisk on Roger Maris' record-breaking 61-home run season. It was baseball that lowered the mound when they thought the pitcher was getting too much of an advantage, baseball that briefly banned Willie Mays and Mickey Mantle for working at a casino and having even a tangential connection to gambling, and it was baseball that initiated a rule to keep ineligible players like Pete Rose off the Hall of Fame ballot and to keep the Hall as pure as possible.

Baseball was so steadfast in its ideology that when it was discovered that one of Ty Cobb's box scores had erroneously been counted twice, and that his hit total should have been reduced from 4,191 to 4,189, baseball simply ignored it because changing one stat would in a sense indict them all. To this day, the number of hits MLB.com says Ty Cobb has is two more than what Baseball Reference says he has, a contradiction that is absurd. Some might call this stubbornness or even close-mindedness, but to the people running Major League Baseball, the preservation of statistics was so sacrosanct that to disrupt them even rightfully wasn't even a consideration.

Now, things have changed. Baseball seems content to let the steroid-users trample the records they had worked so hard to institutionalize. In a way, it seems like baseball doesn't know how to a handle a cheating epidemic of such scale and popularity, nor do they have much of a reference point to help them out. The founding baseball fathers did a great job establishing the rules of the game a hundred years ago, but even they couldn't have imagined the day where a butt-cheek-inserted syringe could transform a middling player into a perennial All-Star. The sport appears so overwhelmed by the rampant cheating, and so unclear on what to do with the stats, that not a thing has been done to challenge the validity of the steroid era's biggest offenders, from Barry Bonds to Sammy Sosa to Mark McGwire. All the home run records still stand. All the MVP's still stand. All the players found to have used illegal substances are still eligible for the Hall of Fame. And there isn't a single veto in sight.

It's debatable whether or not baseball should retroactively displace the numbers of the steroids era with an asterisk or by putting them in their own category, or "wing" if you will. With Braun though, there's all the reason in the world to claim that his MVP is invalid, and all the reason in the world for his prize to be revoked, asterisked, or put up for a new vote altogether. If he's able to walk away with the trophy, it lends little assurance to me that the steroids era really is over. After all, Ryan Braun played so well last year that he got a $104 million extension. If a 50-game suspension and a loss of $1.87 million allowed him to earn a nine-figure contract AND keep the MVP award, then unfortunately, the end still justifies the mean. And if baseball really wants to eliminate cheating, that's the part they're going to have to work on.

If there's one generalization that I've found applies to everyone in life, it's that no one truly knows how to deal with death. There really is no right way to address it, and a lot of times, people will only focus on the positive aspects of a person's life as a sort of memorial. On the one hand, this speaks to the kindness of human nature, that we can look beyond the faults and issues of a person and focus on what made others like them. It's a well-intentioned way to look a person posthumously, but often it's often a dangerously short-sighted tactic as well. Often, the media will whitewash any controversial aspects of a person's life, probably because they don't want to seem insensitive to the dead or because they don't want to insult the next of kin. When Michael Jackson and Jerry Falwell died and were treated like flawless, exceptional human beings, it rang hollow. Everyone has faults, and when those faults are as obvious as child molestation allegations (in Jackson's case) or blaming 9/11 on women and gay people (in Falwell's case), not mentioning their flaws is not only insensitive in how biased it is, it's unethical.

Which is how I felt over the swooning that took place when Joe Paterno died. If his former players and if the current Penn State students want to proselytize what a great man he was, they have to at least acknowledge why someone so otherwise beloved and respected had to be fired in disgrace. To just circle around the same anecdotes of leadership and courage without mentioning that his lack of principle allowed dozens of children to get raped, it's just not an accurate portrayal. He isn't Santa Claus. He is a three-dimensional, flawed human being. And yet when I watched the coverage of his funeral procession on ESPN the other day, I found myself on the verge of drop-kicking my television. Not once was the Jerry Sandusky fiasco mentioned. Not once, in a segment that featured tears and appraisals and compliments of him, was there even an inference of the scandal that got him fired. And in what was a recap of the man's life, it needed to be there. It needed to be shown that this too was a part of the man, myth and legend; to just bypass it entirely was disgraceful.

Now look, I'm not going to pretend that Paterno didn't do a lot of good in his previous fifty years at Penn State -- because that'd be wrong too. He did a lot of good things for the university. He helped a lot of inner-city kids, he preached ethics, he showed a compassion and enthusiasm that propelled the school from a Podunk nothing to a college football powerhouse in the time he was there. The school today wouldn't be nearly as prominent as it is now without him, and that's partly because he contributed millions of dollars to the campus over the years. These things are by no means meaningless.... BUT...

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The Orlando Magic are a very interesting franchise. They're located in sunny Orlando, Florida, a city that at first glance would appear to be a haven for potential NBA free-agents. And yet they have a miserable history of not only attracting players, but keeping the few players they manage to bring in. The Orlando Magic have the bizarre distinction of being a prime destination that no one ever goes to. It's almost inexplicable.

For instance, last night, Dwight Howard scored 14 points and became the Orlando Magic's all-time leading scorer, passing Nick Anderson, who held the previous mark with 10,650 points. Considering that the Magic have been around for nearly 23 seasons, it's hard to accept that Nick Anderson -- who was just a role player on the great Magic teams in the 90's that had Penny and Shaq -- had held this mark for this long.

But it really was a record of attrition. Anderson held it because he is not only the only Magic player to spend ten consecutive years with the franchise, he is the only player period to last ten years with the franchise. It isn't just that Orlando has been unable to attract many big-name players (Tracy McGrady, Grant Hill and Rashard Lewis barely qualify as exceptions). It's that they've been categorically incapable of re-signing the good players they manage to get. They lost Shaq after four years, they traded Penny, they traded McGrady, they lost Hill, they dealt Steve Francis, and it's pretty damn clear that they're about to lose Howard too.

Their lack of success in retaining players is staggering. Assuming they lose Howard, not only will they have lost every single superstar they ever had no longer than seven years into their contract, they've never re-signed anyone of importance. I had to scour Basketball Reference's archives just to be sure, but here's two pieces of information that personify their ineptitude: they have never had a single player who played with them for more than seven years who made $10 million in a season with them; and Dwight Howard is the only player in franchise history to sign an extension that gave him a $10 million salary. And, again, they're about to lose him.

So what exactly is going on here? It's one thing for a cold Midwestern team to struggle to attract players and eventually lose the good ones they have. But this is Orlando, a city with a fantastic climate, an array of amusement parks and tourist attractions, and, let's not forget, it's in a state where you don't have to pay an income tax, which is an enormous plus if you happen to be a multimillionaire basketball player. And yet no wants to be there for very long. Weird.

Choking happens to athletes all the time, but that doesn't make it an indictment on the player. In 1997, in Game 5 of a semifinals series against the Jazz, an 18-year-old rookie Kobe Bryant shot not one, not two, but four airballs in the final five and a half minutes of regulation and overtime, in a game his Lakers eventually lost. By any definition, this was choking at its most obvious. Now, 15 years later, Kobe Bryant is regarded as the clutchest player in the NBA by a mile; a 2011 Sports Illustrated poll asked 166 players, "Who do you want shooting with the game on the line?," and a whopping 74% of them chose the Black Mamba. The next closest player, Kevin Durant, got only 8%.

LeBron James wasn't even in the top five.

Like Kobe, LeBron has had some disappearing acts in crunch time, most notably in the 2011 finals. Unlike Kobe, LeBron has become defined by his failures. But LeBron is a totally different animal from Kobe. Kobe resembles Michael Jordan in his brazen willingness to try to take the game over, to take as many contorted, mid-range fade-aways as humanly possible, and to always take the final shot. LeBron is a much more efficient player, even eliminating the weakest aspect of his game, the three-point shot, from his arsenal this season. Often, he seems content to let D-Wade and Chris Bosh take the last shot in the game, and whereas Kobe seems to exhibit a rabid competitiveness -- shown last week when he indignantly referenced an ESPN ranking that had him listed as the seventh best player in the league -- LeBron doesn't seem to have that drive. He was perfectly willing to join the Miami Heat and relinquish his role as the team's alpha dog, as the team leader and primary go-to-guy; it's hard to imagine Kobe willingly accepting a such subservient role.

At the same time, it's hard to believe Kobe wouldn't bristle at having such a pathetic showing in a poll by his peers. LeBron is the best player in the NBA, and not even 2% of player said they wanted him with the ball in the final minutes.

And maybe that's why Kobe is considered clutch and LeBron isn't. Whereas Kobe's imprint is always on the fourth quarter, LeBron will just vanish sometimes for no conceivable reason. With the Heat, he's developed a nasty tendency in the fourth quarter to hand the ball off to one of his teammates and just sit there in the perimeter, not even trying to get open. Not even trying to make a screen, or direct a play, or do anything that makes it look like he's in the offense. It's not even about deferring to Wade or Bosh -- there are times when he simply doesn't try, where he'll allow a gnat like J.J. Barea or Jason Terry to guard him without ever posting them up.

In simplest terms, LeBron James is hiding himself in the offense. Anyone who's ever played basketball can see it. I certainly know what it's like to have an off game, and to make a less concerted effort to find a shot out of fear that maybe I'd get the blame, or let my team down, or look badly. But I'm not an NBA player. LeBron seems to embody that self-consciousness mentality in every fourth quarter he plays. He seems to do as much as he thinks he has to, or as much as he thinks is acceptable, but little else besides that.

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Dwight Howard shot 39 free-throws on Thursday, breaking a single-game record that had been held by Wilt Chamberlain for nearly 50 years. Chamberlain once attempted 34 foul shots in a game on February 22, 1962 -- just a couple weeks before his absurd 100-point outing against the New York Knicks. Chamberlain, in case you weren't aware, averaged 50.4 points, 25.7 rebounds and 48.5 minutes per game in 1962, in what is unquestionably the most statistically-incomparable single-season in NBA history, and probably sports history. So for a modern day player to actually supplant one of his seemingly-impossible benchmarks really is impressive, even if it's more a record brought on by futility than an actual accomplishment.

Now I can hear what some of you guys are going to say about this: (Or maybe it's dementia kicking in. But either way...) "This is horrible. We don't watch basketball to see a guy go to the line 39 times. It slows the game down and makes it boring to watch. Get it out of the game." And I would be inclined to agree with you... sort of.

If this was an epidemic, if these ridiculous foul-shooting numbers started popping up every other day, with DeAndre Jordan shooting 30 free-throws and Andrew Bogut shooting 20 free-throws, then yeah, I'd say a rule would need to be established to prevent this from happening all the time. However, this was a pretty unusual event. Coming into this game, the most freebies Howard had taken in a game was 14, so I doubt this will become a trend or anything. Plus, as long as it isn't being exploited to the point that it makes the game unwatchable, I don't mind seeing teams take advantage of the one obvious, glaring flaw in Dwight Howard's game.

Another reason why I don't think a rule needs to be enacted to cancel Hack-a-Shaqing is that the teams that do it almost always do so in defeat. The Magic won last night. Shaquille O'Neal, for whom the intentional foul strategy is based off of, had 10 playoff games in 2001 in which he shot 20 free-throws, and the Lakers went 9-1 in those games -- not to mention going 3-0 that year in regular season games where he went to the line 20 times. And the games in 1962 that Chamberlain shot 30 free-throws (the second being the 100-point game)? His team won both games. So let's be clear that while this tactic is annoying to sit through, it's only seen in pure desperation, and isn't something likely to catch on anytime soon.

So earlier today, I posted something on what I thought was the senseless backlash on the hiring of Penn State coach Bill O'Brien, where people are losing their minds over what a horrible hire it is. To me, it's a fine hire because he has nothing to do with the Joe Paterno-regime, and the fact that some people were actually upset about that irritated the crap out of me.

For the record, I go to Penn State, and I've been ashamed at my university over the last couple months, and not just because of what Sandusky did and what Paterno tolerated. I'm ashamed that the phrase "Penn State Proud" continues to be used. It tears at me every time I hear it. It's loyalty to a faculty that doesn't deserve it, it's indifference to the victims who have every right to hate this school. I am not proud to be attending a school where such a human rights violation could repeatedly take place. There are many words to describe what I feel, but pride isn't one of them. At the moment, there's nothing redeeming in saying you went to this university; not when doing so means blatantly disregarding everything that went on. I mean, Jerry Sandusky was recruiting for the football program as recently as last year; how can I possibly say I respect this school after learning that?

The issue isn't something you can wash your hands of. What happened indelibly stains the reputation of this campus. Child molestation is inarguably the most heinous crime anyone on this planet can commit, so what kind of people are we when we flippantly use the word "proud?" What kind of example are we showing, when we say we're proud knowing full-well what went on? Just what the hell are we proud of anyway, that we can ignore something so terrible that happened so frequently?

More to the point, what exactly have we learned when we criticize the hiring of Bill O'Brien? He was hired specifically to be something different from Paterno, an outsider with no ties to the previous administration, which when informed of the incident in the shower chose to look the other way. To me, this is the only thing that matters about O'Brien. Right now, football is the most inconsequential, irrelevant subject in the world. I really don't care if O'Brien is the worst coach on the planet. All that matters is getting the human-decency part of it right. Besides, even if O'Brien is a lousy couch, who the hell are we to say we deserve better? For three decades, our football program allowed a pedophile to use his status as an assistant to establish a charity, which he in turn used as a farm system to molest as many kids as possible. I don't think I'm saying anything extreme when I write that if Penn State goes 2-10 the next five years, it won't be the most unfair thing in the world. Truth be told, I don't think there should be a football program. You can say what you want about SMU, the last school to receive the death penalty, but as crooked as they were, little kids never got fondled.

And so when I read articles and Facebook statuses and Twitter updates and had face-to-face conversations were people actually told me how upset they were over the hiring, it threw me off the deep end. To me, it just confirmed everything the people in the media have been saying about Penn State. It's unbelievably insensitive to be demanding a better football coach, knowing full-well what a gift it is to even have a football program at all. This is the same campus that threw a riot after Paterno was fired, that formed a vigil around his house as though he was the victim, that promised to walk to his house in the event that they actually won their next game. This is the campus that showed virtually no outrage and anger and fury to the coach that allowed Sandusky to recruit for him, nine years after he was spotted raping a kid in the team locker room. And now, now of all times, the campus gets indignant and upset and furious at their coach… And why? Because they don't like him.

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I'm going to be honest: I know almost nothing about Bill O'Brien. I know he was/is the offensive coordinator of the New England Patriots, but the only time I had heard of him before now was when Tom Brady shrieked at him during a Redskins game. (Perhaps provoking O'Brien to look for new work, me thinks.) Besides that, I can't profess to knowing a whole lot about the guy, and I certainly can't make a pronouncement on if he'll be a good coach or not.

But here's what else I know: the people railing against his hiring know just as much about him as I do -- and probably less. And make no mistake about it. People associated with Penn State hate this hiring, with the anger ranging from his lack of ties with the school to the fact that he isn't a big hire. Rather than paraphrase examples, I'll just direct you to some from the SB Nation Penn State blog Black Shoe Diaries, although one particular paragraph from their post-hiring recap caught my attention:

"Dave Joyner (and Ira Lubert, behind the scenes) arrogantly conducted this search with what appeared to be no help or input from anyone else, strung along Tom Bradley and the rest of the remaining coaching staff, acted coy in the media, assured everyone that Penn State knew exactly what it was doing, let the process drag out until the very last weeks of the recruiting period, and came back to us with Bill O'Brien. They proudly strode up to a five-alarm fire, waited six weeks, and threw a Dixie Cup of water on it. Tim Curley's hire of Patrick Chambers -- a mid-major coach tapped to take over a rarely-successful and marginally profitable men's basketball program -- was infinitely more clever and inspired than this."

I can't tell you how annoying it is to hear this debate right now, to witness people actually focus on this hire as though it means anything, as though the school deserves better. It pisses me off that members of my university continue to live in a cult-like vacuum, where the day-to-day decision-making of a doomed program is analyzed without anyone looking around and realizing that it's about as important as rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. It pisses me off that people are wasting their breath discussing this hire, while only referencing the child molestation fiasco that shook the university to the core as "the scandal" or "the debacle," like it's ancient history. It's insulting, it's sad, it's pathetic, and it makes me ashamed to be even slightly related to this college.

Clearly, we have learned NOTHING from the Jerry Sandusky incident. If there was any maxim the school, and the students, and the athletic program could have adopted in the wake of everything that was discovered, it was that football needed to be less of a priority. It was that human lives and the well-being of children needed to matter more than a geriatric's winning record, and that what happened with Sandusky -- when adults looked away and allowed a pedophile to wear the crest of the school's uniform knowing what he had done -- was a travesty.

So when Penn State went out a brought in a complete outsider, a man with no connections to either Sandusky or JoePa to run the football team, the alums should have understood that this was a good hire, for no other reason than because it was a necessary turn of page from the child-molestation-tolerant regime of Joe Paterno. But instead, I've spent the last week listening to PSU people bitching about the hire as it reflects the football team, saying he has no experience as a coach, saying he has no ties to the school, saying he wasn't a splashy hire. I've read and listened to complaints that have nothing to do with the Sandusky aftermath and everything to do with their on-the-field performance, and what's worse is the people most upset with the hire don't even reference Jerry Sandusky at all.

Instead of adopting that maxim, the Penn State alumni have pissed on it and thrown it out a window. They had one chance to redeem their insane rioting behavior in the wake of Paterno's firing and show that they aren't a lockstep band of idiots too obsessed with football to see what's really important; tragically, all they've done is confirm it.

I rage on in Part 2 after the jump... [explicit]

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