Here we go again! No, I’m not watching. I haven’t actually watched a Super Bowl since Seahawks-Broncos, and that was eleven years ago. (And I doubt I’d have watched had the Bills made it, in all honesty. That would be way too stressful!) Anyway, here’s some random trivia if you want to show off to your friends at your Super Bowl party.
The highest combined point total in a Super Bowl is 75 points, in Super Bowl XXIX (49ers 49, Chargers 26).
The lowest combined point total in a Super Bowl is 16 points, in SB LIII (Patriots 13, Rams 3).
The Patriots scored the fewest points to win a Super Bowl in SB LIII, with 13.
The Eagles scored the most points in losing a Super Bowl in SB LVII, with 35.
The oldest existing venue to have hosted a Super Bowl is the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, CA. The oldest existing still-used NFL stadium to host a Super Bowl is the Superdome in New Orleans (which is hosting today’s game, as luck would have it!)
The Rose Bowl is the last stadium to be played in a stadium that was not home to an NFL team.
The Rose Bowl is also the only one of the four venues still standing from the Buffalo Bills’ run of four consecutive Super Bowl appearances.
According to The Simpsons, Homer grew up rooting for the Denver Broncos.
The Baltimore Ravens and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers are the only teams undefeated in multiple Super Bowl appearances, at 2-0 each.
The other unbeaten teams in the Super Bowl are the Jets and Saints, both 1-0.
The current longest period between one team’s multiple Super Bowl victories is 50 years, by the Chiefs (wins in SB IV and then LIV).
The Jets have gone the longest since their last Super Bowl appearance, at 56 years and counting (last appearance, SB III).
The 2024 Chiefs enter today’s game as the only two-time defending Super Bowl champion to ever reach a third consecutive Super Bowl. If they win they will be the first-ever “three-peat” champion.
Before the Chiefs this year, the 1990 49ers and the 1994 Cowboys are the closest any team has come to pulling off the elusive three-peat. Both those teams reached the NFC Championship before losing.
The Eagles become just the fifth team to reach the Super Bowl with the NFL’s leading rusher (Saquon Barkley) on the roster. The others were the Cowboys in XXVII and XXVIII (Emmitt Smith), the Denver Broncos in XXXIII (Terrell Davis), and the Seattle Seahawks in XL (Shaun Alexander).
In possible bad news for the Chiefs, teams winning 15 or more regular season games are only 2-5 in ending the season with a Super Bowl win.
In possible bad news for the Eagles, only one team has reached the Super Bowl scoring 50 or more points in the Conference Championships, the 1990 Bills who won the AFC Championship Game that season 51-3. They proceeded to lose the Super Bowl to the Giants, 20-19. The Eagles scored 55 points in this year’s NFC Championship.
Super Bowl XLI (Indianapolis Colts versus Chicago Bears) featured the matchup whose two cities were closest together.
Last year’s Super Bowl, LVIII, played at Allegiant Stadium near Las Vegas, had the lowest in-game attendance in Super Bowl history, at a reported 61, 629 people, other than SB LV, played under COVID restrictions at Raymond James Stadium in Tampa (Buccaneers 31, Chiefs 9).
Not one of the 14 highest-scoring single-season teams in NFL history has gone on to win the Super Bowl that season.
As of today, prior to kickoff of SB LIX, there has never been a punt returned for a touchdown in a Super Bowl.
Only the Dolphins (SB VI), Rams (SB LIII), and Chiefs (SB LV) have failed to score a touchdown in the Super Bowl.
There has never been a shutout in the Super Bowl.
By the NFL’s quarterback rating system. Ben Roethlisberger has the worst rating by a Super Bowl winning quarterback in history, when he won SB XL for the Steelers despite a rating of 22.6.
Matt Ryan’s rating of 144.1 in SB LI is the best performance by the losing quarterback in Super Bowl history (Patriots 34, Falcons 28).
Buffalo invented the single best food to watch football with, so why the NFL continues to refuse to grease their path to a Super Bowl victory is beyond me. (This one may not be an actual trivia item.)
That’s all! Enjoy the game, or whatever you end up watching instead of the game!
Today John Williams turns 93. His music stands as one of the undisputed bright spots and creative forces behind my own life; to recall a time in my life when I was not keenly aware of his music I have to dig back to memories that are mostly hazy and almost sepia-tinged. I don’t remember when exactly my sister took me to see Star Wars–it wasn’t in May of that year, it was later, probably sometime in the summer, when it came out we were still living out our one year in Wisconsin and then we moved to Oregon, which is where we saw it–but I’m pretty sure it was well before my late-September birthday, so I was still 5 years old when I first got my serious exposure to John Williams. And he’s been there ever since. It sometimes feels like I’ve kind of let him down as a fan, since I haven’t heard a lot of his post-2000 work beyond snippets here and there, but then I stop and re-cast that as seeing it as a gift to myself: I have many hours of new John Williams music to hear.
Below is the text of the post I wrote on this date a year ago, when Williams’s birthday coincided with Thursday so I was able to use it as the genesis of my weekly Something For Thursday music post. I’m reposting it now, because Williams is great on ANY day of the week!
Here is a wonderful tribute by the author of a forthcoming biography of Maestro Williams, and here below is my post from a year ago.
John Williams turns 93 today…and he’s still working.
In his honor, let’s listen to some of his work!
Williams won a Grammy just the other night for this: “Helena’s Theme” from Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. It’s a typically gorgeous theme that manages to evoke Marion’s Theme from all the way back in Raiders of the Lost Ark without echoing it or quoting it.
Here’s something that vexed film music fans for years: the unavailability of the End Credits music that actually was heard in the film of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. The suite that appeared on the album was nice enough, but the film version is longer, quoting several of the movie’s themes as the last scene in the Indian village plays out. And when we finally go to credits and the Raiders March fires up, it actually fades out in the repeat (at the 3:32 mark) so that we can here a brief quote of Short Round’s Theme. Williams’s ability to put seemingly disparate themes together into an actually cohesive whole is always amazing.
Going back even farther, here’s one of Williams’s earliest contributions to film music: his score to the law-school drama The Paper Chase. Yes, it sounds a bit dated, but you can absolutely hear the fingerprints of the Williams-to-come in this cue, the End Credits suite from that movie:
It’s the lot of most film composers to have to turn in really good work for movies that…aren’t. Hook is, for me, one of the few misfires in Steven Spielberg’s output; it fell in that weird late 80s-early 90s era when Spielberg hadn’t really transitioned into the finer drama work that was to come, but you could tell that his heart wasn’t entirely in the magic-and-fantasy flicks he was still doing. But along comes Williams with this amazing score, and this almost perfect tone-poem-in-miniature:
When Williams’s score to 2002’s Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones arrived, a lot of people were a bit befuddled by that score’s mix of darkness and lyrical love music. One person quipped on some message board or someplace, “It sounds like Nixon on a date.” That was pretty funny, but it seemed to highlight the fact that Williams’s score to Oliver Stone’s Nixon has never been particularly beloved. And that interests me, because I have always found it one of his most fascinating scores. He brings just the right blend of paranoid darkness and throwback Americana to Stone’s film (which I consider a masterpiece). Nixon has some of Williams’s most powerful and most overlooked music.
I do have to make an admission: I’m not always a big fan of Williams when he is scoring comedies or really light movies. For whatever reason, I always feel better when there’s a tinge of darkness in Williams’s music. (I can live quite happily without hearing Home Alone again, to be honest.) But in this wonderful march for Spielberg’s early big-budget misfire 1941, you can tell that John Williams has his tongue firmly planted in his cheek. This is absolutely delightful.
I’ve never seen Seven Years in Tibet. I couldn’t even tell you right now what it’s about without Googling it, other than…a guy is in Tibet for seven years. But I love this theme:
Finally–and I’m only ending this here because let’s be honest, I could go on a lot longer about John Williams and how much he’s meant to me and to my creative life throughout my years, but I actually have to eat dinner tonight–here’s a suite of another of what seems to me an underrated score, which is all the more surprising to me because every time I listen to it, I’m dazzled anew by how new this sounds, even for a throwback score. It’s Catch Me If You Can.
Buddy Holly died February 3, 1959, 66 years ago. That’s an entire lifetime, almost…possibly several lifetimes. Had he lived to this day, he would be 88 years old, certainly not outside the realm of possibility.
And he didn’t die alone. Richie Valens, born just three months before my mother, would be 83 now. The Big Bopper was the “old man” of the group who got on that plane; he’d be 94 now had he lived.
I went to college just an hour or so’s drive from Clear Lake, IA, where those three men boarded a small plane to make the journey to their next tour stop, and where the plane crashed in a field just a short distance away. The lore surrounding the crash–Valens “winning” his seat on the plane in a coil-flip, bandmate Waylon Jennings wisecracking to Holly about the plane crashing (a comment that would haunt him the rest of his life)–has taken on a life of its own over the years, especially the sense of what rock music history might have been had those three artists continued.
Certainly popular culture has never forgotten that moment. The sense of a world shifting informs all of George Lucas’s amazing American Graffiti, a world shifting when it had never settled in the first place. A biopic of Valens, La Bamba, came along in the 80s, introducing the world to Lou Diamond Philips and giving the band Los Lobos its biggest hit, a cover of the Valens title tune. (I remember the film’s rather heavy-handed plane-crash imagery throughout, which led Roger Ebert to note that the film’s version of Valens would have been surprised to not die in a plane crash.)
I never made it out to the crash location, which is like many such places a pilgrimage spot. I know that since it’s in the middle of a field you can’t just drive up to it; you have to park and then walk in. It’s a corn field, though, so it’s all straight lines. Just east of the crash site, Interstate 35 lies. I don’t know if you can see the site from that road, but I’ve driven by it quite a few times. It’s quite a thing, isn’t it–one of the most somber moments in the history of popular music is now the kind of place where a roadside historical marker stands.
The biggest cultural artifact of that awful day in Clear Lake, IA, is probably the eight-minute long masterpiece of impressionistic lyric energy that Don McLean penned about it. I don’t know if McLean coined the phrase “the day the music died” to refer to the February 3 crash, but that phrase has certainly come to mean that horrible event. The song unfurls in a wave of impressionistic verse that has had people scrambling to figure out the inner meanings ever since the thing came out in October 1971 (making it probably the first significant work of art of my lifetime!). McLean has resisted confirming any specific meanings for the various persons or events referenced in the song, though he has admitted some of the symbolic meanings contained within. The song is lyrically dense and eternally fascinating. It’s been present pretty much my entire life, and I honestly don’t remember a time when I wasn’t at least passingly familiar with this tune about the guys in the Chevy down by the levee, drinking whiskey and rye. It wasn’t until the 90s that I really started to dig into the song and learn its words. I’ve always resisted all the “meanings”, including the insistence in the late 90s and early 00s, bolstered by an email chain letter (remember those?) that the plane was actually named “American Pie”. It was not.
I even have my own personal “mondegreen” with “American Pie”: late in the song McLean sings, “As the flames climbed high into the night, to light the sacrificial rite….” I have always heard that as “As the planes climbed high into the night”, and you know what? I think that works. I’m gonna stick with it.
I’ve been very good about not buying lots of books over the last year, preferring to actually read through my personal library and supplementing with stuff from the Buffalo and Erie County Public Library.
Yup, that’s what we’re calling this series now: Tuesday Tones, because it’s still going to be a music focus series, but it won’t just be tone poems. Not that it was before, really, because if there’s one thing I like to do, it’s put up boundaries for myself and then immediately break them, because boundaries are only fun when you’re breaking them, right? (I’m still going to use the “Tone Poem Tuesday” post tag, because my tags on this site are already out of control and adding new ones isn’t a great idea unless I really need to.)
Anyway, let’s listen to some music.
Wood Notes by William Grant Still is an orchestral suite of four movements: “Singing River”, “Autumn Night”, “Moon Dusk”, and “Whippoorwill’s Shoes”. The work was apparently inspired by poems by one Joseph Mitchell Pilcher, though I have as yet been unable to track down his actual poetry. The naturalistic writing in Wood Notes calls to mind similar approaches to depicting nature in music as Smetana’s Die Moldau, though the musical language here is pure Still, mingling the sound of spirituals with a decidedly American idiom.
I’ve just drafted a letter that I will be printing out and mailing to my Representative tomorrow. I will be doing a lot more of this, and when I do, I will share the texts here. I have plans already to write similar letters to my two Senators.
Dear Representative Langworthy,
I am a constituent of yours from Orchard Park, NY. I have lived here since 2003, and in Western New York since my family moved here in 1981. I am writing to you today to express my deep dismay at the levels of power and access to our Federal Government’s financial infrastructure that the current Administration has apparently given to Elon Musk.
Mr. Musk has been very active since the President took office, and just over the last few days he and several underlings were apparently given full access to the nation’s payment systems by the Secretary of the Treasury. Mr. Musk has apparently taken it upon himself to demolish an entire government agency, USAID, which was created by an act of Congress and which presumably can only be legally ended by an act of Congress. He has also assumed control of the mechanisms for the Federal Government’s financial expenditures, which is a power that our Constitution gives to the Congress alone.
It is difficult to know what part of all this is the most alarming. Not only do Mr. Musk’s actions, which are assumed to be endorsed by the President, constitute a usurpation of power by the Executive Branch, but it also does so in deliberate and flagrant violation not just of existing laws but also our Constitution, which I have been led to believe you hold dear. Mr. Musk has been subject thus far to absolutely no Congressional oversight for his actions or of those under him, and for that matter, Mr. Musk now occupies a position of invented authority that was invented out of whole cloth, with no advice or consent by the Senate through the standard confirmation process.
Our nation’s government was constructed with many mechanisms designed to prevent the unwise concentration of power in one branch over another. My fear is that you, and others in the Congressional majority, are actively ignoring those mechanisms and choosing not to employ them in any way, in what is a de facto endorsement of the concentration of power in the Executive Branch, at either the President’s behest or at that of servants like Mr. Musk.
It is my hope, as a constituent of yours, that you will recognize the unacceptable degree of power-seizure that the President and Elon Musk have been carrying out, and that you, along with your colleagues in the United States Congress, will exercise your powers as lined out in the pages of the United States Constitution, to prevent these gross excesses. I do not wish to live in a time when concepts like “checks and balances” and “separation of powers” are judged to be quaint anachronisms, discarded in the dustbin of history in favor of what is clearly an advance of authoritarianism and a seizure of power by the current Executive Branch.
Thank you for your attention.
I’ve no idea what kind of response this will get. We’ll see. I feel I have to do something, and this is a start.
I’ve just watched a wonderful documentary about the world of rare and antiquarian booksellers, and you can watch it, too! It’s quite a wonderful film that sheds light on the mindset of people who collect rare books, people who sell them, and why they do all this. There is also some skepticism about the reading future, in this time of electronic devices and bad attention spans, but…well, if books are going away, I hope they wait until I’m gone to do it.
The title of this post comes from this poem, which is recited at the end of the film.
Bills fans in Highmark Stadium. Image found on Facebook.
I don’t blog about football much at all anymore, obviously. I used to be the kind of obsessive football fan who watched every down of every game the Buffalo Bills played, and then I’d write an extensive blog post about the game after. By the time I was blogging, the Bills were mostly not very good, and most of those posts were post-mortems for a loss. Eventually I stopped watching the games entirely and I almost never blog about the Bills anymore.
So this post is not going to be a resumption of regular Buffalo Bills content. However, I just have to say something about the season that ended last weekend with yet another colossal disappointment at the hands of the Kansas City Chiefs. The AFC Championship Game wasn’t quite as galling a defeat as the infamous “Thirteen Seconds” game from three years ago, but it’s pretty close, and yesterday at work I overheard on the radio one of the local sports talk guys hinting that the community may soon be done talking about this one. I scoffed at that, noting to a friend that locals will be dissecting this game all the way up to kick-off of next season’s opener. Hell, we’re still talking about Thirteen Seconds.
Hell, we’re still talking about Wide Right.
So, here are some random and uncollected thoughts about the game and the season that’s now over:
:: This year was supposed to be a temporary step back for the Bills as they reloaded and spent time developing some young players into hopefully the core of the next sequence of contending teams. A bunch of the core players from the last few years of constant Super Bowl contention parted ways with the team due to age or money, and those that remained are noticeably on the tail end of their careers. The Bills have a bunch of very promising young guys coming up, but the overwhelming feel was that the Bills would have an “off” year this year. Preseason predictions of a 9-8 season, missing the playoffs entirely, were common. The Jets and Dolphins were both popular picks to win the AFC East. Instead, both of those teams sucked and the Bills roared to a 13-4 record, winning the division easily as a lot of those “not ready yet” players stepped up.
Given that, and the fact that the Bills have a lot of picks in the upcoming draft and they’ll have some more salary cap room to play with (for several reasons I’m not bothering going into, their cap situation this season was not ideal), it’s not at all hard to see the Bills managing to improve their already talented roster for 2025. It’ll take some time, but eventually the sting of the AFC Championship Game will give way to the brightness of the future.
:: So, what do they need to do in the offseason? Well, everybody’s got opinions. Here’s mine: the offense is mostly fine. Maybe a true “Number One” receiver could be added, someone to reliably make the big plays and attract the double teams that allow the rest of an already-talented receiving corps to step up even more than they did this season. Basically, they could use Stefon Diggs 2.0, a younger version of the Diggs they had in 2020 and 2021. (Not so much the 2023 incarnation, whose production tailed off and who was notably cantankerous on and off the field.)
There’s been a lot of kvetching about how to “fix” the offense so it can beat the Chiefs, but thing is, the offense is good enough to beat the Chiefs. They’ve beaten the Chiefs in the regular season matchups each year over the last few seasons, and while yes, they’ve gone on to lose to the Chiefs in the playoffs, in those last three games they have scored 29, 24, and 36 points each. Yes, in each game they got fatally outscored, but those numbers do not paint the picture to me of a team that needs more firepower. And besides, historically the NFL team that has the most scoring firepower in the regular season often ends up getting beaten eventually in the playoffs or in the Super Bowl because at some point defense actually becomes important. Remember that Broncos team that scored something like 947 points in the regular season and then got smoked in the Super Bowl by the Seahawks by something like 48-8? Or the “Undefeated Patriots” who piled up points at will in the regular season and then got held to 14 points in the Super Bowl by the Giants? So yeah, I’m skeptical about the whole “Put all the eggs in the offensive basket” approach.
So obviously, I think the defense needs the most attention. This year the D lived and died by the created turnover, which is never a confidence-inspiring thing. The pass rush was generally inconsistent, and the linebackers were often banged up. The secondary did what it could, but eventually the injuries piled up there, too, and even a good secondary is going to have a rough time if the front seven aren’t rushing the passer. A lot of people want the secondary improved, but my personal focus would be the front seven. Add a couple pieces to the D-line, particularly a solid and consistent edge rusher, and maybe another linebacker.
For people who say that the way to win is to pile up offensive talent, I point to the Chiefs themselves. They were a score-score-score kind of team the last few seasons, but this year they shifted to a more defensive philosophy, which yielded a 15-2 season, and yet another Super Bowl appearance, in a year in which they scored 30 or more points exactly twice all year.
And another way to look at it is this: improving on defense can actually help your offense score more, by virtue of taking pressure off the unit to score every time and by giving it more chances to take the field.
:: It needs to be noted that the 2024 Bills were really, really good. They set all manner of team records. There’s no need for a major re-tooling here. There’s always a danger in thinking otherwise, especially when it’s the same team that seems to be eliminating you each and every year. But aside from the 2022 season, when the Bills just ran out of emotional gas after the Damar Hamlin injury and got thumped at home by the Bengals in the playoffs, each playoff loss comes down to just a couple of plays that could have gone the other way, or just a couple of instances where a shift in tactics might have produced a winning result. I don’t envy trying to figure out how to “get over the hump” when you’re just that close to doing it.
:: I have no idea how to solve this problem, but it seems like the Bills’ defense is an injury-riddled M*A*S*H unit every year at playoff time, while everybody else is getting healthy for their Super Bowl run.
:: And then there’s the officiating. Yeah, the NFL has a problem here. No, I don’t believe that the NFL is “scripted”, but there’s a definite sense to which there’s a thumb on the scale. Calls are made for the Chiefs that aren’t made for anyone else, or vice versa, and situational calls almost always seem to favor the Chiefs. The Chiefs know this, too; there was a play in last week’s game where the Chiefs got a big catch, and the Nationally Beloved Travis Kelce came running in after the play to get in the face of one of the Bills’ defensive backs for some taunting. It was incredibly obvious taunting, too…but no penalty flag was forthcoming, until another of the Bills got in Kelce’s face to tell him to knock it off, at which point Kelce threw up his arms and flopped to the ground on his back, as if he’d been clobbered (which he hadn’t), and then the refs tossed the flag. Against the Bills. That kind of shit is supremely irritating, and the Chiefs are widely known to engage in flag-baiting. And there really does appear to be an unwritten NFL policy of “When the Chiefs ask for the flag, give it to them.”
I saw a commentator on Tiktok at some point this week (sorry, I can’t remember who), who made the point about the officiating this way, roughly paraphrased: “Take away this contested catch that was awarded the Chiefs, or that first down which was denied the Bills. Take away all those specific calls, and you still have a problem, because in this game you had one team whose defense had to play with the feeling that they were not allowed to hit the other quarterback, and another team whose defense played knowing that they could hit the other quarterback with impunity. If the NFL doesn’t think that’s a problem that needs to be addressed, I don’t know what to say, other than, I’m glad I’m not watching the games anymore.
:: I wonder: do the Bills have to beat the Chiefs to be taken seriously at this point? If they go out next season and somehow end up winning the Super Bowl but their playoff run somehow does not include Kansas City, how much downplaying of their championship will end up happening?
:: If there’s a more endearing out-of-nowhere team-and-fan tradition than the entire stadium singing “Mr. Brightside” at some point, I don’t know what it is.
:: The mood surrounding this team this year has been absolutely infectious, and it’s easy to see why it hurt so many people so badly when it ended before it felt like it should have. This was probably the most genuinely likeable Bills team ever, and I don’t know if I’ve ever seen a pro athlete more adept at always saying the right things than Josh Allen. All of that said, I continue to wish that the Buffalo Niagara region didn’t invest so much of its emotional well-being in the NFL team.
:: As noted above, I’m still not watching the games, and in general I keep the NFL at arms-length nowadays. To check out of football completely probably isn’t feasible, because I do still like talking to people and football is a major topic around here. I’m as suspicious of the NFL in particular and football in general as I’ve always been, though: the public money being used to build the stadium, the increasingly uncomfortable partnership between the NFL and the military (look, I get as excited as anybody for big military planes flying overhead, but every game now gets a flyover???), and the brain-injury thing isn’t going anyway (sometime in the next 20 years we’ll probably be reading some very sad news stories about Tua Tagovailoa). Not watching the games and investing 3 hours a week in closely observing the NFL has done wonders for my mental health. Even last week, when the score went final, I was able to say, “Well, they lost. Wanna watch another episode of Scrubs?”
:: Finally, there’s a thing you hear sometimes when your team loses in the playoffs: “Root for the team that beat your team, so you can say that at least your team lost to the best.” That’s where all of my old football (and sports in general) fan mindset comes out, because screw that. I want the team that beats my team to get the shit kicked out of them, as quickly as humanly possible. So, as I think they say in Philly, Fly Eagles fly!
And it might just happen. I don’t know that the Chiefs have faced a team as balanced as the Eagles all season, and that sadly includes the Bills.
:: More finally, pitchers and catchers report for the 29 teams of Major League Baseball (and their AAAA affiliate Pittsburgh Pirates) anywhere from 8 to 12 days from this writing. Play ball!
:: Oh, and last finally, I’m officially sick of the Kelces (both of them) and I wish they’d go away.
I spent part of my lunch period at work today watching this video that applies thoughts on life and art and work by Hayao Miyazaki to photography. I will be returning to this one.
Letters to Congress, one
I’ve just drafted a letter that I will be printing out and mailing to my Representative tomorrow. I will be doing a lot more of this, and when I do, I will share the texts here. I have plans already to write similar letters to my two Senators.
I’ve no idea what kind of response this will get. We’ll see. I feel I have to do something, and this is a start.