First, let's get one thing straight about the Super Bowl. It was called that in the beginning because it was a game between the champion of the National Football League and the champion of the upstart American Football League. There was a lot of interest in the game because it involved two leagues that were bitter rivals.

The National League champions, as expected, won the first Super Bowl and the second, though I thought the American League teams were competitive.

A strange thing happened in Super Bowl III. The New York Jets, not the best AFL team in the regular season, beat the NFL champs, the Baltimore Colts, and a year later, in the fourth and final Super Bowl, the AFL Kansas City Chiefs scored an easy victory over the NFL Minnesota Vikings.

And then the American Football League ceased to exist, its teams joining the National Football League. The NFL and the media have kept the Super Bowl name alive ever since, but the over-hyped contest is actually the National Football League Championship game, which goes back to 1933.

UNFORTUNATELY, the 2026 game between Seattle and New England took a back seat to a controversy over the half-time show that starred Bad Bunny. That statement might be the most embarrassing thing ever said about the National Football League, which has turned its biggest football game of the season into a rather silly television event in which the intermission is three times longer than it is during the regular season.

Why this football game should be interrupted for a concert puzzles me. I have no quarrel with the performers who've been featured over the years. Neither have I had any interest in watching them. I tune in to watch a football game, not a concert staged in the worst possible musical venue.

What was great about 2026 is I switched to YouTube at halftime and watched highlights of the Winter Olympics. Getting these events in small doses was more entertaining than watching NBC's live coverage. Then I went back to football when when the game resumed.

AGAIN, I have nothing against Bad Bunny, though I was not impressed during my only exposure to him. That's when he was host of "Saturday Night Live" at the beginning of the 2025 fall season. However, he has many fans all over the world and, at the moment, is considered by some to be the world's most popular entertainer.

But Donald Trump and a bunch of right wing soreheads were so upset about Bad Bunny being selected for the Super Bowl halftime show that someone got the bright idea to organize an alternative event around Kid Rock. I know who he is, but have never seem him perform. From his visits with Trump, I'm left with the impression he's a professional idiot. Other performers in the alternative event were completely unknown to me, so there was no way I was interested in watching them.

(Speaker of the House Mike Johnson. who is Jughead to Trump's Archie Andrews, made an even more ridiculous suggestion for the halftime show. His choice: Lee Greenwood, the 83-year-old country singer whose hits are unknown to most of us.)

AS AN OLD FART — a very old fart — I'd prefer a much shorter halftime break at the Super Bowl, and fill that time with a marching band, with Texas A&M and Ohio State being my top choices, or the current champion from Drum Corps International, though their show would have to be re-arranged slightly to reach the crowd on both sides of the field.

(I also wish television coverage of college football games included halftime shows rather than in-studio analysis of first half action and highlight clips from other games.)

THE MOST ridiculous things about the Super Bowl are the prices charged for tickets. I hadn't paid attention to this aspect of the game until this year. Figures for Super Bowl tickets range from about $4,500 to $10,000 apiece. Anyone who spends that much to watch a football game is crazy or has too much money or both. Then consider the additional cost of getting to the game, at least one night in a hotel and meals.

That's why this game qualifies for a joke that has been around since vaudeville: First prize is two tickets to the Super Bowl; second prize is four tickets.

Football games, particularly the Super Bowl, are much better watched on television, and best watched at home. There you can mute the commercials and watch something else at halftime. You can't mute anything at the stadium.

OH YES, the commercials. When will media put to rest the myth there is anything special about commercials presented during the Super Bowl? Judged this year's best such commercial was a Dunkin' spot that featured Ben Affleck, Ted Danson, Jason Alexander, Jennifer Anniston, Tom Brady, and others. The thing is, this commercial wasn't particularly good. It was a corny spoof of "Good Will Hunting," and got by on star power, nothing else. It looked like it was thrown together in a hurry.

(I didn't listen to any of the commercials during the game and scarcely glanced at them because I was on my iPad during commercial breaks. I found the Dunkin' commercial on YouTube a day later after reading it was considered the best commercial. Apparently there was no competition.)

BUT BACK to Bad Bunny. Right wing rabble-rousers at Fox and the other propaganda networks ridiculed the singer's performance because it was done in Spanish. Wow! What a surprise!

Some of the nutjobs claimed a Super Bowl halftime performer should be a unifier, someone who brings us together. Someone who performs in Spanish to a United States audience is a divider, they said.

These whiners are people who support and worship Donald Trump, the most divisive president in American history, a man who insulted Bad Bunny in a lunatic post on his laughingly named Truth Social platform. He also called one of our Olympic skiiers "a loser" just because the athlete spoke his mind when asked how if felt to represent the United States.

Face it, folks, Rosie O'Donnell's description of Trump is perfect. He actually is Tangerine Mussolini, a would-be dictator and constant embarrassment. He seems determined to destroy our country, or, at least, tear it in two. And he won't be satisfied until his name is attached to everything. ("Welcome to the 2027 Donald J. Trump Super Bowl!)

MY RANT isn't finished. I believe the National Football League may be sowing the seeds of its own destruction by endorsing a gambling website and encouraging fans to bet on almost anything — what will be the next play called, how many touchdowns will certain player score, how many times will a commentator say "RPO," how many stupid questions will the sideline reporter ask?

(If there is a pro football gambling scandal, it will come as no surprise. It occurs to me it's not difficult to fix a game and it won't be done through the obvious players, like the quarterbacks. Just arrange for an offensive lineman to commit a few holding penalties or a defensive back to blatantly interfere with a pass receiver.)

Yes, gambling comes naturally; as such, it will always be a fact of life, but it's unseemly for a professional sports league to promote betting as a fun thing to do during a game.

BUT THAT'S the kind of muddled thinking expected from a league that put 32 teams into eight mini-divisions. That means the four National Football Conference South teams play only six games in their division and 11 games against other opponents.

Yes, the same is true in the other seven divisions but it was in the NFC South that no team finished the 2025 season with a winning record, yet one of them, the Carolina Panthers, qualified for the playoffs.

On both the professional and collegiate level there is a tendency to reward as many teams as possible, regardless of their competitive success (or failure). Thus college football team need to win only half of their games to receive a bid to a so-called bowl game.

No less than 68 college basketball teams are invited to participate in the NCAA's post-season tournament, though four of them will be eliminated in so-called play-in games that indicate indecision on the part of the selection committee. (I wouldn't be surprised if the NCAA starts handing out participation trophies.)

THE NFL isn't much better. No less than 14 of the NFL's 32 teams make the playoffs. (It's highly unlikely, but possible that an NFL team might someday make it to the playoffs with a 4-13 record.)

It would make more sense — at least to me — for the NFL to have four division of eight teams each. Teams would play 14 division games and only three non-division games. And only the top team in each division would advance to the playoffs, which would be over in two weeks.

There are many reasons this suggestion would never be considered, with the biggest being television, which provides the revenue that keeps big time sports in business. At the same time, sports are just as important to television, which needs games to fill their schedules, particularly on all of the ESPN channels.

THOSE OF US who watch sports events, whether in person or on television, have had to adjust. This is especially noticeable in college basketball where games that used to take an hour and 45 minutes now routinely run 30 minutes longer than that. One reason: There are media timeouts every four minutes during which commercials are shown.

Referee questions once settled with a jump ball are now decided on the sideline with refs watching television replays. Among the really big questions: Who last touched the ball before it went out of bounds? As one who played a lot of basketball, I believe it's much fairer to use a jump ball to settle this particular matter.

WORTH NOTING is a comment from announcer Mike Tirico during the Super Bowl when he said that among the teams in the NFL playoffs, the New England Patriots played the easiest schedule.

That points to something else that has lessened my interest in professional sports. Schedules in every major league sport make no sense. The fairest and best schedules were those in major league baseball before the two leagues expanded. In those days, each league had eight teams, and each team played every other team 22 times, with 11 of those at home, 11 on the road.

At the end of the 154-game season, only the best team in each league kept playing — in the World Series.

Now there are 30 major league baseball teams, 15 in each league, three five-team divisions within each league. I defy anyone to understand team schedules, which include interleague play.

Like any religion, every league in every sport expects its fans to believe without questioning. (Most messed up is the Atlantic Coast Conference with its football schedule. Miami didn't qualify for the conference championship, yet was one of the two teams in the national championship game.)

As the great Max Shulman used to write, I digress. The whole point of this piece is to put the Super Bowl in perspective and to say it just isn't right when the answer to the question — who won the biggest football game of the year? — is the name of the entertainer who performed at half time.