Your Guide to the Big Game

If you’re just getting up to speed on Sunday’s Super Bowl between the New Orleans Saints and Indianapolis Colts, Jason Gay has the insider’s guide to America’s “overcooked spectacle” of an homage to ancient Rome:

• The overarching theme is disrespect. The Saints feel it because analysts are picking the Colts to win; the Colts feel it because “America has fallen in hot, slobbery love with the Saints,” Gay writes in the Wall Street Journal.

• Aren’t journalists being unethical in openly pulling for New Orleans? Yeah, but “you try coming to the first Saints’ Super Bowl after seeing the rapture on Bourbon Street two weeks ago and remaining prissily objective.”
• Is the Who’s halftime show generating buzz? Yep, but only among the retiree set “who grandly recalled The Who’s amazing halftime show at the Army-Navy game in 1924.”
• Who wins? “The Saints had magical forces on their side against the Minnesota Vikings a couple weeks ago. Why should anything be different on Sunday? New Orleans will complete its mission of cosmic destiny, and the French Quarter will rock like Rick James’s ghost.”

(More Super Bowl XLIV stories.)