Wait, it's Super Bowl Week?

Some random ramblings about the Super Bowl, since I’ve been too much of a slacker to write about it until now:

1. Will Smith’s “Welcome to Miami” will be heard at some point in the evening. (it’s a softball, I know, but I’m just getting warmed up)

2. Peyton Manning probably feels like he’s Matthew Broderick’s character in “Project X” with as many questions as he’s had to answer about monkeys lately.

3. We will hear some variation of “Cover 2” or “Tampa 2” approximately 563,492 times on Sunday.

4. I can’t remember the last time the cities of the Super Bowl teams were this close geographically. Since it’s the Super Bowl, it probably won’t impact the ratings much, but can you imagine how annoyed the TV networks would be if, say, the White Sox played the Brewers in the World Series?

5. Everyone kept comparing Tank Johnson to Ray Lewis on Media Day, but where was Johnson’s Shannon Sharpe? I think the lack of vocal team camaraderie will cause the Tank to come out flat instead of flattening Indy’s O-Line.

6. I’m perplexed by the Colts being favored by a touchdown. Wasn’t the media perpetually enamored with the Bears’ defense? Didn’t Manning and Tony Dungy always choke in big games? The “experts” are down on things they've always been high on and vice versa, and it’s confusing the heck out of me. I need Chris Collinsworth to explain this to me while Sharpe and Jerome Bettis fake laugh in the background.

7. I would make some reference to Edgerrin James’s free agency timing and the location of this year’s Super Bowl, but he knows what he did.

8. The media has heaped more coverage on poor Dallas Clark in three weeks than he’s gotten the entire rest of his career combined. This, of course, leads into a game against arguably the best defense in the league at stopping the tight end. Does the combination of jinxing and horrible circumstances lead to Clark breaking an ankle running out of the tunnel, or will the sheer amount of bad mojo cause it to reverse its polarity and pave the way for our first-ever Super Bowl MVP TE? Are you taking notes, CBS pregame show?

9. You know those commercials where Peyton cheers for regular people at their jobs? Well, given the level of talent disparity between him and his Bears counterpart, Rex Grossman, I think MasterCard had better have the cameras rolling for every Chicago possession.

10. Would you trust a therapist named “Bruiser”? How about a chef called “Slim”? Are you interested in getting in the car with a taxi driver who goes by “Squints”? Or….well, anyway, if you don’t see where I’m going with this, then you obviously aren’t paying attention.

I suppose I should make a prediction, right? I’ll go by the extremely scientific method of picking the team I want to win and then making two numbers up for the scores. We’ll say…Colts 24, Bears 13.