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So what do you do when your favorite team doesn't make the championship game?
Some may root against their least favorite team in the match-up while others may watch for the pure enjoyment of sports. However, when it comes to the Super Bowl, unless your team has a chance of hoisting up the Lombardi Trophy that night, it comes down to two things: commercials and the halftime show.
This year the only play a Patriot made in the Super Bowl was flipping the coin so you can guess what was on mind? Pepsi, Budweiser and the Rolling Stones.
I do not plan on talking too much about the ads but needless to say Pepsi’s “brilliant” marketing plan flopped. To quote Adam Sandler in a Saturday Night Live skit “Who are the ad wizards who came up with this one?”
“Brown and bubbly” was all the Pepsi PR guys could come up with this year. They need to stop asking their children for help when they run out of ideas. I need a young Shaquille O’Neal warning me not to “fake the funk on a nasty dunk.” I certainly do not need Puff Daddy and his crew giving props to a Diet Pepsi can in a recording studio. Again...“Who are the ad wizards who came up with this one?”
Anyway…enough talk about the ads.
It seemed that after Aretha Franklin, & Aaron Neville hacked their way through the Star Spangled Banner, we would have to rely on our friends from across the pond to bail us out: The Rolling Stones.

So after a lackluster first half of football, the huge mouth and tongue symbol of the stones appeared on the field (how do they do that so quickly? It’s amazing). It was not too hard to predict “Start me up” as the opening song. It brought me back 11 Super Bowls ago when that song was overplayed during Microsoft Windows 95 commercials
(Did you know Microsoft gave the Stones $13 million for that song after R.E.M. singer Michael Stipe turned down the offer to use “It’s the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine)?” I think everyone should know that.)
The Stones may be before my time but for the first time ever (and I mean ever) I was excited about the halftime show. After Ciara (whoever she is) and Ashley Simpson (I really shouldn't know who she is) manhandled the past two Orange Bowls, I have been weary of halftime entertainment. Paul McCartney was great last year at the Super Bowl but I was not excited.
The Stones are a different story.
My memories of the Stones stretch all the way back to 1999 when “Hot Rocks, 1964-1971” was the only tape I listened to all summer. I am not sure where the tape is today and I have not listened to the Stones all that much since, but I felt it was worth waiting through two boring quarters of football to see them perform.
So the band, well into their 60s, roared through three songs. Singer Mick Jagger pranced around the big mouth, shaking his hips in his mini cut-off shirt and bouncing around like he has for 40 years.
After “Start Me Up,” some unintelligible talking from Jagger and a song that is not on “Hot Rocks, 1964-1971,” they catapulted into their predictable closer, “Satisfaction.”
At that moment, millions of viewers under the age of 22 sat back down on the couch after a bathroom break and a refill and said: “Do these old farts think they are cool covering Britney Spears?” that may not have been the whole case, but it's close.
Anyway, so far I may have bad mouthed the Stones a little bit, but here is why we need artists like them and McCartney doing halftime shows:
The Rolling Stones are easily the greatest rock band ever. If those endless lists of the all-time greatest albums and songs get anything right…it’s that the Stones usually make the cut multiple times.
For the most part these days, all the respect they deserve ends there. (See an article from Penn State's Daily Collegian.Click here.)
These days we do not remember who wrote great songs last year, not to mention the last 40. You could say it is sad that greats like McCartney and the Stones are only here because Janet Jackson put them there, but maybe that weirdly shaped spiked thing was a blessing. These are the greats and we are lucky to have their performances televised into our homes.
Was the Stones’ performance amazingly memorable? No, but knowing that the bricklayers of rock can still rock and are still represented should be a relief to all of us.
I don’t assume the Stones walked away last night empty handed, but the Stones are a part of our culture. Ciara and Ashley Simpson are not and they will never be. We need more artists like the Stones today, innovators with longevity that are professional artists and true representatives of who we are, were and going to be.
So I guess the saying is true when it comes to football halftime shows, “you can’t always get what you want…but you get what you need.”