I'm pretty useless when it comes to picking football games. Come to think of it, I'm pretty useless at baseball prognostication as well, and I spend about a hundred times more energy on baseball than I do on football. This is a weird Super Bowl, too. I don't have a rooting interest. I could be annoyed at Pittsburgh for beating the Bears in the regular season, but they also did me a huge favor by eliminating the Broncos in the playoffs. It's true that Shaun Alexander led me to a regular season title in my fantasy football league, but it's also true that I lost in the first round of the playoffs when some guy named Adalius Thomas randomly had a 17-point game. On a Monday night! (This was our first year of drafting and playing individual defensive players, something I can't really complain about as it was just as much my defense as Alexander that led to my 11-3 regular season showing. Yes, I totally knew Mike Vrabel was going to start catching touchdown passes every week.)

The Steelers kind of have a reverse lock thing working here. I haven't really read or heard a convincing argument for a Seahawks victory yet, but I haven't been looking that hard. I only watched one Seattle game all the way through the whole year, and that was that game against the Giants at home that New York had won about five times only Jay Feely (my fantasy kicker, by the way) kept missing game-winners. Pittsburgh on the other hand I've seen several times. They game-planned extremely well against the overpursuing Bears defense by running about two screen passes per set of downs. Their defense sure looked good against Indianapolis and Denver.

My gut feeling is that this game is a mismatch and the experts know it, only they hope by repeating over and over again that "it'll be a great game" this will somehow become true. Frankly the recent run of closely contested Super Bowls has been ruining the delicious irony of the most-watched annual American team sports event being year-in year-out one of the very worst actual displays of competition. Pittsburgh 34, Seattle 20 maybe?