If the Vikings hadn't fallen apart Sunday and beaten the Eagles in the NFC Championship game, there would have been a feel-good buzz to the team in the Super Bowl, if for no other reason than it would have been the first time the game would have been hosted by a team in the game.
If the Jaguars had held on to beat the Patriots,fans could have gotten behind a team that had been wretched for so many years before finally getting its game together.
Instead, the Patriots are playing the Eagles.
Did you see the back page of Monday's New York Post?
Here's what columnist Mike Vaccaro of the New York Post wrote under the headline of "Have we ever seen anything like this hellhole of a Super Bowl" "Yes, this is the worst-case scenario for just about everyone who calls our city, its boroughs and its suburbs home. If you are a Jets fan, you are soon to enter a second decade of Patriots Envy, being force-fed an unlikely dynasty in New England when, for the first 40 or so years of their shared existence, the Patriots were the Jets' annual cousins in futility. And, of course, Giants fans detest the Eagles in a way that's almost hard to describe given the fact the Eagles haven't won a championship in 57 years and the Giants have won four in the last 31. Yes, Giants fans dislike the Cowboys and they abhor the Redskins, and take great delight in beating those two division rivals."
And here's what some other people are saying:
Matt Citak, writing for the CBS website in Denver put it this way: "Do we get behind the Patriots, who are looking to tie the Pittsburgh Steelers for the most Super Bowl Championships in NFL history with six, and whose fan base has already begun planning the team's Super Bowl Parade in downtown Boston? Or do we support the Eagles, who, for the second consecutive week, had a fan of the team get arrested for repeatedly punching a police horse? New England, whose team is just a few seasons removed from the Deflategate scandal in which Brady and the Patriots were accused of deliberately under-inflating footballs during their AFC Championship win over the Indianapolis Colts? Or Philadelphia, whose police department was forced to cover the city's light poles with Crisco in an attempt to prevent its fans from climbing the poles following the game."
