A Super Bowl experiment

I have absolutely no intention of watching the Super Bowl this year. This may seem like blasphemy coming from the mouth of a 21-year old male, but it’s true. For one, I’m really not that a big of a football fan (baseball is my game, go Cubs!). But mainly, I just have too much work. Sad, I know, but it’s the truth.

So if I’m not going to watch the game, I figured I’d at least make a social experiment out of it. My goal: see just how long I can go without finding out who won the game. I predict I won't even make it to the end of the night, but if I make it a day, I’ll consider that an accomplishment:

SUNDAY

2:10 p.m.: I will start off this challenge by heading over to the library. What with a men’s home basketball game and Super Bowl preparations, I should have the place pretty much to myself. I figure this is the best place to hunker down and avoid sports for a bit.

6:30 p.m.: Well, the game should be starting now. I think I’m pretty safe in the library, only the nerdiest of nerds would be here during the Super Bowl (myself excluded of course).

6:58 p.m.: Almost 30 minutes into the game, and I’m about to leave the library. I’m only now realizing how hard this actually may be. I’ll have to stay off Facebook for fear of seeing a rogue status update. I definitely can’t look at any sports sites, or pretty much any Web sites for that matter (no yahoo, CNN, etc.) Essentially, I’m limited to the basic Google homepage and actually doing homework, not fun at all.

7:50 p.m.: It must be well into the game now. I made it back to my dorm, and so far so good. I kind of like this actually. One of the benefits of 50 percent of Americans simultaneously sitting in front of their T.V. screens is that there are no lines anywhere. I didn’t have to wait at all for a washer/ dryer (on a Sunday night!), and the lack of lines in the Great Hall made me feel like I had my own personal cook staff. I avoided The Loop for fear of seeing all those TV screens, but totally forgot about the big screen projector in the Great Hall. I managed to hum the theme song from “Doug” and didn’t catch anything about the game (for some odd reason that’s my humming song of choice).

9:00 p.m.: I think the game is still going on, but I can’t be sure. This is a lot harder than I thought. There is a watch party in the common room down the hall, and I can hear a lot of screaming. When I ran to the bathroom, I did overhear someone tell another person the score, but I don't know which team is winning, so I'm still in the clear.

1:36 p.m.: Extremely close call. The professor just started to talk about the Super Bowl in class. I literally jumped out of my seat and started to nonchalantly walk out of the room, humming away. But I could hear enough to know he had stopped. Too close.

4:30 p.m.: I’m heading off to Southpoint Mall to get a haircut. This has absolutely nothing to do with my Super Bowl experiment, but frankly, I really needed a haircut.

6:35 p.m.: The woman cutting my hair almost spilled the beans, but I survived. Also, watch out ladies, there’s a new shorter-haired Jacob in town, so be ready.

7:32 p.m.: It’s over. I'm sitting on the L2 floor of Perkins and I just overheard two guys talking about “how awesome the Steelers’ win was last night.” I gave them a sad look, but they must just think I’m a Cardinals fan. That was really anticlimatic. I was sorta hoping Ben Roethlisberger would bust into the room and scream "We won, YEEEEAAAAH" when the time came for me to find out who won. At the very least, a phone call would have been nice...

So that’s it. I didn’t even make it 24 hours. I really did my best too. I just read up on the game, and apparently it was a pretty good one. Oh well… I got some solid work done yesterday. The Super Bowl is just too big of a deal to avoid. Had I made it past the first day, I might have had a fighting chance of making this go for a while. But alas, no matter how I’d love to escape the commercial-commodity that is the world biggest sports event, I just couldn’t hide from the big bad Super Bowl.