At our house, we’ve been eating the fantastic chili left over from what we ate during Super Bowl XLIX.

There are other leftovers from Super XLIX, including speculation about Seahawks coach Pete Carroll’s inexplicable last play call.

NFL Nation’s Rob Demovsky asks WWMD:

Perhaps you’ve asked yourself what the Green Bay Packers would have done if they had been in the Seattle Seahawks‘ shoes at the New England Patriots‘ 1-yard line with the final seconds of Super Bowl XLIX ticking way.

Would coach Mike McCarthy have done like the Seahawks and called a pass play? Or would he have given the ball to one of his bruising backs, Eddie Lacy or John Kuhn?

History tells us either option would have been in play.

According to ESPN Stats & Information, the Packers had 19 goal-to-go plays from their opponents’ 1-yard line during the regular season. They threw the ball on 10 of them. On those 10 plays, quarterback Aaron Rodgers completed five passes — all for touchdowns.

On the nine runs, they scored five touchdowns. Lacy carried in six of those nine plays, and scored four times. Kuhn got the ball twice and didn’t score on either one. Rodgers took it once, on a sneak against the Detroit Lions in Week 17, and scored.

In the playoffs, the Packers had two more snaps with just 1-yard to go for a touchdown. They ran on both, and failed on both — once by Kuhn and once by Lacy. They came on consecutive plays — second-and-goal from the 1 and third-and-goal from the 1 — in the first quarter of the NFC Championship Game at Seattle. They tried Kuhn up the middle on second down, and the officials initially ruled he scored. However, upon further review from the replay booth, Kuhn was ruled down just short of the goal line. On the next play, Lacy ran off left guard didn’t come close to the goal line. On both plays, the Packers were in their jumbo package with seven offensive linemen, two backs and a tight end.

The Packers’ final percentages looked like this: Including playoffs, they ran the ball on 52.4 percent of their goal-to-go plays from their opponents’ 1-yard line and threw it on 47.6 percent of those plays. Their success rate was 45.5 percent when running the ball in those situations and 55.5 percent throwing it.

This is interesting, but an imperfect analysis because there was no comparable situation to having the ball on the opponent’s 1-yard line with seconds remaining. It seems obvious with one time out remaining that you have time to run the ball, and if, in Sunday’s case, Marshawn “Beast Mode” Lynch doesn’t get in the end zone, you can use your last time out and set up third-down and fourth-down plays.

The bigger issue to me isn’t necessarily passing instead of running. The Seahawks have a mobile quarterback in Russell Wilson. They could have run the read option with Wilson. They also could have (and this would have been my choice had I been in Carroll’s shoes) run a run/pass option play, where Wilson would roll out and, depending on what was available, run it in himself or thrown it into the end zone.

If you think you have to pass, the number one priority, with one time out, is do not turn over the ball. (If you don’t have a time out, that’s priority 1A; priority 1B is to make sure the clock stops, by going or throwing out of bounds.) So throwing the ball into the middle of the Patriots defense — which, remember, has only 11 yards to have to defend, the 1-yard line and the end zone — is the worst possible play call.

The Seahawks’ decision to pass instead of run seems even stranger when you consider that none of the Seahawks’ receivers are nearly as good as the Packers’ Jordy Nelson and Randall Cobb. Wilson may become as good a quarterback as Aaron Rodgers, but Wilson isn’t there yet. It’s hard for me to imagine Rodgers throwing the pass Wilson threw; he would have fired the ball into the seats instead of throwing into all those white shirts.

The Super Bowl now is watched almost as much for the commercials and halftime show (which featured a lion-ish-looking thing, which prompted the observation that that is the first time a Lion has gotten into a Super Bowl) as much as for the game. The Federalist picks apart two of those commercials:

1) Nissan “With Dad”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bd1qCi5nSKw

This ad was the first really bad one to air. It’s about a father missing all of his child’s milestones because he was at work (as a race car driver) and then showing up at the end in a shiny red car as if this makes up for it. To make matters worse, the ad used Harry Chapin’s “Cat in the Cradle,” as the music. That’s a song about how fathers too busy to be with their sons end up having sons too busy to spend time with their fathers. It’s horribly depressing.

If one assumes that Nissan has a goal of selling automobiles with this ad, one must assume that the ad executives thought they were portraying this absentee father sympathetically. And with 24 million children in America living in homes without fathers, this isn’t a great idea. The Nissan child wouldn’t even qualify as a child living in a home without a father, he just has a father too busy to spend time with him. But father absence plays a significant role in poverty, emotional and behavioral problems, infant mortality, incarceration, crime, teen pregnancy, child abuse, sexual abuse, alcohol and substance abuse, and educational lags. Showing up one day with a new red car isn’t really a solution to all of these problems.

The worst part of the ad? He doesn’t even let his son drive. Worst car ad ever.

2) Nationwide “Make Safe Happen”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dKUy-tfrIHY

Easily the worst of the Superbowl ads was Nationwide insurance’s ad about how your kid is going to die and it will be your fault and so you should buy insurance for when that happens. It’s just as bad as it sounds. A kid starts talking about how he won’t ever learn to ride a bike, kiss a girl or fly because he will be killed. And then it goes to the tub where he drowns. And the sink where he swallows a bunch of poison.

What’s the problem? Insurance is all about the fact that bad things happen in life, right?

Sure. But the tagline of the commercial is “Make Safe Happen” and Julia Roberts, I believe, says “Together we can make safe happen.” This is not true. We will never be safe and we need to understand that. Parents, in particular, need to grasp this. They are trying so hard to keep anything bad from happening to their kids that they’re willing to sacrifice any amount of childhood to obtain it. The very worst thing that could happen is for parents to become more obsessively concerned about keeping their kids safe from all risk. …

This helicopter parenting mentality is what causes Child Protective Services to be called when fully functioning children walk a short distance home from the park. This is what leads neighbors to fret over children mowing lawns. This is why playgrounds have become boring and why young adults know next to nothing about proper decision-making and calculation of risk.

This ad is everything that’s wrong with childhood in America. Although it did lead to some funny tweeting:

OK, that’s rather tasteless, but if it doesn’t cut too close to home to you, that would be funny. As for the Nissan ad (which some claim was misread), the use of Chapin’s maudlin dreck made me think of how Chapin died. Yes, a car crash, because Chapin was a legendarily bad driver and didn’t have a driver’s license during his last drive.

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