The superbowl of the pittsburgh steelers and the green bay packers ended and over 90 million people watched this game in the United States.  That is an amazing number of people which was driven by the popularity of the two teams.  Nielsen Ratings calculates how many people watched the superbowl.  If you factor in how many people watched the game outside the US plus how many people watched the game online at p2p4u football sites,  I would guess that the total number of viewers is close to 300 million.  It is surprising that the ad spots for the superbowl did not increase dramatically or at least that the cost is not somewhat variable so that if there is a blowout audience then the cost could go up.

There were 10 football sites which were taken down online, seized by the US government ICE department which had previously posted links to football matches online.  This seizure was done a week before the superbowl and most people are guessing this was done on purpose.  A lot of these sites are back online now, just not using the .com or .net extensions and sticking to the .me, .tv, .eu, and .es extensions.  The reason for this is so that the US government cannot confiscate their domain names since those registries are run out of other countries, while the .com and .net extensions are run out of the US.

The Superbowl started out looking like a blowout when the packers jumped out to a 21-3 lead over the Steelers.  The Steelers managed a touchdown right before the end of the first half to draw within 11 points.  The second half went back and forth but the Packers never gave up the lead at all.  With about one minute and fifty seconds the Steelers got the ball back down by 6.  They could have had the opportunity to win the game with a touchdown drive.  But this drive had to start at their own 13 yard line after a 15 yard unecessary roughness penalty on the punt play.  This penalty has to be one of the dumbest penalties I’ve ever seen, given the situation… after all it is the Superbowl, you have 300 million people watching you, this is going to be the last drive of the game to win the game, and you decide to throw an elbow on the punt play and cost your team 15 yards.  If I was mike tomlin i would have kicked that player off the team and made him walk home that night.