There was probably some other sports this weekend, but c’mon – you know what we all watched …

- Last week, if you’d put money on the New Orleans Saints to win Super Bowl XLIV, it would have been considered a sucker bet or, at best, a sentimental bet. But today, it’s a winning bet after the long-suffering Saints defeated the Colts 31-17 last night in Miami. There will be a lot of talk about how the Saints uplifted the spirit of New Orleans, and that is a great thing that comes out of this game no matter who you were pulling for. But for now, let’s talk about who won the game – or, more importantly, lost it. Drew Brees has one of the greatest post-seasons by a quarterback, and the rest of the Saints did what they had to do to get their hands on the Lombardi Trophy. But to me, the real story of this game is the inexplicable performance by the Colts. This is a team built to win the big game, one that sacrificed the possibility of a perfect season to get to the big game – and once there, acted like they never arrived. League MVP Peyton Manning had a decent game statistically (with one significant exception), but the Colts played like a team more worried about not losing than winning – and that’s a recipe for disaster. Incredibly dull play calling by the Colts’ coaching staff led to field goals instead of touchdowns – and punts instead of first downs – and left the door open for the Saints. And the Saints came marching through …

- Football is a team game, but this more than most was a story of individual moments. There were good moments – Tracy Porter’s interception return to seal the victory, Sean Peyton’s decision to go with an onside kick at the beginning of the second half that left the Colts’ flat-footed and flabbergasted – and bad – Pierre Garcon’s drop of an easy pass on a crucial third down. But the one that will stick with me will be Hank Baskett’s flub of the aforementioned kickoff. Look, the reason you put wide receivers on the front line of a kickoff is for this very occurance – that’s why it’s called the “good hands team”. Baskett, better known as the guy who stole Kendra Wilkinson from Hugh Hefner, was a mid-season pickup by the Colts after getting dumped by the Eagles. After this gaffe, I think he’s gonna be looking for a job once again …

-  OK, let’s talk about the real game … the commercials.  For the last decade or so, the buzz before the big game has often been more about the commercials than the game itself – blame Apple and the original Mac commercial in ’84 for that, I guess.  But, much like the action on the field, the commercials seldom live up to the hype, and this year was no exception.  There were nearly 70 commercials during the game (!), but I’d say only a half-dozen or so were even memorable.  Some of my favorites were the Snickers commercial with Betty White and Abe Vigoda (who’s still alive – who knew?) or the Coke commercial with the entire cast of the Simpsons.  Both were cute in entirely different ways.  There were plenty of attempts to sell with a different cute (Megan Fox taking self-portraits in the hot tub, for example), but for me they fell short.  Same goes for perennial SB advertisers GoDaddy and e-Trade (the new baby sucks).  Among the big winners were Focus on the Family, whose Tim Tebow commercial was remarkably understated compared to the controversy it stirred up, and Toyota, who threw itself on its sword in a mea culpa commercial aimed at the largest audience possible.  Doubt that’s gonna save the stock value, though. The best of the bunch, though, has to be the one in which an entire trans-Atlantic love affair played itself out in the simple interface of a search window, reminding the world that no matter how much money Microsoft and Yahoo invest in hyping their search engines, when the world wants a question answered, it still “Googles it”.