Pham Dinh Vien

February 4, 2007 would be the rainiest super bowl on record as the unrelenting southern Florida rain poured throughout most of the game. Super Bowl XLI would not only be remembered for the torrential downpours as much as it would for the history the game made in featuring the first Black coach to ever win a super bowl. Tony Dungy who lost his son James to suicide in 2005, became the first black head coach to win an NFL title.

Super Bowl XLI was held nearly 40 years after the first World Championship Football game in 1967. Super Bowl XLI featured the Indianapolis Colts and the Chicago Bears. Both teams had played in one previous super bowl of which they had each won. Facing off two previous champions, both with nearly equal regular season records seemed to make for an exciting and interesting game. However, the rain coupled with several missed opportunities, on each part of the teams, disappointed a lot of fans at super bowl XLI. A report from ESPN defined Super Bowl XLI, between the Indianapolis Colts and the Chicago Bears, as the worst Super Bowl ever.

A major disappointment according to many fans and sports writers was the fact that Peyton Manning was awarded the Super Bowl’s Most Valuable Player (MVP). Although many others felt he deserved it for his outstanding 10-year career, he did not live up to his record in Super Bowl XLI. In total, Manning completed 65.8 percent of his passes, but his quarterback rating of 81.8 was the worst of any Super Bowl MVP. He had one touchdown pass and one interception.

Another disappointment to the fans was the announcement by the NFL that tailgating would not be permitted. This was the first super bowl where the NFL stepped in to ban a time-honored tradition of partying outside the stadium during a super bowl. At first, a spokesman for Dolphin Stadium announced tailgating would be allowed, then a quick statement released a short time later by the NFL owners stated that there would be a ban on tailgating and that any non-ticketed fans would be prohibited within a two block radius of the stadium.

Probably the event that garnered the most outrage was the NFL’s attempt to prohibit churches from hosting super bowl parties during Super Bowl XLI. The NFL’s legal counsel sent a letter to the Fall Creek Baptist church in Indianapolis advising the church to cancel their planned super bowl party and to remove the super bowl logo from their website as it violates trademark law, and they could not use their projection screen to play the game. The NFL only permits one TV and it has to be less than 55″. This sparked an immediate backlash of bad publicity as churches all across the USA protested and newspapers began running the story. The NFL subsequently backed off and revised their policy.

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