My question for the Super Bowl halftime show has always been: what’s wrong with just giving us drumline/marching bands? Maybe the two best high school and/or college bands in the country doing some huge medley? The only reason to get a super popular performer for the halftime show is to attract viewers. But there are no commercials in the middle of the halftime show… so why does the amount of viewers matter? Do they think people who watched the first half of the Super Bowl won’t be sticking around for the second half if there’s no superstar performing at the half? It’s the Super Bowl. They’re here to stay.

My proposal: why not run all the movie trailers/teasers together in a big chunk during halftime (if you had a super-huge franchise like Batman or Harry Potter and you gave Super Bowl halftime the exclusive look at a teaser, you’d guarantee a ton of viewers), generate more money, and then have like ten minutes of marching band action? I think this is a sound plan that would bother far fewer people.

Of course, that idea is only available if they don’t want to try the even greater idea I suggested two years ago:

NFL Network/Films should produce a 15-minute (give or take) montage featuring a bevy of highlights that effectively summarize the entirety of this past NFL season. Get a good editor (NFL Films has always been good in that department), include a soundtrack of popular music (new or old, whatever), radio calls of big plays, sound bites, and whatever else and remind fans of all 32 teams what they did well, over the last 5 months (one of the rules would be that every team would have to be positively represented in the video, at least once — you don’t think Lions fans would’ve liked to see that one game-winning touchdown Matt Stafford threw with his dislocated shoulder on the night of the Super Bowl?). People LOVE the One Shining Moment (skip to 1:33 in that video) thing at the end of the NCAA Tournament and that thing has a terrible song and a majority of the footage features a bunch of unknown guys/teams that nobody even remembers. NFL fans are trying to not put a gun in their mouth, when they realize there’s only 30 minutes of football left before a 7 month drought — they desperately need a 15-minute, exciting, star-studded reminder of that which consumed their entire lives during this past fall. Who wouldn’t love this? 

After last night, it’s pretty obvious that the NFL Network clearly loves Arcade Fire (tough to argue with that) and everyone on Earth would get goosebumps at the end of the montage if “Wake Up” was blaring as we saw every great play from three different angles in glorious hi-def. EVERYONE. Barely anything even happens in this NFL commercial from last night but the slow motion and soundtrack makes it like the greatest gladiatorial opera of all time. I can’t figure out why this montage idea hasn’t been represented in some form (at halftime or otherwise). Plus, do you know how much money this would save the league? They’d have to pay to use the music (although I’m sure plenty of artists would volunteer their jams up for free, for that incredible exposure) but aside from that… the league/networks own the footage and the airtime. Have someone sponsor it (there clearly are no qualms with that sort of behavior — “The Season That Was, presented by Nissan!”) and bang, done.