Rams get a Hollywood ending, a look at last night's commercials: 5 Things podcast
On today's episode of the 5 Things podcast: Rams get a Hollywood ending
The Los Angeles Rams are Super Bowl champions. Plus, Paste BN Sports' Gabe Lacques stops by to talk through last night's commercials, reporter Christine Fernando explores the lack of diversity on courts around the country, gun violence is getting worse on the anniversary of the Parkland shooting and education reporter Erin Richards tells us about a new school that offers teenagers money to skip college basketball.
Podcasts: True crime, in-depth interviews and more Paste BN podcasts right here.
Hit play on the player above to hear the podcast and follow along with the transcript below. This transcript was automatically generated, and then edited for clarity in its current form. There may be some differences between the audio and the text.
Taylor Wilson:
Good morning. I'm Taylor Wilson and this is 5 Things you need to know Monday, the 14th of February, Valentine's Day 2022. Today the Rams are Super Bowl champs, plus a lack of diversity on courts around the country and more.
Here are some of the top headlines.
- US officials continue to warn about a possible Russian invasion of Ukraine this week. President Joe Biden is urging Americans in Ukraine to leave the country.
- 15 year old Russian figure skater Kamila Valieva has been cleared to compete at the Winter Olympics. She previously tested positive for a banned heart medication.
- And Ivan Reitman has died. The filmmaker was behind a number of hits, including Ghostbusters. He was 75.
The Los Angeles Rams are kings of the pro football world this morning. They took down the Cincinnati Bengals last night 23 to 20. It's the franchise's first championship since the 1999 season when they were in St. Louis and their first Super Bowl win as the LA Rams. They did it off nearly 300 passing yards from quarterback, Matthew Stafford, who the team traded for this past off season, and a huge defensive performance, holding a high flying Bengals offense to only 20 points. They did that behind seven sacks compared with Cincinnati's two. Paste BN Sports Mackenzie Salmon has more from Los Angeles.
Mackenzie Salmon:
All-in to on top. The Rams are your Super Bowl 56 champions. All the pressure, all the expectations, all the gambles. The Rams signed, sealed, and delivered this organization's first Lombardi Trophy in LA, and its first since 1999. Conventional wisdom in the NFL says: In order to win, you have to build a team through the draft. The Rams said, "Nah, we're good." They treated first round picks as bargaining chips and turned the unknowns of the draft into known NFL superstar commodities, none bigger than Matthew Stafford. In year one in LA, he proves all his doubters wrong and wins his first Super Bowl.
Some in Detroit will likely celebrate this title as well. And it is now clear, Stafford always had this potential. He just needed the supporting cast around him. Odell, Von Miller, Jalen Ramsey, Cooper Kupp, Aaron Donald helped form a star-studded team perfect for Hollywood. While many dream teams fall apart, this one never did. And the glue holding it all together, Sean McVay. This time on the grand stage, he doesn't get out-coached, but becomes the youngest coach to ever win a Super Bowl title. The prodigy now becomes a champion and shows he can finish the job. And that is what this Rams scene will be remembered for, finishing the job and a gamble paying off.
Taylor Wilson:
You can find all kinds of coverage from Super Bowl 56, including what's next for the losing quarterback, Joe Burrow over at Paste BN Sports.
As we talked about over the weekend, Paste BN's Ad Meter was back for Super Bowl Sunday yesterday, as it has been for every big game since 1989. The survey tracks the most popular commercials that aired during the bowl. This year, Larry David and crypto exchange FTX made a splash.
Wheel Inventor:
I call it the wheel.
Larry David:
I don't think so. What does it do?
Wheel Inventor:
It rolls.
Larry David:
Yeah. So does a bagel, okay? A bagel you can eat.
Taylor Wilson:
And so did Anna Kendrick's spot for Rocket Mortgage.
Anna Kendrick:
Barbie really wants this dream house. It's got stunning views and a slide.
(Singing) Barbie's ready for fun.
Child:
So cool.
Anna Kendrick:
And Barbie found out about this dream house with an alert from Rocket Homes.
Child:
She did?
Anna Kendrick:
Well, it's a super competitive market. Everyone wants to buy the dream house.
(Singing) Better Offer Betty
Better Offer Betty:
I'll go 10 over asking.
(Singing) Cash Offer Carl
Cash Offer Carl:
Straight cash.
Taylor Wilson:
To break down some of the ads that were trending overnight and some that weren't, Paste BN Sports Gabe Lacques stopped by.
Gabe Lacques:
It's the big hits and the big misses that always cause a lot of ripples. Everybody was startled to see Larry David and a Sopranos reunion. And one thing I found kind of interesting, HBO advertised on the game, but some of it's... the greatest commercials featured HBO alums representing other products, which just, I guess goes to show you the power of that platform in terms of TV influence the last 20 years. But the big thing this year was, to me, the entry of cryptocurrency and sports gambling into the fray. And it's interesting you either want to flop big time or make a big splash in Coinbase, which only used a QR code superimposed bouncing around on the screen for an entire minute. That has been rather panned rather vociferously in the early ad meter returns that we've seen. Everybody on Twitter seemed to hate it.
But that said, that kind of goes to the no such thing as bad publicity. Tons of people surely clicked on the QR code to go to Coinbase, which of course sells Bitcoin. So we kind of looked at those things as kind of the leading trends going into this thing. And in the case of Coinbase, it certainly got a ton of attention and perhaps not all of it good. It's funny, we get older and you kind of see which celebrities still resonate with audiences. The thing that I found interesting was Megan Thee Stallion was one of the celebrities and she only appeared in voice and animated form for the Flamin' Hot brands of Cheetos and Doritos. But you saw a lot of old staples. Everybody loves Seth Rogen and Paul Rudd. They're kind of the good, funny guys of their generation you might say. A lot of old timers that kind of dovetailed with the halftime show. Dr. Dre is now in his fifties, that's kind of hard for a lot of people to wrap their arms around.
I would say probably 80% of the brands opted to either release a pretty significant teaser reveal who their celebrity is or release the commercial in full. And that was a really interesting trend. And a lot of it is, I guess there's two theories. One is the buzz and the familiarity that you can build up so that maybe it resonates better when it does come on TV. And the one person that watches the teaser can better explain it to the rest of the party goers. And then number two, a lot of people aren't as extremely online as we would think. So there's still plenty of element of surprise there. There may be a few real Super Bowl commercial nerds who will go out and seek everyone out and watch them and be well versed going into the broadcast. But I talked to Frito-Lay about this, and only 16% of their consumers said they plan to watch the commercials on social media, whereas 96% of them will plan to watch it during the game. So it feels like, oh, you're giving it all away when you see it on Twitter or on YouTube beforehand. But in fact, it's still, for the moment anyways, a pretty small segment of the people who actually watch the game.
Taylor Wilson:
Be sure to check out Gabe on Twitter. We'll post a link in today's episode description to his profile. And you can find out the winners and losers of this year's ad meter at 8:00 AM Eastern, 5:00 Pacific.
The Supreme Court has been getting a lot of attention about its historic lack of diversity, but most people's direct interactions with judges happen elsewhere in the country's 94 federal district courts and 13 circuit courts where diversity also continues to lag. Reporter Christine Fernando looks into it.
Christine Fernando:
So we do pay a lot of attention obviously to the US Supreme Court. But the experts who I was speaking with were emphasizing that people's everyday interactions with the judicial system happen elsewhere in the judicial system. So as you can expect, we're lacking diversity kind of throughout.
In 2019, more than 73% of sitting federal judges were men and 80% were white. At the State Supreme Court level, women held around 39% of the seats while just 17% of justices were black, Latino, Asian American, or Native American according to the Brennan Center. So that means that in 22 states, all Supreme Court justices were white. So clearly not too much diversity within the system as a whole, for sure.
But there's a lot of reasons why experts say that judiciary diversity matters. So one, having that diversity on a bench creates this larger range of lived experiences so that bench can better represent and better respond to experiences, perspectives that are often overlooked. So of course, included within that are the experiences of marginalized communities, including communities of color, including queer communities. Part of that is also that improving diversity on the bench improves public trust in the judicial system. So if someone walked into court and sees someone who looks like them, has had some similar experiences to them, they're going to have more trust that that person will understand the background and all the information that some judges might not see when it comes to their case. So improving public trust is a huge reason why experts say that judicial diversity is so important as well.
And then another reason is having a more diverse judiciary today can help create role models of judges from these marginalized communities who can help show people from their own communities that yes, you can strive to sit on this bench one day. So diversity now helps fuel diversity for tomorrow as well.
Taylor Wilson:
You can find the full story in today's episode description.
Today marks four years since the Parkland shooting. On Valentine's day 2018, a 19 year old opened fire on students and staff at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida killing 17 people and injuring 17 others. It's still the deadliest high school shooting in US history. But nearly a half decade later, the number of shootings on school grounds is reaching new peaks. There were at least 136 instances of gunfire on school grounds between August 1st and December 31st according to the gun control advocacy group, Everytown for Gun Safety. And that figure is nearly four times the average for that period since the group began tracking gunfire on school grounds in 2013. The data comes as overall gun violence has been on the rise as well during the coronavirus pandemic. More Americans died of gun related injuries in 2020 than in any other year on record according to the CDC.
A new school is paying teen basketball players a $100,000 to skip college basketball and instead train for the NBA. National education reporter Erin Richards explains what the school has to offer its students and how it got started.
Erin Richards:
Overtime Elite is a private school, a media conglomerate and a new basketball league that's an alternate path to pro basketball that students would take as an alternate to going to college and playing in the NCAA. And this got started because a digital sports startup called Overtime, which is based in New York, has gotten a lot of traction in the last few years running content from amateur sports players and viral videos of cool dunks and neat shots on the court. And they've amassed a huge audience of young fans on TikTok and YouTube. And now they've decided to start a school and a basketball league because it essentially lets them control their own intellectual property who are players. So these are teenagers between the ages of approximately 16 and 20 or 21 they recruited from the states. They can come from abroad. But the main gig is that they have to give up their NCAA eligibility to attend this school and to play basketball for Overtime Elite. And in exchange, they get paid at least a $100,000 a year in salary with performance bonuses.
In its first year, Overtime Elite, which is based in Atlanta and has its own media component to it. So in Atlanta, there is a corporate suite of offices within this big arena that these students practice in. And those folks are filming the students. They're putting up their athletic feats on the basketball court on all their social media channels. And in its first year, Overtime Elite has enrolled 27 players.
There's three teams at Overtime Elite. That means the teams play each other when they're playing their normal season of basketball. They also play other private schools in and around Atlanta. And in the future, Overtime Elite would like to grow that number of players because they think that they could actually prepare more young men for pro ball through this system. So they think that they could probably accommodate up to 40 or 50 players, which would mean that there would be a lot of internal games that these students and athletes would play in Atlanta, which you can go to as a member of the public. You pay seven bucks and you get to go to a cool sort of NBA junior style arena and see some really great high school and post high school basketball.
Taylor Wilson:
You can find more of Erin's work, including how schools are adapting to the pandemic on Twitter @emrichards.
And you can find new episodes of 5 Things seven mornings a week right here, wherever you're listening right now. Thanks as always to PJ Elliott for his great work on the show, and I'm back tomorrow with more of 5 Things from Paste BN.