If you don’t gamble and you’re not from New England or the Carolinas, then Super Bowl weekend might be tough to stomach. I’m looking forward to Sunday as a Patriots fan, but for non-New Englanders, it might feel like the second-coming of Colonial Inauguration.

Instead of being “super,” the upcoming weekend has turned into a hype-fest with lots of style and little substance – exactly like CI.

Watching the Super Bowl, your brain has to sift through hours of interviews, crowd shots, commercials, halftime shows and celebrity coin-flips, and the game gets lost. Sure, all of this eye candy is nice, but after a while you just want to watch a football game, not an endless series of Budweiser ads. CI is the same way. Picking a schedule and registering for classes are the most important parts of the weekend, but they too get lost because everything seems to center on group leaders jumping around and making noise. Registering for classes took five minutes – why did I have to deal with all the cheerleading?

But during the Super Bowl, I’d rather be watching the cheerleading than the annoying commercials. Admittedly, I watch the 30-second spots that cost $2.25 million apiece hoping that a few are actually amusing. But even the tolerable ones get overused. I understand that guys love football and twins, but enough already. Please bring back the Bud Bowl.

Remember the skits during CI? They clearly didn’t cost $2.25 million but were just as bad. The riveting sketches on “lack of sleep” and “bad roommates” felt longer than “Lord of the Rings,” but they didn’t have Liv Tyler. These skits were more painful than watching a girl in the Subway line take six minutes to choose between parmesan oregano and honey oat bread. Make up your damn mind, princess.

As for alcohol, you need it to make both bearable. At CI leaders warn you not to drink because you’ll get kicked out of school. During the Super Bowl you probably shouldn’t drink because it’s a school night. And yet, intoxication is inevitable.

Drinking, accompanied with good food, can make a horrible Super Bowl a much better experience. We order from Cluck-U chicken or other “fancy” establishments, and because delivery takes so long on Super Bowl Sunday, we also make our own food. But once the Super Bowl ends it’s back to George Foreman grilled cheeses, Domino’s and J Street.

Back at CI, J Street hadn’t entered my mind yet. Not that the food is that bad, as GW fed me delicious catered meals during orientation at fancy tables set up in the Smith Center. But when I got to school all that disappeared, and now I’m waiting 20 minutes for a crepe.

Now don’t get me wrong; orientation had a few fun moments. I met some nice, down-to-earth people and took a monument tour. Once in a while there are students who loved CI because they found someone to hook up with (but not with me, which sort of became a trend).

The trend for Super Bowls is a lopsided match-up. Eleven out of 37 Super Bowls have been decided by less than 10 points. If you’re playing the percentages, this year’s big game will be a blowout. If we’re lucky, the game will be like the Patriots-Rams or Rams-Titans match-ups in recent years.

Regardless of how close the game is, if the Patriots win by any margin, the New England GW contingent will celebrate like it’s CI all over again.