How Pete Carroll saved Katy Perry's Super Bowl halftime show
He probably doesn't know it, but Pete Carroll saved Katy Perry's halftime show from being a daytime disaster.
Seahawks coach Pete Carroll didn't know it at the time -- and he probably doesn't care now -- but he saved Katy Perry's Super Bowl XLIX halftime show from being a disaster.
Thanks to Carroll's gutsy decision to get aggressive on offense with 31 seconds on the clock in the second quarter, the gigantic lion Perry rode in wasn't spoiled by the late afternoon Arizona sun.
Sports Illustrated has a fascinating look behind the scenes of Perry's intricate halftime show, but the biggest concern was Baz Halpin -- Perry's creative partner -- who realized during the first half that the mountain time zone was about to spoil every single scene and prop his team had prepared for Perry's show.
Because Carroll let Russell Wilson wing the ball (and eventually throw a touchdown), the sun was down when Perry entered the University of Phoenix Stadium field.
"We made darkness by something like 25 seconds," Halpin said. "For months and months, I never panicked. Then the game was so fast -- how did we not think about the sun? It was a miracle."
No joke here. There's a fantastic shot of the stadium just before Perry came out for the halftime show and the sky is still very much lit up.
The first half, by the way, FLEW by. Yours truly and a colleague were on a red eye out of Phoenix that night and felt comfortable about the timing because the first half moved so quickly. Al Michaels and Cris Collinsworth referenced the speed multiple times during the first half, probably much to Halpin's chagrin.
Perry's "The More You Know" tribute would've been an abject nightmare in the daylight.
Perhaps the tropical scene with the sharks would've been fine but Left Shark's sad look would've been completely obscured. Oh the humanity.
