A late-night clip to cleanse the palate. I figured we deserved eight minutes of football-related entertainment today after yesterday delivered zero.

Usually the day-after numbers on the audience for the Super Bowl are a wowzer testament to the event’s massive drawing power. This year it feels like a casualties list.

All told, when the final Nielsen numbers come in later on Monday, the game will likely come in a little under 100 million viewers.

The overnight household rating was 44.9, meaning that about 45 percent of all the households in America were tuned in to the game.

Last year the equivalent household rating was 47.4. The finalized total average was 103.4 million viewers.

The game topped 110 million viewers as recently as two years ago. Combine increasing fragmentation among America’s TV viewers, 20 years of Patriots fatigue among football fans who aren’t from New England, and one of the few games in NFL history that somehow managed to be tight the whole way and yet somehow also crushingly boring and you’ve got poison. The NFL should livestream every game for free next year to atone for serving up that pile of crapola.

A stoic Matt Whitworth put his team’s loss in perspective after the game, though, observing, “At the end of the day, we’re all gonna die.” True. Sometimes, though, you spend four hours watching something that makes you wish you were dead. Hopefully next year there won’t be a massive blown call in the conference championship games that makes the resulting garbage Super Bowl feel like karmic retribution.

In sum, I agree with POTUS: I wouldn’t let my son play football. Because I wouldn’t want him to risk playing in a game that bad.