Forget “The Lamest Super Bowl Ever” mantra that’s going around. Yes, it was a lousy game – but then most NFL games are lousy, over coached by timid sideline committees afraid that if they let the players do their thing a real football game might break out. Why should the championship game be any different? The reason most fans don’t realize how bad NFL football is because during the season you only care if your team wins or loses. In the Super Bowl, most of us are neutral, so the game’s basic flaws are exposed.

On the other hand, the game was probably just a couple of plays from being considered a classic. If Seattle had been able to score with about three or four minutes left to play, we would now remember Super Bowl XL as a classic, no matter who won, just because it would have had an exciting finish. And let’s face it, that’s all most of us remember about any football game: how it ended. If we’re excited at the gun, we remember it as a good game no matter how boring the first 50-odd minutes were.

What amazes me is how little real analysis is given to the game once the Lombardi Trophy has been presented. The World Series, even a dull one like last season’s, gets analyzed down to the last pitch. But with the Super Bowl, between cable TV and talk radio, everyone shouts rhetorical questions for a day or two and the real issues get lost. Here are four big questions the Big Game game that, to my mind, have not been satisfactorily answered.

1. Where did you go, Shaun Alexander? I searched the TV recaps and all the major papers and web sites in vain for anyone who asked the question “Why didn’t Mike Holmgren call Shaun Alexander’s name more often?’ I’m baffled both by Holmgren’s game plan and the media’s reaction (or lack of a reaction) to it.

In the first half, Alexander had just 10 carries for 31 yards, which isn’t much, but no running back is going to get a chance to swell his stats without being given the opportunity. Alexander finished with 95 yards on 20 tries, with nearly everyone talking about how Pittsburgh “contained” him. Alexander’s average was 4.75 yards a rush, a shade off his 5.1 season average. This is actually very good, considering he was playing against what could be called the NFL’s best run defense.

And yet, Alexander, the best running back in the NFL, was given just one third down carry in the entire game. Nor did the Seahawks try to establish the run with him in the first half, though they were leading through most of the first and second quarters.

Bear Bryant used to say “Don’t take your best player out of the game. Make the other team do it.” The Pittsburgh Steelers didn’t put a clamp on Shaun Alexander, his own coach did.

2. Does this Super Bowl put Bill Cowher in the Hall of Fame? A better question would be, “Why did Bill Cowher need this Super Bowl to make his Hall of Fame credentials obvious?” Cowher has now been with the Steelers for 14 years, having replaced Chuck Noll as head coach in 1992. We’re still hearing, “Bill, you’re no Chuck Noll” complaints. It’s time to put those to rest.

The truth is that there is a lot of objective evidence that Cowher is not merely Noll’s equal, but his superior. Noll’s record in 23 seasons was 193-148-1 for a win percentage of slightly over 56%. Cowher’s regular season record is 141-82-2 for just about 63%. The real edge for Noll, of course, is those four Super Bowl rings and his 16-8 postseason record. (Cowher is now 12-9.) But when the core of your lineup consists of Terry Bradshaw, Franco Harris, Rocky Bleier, John Stallworth, Lynn Swann, Mean Joe Green, Jack Ham, Mel Blount, et al, you ought to win a few Super Bowls. Cowher, in an era of free agency and salary caps, has never enjoyed a roster with that kind of talent. At the end of the 1995 season, Cowher took a Steelers team to the Super Bowl with a quarterback as bad as Neil O’Donnell at the helm; this season, despite losing playmaking receiver Plaxico Burress to free agency, he guided a team to Detroit with a 23-year-old quarterback – who is now the youngest starter ever to win a Super Bowl.

Cowher’s Canton credentials should have been obvious no matter the outcome of this game.

3. Did the referees steal the game? I don’t know whether Shannon Sharpe or Tommy Jackson started this, but you started hearing it about half an hour after the game was over and all day yesterday on talk radio. The culture of complaint in sports is too much with us, and it’s accentuated these days by the number of camera angles and replays – not just after, but during a game.(We no longer get shots of coaches and players conferring on the sideline because all of the available time goes to rerunning controversial plays – over and over and over.)

Yes, Seattle got screwed with a couple of those calls – Matt Hasselbeck’s flag on Ike Taylor’s interception return was the first time I’ve ever seen a quarter back called for an illegal hit. But penalties, if they are just bad luck, are also, to paraphrase Branch Rickey, the residue of design. Did you ever notice how the sloppiest teams – and Mike Holmgren’s teams have now played three sloppy Super Bowls, even the one they won in 1997 – wind up with the most penalties? And is anyone going to seriously argue that a receiver pushing off a defensive back in the end zone, as Seattle was called for in their crucial fourth quarter drive, isn’t a serious error in judgment?

Probably the most important call of the game, and one that received little notice, came in the final period when the Seahawks would have had a first down at the Steelers 2-yard line but were called for holding, which backed them up 10 yards and left them with a first-and-20. On the ensuing play, Hasselbeck was sacked for a 5-yard loss, and two plays later, Taylor picked off Hasselbeck’s errant throw, so you could argue that the holding call – dubious, at best, if you saw the replay – was the real killer.

But not making careless errors, which the Steelers largely refrained from doing (just three penalties for 20 yards to Seattle’s seven for 70), is as important as making the big plays, and the Steelers also made the big plays (with three plays counting for 155 of their 339 yards), while Seattle didn’t.

It isn’t merely that good teams tend not to get penalized while lesser teams do. It’s also that the best teams are frequently defined by their inability to avoid such penalties. The flags dropped on the Seahawks simply highlighted the mental fog they played most of the game in despite their talent. At the end of the first half, Holmgren, his staff, and Hasselbeck managed to waste 21 critical seconds on their final possession, not only costing them a possible shot into the end zone, but leaving them without a chance to make a quick pass and set up a decent field goal try instead of a failed 54-yard attempt. They did it again in the fourth quarter, dawdling away perhaps two full minutes on their last two possessions. A team so unfocused in key situations doesn’t need the referees’ help to lose.

4. Why the Stones? “We could have played this one at Super Bowl I,” snickered Mick Jagger while introducing “Satisfaction” during the half time show. Yes, they could have, and the amazing thing is that it would have been an oldie even then.

Ask yourself this question. Is asking the Rolling Stones to play at the 2006 Super Bowl the same thing as asking Al Jolson (had he been alive) to play at the first Super Bowl in 1967? And yet, and yet … Who else would have been appropriate? The fragmentation of the rock-pop-rap audience along age and racial lines is so severe that it’s doubtful any artists who have been around long enough to establish a name could have pulled in a larger audience or even – and this is the scary part – a younger one.

Mr. Barra is the author, most recently, of “The Last Coach: A Life of Paul ‘Bear’ Bryant.”