Top Five Sporting Events That Didn't Make Last Week's List

1. Super Bowl
I'd rather watch the Super Bowl at home than in person. It's hit-or-miss (usually miss) whether the game is any good, and the pre-game and halftime entertainment is predictably awful, so when you attend the game, you miss the two redeeming factors of Super Bowl Sunday: the commercials and the Super Bowl party camaraderie.

2. Final Four
What I love about March Madness is the sheer volume of basketball over the first two weekends and the guarantee of shocking upsets somewhere along the way. You don't know where and when the most epic games will take place, so you have to stay tuned at all times. By the time you reach the Final Four, things are anti-climactic. It's the only show in town, there are rarely any major surprises, and the basketball can be surprising dull. (George Mason getting to the Final Four was an amazing story. George Mason actually in the Final Four? Not so much.)

3. Kentucky Derby
You can praise the party scene all you want if your idea of fun is sipping mint juleps with Southern gentlemen in Colonel Sanders suits and their floral-hat-clad wives. But I won't go to an event for the spectacle unless the actual competiton is worth watching. A horse race that starts and ends in just over two minutes won't do it for me. (Especially when you consider that since the Derby is limited to three-year-olds, it doesn't even feature the country's best horses.)

4. Army-Navy Game
This rivalry is arguably the nation's most intense and it is certainly the nation's most respectful. The tradition, the pomp and circumstance, and the patriotism that stems from this annual matchup is replicated nowhere else in American sports. Too bad the football sucks. I can get similar quality by going to an Ivy League game.

5. Any MLB, NBA, or NHL Playoff Game
The rules of this Top 5 list state that I must select my event without regard to the teams who are playing and the location. Each sport's postseason produces several epic contests each year, but it's tough to predict when they'll occur, particularly if you don't even know which teams will be playing. The safest bet is Game Seven of the Stanley Cup Finals, which is always an intense, highly-spirited affair, but there is no guarantee that the series will even make it to seven games, so I can't choose it. If I can't definitively say, four months in advance and without knowing who's playing, that Game Three of the ALCS will be better than any other postseason baseball game that year, I'm not going to make it my choice.