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Even though a number of our employees are foreign-born and don’t know Peyton Manning from Lesley Visser (Peyton’s the one on the right, guys), we’re fired up about the Super Bowl. Don’t get your hopes up for any Trulia commercials during this year’s broadcast, though. With the average price of a 30-second spot at about $2 million, it doesn’t quite fit into our 2007 budget — unless the company is planning to fire me about 50 times.

You can, however, use our national heat maps to guide your predictions. Notice how Illinois is significantly “warmer” than Indiana on the map? This tells me that Indianapolis fans are more desperate for victory: heartbroken over their relatively low home prices, they’ve pinned all their hopes on Peyton. So I say Colts by three touchdowns.

Or take it a step further and consider the halftime entertainment: the artist formerly known as The Artist Formerly Known As Prince, who hails from Minneapolis, and Houston product Beyoncé Knowles. If you look at the recent price trends for their respective hometowns on our city guide pages, you’ll see that Prince’s turf is pretty much flat but Beyoncé’s is on a definite upswing. I don’t have space here to explain all the math, but the key takeaway from this analysis — and I think we’re all breathing a sigh of relief on this one — is that any potential wardrobe malfunctions are likely to befall Beyoncé and not the guy who once rechristened himself with an unpronounceable symbol. However, Prince is definitely the more likely of the two to pull up lame during the show: word on the street is that he’s got some serious hip problems and his body might not be able to muster the array of twirls and gyrations that a Super Bowl halftime show demands.

And let’s not forget the media frenzy. Both teams have to watch what they say to reporters in the endless interviews and press conferences leading up to the game. They want to avoid generating any “bulletin board material,” i.e. comments that indicate a lack of respect and are destined to be posted on the bulletin board of the other team’s locker room as a motivational tool.

Trust me, we’re no strangers to the war of words here at Trulia either, especially in the engineering department. Software bug reports often degenerate into juvenile name-calling and so-called “bug wars,” in which two engineers go back and forth filing a string of increasingly trivial bugs for the other’s code. We reach the end game when the bug reports have sunken to the level of “you misspelled ‘looser’ in that last bug you filed,” which might earn a response of “your mother never loved you.” (Seriously, Roger, I don’t even understand how that last one counts as a bug.)

After a particularly bloody bug-filing spree last month, we were instructed in no uncertain terms to follow the football players’ lead and restrict all future statements regarding coworkers to bland pronouncements of respect and sportsmanship. Crap like “I’m sure Edouard’s going to leave it all out there on the field in 2007, and so will I,” or “Jeff has put a lot of work into his mapping JavaScript and it shows — it’s an honor just to be mentioned in the same sentence as him,” or “I’ve got to hand it to Lawrence: he really took advantage of my mistakes and filed some great bugs today.”

But let’s be serious. Everyone knows that there’s no better feeling in the world than talking smack and then going out and backing it up. Tony Dungy should just come out and say what we’re all thinking: Bears quarterback Rex Grossman throws like a tyrannosaurus rex with a torn rotator cuff. Now, to uphold official Trulia blogging standards (and keep my job), I certainly won’t be making any similar comments about our competitors. But I will say this: Trulia knows that defense wins championships, and we’re just going to stay humble, keep our heads on straight, give it 110% and take it one game at a time.

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