Buffaloed by the Stupor Bowl . . .

\o7 What can be more exciting than the savage ballet that is pro football?\f7

--Lisa Simpson, age 8, on "The Simpsons."

The strategy. The action. The violence. The athleticism. The offense. The defense. The camaraderie. The cheering crowd. The spirit of competition. The huge television audience. The enormous financial stakes. The euphoria of victory, the agony of defeat.

Yes, the Bud Bowl has everything.

Everything except as much drooling hype as the NFL championship event that it annually shadows.

Actually, the two are soul mates. Run during the last several Super Bowls, Budweiser beer's once-a-year grating, cockamamie advertising campaign simulates a football game between Bud and Bud Light. The Super Bowl simulates significance.

Both the Bud Bowl and the Super Bowl are creations of Madison Avenue.

One of these days, some \o7 Wunderkind\f7 of advertising will get a bright idea and we'll see a swollen publicity campaign for the next ultimate championship game: The Super Bowl winner playing the winner of Bud vs. Light. And, if tradition serves, we'll fall for it.

The absurdity of the Bud Bowl and the fervor and inflated obesity of the Super Bowl itself (Sunday's CBS telecast begins at 3 p.m.) were captured magnificently on Thursday's hilarious episode of "The Simpsons" on Fox. The story found that football-watching slug Homer "bonding" with his 8-year-old daughter, Lisa, on Sundays--out of self-interest, as usual.

With precocious Lisa picking the weekly NFL winners, the usually hapless Homer was making an unaccustomed bundle by betting on the games. In addition to some grand parodies of Brent Musburger, Jimmy the Greek and sportscasting in general, "The Simpsons" presented its own version of the Super Bowl telecast, with the Redskins winning the game on the field and Duff Dry winning the Duff Bowl in the Duff Beer commercial.

"The Simpsons" has never met a self-important target it couldn't skewer, and this episode--titled "Lisa the Greek"--was no exception.

It's somehow appropriate that Sunday's Super Bowl telecast on CBS caps a TV week that features a loony syndicated program on Elvis sightings, carried Wednesday by KTLA Channel 5--what do you think, was The King really an undercover FBI agent who is still alive?--and Saturday's repeat (at 9 p.m. on KTTV Channel 11) of Fox's doozy special on UFO sightings. Hmmmm. Maybe Elvis himself was an alien mole, a creature from another planet sent here to infiltrate Nashville.