(CNN) - With their campaigns in the fourth quarter, football fans around the country turned on their sets Monday to see the Eagles, the Saints and the candidates.
But these weren't last-minute ads as both campaigns watch the clock tick down: President Barack Obama and GOP nominee Mitt Romney fielded questions in interviews during “Monday Night Football.”
Watch CNN's comprehensive coverage of Election Day starting at 6 p.m. ET Tuesday on CNN TV and follow online at CNN.com or via CNN's apps for iPhone, iPad and Android. For up-to-the-minute results, go to cnn.com/results and for our real-time Election Day live blog, check out cnn.com/conversation. Need other reasons to watch Election Day coverage on CNN's platforms? Click here for our list.
- Follow the Ticker on Twitter: @PoliticalTicker
- Check out the CNN Electoral Map and Calculator and game out your own strategy for November.
Romney, whose athletic credentials include leading the 2002 Winter Olympic Games and competing in his family's own annual "Romney Olympics," said he has a few more accomplishments under his belt.
"I've lived in Massachusetts now 40 years," the former Massachusetts governor said in the ESPN interview, "and I take personal, full responsibility for (the New England Patriots') two Super Bowl wins as well as the Red Sox winning the World Series.”
Romney was governor from 2003 to 2007, serving during the Patriots' 2004 and 2005 Super Bowl victories, as well as the Red Sox 2004 World Series win. That year, Boston overcame the New York Yankees in the American League series, then swept the St. Louis Cardinals and beat back what committed fans considered an 80-plus year curse.
"Hey look, as a governor you get blamed for everything that goes wrong. You might as well get the credit for what goes right," Romney said Monday night.
Obama - known to enjoy a round of hoops, and a coach of his daughter's basketball team - said he sees parallels between the field of sports and the field of politics.
"It’s interesting - political reporters are a lot like sports reporters, and you lose a game and you're a bum," Obama said. "You win a game and you're a God, and the truth is that just like in sports, in politics we're all human.
"We make mistakes," Obama said. "Sometimes we perform well, but the key is to stay focused on what it is that you're doing and in sports it’s about winning championships. Interesting in politics it’s not winning elections, it’s making sure that you're delivering for the folks that sent you."
Romney said if he could change one thing about sports, it would be to eliminate performance enhancing drugs, which he called "the biggest concern in sport." Meanwhile, the long months on the campaign trail have energized rather than exhausted him, he said.
"This campaign process goes on a couple of years - lots of flights, lots of trips, and what I found that surprised me is the more events I did, the more energy I seemed to get," the Republican candidate said. "The more passion that comes from the people, their desire for change if you will, gives me more energy and more commitment to the process. So I came away at the end of the day, instead of being exhausted, I had a hard time falling asleep."
Obama said he learned a different lesson in his second run for the White House.
"One of the big unifiers in this country is sports, and football in particular," the president said. "You don't go to anyplace where folks don't talk about some football."