5 Reasons I Hate The Super Bowl
By Ty Duffy
Super Bowl 50 is meandering toward kickoff. Here are five reasons I don’t like it.
It’s One Game: The NFL is a symphony (or cacophony) of interwoven stories. Each week produces a great finish, a flash point, a terrible call, or something to talk about. There’s fantasy, schemes, overarching strategy, roster management, rumors, coaching and front office drama. But, instead of building to a crescendo, the Super Bowl is one, long coast to the finish.
Two teams. One game. That game may or may not be interesting. We end up reviving the same dead story for two weeks. That could be Marshawn Lynch not talking. That could be everyone more or less agreeing about Cam Newton, and ignoring that we could be watching an all-time great athlete.
Media Day/Night: The thing about media congregating? It’s not news. Media Day (now Media Night) is an odious combination of maximum effort, a minimal amount of content, contrived spontaneity, navel-gazing, and shameless NFL self-promotion. These are just inane pack interviews. The NFL now sells tickets to this, and is moving it to prime time. The disturbing part: people will watch. Were it not for deflated balls, the lead story would have been Marshawn Lynch not talking, for the past two years.
Oh, and Media Day is only the first round of press conferences, which will be happening all week, in case anything was left uncovered.
It’s Utterly Soulless: Ambience makes football. The NFL is sterile and corporate at the best of times. The Super Bowl distills this to its purest form. It’s coming to you live from the latest neutral site, publicly funded, corporately named mega-stadium. Fans? Ha. Tickets are priced to weed out all but the most avid corporate sponsors. Flashing Lights. Fireworks. Anything to distract you from the emptiness emanating from the audience.
It’s a Fitting American Tradition: Consuming mass quantities of processed, high-caloric food. Buying ever evolving crap one does not need. Passively consuming content through a screen. We’ve made screens larger, more elaborate, and more precise. We’ve made screens smaller and more mobile. You’re paying more attention to those screens (and the relentless sales pitch) than to the humans inhabiting the same room. The Super Bowl is a nexus that has defined the last 50 years.