Please Seek Help if You Actually Believe the Super Bowl Matchup is Rigged
By Kyle Koster
The NFL put a Super Bowl ad featuring the New England Patriots and Minnesota Vikings on its Facebook page this week. Some of our nation’s soundest thinkers used this as evidence that the league had predetermined the matchup and this weekend’s championship games were therefore destined to be rigged.
Actually, no. There’s a more reasonable and boring backstory.
“It was a regrettable mistake,” an NFL spokesman told NJ Advance Media via email on Friday afternoon. “The ads were mocked up using all the [possible] combinations, but weren’t supposed to go until Monday when the matchup is known. Obviously, someone jumped the gun.”
A social media manager, bogged down with a heavy work load doing all the permutations, accidentally pressed the wrong button. That type of thing can happen.
It’s not surprising that Eagles and Jaguars fans are using the incident as bulletin board material but you know what? At a certain point people need to accept that there can only be one favorite in a given game. People in Philadelphia are wearing silly dog masks all because their Nick Foles-led team has been — gasp — 3-point underdogs in back-to-back weeks.
Get over it.
I’ll press the issue more.
The NFL shouldn’t have backed away from the advertisement because Patriots-Vikings WILL be the Super Bowl matchup. Come Monday morning they’d have look like geniuses and everyone else like tinfoil hat-wearing whiners.