As the years go by, I have become less-and-less fond of Super Bowl Sunday.
Everything, and I mean everything, both related to the game, the NFL, and even family/friends and co-workers get over-hyped, with just about anyone you bump into, breathlessly, in anxiety-soaked voices, ask "Are you going to any Super Bowl parties?"
It may come in the not-too-distant future, that anyone not going to a "Super Bowl Party" will be banished to a leprosy-like island.
The NFL has long surpassed the label of "To Big To Fail".
It's a veritable money-printing machine.
Keep in mind, as the NFL tries to beat down the players' saleries, add more games, that with the money the NFL owners receive from television (and you can thank the former PR hack, and Commissioner Peter Rozelle for choreographing the NFL for television - the early 1960's Dallas Cowboys, perhaps thinking ahead to "Super Sundays", were the first to put numbers on the shoulders and called them "TV numbers"), that they could play the games in empty stadiums and no concessions, and still make a profit.
All this is a lead in to a good post, by David Roth, over on The Awl;
This is not exactly news, I know, but I've always believed that the bloat—more than a game encased within it, which either will be fun to watch or won't, but will still feature four 15-minute quarters—is the thing that puts people off about the game. The week of pump-it-up-when-you-don't-even-mean-it media coverage, all those thimblefuls of glib microanalysis, the leering reach for the nearest SEO-able semi-scandal—Did Player X RIP Player Y (VIDEO)?—all seem longer and louder and more desperate each year, and they will send you flipping to the Puppy Bowl if you're even remotely so inclined. The percentage of the Super Bowl broadcast given over advertisements expands exponentially—last year's Super Bowl featured seven more minutes of commercials than did 2001's. But this is what happens, it's what the market does: big things get bigger.
But the cellular division that powers this sort of overgrowth is not necessarily healthy, and long ago shaded towards decadent-unto-metastatic. That the Super Bowl is too hyped, too rich and too leveraged and branded and expensive and excessive is palpable, even in the corners most excited for it. It looks strong, of course, but these are steroid muscles—puffed up, built the wrong way, grounded in things that ruin.
If you can pull yourself away for whatever Animal Bowl is being fed into your television, or closedown the zillion tabs and take a break from watching the Super Bowl commercials, take a jump over to Roth's post
Bonus Super Bowl Riffs
Bonus Bonus
1 comment:
Amen brudda.
-Martin
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