Blogged

I hear there’s a football game this weekend

By Phil Barron ⋅ January 29, 2008 ⋅ ⋅ ⋅ Post a comment

This came to me yesterday, apropos of nothing at all: The Super Bowl doesn’t exist for me this year. Even less so than usual, actually. Most years, I pass entirely on watching it, turned off not so much by the game (which is usually not nearly as exciting as the playoff struggles that lead up to it) as by the hyped national pasttime of Super Bowl commercial-watching. Ugh. And the less said about the overblown halftime festivities, the better. (Tom Petty this year? I like him and all, but seriously, I thought he died two years ago.)

I think I was one of five Americans who heard second-hand about that whole wardrobe malfunction thingie.

I dislike the Patriots, whenever I actually make time to think about the Patriots. I could be compelled to root for the Giants, if only to say “boo ya sucks” to Tiki Barber, but, well, meh.

The thing is, most of the free-floating media oxygen seems to have been absorbed by presidential politics. It’s just the NFL’s misfortune to have its “team marching toward perfection” storyline upstaged by Hillary vs. Obama and whatever’s happening on the GOP side.

Too bad. I guess.

Addendum: Forgot to mention that Will Leitch of Deadspin fame has his own problems with the SB thing.

It’s that the actual game of football, at the moment when it is supposed to be at its glorious peak, is utterly irrelevant. It is impossible to keep up the appropriate level – the expected level — of psychotic fandom when the pregame show is 10 hours long, three-quarters of the people at your party are sprinting into the room when the commercials come on and Vegas is taking bets on the duration of the inevitable Tom Petty nipple slip. When the Patriots and Giants take the field Sunday, a fan can be forgiven for thinking, for the first time, that the game itself is oddly small. This is the championship game, the event that everyone is supposedly investing all their emotional capital toward, and we can’t shake the image of Ryan Seacrest talking about Gisele while promoting the new Paula Abdul single. The Super Bowl is when a bunch of strangers come stomping through our living room, wearing muddy shoes and demanding the furniture be rearranged.

Nicely phrased. I see some Netflix action in store for me this Sunday. Er, it is Sunday we’re talking about, yes?

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