Not too long ago, this used to be a week to look forward to. Still buzzing from Conference Championship weekend, the Super Bowl was only 7 days away. The players and fans digging deep for one more supreme effort after a brutal season of big hits, freezing contests, broken hearts and last minute heroics. The game you had dreamt about, longed for and watched, ever since you were kid. The momentum of the season thundering towards that Sunday. Then they added a week in between and things changed....
For the uninitiated, the Super Bowl is the culmination of the professional football season in the U.S. The winners of the two conferences, the American Football Conference (AFC) and the National Football Conference (NFC) in the National Football League (NFL) play off in the Super Bowl for the right to call themselves, wait for it, the World Champion: a peculiar trait of American sports.
The NFL is played over a relatively short 16 game regular season that ends by New Year. The 3-week conference playoffs are done by the second last weekend of January. The last team standing is the conference champion, and earns the right to play for the ultimate prize in American professional sports – the Lombardi Trophy.
Football is the most popular sport in the U.S. So popular, in fact, that the NFL now has its own TV channel with 24 hour-a-day coverage, 365 days-a-year for a season that lasts 5 months. ESPN has at least 30 minutes of NFL coverage a day no matter what the season. But this popularity still doesn’t excuse the waste that is the week leading up to the Super Bowl.
The daily wall-to-wall NFL coverage ensures that every facet of the sport is reported, analyzed, synthesized, agonized, and nuanced. Stories of trades and locker room disputes are made up just to fill airtime. If a legitimate big news story related to football breaks, the sports channels are beside themselves with joy, and ring every last drop of news out of the event. With this added week of coverage, we enter the terrible world of infomercials.
The highlight of this mass waste of consciousness is the Media Day, the Tuesday before the game. All the players don their playing gear minus pads and helmets for a day of idiocracy in front of the world’s media. With everything of importance already asked and answered, irrelevant and childish inquiries into the players’ lives are all that is left. Let’s not forget grandstanding. Like the time a reporter donned a wedding dress to ask Tom Brady to marry her. Enough!
The NFL added this dreaded week in 2004. All sorts of reasons have been given. The most common reason is that everyone involved needs time to organize tickets and accommodation for their families and friends. Really? How about the fact that it gives the NFL and the media an extra week to milk the publicity, the bookies more time to play with the odds and take bets. Supposedly it also gives more time to build the excitement amongst the fans.
Well not this fan. I don’t watch it anymore. It’s not about the game; it’s about the event. By the time Super Bowl Sunday comes around, I’m done with it. I used to love the game and the whole theatre of it. Now it’s just a circus.
You should look into the Fantasy Football leagues next :)
ReplyDeleteI always figured they always wanted to get more people to watch the pro-bowl... Well, I don't think that worked. Everybody still hates the pro-bowl.
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