Like all of you, I’ll be watching the Super Bowl on Sunday. But I’ll be whining and moaning about a lot of it. Including, for your enlightenment, these five things:
5. I Never Win Any Money – For as long as I can remember, I’ve had money riding on the big game – even when I was too young to know what betting was. My mom has always bought squares in her office Super Bowl pool for me and each of my sisters. For 20 years, give or take, I’ve never won. Not one dollar. I’m hoping the Dispatch office pool will change that luck.
4. Story Line Overkill – How many times can you talk about how this is a homecoming for Jerome Bettis? How many times can you talk about T.O.’s ankle? How many times can you debate about whether the Patriots are (were) a dynasty? Billions! And we should love every minute of it. (On a side note, what are the advantages to being recognized as a dynasty and why is it so important to decide if a team is or isn’t one?). The thing is, there are no storylines (besides the return of The Bus) this year. So we’re forced to watch the media fish for them to fill TV time. In the words of fifth-graders everywhere, booooring.
3. Media Day – It’s just a zoo, and I’m sure the players and media people alike are annoyed by it. Also, now all of a sudden Entertainment Tonight, MTV and E! decide that they need to cover football. You know that a media event has become too big when people actually report on it.
2. The Six-Hour Pregame Show – I nearly vomited when I saw/heard this promo last week while watching ESPN: “And don’t forget to tune in for a special six-hour “Sunday Countdown.” If anyone can intelligently justify to me why a six-hour pregame show is necessary, please do. What angle of the Super Bowl could these guys possibly not have talked about in the past two weeks that they now need six hours to cover before the game? Nevertheless, I know what could make the show 15 minutes shorter: Not talking about the length of Ben Roethlisberger’s sideburns.
(Did you know? factoid of this column: ESPN set aside 100 hours of airtime to dedicate to NFL coverage of some kind between Jan. 29 through Feb. 6.)
1. I Never Remember the Game – From commercials to fireworks to halftime shows to halfway-through-halftime shows to pop-up ads on your television screen, the outside forces that have a hand in the Super Bowl – the money-makers – do everything they can to distract you from the game.
And I fall for it every time.
Not that I want to. I really try to put all my attention into the actual game, what’s happening on the field. I have to say, with all the other distractions going on, it’s exhausting to remember what happened last play. By the end, it’s all mush in my brain.
But that’s OK. I guess I can just watch the three-hour postgame show to remember what I missed.
