Most years, I am sick of the Super Bowl talk by Monday of
game week. This week, I’m waiting for it to start.
I wrongly assumed they would be talking about the Super
Bowl. Instead, they were talking about almost everything except the Super Bowl.
They discussed NFL coaching hires and vacancies. The Brian
Flores’ racism lawsuit was discussed. They spent time trying to figure out
where Aaron Rodgers would play next year, what the Bucs will look like next
year, and most bizarrely, spent time trashing Russell Wilson. They even talked
about the Nets in free-fall and a cursory mention of the ongoing Winter Olympics.
They know there’s an NFL game this weekend, right? And it’s
a pretty big one, no?
My Twitter and news feeds are similarly void of discussion
about the country’s biggest sporting event. I’ve been drowning in a deluge of
Joe Rogan stories about cancel culture. I can’t get enough of people trashing
China and the ongoing Winter Olympics. I do not need any more Aaron Rodgers talk. Regardless, it feels very odd that we’re not already into all day,
non-stop Super Bowl hype.
Even more curious is the fact this Super Bowl matchup is
overloaded with interesting stories and subplots. Both quarterbacks are making
their first Super Bowl start with ridiculously different and compelling back
stories. The Bengals haven’t played in a Super Bowl since I was in elementary
school. The Rams haven’t won a Super Bowl since I was a freshman in college.
The Rams are loaded with stars. Ja’Marr Chase and Odell Beckham Jr. are two of
the most fascinating and impressive wide receivers in the league. Cooper Kupp
was the league’s best wide receiver. The Rams need to make up for a disastrous
last Super Bowl, which may have been the worst Super Bowl of my lifetime.
All of that is worth an easy week’s worth of TV coverage and
sports talk. Maybe it’ll come around later in the week. Maybe we’re all too
distracted by how terrible the national discourse is at the moment with racism
and COVID. Regardless, it’s a very odd feeling that we’re less than a week from
the Super Bowl and it’s not the #1 topic of discussion everywhere.
Even the network with the most to gain from people talking
about the Super Bowl is in pure desperation mode because the Olympics are tanking on a historic level in the TV ratings. Every time you turn on NBC this
week, you’re likely only going to see Olympics talk.
It’s a very odd situation, which is partially driven by how
our sports media seems to be obsessed with everything except the games these
days. It’s become a gossip culture, where the talk is centered on trades, free
agencies, and drafts instead of previewing the games we watch.
It feels like not even a decade ago, the entire week leading
up to the Super Bowl would be an endless dissection of players, plays,
coaching, and strategies to the point where you felt like you knew everything
about both teams. This year, there has been shockingly little of that across
the broad media spectrum.
We haven’t even gotten to the usual hype around commercials,
or halftime performers, or the ga-ga that surrounds the game. Even in the host
city itself, the spotlight was on NASCAR doing its darndest to bring the
celebrity attention to its unique and shockingly entertaining Clash race this
past weekend. The halftime show featuring Dr. Dre, Snoop, Mary J Blige, and
Eminem suddenly feels tone deaf in the wake of the Flores’ lawsuit. Super Bowl
commercials have been dreadful for years now, with the brands now advertising
their ads, which all seem to feature one or both of the Manning brothers.
It doesn’t help the league that its new never-ending season
has pushed the Super Bowl back to mid-February. Other leagues had cleared out
schedules until the NFL season ended, but now have crawled back to re-claim
early February. NASCAR and the NHL held big All-Star events. College basketball is in the homestretch and playing big games. Super Bowl weekend now conflicts
with the NBA trade deadline, which is looming even larger this year with big
names like James Harden and Ben Simmons being tossed around. There’s also this
little holiday known as Valentine’s Day coming up the day after the Super Bowl
now.
This is not to throw a pity party for the NFL, which
especially does not deserve one right now. It’s simply a commentary on the
changing landscape of sports media and how we consume sports.
Come Super Bowl Sunday, there will be close to 100 million
people watching and I’ll be closing in on eating 100 million buffalo wings.
It’ll still be the biggest event in this country by a magnitude of 1000.
It just won’t feel like the culmination of weeks’ worth of
hype. I don’t know if that’s good or bad yet. For now, I only know it’s
different.
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