Every Year I Love You Less and Less

I’m a baseball guy. No surprise there but every year I like football more and more. My love of baseball doesn’t diminish but each year I get a little more attached to football. There’s never been a time that I hated football but I never consistently planned my Sundays around it. I did this past season though. I watched every Falcons game and, for the first time ever, a lot of non-Falcons games as well. I watched every minute of each playoff game too…until last night. You see, as my love of football grows, so does my hatred of the Super Bowl.

There are a lot of reasons to hate the Super Bowl. I guess my reasons are not unique but that won’t stop me from outlining them for you today.

1. The commercials. There are very few legitimate excuses for tuning into the Super Bowl just to watch commercials. I’ll accept it if you are in the advertising bidness or maybe if you have rigged some Clark Howard-esque deal where you get paid to watch commercials. That’s really it though. Why would you willingly watch commercials especially if the vast majority of those commercials will be for beer? The last time I genuinely thought a commercial was clever and looked forward to seeing it was when they’d air the Christmas version of the Fruity Pebbles commercial where Barney dresses up as Santa in an effort to steal Fred’s Fruity Pebbles. It was the song I was particularly fond of. (Seasons greetings in our souls / Yummy Fruity Pebbles in our bowls / Ho Ho Ho, I’m so Hu-hu-hungry) And I think the last time I saw that commercial is when I was 10. Ever since then I’ve been in a begrudging relationship with commercials. They’re there and I understand why they are there. Occasionally they might induce a chuckle, but for the most part they are bathroom breaks and, more recently, reasons to hit the fast-forward button three times on the TiVo remote.

2. The spectacle. There is absolutely nothing charming about Media Day(s) which is the football equivalent of Spin Alley. Each year they produce the same cliché-ridden articles full of the same boring pronouncements from the players. There is nothing charming about players guaranteeing a win for their team. Yawn. I also can’t stand the fact that you can tell that something is up even when you aren’t thinking about the game. The grocery stores put there chips and sodas in huge displays. The electronic stores advertise TVs that are larger than a bay window. The Super Bowl is not a holiday! (But try telling that to the NFL.) I guess this is how it feels for Jehovah’s Witnesses walking through endless Valentine/Halloween/Christmas displays anytime they just want to buy some bread and bug the cashier with talk about 1914.

3. The two week wait. That two week wait between the conference championships and the Super Bowl are a killer. It gives me time to think about the fact that the season is over and that Sundays will not be Sundays again until the fall. (I’m lucky I love baseball. Football die-hards must have serious withdrawals.) I end up thinking about how I could care less who wins the big game and about the horrible odds that it’ll actually be an interesting game worth all of the hoopla. You see, each week of the football playoffs gives us diminishing chances of seeing a great game. By the time it gets down to those last two teams, if one of them isn’t “my team” I really can’t get excited. I’m not saying it’s always bad. Sometimes they are really good games, but even the good games aren’t worth the hype…you know, until the Falcons make it back. Even when the Falcons were in the Super Bowl I hated the two week wait. It was torture. I just wanted to see the game. I’m sure there is far too much money made in that extra week for anything to change but it is the single worse thing about the Super Bowl. I’d be a lot more tolerant of the NFL-manufactured excitement and talk of commercials if they’d just cut out that extra week.

There it is. I think the Super Bowl sucks and yesterday did nothing to change my mind. It was a boring game full of bad calls by the refs and by the teams as well. It seems the consensus with sports journalists is that this year will be remembered for the bad calls by the refs. Wow. And this is the crappy game we treat as the second-coming each year? I wouldn’t be so upset if the playoffs leading up to the big game were bad too, but they always outshine the Super Bowl, this year being no exception. The excess attention is just misguided. The NFL is right to ride the game into the ground though. It’s smart business. If I were in their shoes, I’d do the same thing. I just wonder when the people throwing parties and buying TVs are going to catch on that they are celebrating football mediocrity. As Dr. Phil would say, “You can shit in a waffle cone but that don’t make it chocolate ice cream.” Okay. Dr. Phil didn’t say that…but he should.