The Super Bowl
First off, here's the good bit about the Super Bowl:
That's a terrific scoreboard overlay: small, clean, well-designed. It gives you the information you need and stays out of the way otherwise. It's Hemingway compared to ESPN's Tolstoy (if War and Peace was just 1000+ pages of clutter).
There's something about the Super Bowl that seems so sterile. Nobody goes to a Conference Championship to say they went. They go for the game, and the crowds are deafening. At the Super Bowl, though, plenty of people are there to be able to say they were. The crowd is never overwhelmingly loud, and it's all strangely dispassionate. Even when the game is good, it all feels a bit flat.
I've seen all of them, but it doesn't feel like it used to.
What drives me crazy is how the NFL no longer positions itself as entertainment, but as a positive moral force. Seriously? NFL owners are some of the worst people in the world. They're legendarily bad. And most NFL coaches need years of therapy to even approach normalcy (narrator: they wont get it). But the NFL puts its finger in the air, judges which way the wind is blowing, and pretends to head in that direction. It's gross, honestly.
I don't watch the WNBA (I really like women's volleyball, as I've mentioned before, but not women's basketball), but the WNBA actually does try to be a positive moral force. Which makes the NFL's half-hearted, cynical attempts even more embarrassing in comparison.
Cranky old man on the porch. Kids, get off my lawn.
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