Super Bowl LVIII

I did something I haven’t done since the 2000s, and watched the entirety of the Super Bowl.

To be fair, when I say “watched” what I really mean is “had it on in the background while playing ICEWIND DALE on my iPad for the most part.” I admit that when I was younger and more insufferable, I would make a point of refusing to watch the Super Bowl. Then I realized such an approach was self-defeating – professional football is no better or worse than any other form of recreation. Additionally, connecting with people socially is not among my strengths, and very often sports discussions are the “low hanging fruit” of easy social engagement.

That said, I don’t exactly pay close attention to professional sports, so here is what I found interesting about the Super Bowl as an outsider, so to speak:

-An observer completely unfamiliar with American culture and professional sports, upon watching the Super Bowl, would conclude it was a three and a half hour block of commercials infrequently broken up by two-minute clips of football.

-The Christopher Walken commercial was the funniest one. Also the Dunkin Donuts commercial.

-The NFL may not be a cartel in the strict legal definition of the term. But it’s totally a cartel. Which is a pretty sweet position to be in, because you have massive corporations like Apple and Verizon shelling out big bucks so it’s the Apple Music Halftime Show and the Verizon Pregame Show or whatever.

-I think from an objective viewpoint it is rather surprising that football became the predominant sporting event in America. (I believe the reason had to do with football commissioners presciently seeing the potential of broadcast television in the 50s and 60s.) American football is this weird mutant form of rugby with a lot of arcane terminology and peculiar rules. And compared to soccer or basketball, it’s a very slow and plodding game. Like, there’s fifteen seconds of action, and then everyone stands around for two or three minutes (just in time for a commercial break, brought to you by Verizon!). Soccer and basketball are much faster-paced. If American football is the imperial system, then European football/soccer is the metric system that everyone else in the world uses.

-I suspect to really appreciate American football you have to get into it as a child and grow up with it so all the weird rules become second nature.

-Which is probably why the NFL embraced Taylor Swift so much. I don’t really have an opinion on Swift one way or another since I mostly listen to computer game soundtracks. But like I said above, I think to really appreciate American football you have to grow up with it, and football doesn’t quite have the cultural hegemony it had in the 80s and 90s. Like, it’s still massively popular, but more and more parents are keeping their kids away from playing it because of the danger of long-term head injuries or because of all the many sketchy things the NFL has done over the years. (To be fair, it’s not like FIFA is a paragon of business ethics either.) So you have more young people who don’t grow up with it and therefore can’t be bothered to pay attention. But Swift is popular with The Young People, and the NFL desperately wants more of The Young People watching the games.

-I don’t think the Super Bowl or the NFL season is scripted in advance, but I can see how people come to that conclusion. Partly because it’s all so slick and media-savvy. Mostly because the human brain has this tendency to see systems and order where there is in fact nothing more than chaos. Though this year’s game was so dramatic, with the Chiefs squeaking out a win in overtime, that it feels like it should have been written in advance.

-Are football and professional sports in general the modern “bread and circuses?” Maybe, but if they are, is that even a bad thing? Every large civilization has had games and public spectacles as part of the maintenance of social order. Some aspect of human psychology seems to require it. There’s lots to criticize about the NFL, but it’s certainly better than the stuff the Romans got up to. Or early medieval tournaments, which were mock battles that sometimes escalated into actual local wars. Perhaps modern professional sports are a more efficient and (usually) more bloodless method of public spectacle.

So I don’t really have any grand conclusion here, just observations made while watching the Super Bowl and mostly playing ICEWIND DALE on my iPad. I’m pleased to report that I defeated an ogre with a bunch of Level 1 characters, and my Thief and my Cleric both leveled up during the game!

-JM