Wait, there was a game on Super Bowl weekend?
- col-dave-mast
- February 14, 2024
- 647
The big game is over.
An overtime thriller, filled with plenty of shots of Taylor Swift.
It was one for the books.
Yet somewhere along the line, the NFL Super Bowl went from being a football game to being about almost everything except a football game.
With every television station amping up to run 19 1/2 hours of Super Bowl coverage featuring everything from the left guard’s favorite dating app to the punter’s favorite type of toilet bowl cleaner, this cumbersome concoction of unnecessary information is enough to put viewers into a TV coma before the big game even kicks off.
I’m not even 10% certain why TV producers felt it was necessary to bludgeon viewers over the head with that type of information overload, but then again, money.
Speaking of airtime and money, when this Super Bowl thing first began, the average 30-second commercial cost an advertiser just $42,500, an amount adjusted for inflation of just a tick over $345,000. Today that same 30-second ad costs a mind-exploding $7 million, adjusted for inflation of, wait for it, $7 million.
Do you know how many bags of M&Ms they need to sell just to break even?
Then there is the whole Super Bowl commercial escapade.
Two decades ago, developing catchy, sensationalized and often humorous commercials became the in thing, and companies went out of their way to bring us talking frogs, witty banter and anything out of the norm.
Commercials became a thing of their own, often talked about by viewers as the main thing of the game, rather than the game itself.
“What was your favorite commercial?”
“I can’t believe they got Johnny Depp to light his hair on fire!”
“How did they even get those horses to play poker?”
Statements like these became the SB buzz words, the game a distant echo of what the evening provided.
However, in recent years society lost its ability to understand humor or take a joke, advertisers went all political and the commercials took a nosedive into Bordomesville.
Then there is the food aspect of game day.
It’s not enough to simply gather together and enjoy a game of men knocking heads on the gridiron for a large gold trophy and a trip to Disney World for some fortunate performer. Humans have to usher in a whole stable of food that is usually enough to feed the 5,000 but in reality is meant for eight.
I recently received a presser ranking Ohio’s top 10 foods to serve at the big game.
It’s not hard to imagine that pizza is No. 1, but surprisingly, wings fell to No. 7. In between was chili, deviled eggs, Buffalo chicken dip, guacamole and jambalaya with sloppy joes, bruschetta and quesadillas rounding out the top 10.
I don’t think it was mean to have all 10 representatives available for consumption during a four-hour game, but that’s what people have created, a food frenzy featuring all the best and brightest food sampling a person could want.
In addition to the main food group, people have a conveyor belt of various chips and dips, desserts galore to satisfy anyone’s sweet tooth, and I’ve even heard of people doing the unthinkable and throwing out a healthy dose of raw veggies.
“What are you bringing to eat today? We’re bringing a swimming pool of chili, a half-acre of roasted ears of corn, all of the candy that was meant for the children’s parade hot air balloon candy drop and eight large garbage bags filled with tapioca pudding. Oh yeah, and one head of broccoli. We gotta eat healthy!”
“I know the Frito-Lay guy, so I’m bringing enough chips to emulate the actual size of the Washington Monument!”
Well, that takes care of about 1/20th of the food that will be available.
The food is so excessive that it has superseded the game itself.
Then there’s the halftime show, which is now approximately as long as the game itself.
The initial Super Bowl I in 1967 featured the talents of the University of Arizona and Grambling State marching bands. From there it went to salute to the Caribbean to an “It’s a Small World” presentation, a salute to Motown and the Big Band Era, and sometimes sets highlighting the hosting city.
How times have changed.
In 1993 Michael Jackson produced the “Heal the World” halftime extravaganza, and it has been full tilt ahead the rest of the way, with acts like Christina Aguilera, The Blues Brothers, the Janet Jackson and Justin Timberlake debacle, Aerosmith, The Black-eyed Peas, Madonna, Lady Gaga, Maroon 5, and The Weeknd vying to up the ante and outperform all predecessors in absolute spectacle.
Singing went to including thousands of dancers, fire, fireworks, billions of lights both on stage and in the crowd, and Katy Perry soared into the night sky in 2015, singing her hit song “Fireworks.”
Yes, you might say the game has become a caricature of itself, now taking a back seat to so many other spectacles that it has become irrelevant in and of itself.
Pretty much nobody but sports bettors care about the outcome because their team isn’t in it, and by the fourth quarter, three-fifths of the 294 million people watching are either mired in a food coma, dozing off or have found things to do elsewhere, having lost interest somewhere between a third quarter draw play on third-and-19 and the Lay-Z-Boy commercial that became too inviting to resist, enticing people to plant themselves in the comfort of their old faithful recliner and fade off into dreamland.