A Tale Of Two Cities

I usually don't watch the Super Bowl. Of course I have no interest in the commercialization, the pop-star halftime shows, or the endless progressive political pandering during the abundant commercial breaks. But also, I don't enjoy the format of nationally broadcasted football. There's the formulaic commentary. There's the panel of four, which includes two noted veterans of the game (invariably white) and two lesser-known younger men in over-the-top fancy suits, at least one of whom must be white. They specialize in filling dead air without saying much. Then, on the field there must be the attractive female reporter. She specializes in getting the insides scoop from the people on the field. The players rarely say anything interesting ("we're going to try real hard to win"), and the coaches occasionally do.

The theatrics can be ignored if the substance of the game is well done. Unfortunately, the coverage of the game is superficial. Football is a very complex sport. There are 22 players on the field dynamically interacting. The quarterback is constantly reading the defense and adjusting his team, looking for gaps in the defense, responding to pressure they are exerting. The defensive captain shifts his people in response, calls out blitzes, or merely the show of blitzes. Meanwhile, the coaches are involved in a higher level strategic bout against their counterparts. They must call the plays that maximally capitalize on defensive weaknesses, and then note the defensive adjustment and change the calls accordingly. They try to call plays that the defense isn't expecting, while the defense is trying to predict which plays will be called, while not overreacting and exposing weaknesses. A team that is good at running but terrible at passing must still throw the ball from time to time. If there is no threat from the air, the defense could just wall up and shut down the ground game. As passing because a greater danger, the defense must peel off linebackers to help in the secondary.

These things are rarely mentioned by the commentators. Even worse, they are rarely shown at all! When the quarterback drops into shotgun, the cameras zoom in on him and the linemen. The drama unfolding in the secondary goes off-screen, ignored until the ball moves downstream. We don't know when the secondary shifts from man coverage to the various coverages, or see the strategies the receivers employ to split up defenders and open gaps in the coverage. Watching on TV is not the same as watching live. Having zoomed-in replays is nice, but it is actually harder to watch the event unfolding live on the screen. Football is so complex that it would be impossible for the commentators to describe everything going on. Radio commentators must attempt to do so, which is why the best approach to watching games is to mute the TV and put the radio broadcast over it. The TV crews are simplifying the game by ignoring half of it. The NFL wants to make the game presentable to women, most of whom don't know the difference between a lineman and a linebacker, or between a dive and an option. (Some do, of course, and many men do not.)

Football is being made into an everybody sport. Guys aren't allowed to have a thing, so football must pander to women. This is evident by what is broadcasted during the commercials. Everything is about "diversity is our strength" signaling, coming together, and all that. The commercials really are a groanfest. The most famous commercial when I was a kid were the infamous Budweiser frogs. They were an amusing antic with no political messaging whatsoever. The Budweiser commercial that I caught this year was a message about rejecting social pressure to be "typical" and its limitations. Nontypical was just another word for diverse.

Most of the game was a tribute to San Francisco, the queen city of gay pride. By the third quarter, it was pretty clear that Midwest team had little chance of victory. Even the corporate sponsors seemed to revel in the victory of the coastal liberals over corn-fed, red-state America. Then the miraculous happened, and the Chiefs pulled off an unbelievable series of quick trips to the endzone. After the game, the team owner was interviewed in front of the whole stadium, and the entire country. He spoke briefly, but made sure to thank God for the goo fortune of his team. It was quite a departure from the nonstop parade of Globohomo! We joked about it. 'Merica! Trump! And then, almost on cue, a Trump campaign ad played. It' hard to believe the network even allowed a Trump ad during the game, but there it was. The whole thing started to feel like something bigger than a football game. It really was a victory of Kansas over California.