The Super Bowl Sucks
And every other major event has become Super Bowlified
New column alert! Occasionally I have a strong opinion that doesn’t fit our usual humor formats. This is one of them.
The Super Bowl is terrible. It's time we stop pretending otherwise.
Let's start with the football itself. The game is usually boring, in part because that’s football! By rule, the sport consists of four-second spurts of action in which hefty lads bump into each other, followed by long stretches where they stand around adjusting their buttcracks.1 This continues until Patrick Mahomes gets a trophy.
There’s also the fact that the game generally feels beside the point. (Surely, I’m the first to observe this.) The Super Bowl isn’t really about onfield events. They’ve long been upstaged by the weeks-long orgy of commerce surrounding the big game. Football is merely the delivery method for liquor conglomerates to explain how cool they are, with a little help from the reunited cast of Clarissa Explains It All.
This would be fine if the Super Bowl weren’t America’s premier cultural event. That in itself is a bit depressing and seems to indicate that snooty Europeans may be right about us—I’m guessing most foreign cultural touchstones have fewer military flyovers. But my real problem is the Super Bowlification of everything else.
The Super Bowl’s enormous financial success and cultural footprint mean that everything from the World Series to the Oscars to Comic-Con to Coachella aspires to imitate it. There’s no real aesthetic difference between any of these things anymore, which makes them all seem equally empty. It’s like an entire cultural landscape covered in Doritos dust.
None of this is to say that we shouldn’t enjoy ourselves on Sunday. Any day is a good day to eat terribly and watch Kendrick Lamar make fun of Drake. But the Super Bowl is lame, and it only figures to get bigger and worse every year.
What do you think? Does anyone care to defend our most Super of Bowls?
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I’ve always been confused when football fans say baseball is boring, because to me it feels like they have similar rhythms.
I think you might be under-rating the satisfaction that comes from watching the hopes and dreams of a rival city's fanbase get crushed, even if your team is not competing
You are spot on about Super Bowl! We have more fun at our churches souper bowl the night before. Several people make different kinds of soup and we gather and play games and visit!! Lots and fun with my church family!! Good food and great fellowship!!❤️❤️