 |
| This is the sort of image that ought to make the NFL insist on better field conditions. It won’t, of course. |
But wait… that’s not all! (We’ll get to that in a moment. Read on, Gentle Reader.)
We can’t blame the boring commercials on the NFL, and—to be fair—Curmie missed some because he didn’t watch much of the pre-game slop and a couple of ads he did see were actually good (Amazon’s was both cute and sentimental, with a nice twist at the end; Workday’s was actually funny—“Hi, I’m Ozwald” is good stuff). And the game’s officiating was no worse than usual: a couple of penalties missed, a reversal that shouldn’t have happened… but the call that had Eagles fans (and Fox designated moron analyst Greg Olsen) in a tizzy was actually correct, as even Eagles’ cornerback James Bradberry admitted: “It was a holding. I tugged his jersey. I was hoping they would let it slide.”
We can’t expect much from the announcers, either. Play-by-play dude Kevin Burkhardt made a number of objective mistakes, but he’s not as awful as Joe Buck was, so there’s that. Olsen is a blowhard, given to stating the obvious as if it were Solomonic wisdom.
Inexplicably, he got a lot of adulation for his call of a play late in the game. With the Chiefs well into range for a potentially game-winning field goal and a little under two minutes on the clock, KC ran Jerick McKinnon off left tackle. He broke through the front line and could have scored a touchdown had he wanted to do so. But as the Idiot Olsen screamed “He’s got to get down,” he did, staying inbounds and allowing Kansas City to run down the clock so that the Eagles had only a single shot at a Hail Mary after Harrison Butker kicked a chip-shot field goal.
Sports Illustrated’s Andy Nesbitt gasped that “That is so good. His energy and sense of urgency on that call were exactly what that play needed, and Olsen made a dramatic moment feel dramatic, which is what good announcers do.” All this proves is that Nesbitt is even stupider than Olsen, which is no small hurdle to clear.
Here’s the thing. First, it wasn’t a dramatic moment at all; making the mundane “feel dramatic” is what people who don’t understand drama do. Second, Olsen trod all over Burkhardt’s call, making the game about himself (he’s trying to be the NFL’s version of Bill Walton or Dick Vitale, either of whom will make Curmie watch a different game, listen on the radio, or hit the mute button). Third, the two announcers had just discussed what the Chief’s strategy should be. Burkhardt even says they “could essentially run it down to the field goal try.”
Earlier, Olsen argues for not scoring the touchdown, but he doesn’t say why. There are two kinds of people who watch the Super Bowl: those who know something about football and those who don’t but who take advantage of the opportunity to have a party with friends and loved ones. The former group sees the Chiefs’ forgoing the touchdown as a likely if not obvious strategy, so Olsen isn’t telling us anything. The latter might wonder why you wouldn’t want to score a touchdown. The answer—that you’d rather be ahead by 3 with 5 seconds remaining than ahead by 7 with over a minute and a half left and a Pro Bowl quarterback on the other sideline—went unspoken throughout.
Of course, Fox also felt compelled to show us all the celebrities at the game. Curmie remembers LeBron James and Paul McCartney; there were others. Exactly why anyone should care surpasses Curmie’s feeble ken, but it did serve as a nice reminder that there was virtually no one at the game who wasn’t stinking rich: the average ticket price was close to $8800. Note: because the average fan can buy tickets only on the secondary market, there is no real “face value ticket,” and different distributers offer different deals. But hey, you could get a crappy seat across from the corner of the endzone for a mere $5,308. But if you wanted one of those luxury boxes, that’d run you between $1.5 million and $2 million—they were “in high demand,” after all. Of course, several people can fit into one of those boxes, so it could work out to only $100-200K per person.
Curmie’s favorite moment was when we got to see Elon Musk sharing a box with Rupert Murdoch. Musk was even looking in the direction of the game, although whether he was paying attention isn’t clear. Fox’s Burkhardt, of course, felt compelled to marvel at the two “brilliant” men; Curmie supposes that the more accurate term, “narcissistic sociopaths,” would be too many syllables. The shot also underscores the fraudulence of Musk’s claim to being independently minded or anti-media, but you already knew that, didn’t you, Gentle Reader?
Oh, and we mustn’t forget Terry Bradshaw’s bizarre encouragement of hefty Chiefs head coach Andy Reid to “waddle over here” for a post-game interview. Just as many people initially thought Sylvester Stallone was a great actor because he couldn’t possibly be as stolid and inarticulate as Rocky Balboa (he was), lots of us thought Bradshaw had carefully cultivated his good-ol’-boy image, pretending (we thought) to intentionally play into Hollywood Henderson’s great line that Bradshaw “couldn’t spell ‘cat’ if you spotted him ‘c-a-.‘” It turns out, alas, that he really is that stupid. And crass. And mean-spirited. He should get a job writing Super Bowl commercials; most of them appear to have been written by drunken frat boys who think they’re hilarious, which is certainly the persona Bradshaw seems intent on emulating.
But the most egregious displays were by the NFL itself. We can start with the half-time performance. Curmie is not a fan of Rihanna, which is fine. A lot of friends thought she was wonderful; they are absolutely entitled to that opinion, even if Curmie thought the lengthy performance (which more than doubled the length of the half-time break) was boring and more about announcing the star’s pregnancy than anything else.
All that, though, is perfectly reasonable. A halftime show Curmie that would really like would no doubt bore younger viewers. Curmie objects, rather, to the hype about how Rihanna didn’t get paid for her performance. Her estimated net worth is about $1.3 billion (yes, “billion,” with a “b”)—no multi-million dollar donations to charity (à la J.K. Rowling) or attempts to influence policy about an issue she knows nothing about (à la Bill Gates or Elon Musk) for her, apparently—so we might suspect that the free publicity will be enough to leave her above the poverty line.
The point is that everybody else involved in that show had damned well better have been paid: the choreographer, dancers, lighting designer and technicians, sound techs, computer programmers and operators, the engineers who created and built those amazing LED rising platforms and the rigging that made them safe, the techs who got all that machinery on and off the stage in mere minutes. Most if not all of those folks are union workers (see this graphic of the unions involved), so they were appropriately recompensed for their time and expertise. Add in the cost of the equipment, and the total pricetag had to have been in eight figures (yes, Apple paid for some of it). Certainly the NFL could have spent a little less on glitz and made a more generous contribution to the Pat Tillman Foundation if that’s a cause they actually believe in rather than one they think looks good to fans.
But it’s the pre-game festivities where your particular political and quasi-political philosophies come into play, Gentle Reader. If you lean a little to the left, you no doubt winced at the hijacking of Pat Tillman’s legacy by the very military that killed him: no, not just put him in harm’s way, killed him and strove valiantly to cover up the evidence of having done so. Even the Military Times is raising an eyebrow over the whitewashing of Tillman’s death.
Tillman, the former Arizona Cardinals safety who turned down a multi-million dollar offer in order to enlist in the army in the aftermath of 9/11, was a legitimate hero. Curmie’s pacifist friends might object to that term, but it is undeniable that he rejected personal wealth in order to follow a path he believed led to the greater good. Of course, he thought he’d be sent to Afghanistan—you know, where the threat was located—but ended up in Iraq, instead.
Significantly, he regarded the invasion of Iraq as “fucking illegal,” and generally objected to US policy in the area. He was subsequently transferred to Afghanistan, where he was killed by friendly fire; the military then proceeded to burn his uniform and body armor to conceal the truth.
The Pat Tillman Foundation is an honorable organization, as far as Curmie can determine, and their honorees are worthy recipients. But, as Jay Willis tweeted, “Obviously the Army killing Pat Tillman and covering it up afterwards is the worst thing the U.S. military did to him, but the years they’ve spent rolling out his portrait backed by some inspirational music as a recruiting tool is a surprisingly close second.”
Of course, all this ties in with the NFL’s simplistic and repellent conflation of patriotism and militarism, exemplified by the now ubiquitous pre-game flyover by fighter jets (your tax dollars at work!). Ah, but if your predilections tilt right-ward, you were no doubt exasperated by the breathy announcement that all of those pilots this time were (gasp!) women. (Who cares?) Curmie is not quite as inured to quotas and virtue-signaling as he would like to be. Or maybe that’s a good thing.
There was also the treatment of the national anthem as what Jack Marshall has rightfully described as “the opening act,” as it was followed by both “America the Beautiful” (bad enough), and “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” which is sometimes referred to as the “black national anthem,” suggesting not inclusion but separatism. Curmie frankly doesn’t care if he ever hears the Star Spangled Banner at a sporting event ever again, but if you’re going to play it, give it the respect it deserves, and that isn’t as the antepenultimate song, the warmup for the finale.
Ah, but Curmie promised you a “that’s not all” story, didn’t he, Gentle Reader? Here it is: the NFL’s most glaring failure was the condition of the field. SB Nation’s headline that “The playing surface at the 2023 Super Bowl is basically a big Slip ‘N Slide” may be a bit hyperbolic, but it’s not terribly wide of the mark. It was a minor miracle that no one suffered a potentially career-ending injury from the slippery turf. Both teams’ kickers had their plant foot slide out from under them (that’s Eagles kicker Jake Elliott on the second-half kickoff in the photo above); ball-carriers and pass-rushers alike looked like something out of a silent movie comedy as they slid around. And apparently the half-time show made conditions even worse.
The grass itself was bad enough, but where it had been painted over (the NFL just can’t resist hyping itself) was worse: enough so that even the Idiot Olsen worried at game’s end that the easy game-winning field goal attempt might not be so easy, as the kick would come from the painted part of the field, which included virtually everything between the hashmarks from about the 17 to 33 yard-lines… where the overwhelming majority of point-after and field goal attempts take place, of course.
Eagles defensive end Haason Reddick called it “the worst field [he’d] ever played on.” That, shall we say, is not commentary one wants to hear about the sport’s signature event. It’s important to point out that the Eagles weren’t making excuses—head coach Nick Sirianni said “It’s not like we were playing on the on ice and they were playing on grass.”
Two additional points need to be made. First, the slipperiness of that turf has been an issue for a long time—time enough to notice and to do something. The Chiefs complained about field conditions when they played the Cardinals back in the season-opener. Injuries to Butker and cornerback Trent McDuffie, the Chiefs’ first-round draft choice, were both attributed to the slippery field.
Another rather significant game—the NCAA national semi-final between TCU and Michigan—played on that field also featured players for both teams sliding around. Whoever is in charge of that turf needs a good talking-to at the very least. Which brings us to the other big point: there was lots of grandstanding about the grass prior to the game about the new $800,000 turf.
There was a puff piece in England’s Daily Mail, of all places, about 94-year-old groundskeeper George Toma who, we might reasonably surmise, kinda wishes he’d retired last year. And there were self-promoting posts from two different sources—the United States Golf Association (well, actually Golf Digest on the USGA’s behalf), and Oklahoma State University. The latter, at least, is now scrambling to say that their grass was only the underlayer, that it was some other totally different top layer that was the problem. Who knows, they may even be telling the truth, but we sure as hell wouldn’t be hearing about that part if the field had been fit for an early-season 1-A high school game.
The bottom line is more concerning. Eight years ago, Curmie wrote about the decision to play the Women’s World Cup on artificial turf, suggesting that FIFA a). was being sexist, and b). really couldn’t care less about the health and well-being of the players. The NFL can’t be accused of sexism, and they’ve long since demonstrated their indifference to injuries such as chronic traumatic encephalopathy, but this breaks new ground. Football is a rough sport, and injuries are an inevitable part of the game. What we’re talking about here are acute injuries that could readily be prevented. What is worse: the NFL not only doesn’t care about players, they don’t even care about the game.
We should have known that already, but some of us held onto the naïve belief that no one could possibly be that stupid or uncaring. We were wrong. It’s time to admit it.
No comments:
Post a Comment