| The National Football League season and postseason consists of 268 football games and one festival of entertainment that has a football game attached to it. The Super Bowl is the grandest and yet strangest of things in sports, a loud, flashing, electrifying, frenetic week that somehow comes together into a giant show that is something to everyone and everything to some. And it’s here. There are levels of interest and levels upon those levels, but the Super Bowl is that perfect combination of an entity that’s completely unavoidable and compelling enough that you’d be mad to want to avoid it. What the heck is it, really? How would you describe it to a visitor from outer space? The answer, of course, depends on who you’re asking. The Super Bowl is all about the technical intricacies from the most tactical and strategic of sports, spearheaded this time by the allure of trying to figure out how the humdinger of a battle between the Kansas City Chiefs’ sizzling offense and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers’ brick wall defensive resistance will play out. For some, it’s most compelling feature is a testament to the timeless enjoyment of sporting excellence, the mere fact that to get here the Chiefs and Bucs had to overcome and persevere, two organizations which had to figure out how to be great and two groups of players who hold responsibility for keeping it so. “The (Chiefs) are a team that has all the answers,” former All-Pro Brandon Marshall told First Things First on FS1, highlighting how Tampa Bay is a significant underdog (Buccaneers +3 [+100], per FOX Bet). What else? For the romantics (aren’t we all?), there is the chasing of narrative, personified perfectly by Patrick Mahomes and Tom Brady, a young man hunting down history and an ancient one (in football terms) who seeks more of it. The Super Bowl is all of these things and so much more, because there’s so much more to it. Yet the real story of this precious Sunday is how we consume it. Think back to any and every Super Bowl that occupies your memory and chances are you can recall who you were with and where, and what you did and ate and drank. Apart from the few who get to be there, which at Raymond James Stadium will delightfully include 7,000 vaccinated healthcare professionals, it is a television event, albeit one that flips the entire script. It is a show where a not-insignificant chunk of the audience are cheering for timeouts and review delays because they’ve been hanging out and waiting for the commercials, pocket-sized bites of ingenuity that have had millions of dollars spent on them. Even the pure football diehards who breathe routes and coverages can agree the ads are great, though picking a favorite can spawn as much conjecture as a disputed pass interference call. This is a sports column so it’s fair to assume most of us here will be fixated on the game and its twists, but we all know people for whom the Super Bowl is a concert, with the most awaited moment being when The Weeknd gets out there and does his halftime thing. Take all those points of focus above and you’d be likely to find each of them across the spectrum of a big, typical Super Bowl gathering, featuring multiple families and friend groups, just like we’ve seen in the past. Hopefully – but hurtfully – that won’t, or at least shouldn’t, be the case this time. “Just lay low and cool it,” Dr. Anthony Fauci told the “Today” show, warning that Super Bowl meetups could spark a fresh spike in COVID-19 cases. We find our connections in different ways these days. Virtually to a person, we’ve had less human contact than we were previously accustomed to. Togetherness for the most part used to mean gatherings, get-togethers, parties and glee. Now it is Zooms and FaceTimes and whatever we can get. But once Sunday hits its afternoon hours there is community to be found, even for those watching solo. We will find it in Mahomes’ ridiculous sidearm throws, or Brady’s improvisation, or Gronk being Gronk, in thunderous tackles, Andy Reid’s brilliance, in unheralded heroes, in blown calls, the anthem, in Blinding Lights and in wondering what the heck happened to the Clydesdales. For a few, short, color-splashed, marvelous hours, we will all be doing, watching, talking about and enjoying the same thing. It’s not everything we’d want, but it’s something. It’s the Super Bowl. Here’s what others have said … Jerry Brewer, Washington Post: “Super Bowl LV will be a restrained spectacle … The pandemic can’t stop the event from feeling gigantic, and social media will be the primary mechanism to gauge the intensity of interest and to connect with the world. Community, though dependent on technology, will exist, at least for one precious day. It will feel weird, but there is connection even in shared oddity. And that will feel good, taking one figurative step toward normal living, toward each other.” Larry Olmsted, Author: “When an avid fan is subconsciously merged with the team, it is, to a lot of people, greater than other beliefs you hold. For a significant enough portion, it’s a bit of an acceptance. It’s so important to them that they put aside other things because they’re so invested in supporting their team.” Roger Goodell, NFL Commissioner: “I don’t know when normal will occur again and I don’t know if normal ever will again. I know this, we’ve learned to operate in a difficult environment. We have found solutions and we’ll do it again.” |
