Super Bowl should be about the game, not the festivities

It’s Monday, the 2nd of February. I am sitting up at WPTS-FM’s main desk doing office hours…. It’s Monday, the 2nd of February. I am sitting up at WPTS-FM’s main desk doing office hours. Not surprisingly, the water-cooler talk surrounds Super Bowl XXXVIII.

But my fellow WPTS staffers and I are not discussing Jake Delhomme’s 87-yard bomb to Muhsin Muhammad. Nor are we discussing Adam Vinatieri’s game-winning field goal, or even Tom Brady’s second Super Bowl MVP award in three years.

Our discussion centers around Janet’s (Ms. Jackson’s, if you’re nasty) right breast.

And this is exactly why I hate the Super Bowl.

I love music with a passion, although I hardly consider P. Diddy lip-synching his trademark horrible rhymes for 30 seconds a solid live outing. I even enjoy making fun of celebrities from time to time; if you don’t believe me, ask Whitney Houston. And I’ve been a big fan of Janet Jackson’s breasts for as long as I can remember.

But I keep my love of sports separate from those other pleasures. And the NFL needs to realize who its core audience is and do the same.

Over the last decade, the hype and entertainment dollars surrounding the Super Bowl have overshadowed the game itself: the championship football game of the NFL. Nipplegate 2004 is just the latest example of the joke the Super Bowl has become.

First, Super Bowl Sunday became Super Bowl weekend, a celebration wherein masses of people could come together, tailgate, and enjoy themselves before the big game. Then, it became Super Bowl week, and the emergence of 24-hour news networks ensured that we would be deluged with dumb-jock cliches and boring press conferences for seven straight days.

This season, after wisely scrapping the system for two years, the NFL returned to the two-week layoff after the conference championship games. This meant twice as many boring press conferences, Rock ‘n’ Jock chump contests and stupid lines coming out of Vegas on the over-under on how many times Phil Simms will say “Gosh, golly, geeee-whiz,” in the first half.

The environment of the game itself is deplorable. It is always in a warm city, and usually in a dome; truly horrible conditions for proper winter football viewing. The majority of the tickets go to corporations for promotional purposes, so instead of die-hard partisan fans making noise, the attendance is mainly made up of indifferent suits.

More attention is paid to the halftime show than to the physical condition of the field. If you actually watched the game on Sunday and not just the commercials, you might have noticed that there were several players losing their footing in the second half. I’m willing to bet that this had something to do with the overblown, Spinal Tap-esque stage sets that were being wheeled around at halftime.

So if you love football, watch the NFL conference championship games. They are much more exciting and have far better crowds. If you love sports-entertainment, watch the Super Bowl and, while you’re at it, check out Wrestlemania XX in a couple of months.

And for those of you who enjoyed Janet and Tim-bo’s “wardrobe malfunction” on Sunday, I’ve got news for you: there was also a football game being played in Houston that night.

And it was outstanding.

Michael Cunningham is a senior staff writer for The Pitt News. He would like to dedicate this column to the guy who got to hold Janet’s breasts on the cover of the janet LP.