It is Super Bowl Sunday. High Holy Days in the United States. One can imagine in the not-too-distant future our Gregorian calendar being replaced by a Kraftian calendar (named after Patriots owner Bob Kraft), with New Year's Day falling on the first Sunday in February. Because, after all, can we really consider the old year to be concluded until the Vince Lombardi Trophy has been hoisted by the triumphant Super Bowl MVP?
Two decent pieces this weekend are Joe's Drape's "
‘The American Dilemma’: Why Do We Still Watch Football?" and Steve Almond's "
Trump’s Blood Sport Politics." Drape wonders why so many people continue to watch professional football when it is common knowledge that the game causes brain disease:
C.T.E. has been found in the brain of one dead N.F.L. player after another. Published studies have found a correlation between the total number of years one plays tackle football and the likelihood of one’s developing brain disease later in life.
Still, we shrug. Last year, 111.3 million people tuned in to CBS’s Super Bowl broadcast, according to Nielsen. Even with N.F.L. regular-season ratings down 12 percent this season, Eagles-Patriots on Sunday will almost certainly be the most-watched television event of the year — as the previous year’s Super Bowl was.
“I’m embarrassed how much I love football,” a friend texted me recently during an afternoon of football watching. “The American Dilemma.”
Stories of concussions do not affect viewership of the game for 77 percent of fans, according to the annual Burson-Marsteller Super Bowl survey. Alan Schwarz, the former New York Times reporter who exposed football’s concussion crisis, said that the issue does not discourage him from watching the N.F.L.
“I have no problem watching the N.F.L. — these are grown men making grown men’s decisions,” said Schwarz, whose investigative articles from 2007 to 2011 compelled new safety rules for players of all ages. “After being kept in the dark for so many years by their employers, they now know they could wind up brain-damaged. Fine. They’re professional daredevils. It wasn’t immoral to watch Evel Knievel. We watch stuntmen in movies.”
Drape failed to mention that ratings have continued to slide during this year's playoffs. CNNMoney's story, "
NFL Championship ratings dip, but games still bring in huge audience," by Frank Pallota, registers a discernible shift in the recent panic coverage of the multi-year NFL TV ratings drop. The NFL, though slipping, is still -- by far -- the only "game in town" when it comes to television:
Let's start with the bad news. The overall viewership for Sunday's two games dipped compared to last year.
CBS' early game on Sunday, when the New England Patriots held off the Jacksonville Jaguars in the AFC Championship to head to the Super Bowl for the second consecutive year, was down 5% compared to the early game last year between the Green Bay Packers and the Atlanta Falcons on Fox.
Sunday's night game on Fox, which saw the Philadelphia Eagles decimate the Minnesota Vikings in the NFC Championship, was down 12% compared to the Pittsburgh Steelers and New England Patriots night game on CBS last season. The Vikings and Eagles game had the makings of a blow out by halftime, so that could have hurt viewership.
The NFL's numbers have been sluggish all season, so last weekend's ratings aren't exactly surprising. The blame for the declining viewership this season has been pinned on everything from a surplus of TV and streaming content to a roster of injured players.
Now for the good news: Despite a loss in viewership, the NFL still brings in the biggest ratings on TV by a big margin.
Both championship games had more than 40 million viewers tuning in, which makes the match-ups some of the most-watched programming on TV in the last year.
Fox noted that the roughly 42.3 million viewers that watched Eagles-Vikings on Sunday night "registered as Fox's highest-rated and most-watched broadcast on the network since Super Bowl LI."
The 44.1 million who watched Sunday's AFC Championship made the game the most-watched and highest-rated TV program since last year's Super Bowl programming.
When it comes to national identity, the NFL, though beginning to loosen its grip, is all that binds the people of the United States.
Steve Almond -- wrongly, I believe -- argues that this has had a malign effect on our politics:
As Americans have become geographically uprooted and spiritually unmoored, they have turned to sports as a source of tribal identity, a primarily masculine refuge from the anxieties of adulthood, the lingua franca in a fragmented culture. The hours we spend consuming sports dwarfs the amount devoted to political activism, volunteer work, even religious worship.
From the moment he began his campaign, Mr. Trump understood that most Americans have exchanged the burdens of citizenship for the pleasures of fandom. And he intuited that politics, for all its precious norms and pretensions, was at its root a blood sport.
While his primary opponents droned on about policy, Mr. Trump dominated debates simply by trash talking. At rallies, he bragged about his poll numbers and urged partisans to pummel protesters. He mocked elitist losers and vowed to usher in an era of winning.
Establishment Republicans yelped that he needed to pivot to a gentler, more inclusive tone. But in the end nearly all of them voted for Mr. Trump. They did so because of what political scientists call “negative partisanship,” an ingrained hatred for the other party that is often entirely divorced from ethics or policy.
Orwell would have seen in this pattern the infiltration of the sporting spirit into our political culture. The result is voters whose prevailing ethos boils down to the motto of Al Davis, the former owner of the Oakland Raiders: “Just win, baby.” Even if you need to suppress votes, or gerrymander districts, or get help from Russian agents to do it.
But Americans across the political spectrum got caught up in the same spirit. Think about how much time liberals spent hate-watching Mr. Trump’s rallies, or hitting refresh on predictive models such as The Times’s Upshot meter. They, too, gobbled up stories that focused on strategy and poll numbers. Is it any wonder that the news media spent so much time focused on the scoreboard, and not the stakes?
We should all be alarmed by a postelection study, conducted by Harvard’s Shorenstein Center, which revealed that just 10 percent of the 2016 election coverage focused on policy. But we should also understand that this dismal statistic redounds to us.
I would say Almond has it backwards. People identify with sports because politics have become completely debased and unauthentic. W. promised that he wasn't going to nation-build, and then he invades Afghanistan and Iraq. Nader won a sliver of the presidential vote in 2000, yet he was widely blamed by liberals, indulging in self-deluding sophistry, for electing Bush, and hence the invasion of Iraq. Obama won the primary in 2008 and later the general election because he proclaimed himself the peace candidate; he was opposed to the war in Iraq. In office Obama presided over the huge covert war against Syria.
People are forced to vote for candidates from one of the two main parties, and the two main parties are united in their
devotion to perpetual war. True, there is no escape from militarism when you tune into an NFL game. But at least there is a display of
honest effort.
Lying has become so pervasive that now it is common -- this is the Trump administration's contribution to the continued debasement of politics -- for the president to say one thing and his secretary of state to say another (on NAFTA), or, what's worse, the Pentagon (the Kurds of Rojava) to fight a war against the CIA (the Free Syrian Army).
In this environment a rational thing to do is watch a contest on the gridiron. I started watching the NFL again in 2004 after a ten-year layoff probably because the Green Party was splitting and obviously was not going to be the vehicle for political change that seemed apparent in 2000.
The 2004 season also featured a Patriots-Eagles Super Bowl. This iteration of the Patriots-Eagles has the Patriots favored by four, a line that has narrowed by two points as money began flowing to Philadelphia this past week.
The New York Times is going with the favorite. The analysis of the writer Benjamin Hoffman boils down to a distrust of Nick Foles and a faith in Tom Brady. Hoffman points out the dominant nature of the Eagles defense and the so-so quality of the Patriots defense. Clearly, based on this basic but essential match-up, the respective defenses, one would be justified in taking Philadelphia.
Hoffman talks himself out of going with the Eagles because of Foles' poor first half in the divisional round against Atlanta. Hoffman fails to mention that since then Foles has been flawless. The weather conditions -- bitter cold, high winds --in the first half of the Atlanta game didn't favor passing. Foles got himself back on track in the second half by sticking with the run-pass option (RPO).
I don't think the Patriots have an answer for the Eagles RPO or the Eagles running game.
For me the question is whether Philadelphia can maintain pressure on Tom Brady into and through the fourth quarter. You will notice if you watched the AFC Championship Game that Jacksonville had New England beat until the fourth quarter when the Sacksonville pass rush disappeared, leaving Brady with a clean pocket. Give Brady a clean pocket in the fourth quarter and he will score at will. Ask the Atlanta Falcons.
The other question I have about Philadelphia's defense is its ability to cover the running back catching passes out of the backfield. Jerick McKinnon had a dynamite game for the Vikings in the
NFC Championship Game. The Patriots have two Jerick McKinnons in Dion Lewis and James White. So New England will be able to move the ball on offense.
All that being said, Philadelphia has only given up 17 points in the playoffs so far. The defense looked a little confused on Minnesota's opening drive before settling down, creating turnovers and taking care of business, while New England's defense is the weakest of any of the recent Patriots Super Bowl teams.
Finally, I have to mention that I have talked to a lot of people about the Super Bowl. No one I have spoken with is rooting for the Patriots. Everyone wants an Eagles win. But the overriding sentiment is one of fear. Fear of Brady. Brady the corporate magician, the machine logician.
I say it is different this year. Yes, Brady has been spectacular. He is the best quarterback in the history of the game over a two-decade stretch. But Gronkowski is playing shell-shocked, and there is no Julian Edelman this go-round. Brady is going to have to do it with Brandin Cooks, Dion Lewis and Danny Amendola. I say that's not enough against the Eagles defense. Plus, I like Philadelphia's running game controlling the clock.
The Philadelphia Eagles will win their first Super Bowl.
