“Aren’t there kids watching?” That was me at the sight of Jason Derulo, who loves to say his name, grinding onstage with a barely clad dancer during the interminable Super Bowl pregame show. Or as someone watching with me put it, “Why do I have to see so much ass?”
And then prancing in formation next to him came a phalanx of four-legged, uh, robot animals? Cute, was the idea. Bizarre, was the effect. They concluded their choreographed appearance by rising on their hind legs, as if in supplication for a treat. Maybe, shades of the Tin Man, a spritz of WD-40? Or how about a baseball bat across the midsection.
This is the world we’ve made? No wonder people home-school their children and head north to homestead in Alaska.
So, the pairing of the N.F.L. and Fox Sports was less than ideal for all involved. That may be the no-duh statement of the year, but, what, no one ever went broke infantilizing the American public, is that the lesson of Fox’s weird use of computer-generated, football-playing Transformers, or whatever the hell they are, to goose the coverage?
And, amazingly, the N.F.L., for all its power and riches and popularity impervious to any gruesome head trauma, simply cannot get out of its own way. Because you’d have to try pretty hard to screw up a back-and-forth game featuring the league’s two best teams, headlined by two exciting, scrambling quarterbacks, but between the action-deadening surfeit of pointless penalty flags and the endless video booth slow-motion review of close plays, that’s exactly what they did.
Thus at 35-all, what should have been a thrilling last-second showdown went out not with a bang, but with a slow and deflating release of gas — and perplexed silence from the stadium fans — as the Kansas City Chiefs essentially ran out the clock. What a waste.
Gilding the lily. All these questionable holding calls and no-touch pass-interference calls — it was all overthought, designed to help offenses and in turn spur fan interest. But in reality the way it’s gone down is that it’s impossible to enjoy a single long bomb of a pass, as you sit there wincing in anticipation of the inevitable nullifying penalty.
Time to go back to basics. Enough with the challenge flags and the video review. Let the players play. What’s so hard about that?
In the meantime, we can all move on to greener pastures, because next week, believe it or not, spring training baseball games start across the Cactus and Grapefruit Leagues.