Not So Super Bowl

You know what Sunday is? Other than the long-awaited debut of DIY’s “Bathtastic”, the first remodeling show to finally have the courage to focus strictly on the water closet? It’s Super Bowl Sunday, where we as a nation will gather in front of our televisions to watch football and see how many food items we can cover in spicy cheese. (Your author’s personal best is 13, but only if you count a potted bamboo plant as food.)

This year’s matchup is far from riveting, putting the impressive 12-4 Pittsburgh Steelers against the Arizona Cardinals, a team which may actually have less fans than it does players. (QB Kurt Warner has already made it clear he’ll be rooting for the Rams.) While the game may not be a blowout, you’d have trouble finding many sports pundits who gives Arizona much of a chance to win outright. So…why are we all gonna watch?

Approximately 80-90 million Americans watch the Super Bowl every year. That’s, like, a lot of people. The last time I spoke in public there were only 2 million people in attendance, and I’m very famous. “But wait”, you say, “football is a sport beloved by children young and old. Of course there will be many viewers!”.  My response is 1) why are you talking little a weirdo, and 2) we don’t like football THAT much. According to Wikipedia (you want well founded research, buy a textbook), our best comparable, Monday Night Football, optimizes out at around 17 million viewers, but even the best rated Sunday games only eek into the mid 2os. That means over 50 million people are watching the Super Bowl who haven’t been regularly tuning in to previous games! 50 million people who presumably would just assume be doing something else! We all know these people. We sit next to them at the parties and tolerate their “how much is it worth when they kick it?” questions while wondering in our heads exactly how long it would take to drowned them in spicy cheese. 

So here’s what I want to know: why does this happen? On Sunday afternoon 50 million people (more folks than live in Texas and New York combined, by the way) will be essentially unhappy. They’ll shuffle their butts to parties they don’t really want to attend based around watching a game they care nothing about. They’ll make a big deal about the commercials, as if these are the only things that keep the event interesting for them, forgetting after all that they’re just motherfucking commercials. And then when it’s all said and done they’ll march home tired and on their way to a hangover, wondering why they even bothered. It’s like optional slavery. “Yeah sure, I’ll go this thing that I don’t like for a while, why not?”. So I say, this year – stay home. Rent a movie, catch up on your laundry, read a good book. Don’t watch a football game just because it seems like you have to, or because you worry you’ll be missing something great. I love football, and I’m entirely certain that nothing great will be going on on Sunday. Unless of course, you’re watching DIY. At least then you’ll have a chance at something like this…