Super Bowl, while great, is out of season — just like all other sports

Drew Brees would have been just as impactful in a mid-January Super Bowl (image via Wikipedia).

Good thing I didn’t ask the ol’ gang from Mather High School — “Men of a Certain Age” transplanted to real life — to remind me what day it was while we ooohed and ahhhed over Drew Brees’ pinpoint Super Bowl passing the other day at a local sports bar.

If one of the boys had said “Feb. 7,” I might have pointed out that high-school basketball playoffs are mere weeks away. Or that spring training starts in 10 days. Or that it’s beyond the halfway point of the NBA season.

Obviously the more casual fans don’t care. Whether they’re snowbound in the dead of winter or just happy to party to take their cares off a stressful like, they watched the Saints’ inspiring, exciting Super Bowl triumph in record numbers. Some 106 million is impressive, with Brees proving that for just one game, the best defense is a good offense when you’re playing Payton Manning.

But this here blogger, writer, columnist, crank, whatever you want to call me, is both a purist and a dinosaur. There’s no way the climax of the NFL season should be played in the dead of winter. And now NFL commissioner Roger Goodell wants to expand the season to 18 games?

It’s not just the nation’s most popular team sport that’s guilty.  Baseball should not force pitchers and catchers to report Feb. 15 for a season that begins April 5, which in turn is about a week to 10 days too early anyway.  Two weeks early when the season actually began in March recently.  And on the other end, baseball should not logically continue after Oct. 15, maybe stretch it to Oct. 20 at the very latest. Slopping into Halloween or even five days into November, past the start of the NBA and NHL seasons, is ridiculous.

The NHL starts way too early in October. The NBA could stand to wait another week or so from its Nov. 1 tipoff. But their end games stretch way too long past the practical end of spring. I remember the Bulls-Suns Finals in 1993 with temperatures of 110 outside America West Arena in Phoenix in mid-June. By the time the “winter” sports are finished, NFL training camps are ready to go and first pre-season games are played before the end of July.

I know we can’t turn back the clock to a long-gone era where major-league players like Gene Conley could hold second jobs as NBA players in the off-season, and only miss most of spring training if they were caught up in playoffs in March before switching to their baseball flannels.  Money is sports’ golden calf, so the seasons collide and overlap and intrude into places they logically should not go.

In my ideal world, baseball starts April 15, ends the regular season Sept. 25 and finishes the World Series no later than Oct. 20. The NFL begins the second week of September, has playoffs through the first week of January and stages the Super Bowl no later than Jan. 15. The NBA and NHL begin Nov. 1, go into playoffs in late March and finish by mid-May.  No wearing winter gear to a World Series game, no shorts and halter tops to a hockey game in mid-June.  Imagine if the old Boston Garden still existed, in which the fog wafted off the ice on an 85-degree late-spring day with locker rooms like sauna baths?

I have this memory of attending the only Bears game ever played in Dyche Stadium (now Ryan Field), Northwestern’s home field in Evanston, back in 1970. Cecil Turner of the Bears ran back a kickoff for a TD. The game was the Bears’ home opener and their second of the season. It was played on the final Sunday of the MLB regular season. The overlap was minimal.

Things seemed more right with the world, and sports, at that time, when future men of a certain age had only teen-age problems about which to worry.