2008 Woodie Awards
Super Bowl coverage? Good riddance...
Chris Martin
Issue date: 2/4/08 Section: Sports
It may be blasphemous to say so, but I cannot express how glad I am that the Super Bowl is over.
Don't get me wrong, I watch the NFL every Sunday and have an almost insatiable appetite for football, but I feel as though I'm going to vomit from having to digest the glut of Super Bowl coverage I have been force fed for the past two weeks.
Every time I logged on to my favorite sports news, I was assaulted by pictures of Tom Brady, Randy Moss, Plaxico Burress or Eli Manning that took up nearly a quarter of the entire Web page. The saturation of coverage even pushes good stories off the front page.
For instance, the Los Angeles Lakers picked up all-star forward Pau Gasol from the Memphis Grizzlies without giving up any significant parts. In the normal course of events, that story would have been front page material and all the analysts would have been throwing in their 2 cents on how this is the move that will keep Kobe Bryant in LA and that it will turn the Lakers into a serious title contender.
Instead, it was given an embarrassing lack of coverage in between reports of the Patriots still being undefeated and the Giants great three-game winning streak.
The only newsworthy items that could come out of the weeks leading up to the big game would be if someone got injured or some other story that might keep a player from playing, but instead we are handed a full platter full of feel-good stories. The Giants made an unlikely run to get to the championship game and the Patriots are seeking to become the only team aside from the 1972 Miami Dolphins to go undefeated in a season. But haven't we known all of this for a long time?
I understand that the Super Bowl is the largest sporting event of the year, but two weeks of rehashing the same stories and pretending they are important makes me not even want to watch ESPN.
Really, I wouldn't be surprised if you didn't know that the Lakers picked up Gasol, the Mets traded for Johan Santana, Kansas' men's basketball team lost its first game of the season or that former WWE superstar Brock Lesnar fought in the UFC this past weekend.
Now, the game itself is definitely something to look forward to, and I honestly was excited when watching the game, but there are things going on in sports that aren't related to football.
Another reason to look forward to the resolution of the NFL season is that it signals that March Madness is almost upon us. NCAA basketball's tournament season is, for my money, the most exciting postseason in all of sports. As improbable as it was for a team like the Giants to make it to the Super Bowl, it was astronomically less likely that George Mason would make it to the Final Four in 2006.
So, now that the Giants and Patriots have finally settled things out on the gridiron, we can finally get back to normal and not worry about Eli's psyche or whether or not the Patriots can go through the season without a blemish on their record and actually read about sports like basketball.
I assure you, they still exist.
Don't get me wrong, I watch the NFL every Sunday and have an almost insatiable appetite for football, but I feel as though I'm going to vomit from having to digest the glut of Super Bowl coverage I have been force fed for the past two weeks.
Every time I logged on to my favorite sports news, I was assaulted by pictures of Tom Brady, Randy Moss, Plaxico Burress or Eli Manning that took up nearly a quarter of the entire Web page. The saturation of coverage even pushes good stories off the front page.
For instance, the Los Angeles Lakers picked up all-star forward Pau Gasol from the Memphis Grizzlies without giving up any significant parts. In the normal course of events, that story would have been front page material and all the analysts would have been throwing in their 2 cents on how this is the move that will keep Kobe Bryant in LA and that it will turn the Lakers into a serious title contender.
Instead, it was given an embarrassing lack of coverage in between reports of the Patriots still being undefeated and the Giants great three-game winning streak.
The only newsworthy items that could come out of the weeks leading up to the big game would be if someone got injured or some other story that might keep a player from playing, but instead we are handed a full platter full of feel-good stories. The Giants made an unlikely run to get to the championship game and the Patriots are seeking to become the only team aside from the 1972 Miami Dolphins to go undefeated in a season. But haven't we known all of this for a long time?
I understand that the Super Bowl is the largest sporting event of the year, but two weeks of rehashing the same stories and pretending they are important makes me not even want to watch ESPN.
Really, I wouldn't be surprised if you didn't know that the Lakers picked up Gasol, the Mets traded for Johan Santana, Kansas' men's basketball team lost its first game of the season or that former WWE superstar Brock Lesnar fought in the UFC this past weekend.
Now, the game itself is definitely something to look forward to, and I honestly was excited when watching the game, but there are things going on in sports that aren't related to football.
Another reason to look forward to the resolution of the NFL season is that it signals that March Madness is almost upon us. NCAA basketball's tournament season is, for my money, the most exciting postseason in all of sports. As improbable as it was for a team like the Giants to make it to the Super Bowl, it was astronomically less likely that George Mason would make it to the Final Four in 2006.
So, now that the Giants and Patriots have finally settled things out on the gridiron, we can finally get back to normal and not worry about Eli's psyche or whether or not the Patriots can go through the season without a blemish on their record and actually read about sports like basketball.
I assure you, they still exist.
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