On Sunday, we will gather again for the annual ritual of the Super Bowl, where men collide on a numbered rectangle in a contest to win jewelry and one (1) statue of a football. Computer-generated animals will make us laugh about corn chips. When the game is halfway over, there will be singing while the football men steal away to formulate strategy and ingest painkillers. Lady Gaga has them covered.
Later, we’ll debate how well the corn chips animals sold their product. How effectively did the Wix.com squirrels deliver their brand message? We will find the wittiest way to express our opinion on the matter, and we will push the tweet button. Maybe we will win the Super Bowl of getting retweets! We will try.
The announcers will be Joe Buck and Troy Aikman, Fox’s lead crew. Buck gets flack for his sarcasm, but I like that he laughs at himself. The savviest football broadcasters acknowledge how ridiculous their job is. Talking about an NFL game for three hours straight—coming up with something to talk about on every down!—is a peculiar skill for a person to have, in the same way it’s peculiar to kick a leather bladder between two poles. And like kickers, announcers tend to be remembered most for their misses. So I give them a little benefit of the doubt, and I think Buck does a fine job. That said, Troy Aikman is not great. We will tweet about him too, because we are cruel, and we’ve got to have those sweet retweets.
It’s a rich multimedia pageant. But it’s also a game that only one team can win, so we have to choose sides. There are two ways you can go about that: You can root for a team, or you can root against a team. I encourage you to focus on the former. Rooting against each other is now the national pastime, which we pursue to the point of exhaustion. Maybe this was the foreseeable result of electing a president whose previous claim to fame was humiliating people in a fake conference room. His “movement,” aptly billed as such, has inspired resentment at every turn. So now, with him in charge, of course we’re all out to get each other—some from a position of power, and others from a position of righteous resistance.
Amid this hellscape of ubiquitous conflict, a theoretically fun football game will take place. You could pick a team to hate, but you might as well take this opportunity to instead fill yourself with devotion, however fleeting and manufactured, to one team or the other. Find someone to love in this gloriously meaningless pageant, and save your anger for the shit that matters.
The game is more satisfying that way. Watching the Super Bowl as a hater is ultimately a hollow experience. I know from experience, as a New England Patriots fan who watched the Indianapolis Colts’ Super Bowl appearances with a Peyton Manning voodoo doll close at hand. When the Saints beat the Colts in Super Bowl XLIV, I thought I’d be happy, but it was an anticlimax. I realized that you don’t really get a culminating moment of revenge as a Super Bowl hater. When the game ends, nothing really happens to the defeated players. There’s no ritual humiliation, no auto-da-fe to punish their heretical losership and vindicate those who scorned them. They just leave the field. The losers’ penance is to go away and be forgotten. Existential retribution isn’t exactly the slam-bang payoff that haters might want.
So don’t root against, root for—even if it’s a distinction without a difference. If you can’t stand the Patriots, just focus on loving the Falcons, so you can savor it all the more if they win. (Winning as a fair-weather fan is unearned fun, but who says you have to earn fun?) In any case, it will be therapeutic. We can and will resume the fighting on Monday. On Sunday, let’s cheer.
Super Bowl LI: New England Patriots vs. Atlanta Falcons — Sunday, 6:30 p.m. Eastern, Fox
All of the positive thinking up above is quite heartfelt and all, but at the same time, I’m a bit full of shit. It’s an awfully self-serving tack for your New England Patriots-loving Block & Tackle columnist to preach love, not hate. Because when I say, “Don’t root against a team! Fill yourself with sunshine!” I’m obviously talking only about the Patriots. Nobody is nursing a vendetta against these Atlanta Falcons.
And my plea to discard your Patriot hatred is a ludicrous request, even if maybe I softened you up by saying some mean stuff about Trump. There will be no new converts to the Patriot cause this Sunday, nor will Pats-haters declare a sudden armistice. The lines that divide the NFL fan base have been drawn for some time. There are Patriots fans, and there are people who hate the Patriots, and then there are even more people who hate the Patriots because they are registered to hate the team in multiple states.