The Super Bowl. It is basically a national holiday within the United States and conveniently always falls on a Sunday, so you do not have to ask off work anyways.
It is a time when two teams of sweaty men run around a field in shiny tights and throw a pigskin around and everyone is yelling.
Sounds like something millions of people would tune in to watch right?
Yeah, me neither. So then we are left wondering what the big deal is about this bowl. Why so many people take time out of their days to watch two hours of people yelling and sweating so much is perhaps one of the Great Unsolved Mysteries of this universe.
I am not a super athletically-inclined person, so therefore my interest in the athletics in both watching and participating is quite low. I remember many a night when growing up, I would fall asleep on the couch as my parents watched the Packer game and then be woken up every time they screamed over a touchdown or flag. That was basically my only experience with football until high school.
Powderpuff, as my best friend explained to me, was super fun and had lots of bonding things and looked good on a resume! (I am not sure how valid that last claim was, but alas my naïve high school self trusted her blindly.) So powderpuff, for those of you who may have the fortune of not knowing, is the “girl-version” of football in which two teams are made and bedecked with tutus and crazy pink outfits, and then they attempt to play until one team gets a touchdown.
If you mistakenly think powderpuff was the experience that changed my view upon football forever and converted me into a fanatical fan of the super bowl, then you are dead wrong.
Our coaches consisted of chosen members of the football team at my high school, who probably volunteered because then they got to see girls attempt to play football and also to try and get their numbers. These coaches would start practice by making us do a few laps until they felt we were properly warmed up. Then we proceeded to sit on the ground for at least fifteen minutes while they argued over which play was the easiest one for us to be able to learn. Finally a play would be chosen, and orders would be given to either ‘run that way’, ‘tackle that girl’, or ‘uhh… you should go grab us some water.’
The actual powderpuff game, which was the opener for the homecoming football game, consisted of about two and a half completed throws, maybe one touchdown if the referee was feeling extremely generous and many illegal tackles. In short, we had absolutely no idea what we were doing because no one told us the actual rules of the game and we were just running around on a field like headless chickens.
That was my only other experience with football.
So now all I can say about the Super Bowl is I do not understand it, I do not like it and I think it is an enormous waste of money, time and resources. It displays the opulence and wasteful tendency of our country’s economic weakness towards the entertainment industry.
But I do love the cute kitty commercials, even if every second of airtime is roughly 150,00 dollars spent that could be going towards solving world hunger or cancer or helping alleviate the stress of college students.
