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at Super Bowl Week XLIX from “The Valley of the Sun” – aka: Phoenix/Scottsdale/Tempe/Glendale et. al.
This place is fabulous. But you already knew my opinion on Arizona, right? Sorry about the snowstorm getting ready to Kam Chancellor the East Coast with replacement referees not watching for helmet to helmet contact, but hey, when are we going to learn that living up in those places means dealing with that nonsense every winter.
/global warming dig
/Al Gore joke
As you listeners/readers may know, I have become selective in terms of which cities to bug my employers to send me when it comes to the Super Bowl. Cold weather recent venues (Indy/NY?) Hells, nah!
Arizona? I’m in.
Maricopa County has grown from 2.6 million residents in 1996 (Super Bowl XXX, where Neil O’Donnell handed that jackass Barry Switzer his ring) to nearly 4 million today. So the place is doing something right!
The photo above was from that venue, the ASU campus stadium, which was deemed “good enough” by the league back then to get it done. Also, what I find interesting, is that all the photos from the 1996 game I find on-line, are clearly printed analog photos, that have been scanned. Digital cameras and the internet were still tiny tadpoles, in what is now our sprawling digital age.
Which got me to thinking about this annual tradition of “radio row” and “saturation coverage” leading up this game. This week WAS what the internet and digital media now delivers every day, every week, every season. Not just 4 or 5 stories about a game, but 40, or more. And more. And more.
It was sorta special then, because when else would you have so much content produced by so many outlets, for just one game? Answer: never. Now, this degree of content about sports, and big games, gets produced on a regular basis thanks to the miracle of cheap (actually, almost FREE!) digital publishing platforms and countless numbers of highly creative and thoughtful people out there hustling to make a name for themselves.
In other words: every day in sports land, is Super Bowl Week. It’s just going to cost our employers more money this week!
But I am going to take a low-key approach this week, if it’s okay with everybody. Because who cares about me and the per diem spending, really? I’m barely going to tweet, if at all, and I’m just going to do the best shows I can do from here.
And I think they will be good, and focused.
Because this should be an epic game. Incredible, interesting matchups galore. Lots of “legacy” crap on the line for both teams/coaches/QBs. Big contract looking for Russell Wilson. What happens if all of a sudden, the carriage turns into a pumkin and he looks even WORSE than he did against Green Bay before they collapsed?
(Don’t scoff. Many would argue that New England’s defense is every bit as good as Green Bay, if not better. Plus, hello. Revis.)
Even the guys who don’t say anything – like Beast Mode and the Hoodie – are still fascinating in the way they say nothing, and why they say nothing.
I think #deflategate will cease to be much of anything by Wednesday, with the only last flurry left being Roger Goodell’s obligatory corporate-speak, ass-covering answers in his state of the union presser on Friday.
There might be some fun/semi-relevant shenanigans and we will of course let you live a bit vicariously through us on those moments, if/when they happen.
In the meantime, here’s a video that has a mere 16 million hits in about 1 week. I always think “well, SURELY everyone has seen this already after getting passed around via Facebook, Twitter, email and such” but then you may still have missed it.
How many takes, and how many creative writers it took to make this bad lip reading video is beyond me. All I know, is that they are geniuses.
Your prediction of a blizzard ruining the NYC Superbowl was only one year off!