SubscribeSome Super Bowl/football thoughts
So I was listening to the Pardon the Interruption podcast on my way in this morning and two of the topics were pretty though-provoking, so I though I’d share.
One of the issues was Aaron Rogers’ comments about the lackadaisical play in last Sunday’s Pro Bowl. “I was just surprised that some of the guys either didn’t want to play or when they were in there didn’t put any effort into it,” Rodgers said.
Michael Wilbon believes the pro Bowl is a “joke” and a waste of time. Tony Kornheiser said he didn’t know what, if anything, the NFL could do to “make” the athletes play harder. “Most players, given the opportunity, would like to take the trip to Hawaii and they don’t even want to play. They don’t want to get hurt. This isn’t basketball, this isn’t hockey, where you just lay back and let it be all offense. Football is a contact sport and they don’t want to make contact.”
Wilbon said the game has become was “worthless, yet 15 million people watch because Americans will watch anything football-related.”
Continuing on that idea — that fans can’t get their fill of football — Wilbon and Kornheiser turned to the latest gimmick: selling tickets to the annual Super Bowl Media Day. This is the time set aside for reporters and broadcasters — a number of whom do not even cover sports on a regular basis — to ask questions like, “If you were a tree, what kind of tree would you be?”, etc.
Barton Silverman/New York Times
For the first time, fans were allowed to purchase tickets (face value $25 but many many more times that through the secondary market (who used to be called scalpers; I guess that’s politically incorrect, especially since they sell a lot of advertising)) and watch from the stands while the players were being interviewed. The fans were given headphones so they could hear selected conversations. Whee.
Wilbon sarcastically said he had no problem with try to relieve fans of even more money. “If people want to be dopey enough just to go look at guys on a screen or see them talk to people. Americans will go in huge numbers to a stadium…. They can sell 80,000 tickets next year at $100 a pop because people will watch NFL players in a uniform take a nap on a circle on the field, that’s how nuts people are about professional football in America.”
Kornheiser called media day “a goat rodeo” and said he had no problem as long as the fans didn’t get in the way of the working journalists . “Why wouldn’t you charge for it exactly?” he asked. (Maybe they should change the name of the show to Pardon the Grumpy Old Men.)
Speaking of charging outrageous prices, did you see the stories about the Indianapolis hotels, parking, facilities, etc. that are gouging customers by raising rates by what I would think would be illegal levels? Forget about the $14,000 tickets to the game. I’m talking about the local budget motel charge almost $900 a night for what would be $55 any other day. Or the car rental that regularly goes for $100, being raised 300 percent.
I know, I know. Free enterprise. Supply and demand. What the market will bear. So an additional 100 percent wouldn’t have been enough? Seriously, if money was no object for me, I still don’t think I would plunk down the coin to attend the Super Bowl. On the other hand, if I won a contest, or someone gave me tickets and accommodations, I might consider it. There’s just something I find odious about spending all that dough, the conspicuous consumption, in these times. It almost seems like a subject for a dystopian feature film (Rollerball, anyone?)
Agree, Ron. Don’t think I could justify shelling out that kind of dough for one game.