Super Bowl Media Day has always been one of the more perverse dates on the calendar, and is a little bit sicker now that they’ve started charging fans to attend. The big game, alone in the sports news cycle—not in fact, but degree—is subject to a level of coverage usually reserved for the Olympics or a political primary. Between that and the bye week, there’s plenty of justification for setting up a day for special access. Throngs of reporters, American and, for what is usually the first and only time in the football season, foreign, descend on the Super Bowl site—Indianapolis this year—to ask all manner of inane or incisive questions that, on balance, pertain to football and the two involved teams. Among players and the workaday football press, the week is treated with equal parts dread and bemusement. It’s mostly unnecessary, and, just as with the Golden Globes, the blame lies with the foreign press.
Football writing in the United States is a bit of a strange discipline, traditionally lamented as bad writing—“the bigger the ball, the worse the prose,” they say—but as insightful a repository of sporting analysis as you’ll find among the big four. Sports Illustrated’s Peter King, the trade’s current big dog, is mostly renowned for drinking coffee and pulling Sunday all-nighters for his weekly column, but is a magnet for information and access, and it comes across, Starbucks worship notwithstanding. Outsider analysis is plentiful on the Web, a cottage industry that rivals baseball’s, and the information is just as crucial—new metrics, the sacks-prevented index and all that—and just as insightful as King’s access for understanding who wins and why.
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While there might only be five good football books (don’t ask me to name them, though George Plimpton wrote the first two) the healthy analysis has generally trickled down to TV coverage as well. Tim Tebow fealty aside, when ESPN throws guys not named Matt Millen into the action, they are surprisingly cutting and incisive, something not the case for most other sports. Football may be an ugly concussion factory and lacking in character, but its details certainly come across well on this side of the pond.
Of course, even the best journalist can’t make something out of nothing, and during Media Day, there’s not much to make a story out of. Players and coaches, trained by teams on how to handle interviews, measure their words carefully, and are either too hung over or concentrated to slip up and let anything of substance slide by.
So the only memorable Media Day moments are blunders by the foreign press, there to cover the spectacle but not the game. The Super Bowl media blitz can be stupid, but the two teams still play a complicated game, and anyone who doesn’t watch the stuff full-time usually isn’t fit to comment on it. “I play defense,” is a good example of bad coverage this year; Ines Sainz, the object of the Jets’ unwanted attention in 2010, measured players’ biceps in 2009. But for the surprise reunion of radio legends Chris Russo and Mike Francesca, Tuesday was a whole lot of nothing.
During the rest of the year, it’s very likely that nothing that happens outside the lines—good or bad crowds, mean stories, momentum, statement games—has any effect on player performance and who wins or loses. These players, who have all spent a lifetime in youth league, high school, showcase, and college competition, become inured to whatever else is going on outside the lines. For their purposes, every game is Week 3 vs. the Bengals. But Super Bowls have, on balance, been historically bad football games, and while they can’t all be winners, one wonders if the terrible, shameful ordeal of Media Day makes these guys want to hang it up and go back to their Orlando homes. No more questions!
