Are You Not Entertained?

At the end of the game, after spending the previous hours harming each other in ways that were legal and accidental and illegal and illegal-but-out-of-referee-eyelines, the Seattle Seahawks and New England Patriots finally got around to actually, frankly trying to beat the shit out of each other. Unsurprisingly and perfectly, they were pretty terrible at it. There was some shoving and wrestling and the usual hold-me-back non-grappling. But the fight at the end of Super Bowl XLIX wasn't much of a brawl, honestly.

The players tussled and tumbled and photographers tore onto the field to get photos, scurrying to avoid being reduced to paste beneath a toppling Nate Solder or Michael Bennett; NBC's Al Michaels and Cris Collinsworth studiously avoided mentioning the scuffling, which added a nice gloss of unreality to what had already been a dizzying and improbable minute of football. The aggression was desperate, unfocused, and about what you'd expect from wrung-out athletes tired and dazed after a fast, tense, characteristically vicious football game whose whipsaw storyline everyone involved seemed to be chasing as much as authoring.

This is how we know a football game is working, and what it feels like when it does. That sort of game is transporting, for sure, and disinhibiting in a way that makes intelligent and well-balanced adults blast hot jets of profanity and/or exultation at plasma-screen electronics. But, as much as it's that, it is also feverish and crazy, a legitimate and happily unmanageable high. We don't even think to try to make sense of what we're experiencing until after it ends. There's no time. Even a day later, there's something unreal-feeling about the most important game of the NFL season turning on a gambling bit of counterpunch coaching and a moment of shocking hand-of-God virtuosity from the Patriots' fifth cornerback. This is not going to stop the noise, because there is a whole loud industry built on it, but there's no amount of retrospective armchair quarterbacking or what-if conjecture that is going to make Super Bowl XLIX make sense, which is about as high a compliment as there is to give to a game.

Although maybe this is close: the happy nonsense of this Super Bowl would be and feel just as profound if the outcome had gone the other way, and it was Marshawn Lynch setting a Super Bowl record for "you feel me"'s in a post-game interview and Chris Matthews, who made the first catches of his NFL life on Sunday, beaming dazedly through some gobsmacked non-answers. If a game is great, it is also weird enough and thrilling enough that there's not even a temptation to map some hasty logic over it until later. We are pulled along by it and in it, and for that time more or less happily at momentum's mercy. It's on the players and the coaches to try (and fail) to make their anguished computations and reads in the moment; for the rest of us watching, with or without a rooting interest, the moment is the only thing. We are not ourselves in that moment, which is precisely why we keep seeking it out.

The challenge, where the NFL is concerned and in this Super Bowl in particular, is everything that surrounds and interrupts the wild delirium of the game itself. The NFL has spent this whole year in disgrace, all of it self-inflicted; the league's culture is curdled and corrosive at most every level, from the tragicomic nincompoopery of its executives down to the Hobbesian rot of its labor relations. It is not just that the league cannot get out of its own way, although it cannot and will not do that. It's that it is now locked in a sort of crazy, clock-killing argument with itself. It is extremely lucrative and extremely popular, and also in some serious ways very sick, and quite probably dying.

Take the game out of the equation, and this is something to shrug at: a corporation eating itself, and being poisoned for it. Take your eye off the game and the perversity is staggering all the way down. This is the league that gives us macabre legalisms like "the league's unaffiliated neurological trauma consultant"—a new and weird phrasing that debuted after after Seattle's Cliff Avril was led to the locker room with a concussion—and it is also the league in which the existence of said unaffiliated neurological trauma consultant, and the belated acknowledgment of the need for same, represents something like progress. This is a league that has addressed a real and perceived problem with domestic violence through some extravagant and semi-shady measures of image-laundering, not so much out of malice as because that is all it really knows how to do.

And this is all known to everyone who wants to know it; the NFL itself is indefensible, in large part because of how little it understands its various crimes. In this one way, the NFL is a corporation that is like a person—its organizational arrogance manifests in the same ways, and in the same empathy-deprived tones of umbrage and upset, that you would get from a delusional narcissist. If the NFL was a person, it would be a person that anyone would do well to avoid. We would warn our friends, in no uncertain terms, "do not get in a relationship with [whatever the NFL's name would be, which is most likely some unholy prep school neologism like Phipps or Cupper]. I understand [Phipps or Cupper] has a lot of money and nice things but I promise you do not want any of that."

But the NFL is not a person, although Roger Goodell is doubtless still working on that. The NFL is a corporation with the professional monopoly on a game, that exists to sell that game, and the only reason the NFL can exist in its current form of bloated colossal potency or any other is that the game is so great that we continue buying it. This is a high we cannot give up, although we know that our dealer is not to be trusted, that our dealer does not have our interests or anyone else's at heart. It is bad for us, like most things we love most. But the game and what it does for us when we watch it is powerful enough that we're able to tune out what it does to us. The NFL has leveraged everything—metric tons of luxury villainy, not to mention various roaring waterfalls of profit—on this comparatively small thing, and yet the game is somehow strong enough to support it.

The hope, which is unreasonable and extremely human and extremely stubborn, is that we will not have to quit. The hope is that the game itself is neutral, and can be made relatively less destructive and irresponsible by less destructive and more responsible stewardship; that, for all the viciousness inherent in the game, everything around it could somehow be a lot less cruel. The hope is that we can continue to experience the wild and heart-opening joy that comes with watching a game like this last Super Bowl, face-to-face in broad daylight, out of the long shadow of the NFL's soaring cynicism.

But this, maybe, is also an attempt to write some logic onto something that resists it, a futile attempt to plot a course when the current already has us, and will take us wherever it's going. It might be that this is it, and that this how watching football will feel, and that we will have to put our own price on this feeling's cost. It's hard to know, now. This game has a way of carrying us away.