Today’s NFL Super Bowl is “Sport” for Losers

There are many virtues to be gleaned from sports in a civilized society. Sports teach by doing – the most effective method of teaching – that there are rules to live by, and, as Jordan Peterson has said, whether you win or lose any particular game, everybody wins. Because unlike the battles they have in some countries, nobody’s died, and everybody has learned more about themselves and others in a way you simply can’t learn in the classroom. That’s sports; but the Super Bowl is not sports.

For most Americans, there is nothing to be gained from watching the Super Bowl. In fact, for most Americans, the act of watching the Super Bowl, either alone or with others, can actually be harmful to you.

Let’s lay aside all the really, really dumb things individual players have done. The one thing the NFL has lately contributed to American society was the act of Tebowing, but an ungrateful diva-player even ruined that by kneeling at the wrong time for the wrong reasons. And rather than take a strong stance for America, the right thing to do, the NFL sided with its mostly African-American audience, and allowed one diva dressed in a football uniform to effectively discredit the entire institution. But we’re not addressing that buffoonery specifically, here.

Even before the football divas began to take down the NFL from the inside out, leading to a decline in viewership which continues to this day, the NFL and the Super Bowl has long ceased to be any kind of positive influence. That’s because any virtues of actually playing football in those backyard and high school teams are effectively perverted beyond recognition, like so many other things, when they are put on television.

For most Americans, television football-watching is an excuse to gather around the television and eat junk food, or worse, go to a local bar and drink alcohol and junk food. Granted, this is not always the case. I know some people at the gym who watch games when they work out. I’m not talking about that.

I’m talking about this odd, pagan kind of revelry which now projects a kind of cynicism about not only America, but the game of football itself and all the virtues that the game once represented. So what is the Super Bowl if not sports? It looks like sports, right?

Michael Savage has famously called it “The Stuporbowl,” because it’s really a distraction from the things that matter in life. It’s a distraction that previously America could afford, but increasingly, it’s become an anti-American institution, both in its overt political leanings, and even in the way it occupies an inordinate amount of American attention that might be better spent elsewhere.

I know what you’re thinking. Pete, you’re America’s Man’s Man, and you’re dissing the Super Bowl? Yup. I mean, it’s kind of sort of interesting, but here’s what I would suggest doing in lieu of watching the Super Bowl.

Why not gather together some like-minded friends and play football? I know, it’s a little cold out in some parts of the United States, but maybe your pastor has a hall available in the church recreation center or basement. While we’re talking about church, one thing AMM recommends against is having a church Super Bowl party. It kind of defeats the purpose, plus, they’re going to be airing only God knows what in between plays. I just read that Kraft and Heinz’s Devour brand will be airing an ad about pornography. And for years, churches would simply turn these kinds of things off. But that’s a bad strategy.

The bottom line: when you add up all the wardrobe malfunctions, and the Lady Gagas, and the anti-American protests by the players, there is only one reasonable conclusion a Bible-believing Christian can come to – it’s all trash. The Super Bowltoday is, sadly, a hapless mix of over-the-top, anti-American, pornographized gimmickry. It’s the farthest thing from the values inherent in the actual game itself. It’s all the glory with none of the effort; it’s all emotion with no sacrifice or personal investment.

I’m not saying that there aren’t positive lessons to be learned in compulsive pagan revelry. One positive takeaway, for instance, might be the example of the Tom Brady work ethic. The man is, if nothing else, a portrait of ceaseless, focused effort that pays off again and again. There’s something that can be taken from Tom Brady’s example. And I’m not saying that just because I’m from the Hub of the Universe.

I am saying that if you do a cost/benefit comparison of watching the Super Bowl, between the irreparable harm that can be done to young children from some of the more anti-social stunts of commercial gimmickry and the cash that one way or another the NFL gets out of you from watching the thing – it’s simply not worth it.

Not at a time when we’re raising boys who are being taught that they may not actually be boys; and vice versa.

The sad thing is that the NFL could be a really great institution. It’s always been commercialized to some degree, sure. It’s always been used to sell cheap sugar-water that Tom Brady isn’t drinking, and other junk that destroys both the body and the mind of America.

Again, it comes down to, at this point in history, an overwhelming, year-after-year preponderance of smut and missteps by the NFL that wise men do well to protect their families from.

This goes for today’s televised sports in general. ESPN, of course, is one of the best examples. The cable channel has become, more than anything else, little more than a political platform for the left, which again, is attempting to sell the lowest common denominator in America, that lowest 10% IQ group, on a leftist ideology and a lifestyle which will only make them and their country even poorer than they already are.

In a free country, of course, ESPN and the NFL have a right to sell the dumbest and the poorest whatever ideological poison they wish to, because such is the capitalist marketplace of ideas. If a woman wishes to believe she is actually a goat, who am I to legislate otherwise?

It is, however, my responsibility as an American of Christian faith, the foundational American faith, that there is a better way. And so, I suggest to you that there’s a better way to spend your Sunday than watching a bunch of ungrateful, unmanly divas playing to the camera. This despite the fact that once upon a time, there was a national football league which brought out the best in their players and in ourselves, a league which has devolved into a pagan junk food festival which brings out the very worst in all of us, and whose once laudable values have since become the punchline of deviant marketing agencies.

Actual sports are a win-win for men. Valuable life lessons are learned, including the fact that winning matters. The Super Bowl, however, is not real sports. It’s sports appropriated by television and far-removed from any iota of edifying masculinity. Kind of like feminism is a false religion that brings out the worst in women, today’s Super Bowl, thanks to chronic mismanagement and ceaseless selling out by the NFL board, is a kind of Las Vegas, chorus-line made-for-television adaptation of the real thing, like watching the movie instead of reading the book, which brings out the worst in American men, a reflection of the weak leadership who have fumbled the ball. Weak leaders like NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell, who could have taken clear, decisive, immediate action to get rid of the bad, anti-American apples when they started throwing diva-fits.

Like so many other posts you’ve seen from America’s Man’s Man, this one will suggest that media has had a really big influence in the downfall of the NFL. Goodell has grown comfortable with the television deals, and the income. But the result is a mediasphere that’s got him by the neck. He could terminate contracts, perhaps distribute the Super Bowl independently via an independent Web stream, sell their own advertising, that sort of thing. The major networks, after all, need the NFL more than the NFL needs them.

But again, it’s this chronic media addiction, this fear-based control by the ubiquity of media influence that has really got ambivalent guys like Goodell throwing their hands up in the air, preventing them from putting back together an institution continuing its long downward spiral. He’s reacting rather than making decisions. Trying to avoid controversy, rather than taking control of the game. Goodell is on the defensive, not the offensive.

It’s a losing strategy.