It’s Time to Stop Pretending the Big Game is about Football

We are a day away from Super Bowl LVIII, a matchup between the San Francisco 49ers and the Kansas City Chiefs. These teams are no strangers to the big stage as they matched up for Super Bowl LIV, with the Chiefs also playing in their fourth championship game in the past five years. The Super Bowl is arguably one of the largest spectacles of the year, but it’s easy to see how this has become more of a show and less of a championship.

The NFL is the only league of the four major US sports to have the championship be decided by a single game, which means the highest of stakes and leaving it all out on the field. There’s no chance for do-overs or shrugging it off and getting back on track the next game, which emphasizes how big the game should be, realistically. The NFL’s biggest problem is that it’s too focused on everything else outside of the matchup itself and fails to acknowledge how far it has gone from being big game. The Super Bowl is no longer a championship game, it is simply a series of entertainment segments with a football game played in between those events.

This greatly goes against the image the NFL is pushing to portray as throughout the season. A gritty game with deeply rooted history, football by NFL standards is not flashy or dainty, so it’s certainly interesting that the biggest game of each season goes in almost the complete opposite direction. If you were to have someone new to American Football watch the Super Bowl do you think this game would exemplify the nature of the sport? Or would it feel more as an entertainment segment? This is an important concept to think about, as the NFL struggles with the balance of modernizing while remaining true to their foundation.

Overall there is nothing inherently wrong with the Super Bowl being more than just the game, as the end focus is undoubtably viewership and ad revenue, but there’s something to be noted on how far the big game itself has strayed away from what the NFL as a league values. So enjoy the game, eat all the snacks, and push for your squares to hit because that’s what really matters to 99% of viewers anyway, but it’s okay to acknowledge the evening itself isn’t really about football.

Go Bears.