FOOTBALL CHRISTMAS

Quickly now, my Super Bowl prediction here at 3:12pm 2/7/10:

Saints by 14.

And the funniest commercial will be where the guy gets hit in the balls.

If you are having a vegetarian Super Bowl, as was the suggestion in Whole Foods to us shoppers, you need to be sent to Guantanamo Bay. Not the prison camp. The Bay.

Comments

[Mr. Mustache]

Larry, I am curious to see if you are as sick and tired of what seems like the entire Super Bowl being overshadowed and pawned off as a dramatic second coming for Hurricane Katrina refugees as I am?

The pre-game coverage on CBS has been so extremely difficult for me to digest that I find myself flipping to other channels continuously in a conscious effort to avoid the orchestra level overdose of sad violins in the name of flooded New Orleans ghettos with a side order of dead children underneath rubble in Haiti and human interest stories about former NFL players such as Plaxico Burress currently incarcerated due to criminal activity.

Don't get me wrong. Hurricane Katrina and the earthquake in Haiti were horrible disasters worthy of empathy and charitable aid, but the force-feeding of these human tragedies within various political and at times editorial points of view on the coattails of an otherwise fun American tradition such as the Super Bowl leaves me wondering if Bono from the band U2 and Wyclef Jean are the new program directors for CBS Sports.

And of course all of this bad taste in Super Bowl Sunday programming comes on the heels of my accidentally witnessing footage hours earlier on WSB which featured Monica Pearson and her living hairdo which I am convinced has a mind and personality of its own interviewing Michael Vick about some meaningless confession of getting Dan Reeves fired from the Atlanta Falcons a decade ago.

It all makes me cringe to be honest. Monica sitting there smiling like a giddy teenager in the presence of a faux Atlanta hero who is insanely and repeatedly forced down the throats of Atlanta residents on what seems like a weekly basis by twisted and seemingly racist local media-types. And granted the Vick story today is not part of CBS' NFL programming, but it has the same sentiment and feeling as all the Katrina "Who Dat" propaganda.

Guys like Michael Vick and Plaxico Burress to me fall in line along with O.J. Simpson or any other criminal celebrity. These fallen athletes should not be celebrated or given primetime coverage beyond the original scandals and crimes that got them put in prison in the first place. Unless they are covered in a return to professional sports and simply documented for their athletic achievements. Especially when considering the damage these types of failed athletes wreak not only upon the NFL but the cities that hosted them at great expense only to be greatly disappointed in the end.

Michael Vick did severe damage to the city of Atlanta yet he is still continuously admired and recognized for his progress after prison time and criminal rehabilitation like it's some special or monumental event. Isn't criminal rehabilitation to be expected by any general citizen found guilty in court? Why make such a big deal or a special example of a guy just because he is capable of running fast of tossing a rubber ball down a playing field?

I am simply disappointed and honestly unenthusiastic now about watching the 2010 Super Bowl following the previous hours of continuous indoctrination by CBS to feel bad or guilty for what it feels like the rest of America did not do to help New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. It all feels like the same CNN-type condemnation of failure by the Bush regime in 2005 on continuous loop.

For me, CBS Sports' high volume of editorial content today of unrelated NFL human interests is overshadowing what I looked forward to all week as a common everyday sports fan. What happened to the simple excitement of yesteryear over a major American sports event? Seeing this politically baited and utterly depressing pre-game drama takes away from an otherwise well-balanced and competitive professional football game.