Footballius Ridiculum

I sweat the small stuff. My wife only gets upset about the big stuff. We complement each other that way.

We had a fire last week at a property we own. Valerie nearly cried. I was upset, but not as much as I am when, say, I see some moron running a red light because he's too busy talking on a cell phone to notice that he just ran a red light.

Which brings me to the subject of the Super Bowl.

I haven't actually watched the Super Bowl in years. But that doesn't matter, because we've reached that time of year when the Super Bowl is looming larger with each passing day, everywhere you look. Here it comes: the annual two-million-dollar-a-minute festival of TV ads. Let's be honest, For a lot of people that's exactly what the Super Bowl is, not so much a sporting event as a showcase for expensive advertising. Come to think of it, I suppose an evening of multimillion dollar one-upmanship on the part of Coca-Cola, Pepsi and the Ford Motor Company does qualify as a kind of sporting event.

I'm not a football fan, but if I were, I'd be more likely to follow college football than the NFL. In fact there have been autumn Saturday afternoons when I felt that I was missing out on something in not following college football, when I look around and see how much fun a lot of other people are having watching it. My biggest problem with college football is that there are so many teams out there I can't keep track of all of them. What team would I root for? I can't even wade through the alphabet soup of the universities they represent. I went to San Diego State, but somehow never became a fan of the Aztecs. They turn up on TV so seldom, especially since I left the San Diego area, that following their fortunes hardly seems worth the effort.

Why would I be more likely to follow college football? Incredible as it might sound, given the amount of money that college athletic programs suck up, it's because college football is so much less blatantly showbiz than professional football. Professional football didn't even acquire a mass audience until the advent of television, and I think that says a lot. Baseball had a mass following even before radio, and when radio came along, that medium and baseball seemed made for each other, at least once the hysterical fears of team owners, who thought radio would hurt ticket sales, was overcome. There are still people around who think radio is a better way to experience baseball than television. But the NFL would be nowhere without the Tube.

TV equals Hype. Hype equals marketing. Always has. And the "little thing" that gets my goat every year about the Super Bowl is directly related to the hype that is marketing and the marketing that is hype.

I'm talking about those damn Roman numerals.

The first Super Bowl was played in January, 1967. NFL historians out there may correct me if I'm wrong, but the Super Bowl grew directly out of the battle for television. For decades there was only the National Football League. Then, in 1961, a new league was created, the American Football League. Football borrowed a page from baseball: two leagues, the National and the American. Not a bad idea at all. More competition, for one thing. More jobs for professional football players. More ticket sales.

More television contracts. There's the rub, by the way. The AFL knew it was competing with the older NFL for eyeballs on screens, and it hit upon a brilliant play: changing the style of the game. The AFL, with new, young teams like the New York Jets, Boston Patriots and San Diego Chargers, began playing a more pass-related game than the NFL, which still laid its heaviest emphasis on running. It worked better than might have been expected. After a few seasons the upstart AFL was stealing major market share from the NFL. Then came the first Super Bowl, football's equivalent of the World Series. The best team in the AFL would play the best team in the NFL.

Then the AFL won. If you're old enough to remember, it was January, 1969. Joe Namath predicted -- no, guaranteed -- that his high-flying Jets would win the Super Bowl from the hard-charging Baltimore Colts. The Jets won that game, 16-7. The NFL panicked. This was TV money we were talking about! The following year the two leagues were joined under the NFL umbrella as the AFC and the NFC. All the money was going into one place again.

That big victory by the New York Jets was in a game called Super Bowl III. Not just "the Super Bowl," but "Super Bowl III."

The Lords of Football aka the Lords of Television aka The Lords of Marketing and Hype decided that this big football game somehow had to be imbued with an awe-inspiring sense of historical significance, as if this were some epic clash stretching back for centuries and not something that had just been cooked up for TV. So they inaugurated the ridiculous annual marketing tradition of assigning a Roman numeral to each Super Bowl game, you know, to give it Weight, as in World War I. World War II. Pope John XXIII.

Did you watch World Series CIII last October? No. If you watched it at all, you watched "the World Series," period.

I didn't have a serious problem with this Roman numeral business for the first few years they were doing it. I, II, III, IV, V...most of us can deal with those caesarian digits -- after all, for 30 years now most of us have learned to associate them with "Rocky" movies. And when I was young, Hollywood for some reason used to use Roman numerals to assign copyright dates to television shows. If you're of a certain age (mine) you got used to seeing them after the credits. Super Bowl I was played in the year MCMLXVII. We were taught some of this in school, by the way, just to drive home what an important leap forward the discovery of the number "zero" was. (The Romans didn't have zero, and their math suffered accordingly.)

But I don't think it's being taught in schools anymore, because not much of anything is taught in schools anymore except multiculturalism and self-esteem. This year we're being sold Super Bowl XLI. Enough already! Yes, I know that XLI means "41," but I would be willing to bet that very few people under the age of 35 do. Most people under 35 can't find Washington, D.C. on a map, think the Civil War was fought back around the time of Babe Ruth, and spell the word "Cars" as "Car's." Don't try to tell me that they can read "Super Bowl XLI" and know what they're looking at. Or care. In fact a lot of them are only tuning in to see the $5 million Pepsi ad in which Jennifer Lopez is computer-morphed into a can of Pepsi and then sucked into a spaceship that promptly takes off for planet -- er, large object -- Pluto.

Before Super Bowl XLII rolls around, I would like to ask the Lords of Hype to re-think this annual insult to everyone's intelligence -- or lack of it. They won't of course, and I'd also be willing to bet that very few people share my curmudgeonly dislike for this bit of cultural effluvium. (From the Latin Effluere, to flow out.) But still I make my plea: let's dump this cheesy marketing ploy, guys! It it has no place in the year MMVII!