The Lth Year of the Super Bowl in the “50+”th Year of the NFL

Word has it that the numerals “50” were used in the logo of the fiftieth Super Bowl (2016) because the Roman numeral (used in each Super Bowl) for “50” is “L,” which the credulous might confuse with the finger-symbol for “loser.” Really? What is wrong with keeping up the lesson in Roman numerals? Are we NFL fans that stupid, thin-skinned, and politically correct? Let us hope to every wing in the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton we will see next season “LI” instead of “51.” It’s just classier and more cerebral, qualities sorely needed by the most brutal level of an already brutal game — the game we fans un-apologetically love.

I must confess I approached Super Bowl L, once Denver and Carolina were determined the two conference champions, with a degree of neutral ambiguity.  I felt I had “no dog in this fight,” as I cannot label myself a follower of either team.  I admired the way Carolina played as a team — good in all three phases of the game.  And Cam Newton reminded me of Joe Namath back in the days before Super Bowl III — Cam could talk and act however he wanted, because he backed it up; he walked the walk.  Peyton going from the Colts to the Broncos made it comfortable for me to openly express my admiration for the NFL’s elder Manning brother, one of Archie’s sons.  Moreover, even if I did not follow Denver, the Texas A&M connections (head coach of the Broncos, Gary Kubiak = former Aggie QB and star LB for Denver, Von Miller = former All-American Aggie LB) mean I could never think badly of former Aggie players on any NFL team.  Then there was the Defensive Coordinator of the Broncos, Wade Phillips, son of beloved head coach Bum Phillips of the long-gone Houston Oilers, as well as former Cowboy great OLB, Demarcus Ware, who had the chance to win a Super Bowl ring now that he was sadly no longer with the boys with the star on the helmet owned by stupid-decision king Jerry Jones.  In addition to my admiration of the Panthers, I, on the other hand, as an Aggie fan, a “fossil fan” of the Oilers, and a Cowboy fan, could think of nothing negative about the Denver Broncos.

Therefore, when the end to Super Bowl L came, I surprised myself how good I felt, despite the fact the Broncos are in the American conference, opposite the Cowboys’ National conference, because Gary, Von (the game’s MVP, by the way), Wade, and Demarcus were getting rings.  I guess I had a dog in this fight after all, and I didn’t know it.

 

I’ve often repeated that I will never stop loving both upper levels of football — college football and pro football — because one of the fascinations for me as a fan is to see both the correlation and lack of correlation between those players successful on the college gridiron and those players successful on the pro gridiron.  For every whiz-bang success making the transition from college to professional, like Peyton Manning or Von Miller, there seems to be a crash-and-burn failure, like Vince Young or Brian Bosworth.  The failures seem to parallel Greek tragedy — a clear hero with an equally clear “fatal flaw.”

As every fan of following players’ transition to the NFL knows, there is no assurance “your favorites” are going to make it (part of the fascination), and one of my all-time favorites, Johnny Manziel, was no exception.  Yet, as the 2015 season brought Johnny’s case into focus as a probable failure, his personal tragedy loomed especially sad for me.  Just as his gridiron success at Texas A&M was countered by off-the-field “negative spinning” by the media, efforts to shine his every NFL off-the-field move in as negative a light as possible became even more ratcheted up than in college, in my opinion.  Johnny definitely has a “fatal flaw,” an Achilles heel, if you please, but for him it seems the NFL, the sports media, and his NFL team set him up to be a failure because of an apparent drinking problem, spinning it as if his problem was on the same plane as the problems of fellow Heisman Trophy winner and QB of my Tampa Bay Buccaneers, Jameis Winston — ludicrous at best, as NFL fans paying attention recently to an ESPN crawl line saw Winston settling with a young woman over charges of sexual assault for around a half-million bucks.  All I’m saying is slapping someone in the face while intoxicated is not sexual assault; slapping someone in the face means you are a bad drunk, not an accused rapist.  Johnny does not deserve the bad press he is getting.  I’m not condoning what Johnny did off the field; I’m condemning the demonizing of what he did.

But whether Manziel is a success or failure in the transition is really up to him.  The light at the end of the tunnel for Johnny is that this is a game, not a public office; his career can be turned around with a team that will give him a chance to recover the feeling of having fun playing the game that we Aggie fans saw on the gridiron for two unforgettable seasons.  He needs not only to address his personal demons, he needs to change his personal posse he takes with him to parties; he needs true friends who understand his weaknesses and have his back; if he asked for interviews for such a “posse” position, I think there would be a long line of his generation waiting to apply, not all of them Aggie fans; were I not so damn old, I’d like to join that line.  Johnny could be another Joe Namath, or he could be another Ryan Leaf; with JFF, we can have another “feel-good” story of athletic success, or we can have still another Greek tragedy.  I join the ‘Bama fan who wrote an editorial in the local paper recently hoping that Johnny can turn his life and career around; the NFL needs him to do just that.

(Whatever the future holds for Johnny Football, Texas A&M has to, in the long haul, pay eternal homage to him, if for no other reason than the millions of dollars he brought and is still bringing to TAMU.  The least he deserves is a kick-ass statue that rivals or excels the great statue we already have outside Kyle Field of the late, great Heisman Trophy winner John David Crow.  I am such a “homer” Aggie, I believe Johnny was sincere when he closed his Heisman acceptance speech with “Gig ‘Em!”)

 

When Tony Romo got hurt early in the 2015 NFL season, it was “curtains” to Cowboy hopes for a repeat of a great season.  Tony’s bad luck illustrates a real concern I have as a football fan, especially in the NFL — the damn game is too damn dependent upon one “prima-donna” position, the QB!  The salary money gets top-heavy toward one position, as if the only successful teams are those who have QB’s that can still throw the ball at the end of the season.  How stupid is that?  In the Cowboys’ case this past season, poor choices for back-up QB indicated not only inflated QB salaries, but also idiotic money-saving hires of people who the organization hopes will not take a single snap all season, and the lack of keeping a quality offensive line intact to protect Tony in the first place.  Has anyone out there in “coaching land” not remembered the good old days when the QB did not have to touch the ball but very few times, like in early versions of modern “wildcat” formations or the old wing-T or single-T formations, from all of which you can, with the right personnel, throw or run every single down?  And I mean throw like Joe Namath, Tony Romo, Peyton Manning, Cam Newton, or Johnny Manziel?!  Sure the NFL defenses (one of the reasons I liked Super Bowl L — it was dominated by defense) will soon adapt to any innovative or throw-back offense, but does any offensive coordinator really believe that all offensive possibilities have been exhausted?  Bill Walsh sure as hell did not think that!

 

Concussions have to be addressed even more than they have already.  Every NFL fan should see the movie Concussion.  The “art and skill” of tackling needs to be coached differently from Pop Warner football on up.  Innovations in helmet and uniform protection of the player need to be accelerated independent of business factors.  Rules like targeting need to be tweaked and policed to walk atop the fence line between a safe game and a violent game, with the rules simultaneously not being as “metaphysical,” not being such a judgement call, as, say, pass interference.  We’ve not even begun to seriously consider if there is even such a thing as a safe, violent game.  As a football fan, I hope and pray such a game does exist; I hope the Pro Football Hall of Fame never becomes just a museum of history that enshrines some ending date.

 

2015 was another NFL season when the NFL showed it was “too big for its britches.”  Driven by profits, owners prop up a commissioner to do their bidding, and are so impressed with the successes of their bottom lines, they feel entitled to pontificate controls over their “assets,” the lives of the players.  This not only involves the concussion issue, it involves the moral and legal lives of the players.  The NFL should be a big HR department for players, not a police department or a church of the oblate spheroid.  As the only HR the players have, the players’ association should only have to be an adviser to the owners, instead of having to be their antagonist.  Players are the essence of the NFL, not its “workers.”

Unfortunately, the game of pro football became even more a game with only the rich and self-entitled seated in the stands, as costs to “average Joe” fans continued to rise.  Pro football is not really a game of the people anymore, it is more a game of the privileged.  Thank God for great TV coverage of the games!

 

As for the 2015 season on the gridiron, I enjoyed seeing the return of the Minnesota Vikings to prominence and the playoffs, as well as the noise the Tampa Bay Buccaneers made on the field.  The Seahawks were a hard team to figure out, and the Cardinals and Bengals sure were pleasant surprises.  The Chiefs were fun to follow, and the Chargers remain an enigma.  I sympathized with the troubles of the Saints, Bears, and Lions, but, of course, had no sympathy with any troubles suffered by the Giants, Eagles, Steelers, Redskins, and Forty-Niners.  I thought the Raiders and the Falcons had some unexpected bright spots.  Would you objectively call the Packers’ season expected or unexpected?  How about the Rams’ move to LA?  Will they be joined by one or both of the Raiders and Chargers?  Once more the city of St. Louis is left out in the cold.  I loved that former Aggie QB Ryan Tannehill ended up with a successful season with the Dolphins (not to mention former Aggie Dan Campbell’s interim head coaching stint) despite many premature obituaries from the media.  And good for Tom Brady for letting the stupid deflated-balls-fiasco motivate him and his Patriots to a great season.  And, finally, when oh when will the Texans get them a good NFL QB?  A drinking party-man from the Browns with a built-in Texas fan base would serve the boys from Houston better than what happened last season.

Coach Bill Belichick is to the NFL as Greg Popovich is to the NBA; Bill is still the best in the league, in my opinion.  With that, I shall sign off until next season, when the number “50” at the midfield stripes should morph from gold to white and we shall return in our heads to the fallacy that our QB going down is more serious than another on the team going down.  Deep down in our egalitarian hearts, we know that it isn’t true, just like we know deep down that we would like to watch a dangerous game of blocking and tackling rather than a game of touch pass or flag football.

RJH