Super Bowl XLIX and the Week of the NFL Non-Story
By Jerry Landry
@jerry2landry
Peter Casey-USA TODAY Sports
Deflated footballs and a sarcastically mum running back are grabbing all the headlines the week leading up to Super Bowl XLIX.
Travel back in time to 2013, tell a reasonable person that above sentence, and then watch them crank their head and go “Really?”
Our media is so pervasive and powerful that a story is going to be written one way or another. Our collective complex of instant gratification demands a narrative, and if the media doesn’t provide one, then what will we digest? We are, after all, consumers.
What’s amazing are the angles at which we attack these non-stories. We make unfounded claims that Marshawn Lynch suffers from social anxiety disorder and then compare him to Ricky Williams. Some argue that it’s in Lynch’s contract, so if he would like to be exempt from interviews, he should contact his NFL Players Union representative, which ironically happens to be Richard Sherman.
When we’re not talking about someone who is not talking, we’re complaining how there is nothing more scandalous than mysteriously deflated footballs. Bill Belichick is no scientist, as told by Bill Nye and turned viral. Tom Brady is a cheater, and the New England Patriots are dirty, yet they could’ve beaten the Indianapolis Colts by two touchdowns if they were tossing around a cinder block.
Are deflated footballs easier to catch? Are they easier to throw? Apparently everyone has an answer to all of this, since all of us immediately recalled the thermodynamics course that we all attended back in college. What really mattered was a property of matter. Pressure proportionate to volume, volume scaling to a fever pitch.
Is the NFL tainted? Has the integrity of the game been tarnished? Is there a deeper meaning behind Lynch’s non-answers?
I don’t know.
All I do know is that there’s a big game on Sunday.
Jerry Landry is a writer for www.RantSports.com. Follow him on Twitter @Jerry2Landry, “Like” him on Facebook or add him to your network on Google.
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