Most Super Bowls fade pretty quickly from memory, but it takes a special sort of dud to basically tape over itself in real time. Super Bowl 59, for all the highlights it generated and the broader satisfaction of its thoroughness, was more or less erasing itself as it happened; by the time it finally lapsed into the Rob Lowe-hosted game show that followed it on FOX, it was pretty much gone and the long sports winter already felt deep and endless. For Defector, this is both a challenge, because there just aren't a lot of sports happening right now, and something of an opportunity to stretch out a little bit, write some anglerfish fiction and jarringly vivid descriptions of bad smells and the like.
That wasn't why Drew and I decided to make this week's episode a two-hander—we just sort of felt like it was time—but the episode that resulted both embodies that seasonal tension and glories in it. There was some sports to talk about, and we did talk about it. But there is also enough space that we didn't really feel too compelled to rush it, or to try to fit too much in, or more to the point not to begin the episode with a longish conversation about gnarly party dips and various color commentators we like and don't like.
There is, blessedly, not very much of the dip stuff—Drew describes a Buffalo chicken dip "the consistency of ricotta cheese" and I ask him to stop doing that, more or less—but there is a bit more commentator chat. This bit, which is kind of recurring old-guy feature for us by this point, began with my wife, who was very pointedly not paying attention to the Super Bowl, still managing to notice how lousy Tom Brady was. From there we talked about the challenges of being a heavy sports consumer in a pre-internet age, my gateway experience of reading the literary canon created by John Madden and Dick Vitale, and an appreciation of John Madden as master teacher/Muppet hybrid. Drew celebrated Vitale's secret depths as a motivational speaker, and both of us talked about Hubie Brown's long path to enlightenment, from his days as a true maniac to being the foremost enthusiast-educator in the business. All of this was more or less a way to explain why Tom Brady stinks, beyond Drew's unassailable early explanation of that, which amounts to the fact that he doesn't need or seemingly really want to be there, and that his actual personality either doesn't exist or is buried very deeply.
We did also talk a little bit about the Super Bowl itself, giving Vic Fangio credit for not doing anything too fancy and not giving Nick Sirianni credit for anything. I unpacked my issues with Big Dom, the Eagles' resident big camera-hungry cop, and both of us considered Aaron Rodgers's amusingly bleak future and the impossibly bad idea of Aaron Rodgers, Veteran Backup one last time. If it is indeed time to say goodbye to the NFL's foremost raw water advocate and weirdly weepy culture warrior, I'm glad we got to say our farewells. Also I expect we're going to do it another few times before it's all over, even if Rodgers is as done as we both agree he is.
Before we got into the Funbag, a conversation that might have been a brief pit stop—the operative question was whether Miriam Adelson the NBA's Dan Snyder—became something a bit more interesting. We talked about the latent political possibility in fans getting mad at owners, what it means for a fan to feel betrayed by ownership and what that particular bargain means for both sides, and considered Mark Cuban as a not-quite-innocent victim of billionaire-on-billionaire crime. And then it was time for more important questions, like what band t-shirt would an actual Libertarian Beavis wear and what is the worst thing to spill in your kitchen? I was in the rare position, on that last one, to feel like I have experienced the single best and most definitively correct answer to that one. I won't be right like this about everything, or really much of anything, but it was nice, this once, to feel like the actual truth was not just knowable, but known.
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