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The Superb Owl Leadup That Never Was

A photo of a man on stilted legs and dressed in white suit walking down a dark and mostly empty Bourbon Street in New Orleans.
Kathleen Flynn for the Washington Post via Getty Images

This has not been a terribly memorable walkup to the Superb Owl, not in New Orleans, not across America, not even in Australia, where the NFL is staging a regular-season game in 2026 as a very belated punishment to the Los Angeles Rams for those uniforms. And if you can't be weird in Louisiana, well, what exactly is the point?

When your biggest moment of the week, after all, is Roger Goodell leaning hard into an 18th game, you have a serious cultural dud on your hands. The football will be the football, of course, and as matchups go Eagles-Chiefs is not far from the best you can do. But New Orleans might be the last bastion of the pre-corporate days when the town created the atmosphere, and it was up to the visitors to keep up. This time, the weirdest thing we got will be something we have to conjure in our own minds—the big game with a sitting president (Uncle Dismal) and a potential rival in 2028 (Stephen A. Smith). Neither is qualified to do the job, as one has proven and the other certainly would if given the chance, but the moment Smith's name appeared on a poll listing potential Democratic candidates and garnering 2 percent, we took an irrevocable turn toward a world in which Prince Andrew seems leaderly. All that is left for the rest of us is to find a country without an extradition treaty out of the way of the nuclear winds.

In other words, there is a lot of pressure on this game to produce what the week could not, and in doing so outdo the excellent game of two years ago that relaunched Patrick Mahomes as the face of the decade. The NBA must have sensed the void because it delivered one of the great trade deadline performances of all time, one so good that the stage already has been set for the offseason sweepstakes to come. Even the antiquarian FA Cup made some non-contextual news Sunday when Plymouth Argyle, the worst team in the English Championship and therefore the 44th-best team in England, beat Liverpool, the best team in the Premiership and one of the best teams in the world, 1-0.

These are deeply depressing times, is what we're saying, and this is the week and the city that is best positioned and most expected to slap a colorful mask on the grotesqueries beneath. Instead, New Orleans just kind of sat there being, well, New Orleans. It still has the geography and the expertise to contain a big event and seemingly make it bigger, but outside of the Quarter the event just never seemed to find its legs. The coverage from inside the drunk tank to the outside world was boilerplate, even dull at times, and most New Orleans Owls radiate outward and catch the nation in a mood to be swept along.

But maybe these times aren't those times. Maybe we are impervious to madcap because even madcap seems to need corporate sponsorship. Maybe the NFL is now so good at sanitation that everything seems hospital crisp and urgent care bland. The game's only remaining rogue working his own hours is Jerry Jones, and he has kind of reached, passed, and erased his own cultural sell-by date. If your owner is the outlier, what you have left is a branch office of the Take A Nap Foundation.

We couldn't even convince ourselves that the gameday ads will be fun, because the prime products this year are the same ones that have fouled your streams and televisions all year—a joyless dystopian phalanx of either unnecessary or blatantly foul products that will mostly be AI, crypto, insurance, medications for diseases that eliminate the disease you have but give you four more that are probably worse, and gambling, easily the most benign of them all. They are the five floats announcing the apocalypse, and the best thing about the ads (but sadly not the advertisers) is that they will all die a week later, only to be replaced by something worse for you and with cheaper production values.

The game then will have to suffice, and one can ask even this late in the proceedings if these are the two teams most up to the task. Maybe for pure distracting zaniness, Lions-Bills might have offered better cover. After all, Dan Campbell taking a nap on a stationary bike is going to be more hoots than Nick Sirianni holding up the Lombardi Trophy while shouting at everyone within earshot to kiss his cranky, unfireable ass. And Andy Reid—well, seen it, done it, and we'll be grateful only if Jake from State Farm isn't standing next to him.

We don't mean to chill anyone's vibe if so oriented. Maybe it's just that we seem to be asking more of the day than it can deliver, given the mood of the nation. Maybe the president showing up to ruin the national vibe destroys the illusion that there is meant to be a separation between church and state, and maybe thinking of Stephen A.'s 2 percent smothers the mood entirely.

But this is what we have, like it or not, and the fact that it doesn't seem embraceable doesn't mean we shouldn't give it a try. Maybe we can get Ja Morant's father to deliver the invocation.

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