Roger Goodell doesn’t deserve this, a Super Bowl matchup that he couldn’t have crafted better had he appointed his own independent investigator to freeze the envelopes and hold a draw.
For the next two weeks his league will bask in the light created by the ageless Tom Brady, who has played so long and so well for the New England Patriots that even those that resent him and his wife and his chin and his Uggs — mostly his Uggs — can only admire his ability to remain excellent, always.
After Week 4 the Patriots were 2-2 and Brady, 37, had a quarterback rating that would make Tim Tebow blush. The Patriots are 12-2 since and Brady will make his sixth Super Bowl appearance in Arizona.
He’ll be facing the feel-good Seattle Seahawks and gritty, gutty Russell Wilson who shrugged off the worst performance of his career — he threw more interceptions (three) in the first half than he had completions — to cap Seattle’s comeback from 12 points down with 3:52 to play with a winning touchdown pass on the first possession of overtime to Jermaine Kearse. That all four of Wilson’s interceptions had come on balls intended for Kearse only made it sweeter.
“I kind of felt it would come to fruition at some point,” Wilson told reporters afterwards. “Storybook ending.”
It’s a matchup that seems engineered, which doesn’t seem beneath Goodell, when you think about it.
It’s the Seahawks, who are striving to become the NFL’s first repeat champions since the Patriots did it in 2004 and 2005 against Brady and New England, the NFL’s gold-standard for excellence, who are trying to win their first championship in their third appearance since their back-to-back wins.
Just a few months ago the NFL was in crisis. Again. Media and fans alike were taking a hard look at what goes into the sausage they enjoy every Sunday, Monday and Thursday and finding it tough to stomach.
There was, of course, the image of Janay Rice being punched and dragged out of a casino elevator by her then-fiance, now-husband Ray, and the subsequent bungling of the disciplinary process as overseen by Goodell, the Teflon commissioner who works so hard to be seen to be saying and doing the right things on his way to collecting the $44 million he earned in 2012, the most recent reporting of his wages.
There was the Adrian Peterson scandal that saw one of the NFL’s most marketable stars pled guilty to assaulting one of his children with a stick, and the subsequent bungling of that disciplinary process by Goodell.
There were players taking the field while being investigated for having assaulted women; there were players taking the field having been convicted of assaulting women and there was Ray Rice, forever in limbo it seems, because his assault was caught on video and TMZ made a couple of phone calls that the NFL apparently didn’t and shared it with the world.
The team in Washington remains nicknamed a widely held racial slur.
There have not been – thankfully – any recent suicides by former NFLers who have suffered irrevocable brain trauma while on the job, though the heartbreaking story of former Buffalo Bills linebacker Darryl Talley, told in gut-wrenching detail by Tim Graham in the Buffalo News, shows that all we’ve been is lucky so far in that respect.
Meanwhile for Patriot running back Kevin Turner, one of the lead plaintiffs in the class-action concussion litigation against the NFL was too weakened by ALS at age 45 to attend the latest court hearing on the fairness of the $765-million settlement, which the league’s lawyer suggested was a pretty good deal given that “the league could have fought these claims — successfully fought these claims — for many, many years.”
See? Maybe the guys at the league office aren’t so bad.
Through it all, the game took flight, which only makes sense because from the right distance, it’s an incredible game, a nearly perfect combination of athletic feats and tactical acumen, flavoured with bravery, toughness and intelligence, played out on a bright green rectangle that fits perfectly on my flat screen, with plenty of breaks in the action for beer getting.
The NFL is like a cheap sun vacation to an impoverished island country: even if you feel guilty as you sweep by the panhandlers on the way to the beach, the sun and the sand quickly wash over you and it makes it easy to forget.
Similarly, thoughtful, credible people have speculated that the inherent violence of the NFL in all its forms will, over time, mean the End of Football. It’s a game that can’t be sustained.
But — like global warming – the threat seems plausible, but distant. In the meantime there’s a game on and it’s hard not to watch.
Prior to Sunday’s conference title games the four divisional playoff games the weekend before weekend averaged 37.8-million viewers — a record even more remarkable as the splintered attention of audiences have generally driven ratings down for most TV fare.
Since the regular season started all of the 20 most watched shows on television this year were NFL regular-season games, as were 45 of the top 50.
This year’s Super Bowl with its picture-perfect matchup will undoubtedly be the most watched TV event of the year; it always is.
Roger Goodell will be in Arizona, watching it live, smiling at the knowledge that even after a year like the one just past, the game always wins.