Long-time readers will know there was a period when if it was the first Sunday in February, it must be time for my annual Super Bowl rant. The last one of these rants actually came in 2018 and I called it Rant IV, given that Rants I, II, and III had already played out on the virtual pages of MORE TO COME . . .

Over the course of those years, I gave readers 14 reasons I wouldn’t be watching the Super Bowl. (And yes, reason #10 is these stupid and pretentious Roman numerals.) 

But reason #11, which I posted two years in a row, related to a certain team in New England, and their intolerable head coach and quarterback. Remember, this was back in 2018.

“11.  It’s the damn Patriots. Again. Is there anyone more insufferable in sports than Bill Belichick/Tom Brady? (Wait, I’ll answer that. Maybe Coach K. But that’s another post. And I know that Belichick and Brady are actually two people, but I’ve grouped them as one because they synch their grating to perfection.) They push rules up to the line and over, and then act like their sainthood has been challenged when they are caught.” 

In recent years I’ve slowly dipped my toe back into the water to watch an occasional NFL game, especially those featuring Patrick Mahomes and the Kansas City Chiefs. Their last-second “pull it out of the hat” endings are just so exciting. And since Mahomes and the Chiefs were going for the threepeat in this year’s Super Bowl, I thought I’d venture a look.

Oh. My. God. No one told me the insufferable Tom Brady was the “analyst” on the game . . . for the unwatchable Fox network. (See reasons #4, #8, and #12 from the earlier posts. I’ve been calling out Fox’s sins for years.) On Sunday I watched the first half and was thankful it was a blowout, because I felt perfectly fine leaving Tom Brady to simply say out loud what everybody already saw.**

Joe Posnanski, as I expected, had a wonderful take on the boredom that is Tom Brady and he also did a good job of explaining why the game itself was a blowout. Brady, he noted, offered up occasional dry insider terms (“We call that a ‘rub route’”) and would dive into the collection of cliches that were “so useful to him in postgame press conferences (winning the Super Bowl is the ‘highest of highs,’ but losing the Super Bowl, alas, is the ‘lowest of lows'”).

“This is simply who Tom Brady is and has always been. I imagine that while Fox Sports might prefer a few more insights here and there, they had to know that this was more or less what they would be getting. Brady has worked hard at improving—working hard to get better is a defining Brady trait—and he did progress in his first year from an unlistenable sound machine to relatively odorless and harmless background noise.”

I’ll have to take Joe’s word for that. I haven’t been following Brady’s broadcasting career. Per the dozens of comments on Joe’s post, many others feel the same way I do about Tom Brady.

Joe also had a spot-on rant about how “pretty much every Super Bowl commercial this year was basically little more than a star cameo.” For guys my age, the Hellmann’s Mayonnaise commercial—with an aging Harry and Sally—brought a bit of a laugh but also a cringe. As Joe said,

“I remember when Super Bowl commercials were just frogs croaking ‘Bud-weis-er.’”

This serves me right, I suppose. The real reason I don’t really enjoy watching NFL football comes back to concussions. As someone whose spouse fell and suffered a serious concussion in 2011, an injury which took a full year for recovery, I’ve seen firsthand the very real effects of impacts to the head.  I worry a great deal more these days about spills, trips, crashes, and other mishaps that could lead to concussions. So why do I want to watch—and support—a sport where hitting someone as hard as you possibly can is considered great play? And when I read about the stars of my youth—players such as the remarkable Tony Dorsett—having signs of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a degenerative condition many scientists say is caused by head trauma and linked to depression and dementia, I wonder if I can continue to support a sport that leads to such injuries. I know that concussions occur in all sports, baseball included. But no other sport outside of boxing comes to mind where the play itself puts players in such risky situation on such a regular basis.

So I scratched an old itch and got pretty much what I deserved. Please send me this post next year if I mention that I’m thinking about tuning into the game.

And guess what?! Spring Training Countdown was revised for this year to reflect the Cubs’ announcement of pitchers and catchers reporting on February 9, 2025 (the day OF the Super Bowl and notably earlier than most other teams due to their unique situation of opening the regular season in Tokyo against the Los Angeles Dodgers on March 18.)

Let’s play ball!

More to come . . .

DJB

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*This is your official Super Bowl Rant V!

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**UPDATE: Another commentator phrased it all this way: “The most insufferable team played against the team with the most insufferable fans in front of the most insufferable person.” I pretty much agree on all points.