by Kevin Burton
I’m trying to care. Honest to God, I’m trying.
I am a football fan. And I am going to watch the Super Bowl.
Somebody asked me the other day, “you going for Seattle or New England?” “I don’t care,” I said.
And that is mostly true. I would prefer that New England not win, more than I have any affinity for the Seahawks.
Some years ago I adopted the baseball Seattle Mariners during their 1995 Refuse To Lose run to the AL Championship Series. I was living out there at the time. Somehow none of that ever carried over to the Seahawks.
Now the Tom Brady Patriots, I loathed that cheating team. So the first time these two squared off in a Super Bowl I was all about Seattle.
But the Drake Maye Patriots? I don’t hate them. They are more of an underdog team, the kind I usually latch on to. So they are the ones I should be rooting for? I don’t know.
The teams I like, Cincinnati and Kansas City, the teams I sort of like, Washington and Detroit, none of them even got close to making the playoffs this year.
The Rams were the last team standing, in terms of somebody I truly cared about. And that has nothing to do with traditional rooting interests.
Across my eight fantasy teams this year (three champions!, three champions!) I had no fewer than six Rams and they all did well for me. I had quarterback Matthew Stafford, running backs Kyren Williams and Blake Corum, wide receivers Puka Nacua and Davonte Adams and tight end Colby Parkinson, who with 11 fantasy points, won me the league I am in with some of my beep baseball buddies.
I’ll tell you how good Puka is. I just misspelled his name as “Nacus” and the little corrector thing gave me “Nacua” as an option.
That’s respect! I don’t think that would happen for Colby Parkinson.
I wanted the Rams to beat Seattle and go to the Super Bowl. But if the same two teams make the NFC championship game next year, who I root for will have everything to do with who I had in fantasy, nothing really to do with the actual teams.
I had Maye on some of my teams, but I didn’t play him as much as you would think because he is turnover prone.
So all I have is Seattle and New England. No real fire either way.
OK, so I said I am trying to care. You know what I did? I watched some of the little 30-minute Super Bowl videos made by NFL Films. That got my blood pumping!
I formerly rooted for the Oakland Raiders. So I watched “Black Sunday” the film about their January 1984 demolition of Washington. I watched their Super Bowl 11 win over Minnesota too. I then watched the Jets 16-7 upset of the Baltimore Colts in Super Bowl 3 and the Steelers win in Super Bowl 9 over Minnesota.
The mantle of greatness passed that day from the Minnesota Purple People Eaters defense to the Pittsburgh Steel Curtain. That was proclaimed by no less an authority than John Facenda, “the voice of God” who narrated those early videos.
Of course the very first one I watched, with my wife Jeannette, was the Super Bowl 4 video of the Chiefs handling (again) Minnesota 23-7. That’s the one where Chiefs coach Hank Stram employs his boys to “keep matriculating the ball down the field.”
He then went nuts on camera about having called a “65 toss power trap” the play that Mike Garrett scored on. By the way, Marcus Allen’s first touchdown in the Super Bowl against Washington looked kind of like that 65 toss power trap.
Great stuff. I will probably watch a few others before Sunday. If so, I will be, as Barry Manilow sang, “trying to get the feeling again.”
If I have any gameface at all this year, it will be while dialing the phone to order pizza.
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