Nekrasov’s Notebook: Reflections From Super Bowl Sunday

When it comes to the Super Bowl, spectacle is everything. Every year, the February football game claims international attention, but most people at your Super Bowl party hardly care about the game at all. The drama of the game – the touchdowns, the sacks, the dropped catches – it’s all just a magnet for the glitz and glamor of the main event of the American sporting calendar. 

Maybe that’s why this year, it all felt so weird. In a season like this NFL season, defined by COVID-19 and political unrest, Feb. 7 was circled on all our calendars as a point where we’d all gather in our living rooms, politics would take a back seat and everything would feel normal for a few hours. The razzmatazz of advertisements and halftime shows would mark another step on the journey back to life before March 2020. 

Instead, it all fell kind of flat, like the bottle of Dr. Pepper you forgot on the counter last night. 

The hyped-up quarterback duel between official “NFL Dad” Tom Brady and young superstar Patrick Mahomes fizzled away in a game defined by Brady’s efficiency rather than Mahomes’ flashy skills. 

The ads were just … ads, I guess. A few grabbed my attention, but I barely laughed the entire night.

The halftime show packed energy, sizzle and gusto, but the enduring memory from the Weeknd’s performance will be the Twitter memes of his crazed mirror sequence, not his singing or dance routines. 

It was just another Super Bowl really, a game of football with strings attached, trying to hold the attention of an entire country in a year where days bleed into each other and nothing but the imminent collapse of democracy seems to stir our collective psyche anymore. 

In difficult times like these, we want emotion and nostalgia to somehow break through and distract us. We want to feel something, to scream at the game and laugh at ads and gasp at an unbelievable vocal run. In other words, we want to feel like we used to feel at all those other Super Bowl parties – the parties before the world changed forever. 

Instead, the game just crept by — and then it was over. I looked away from the TV for a moment late in the fourth quarter, wishing for a dramatic Chiefs attempt at a comeback to spark the game into life, then looked back and saw Brady high-fiving his teammates as the clock expired. A year that called out for drama, spectacle and distraction instead got the quietest Super Bowl blowout win in recent memory for the Bucs and a top-rated Chiefs offense slouching out of Raymond James Stadium with barely a whimper, its tail between its legs.  

Just like that, Super Bowl LV was in the annals of history. Honestly, 10 years from now, you’ll probably remember your party more than you remember the actual game. 

“I remember where I was when Brady won his seventh ring,” you might say. 

Most likely, however, you won’t remember a throw he made or any of Leonard Fournette’s runs up the middle. You probably won’t remember a single ad from the entire night. Instead of exploding in spectacle, Super Bowl LV just sort of happened – it was inescapably normal. 

But maybe in a year like 2021, normal was what we needed deep down. Maybe a regular, boring Super Bowl where Tom Brady won (AGAIN), where we ate too much food and groaned at boring ads, was the non-event that 2021 was crying out for. What’s more normal than Tom Brady throwing touchdowns in the Super Bowl to Rob Gronkowski like it’s 2010 all over again?

For a few hours, we sat in front of our TVs and watched football. A team won and now we move on to a new cycle of NFL football. Uncertainty clouded the NFL from the very beginning of the season, but in the end, the Super Bowl actually happened – and maybe that was enough. 

John Nekrasov is the Sports Editor. Follow him on Twitter at @john_nekrasov.