The best football game that I saw all year was the Texas 6A high school championship game that was a nail biter until the very end when Galena Park North Shore won with a Hail Mary pass in the final minutes. In fact, most of the high school games are a great deal more fun than even the college efforts these days. Sadly the whole football experience is about  money, and in today’s world that boils down to a few usual suspects with everyone else left behind. The fun and the possibility of surprises is mostly not there anymore. as coaches get lured by incredible salaries and players use universities to launch careers sometimes before they even graduate. Somehow the joy and the luster has worn off just a bit for me and nothing was a more obvious example of what I’m feeling than last Sunday’s Super Bowl game.

There was a time when that gridiron rivalry had something for everyone. Even if the game itself wasn’t particularly inspiring the food at the parities, the halftime show, and the commercials were enough to keep the excitement going for days. This year not one of those things seemed to spark the kind of enthusiasm that was so often generated in the past, which makes me wonder if the Super Bowl experience needs an overhaul, something to make it a bit more worthwhile. I find myself thinking that we may have just grown weary of the tried and true formulas or maybe we have just become so picky and even political that we can no longer be as easily pleased as we once were. We tend to shroud almost every aspect of our society in controversy these days and the game of football is feeling the blows of our discontent.

We grumble about the fairness of selecting the teams who will play. We scream about who should sing the national anthem and whether or not there should even be a performance of it. We preach to the fans about choosing healthy snacks rather than chowing down on chicken wings, pizza and beer. We watch the advertisements searching for reasons to become angry about them if they do not appear to represent America the way we think that they ought to do. We grumble about the performers in every manner from their choice of music and wardrobe to whether or not they honor the demographic realities of the country. We pick the whole event apart as if it is a presidential contest, or something that really matters.

There was a time when a kid from nowhere had a shot at glory in a particular sport, and that is generally still true, but virtually every kind of athletic endeavor is now driven by big money. The wealthy programs dominate and the fairytale of Cinderella teams becomes less and less believable. I wonder how many young souls are eaten alive in the competition to reach the top. When politics are added to the mix things get really messed up. Sport becomes distorted and used to satisfy the unrelated desires of businessmen, advertisers, and politicians. The Super Bowl becomes a circus of craziness that leaves us less and less satisfied over time.

It feels as though almost all aspects of life have become mega competitions to get bigger and better with each passing year. It’s not enough for our schools to produce students with the knowledge and skills to find success in college or work, we want to constantly improve the numbers. If everyone passes a test we push for all of the scores to increase. We exert more and more pressure on virtually every phase of our existence and when it’s not enough to satisfy us we grumble. Little wonder that we seem to have an epidemic of discontent. We have become like the poor rich kid who expects more and more for Christmas each year and pitches a fit of rage when his desires are not fulfilled.

I suspect that I am not alone in wishing for a return to a simpler way of doing things, a time when we focused on the games themselves and not the celebrity or distractions. Perhaps if we kept things simple and didn’t debate about every tiny little detail surrounding the actual performances on the field our enthusiasm might be energized. As of now we’ve gone off the rails.

I suppose that our reactions to the Super Bowl game are just another bit of evidence that we’ve lost our way in the present social and political climate. In general we are tense and irritable about almost everything. We’ve turned our nation into an anxious nail biting caricature of itself and that spills over into everything from football to who will host or not host the Academy Awards. In our efforts to become infinitely fair we have actually become a bit unfair. Our expectations for perfection are so high that we are stressing out our kids and driving good people from their jobs. The tendencies are everywhere and they are infecting our relationships with one another. Voicing an opinion is akin to hurling a live grenade.

Perhaps we need to scale back on almost everything, including the way we deliver the news and how much time we spend doing so. Maybe we were better off before we had a twenty four hour cycle of real time videos and discussions of the world around us. Maybe we don’t need so many pyrotechnics and analyses, but rather just a few lights, an enthusiastic crowd and two teams playing their hearts out. That may be enough to bring back the joy.