It’s been a week and a half since Super Bowl LX and in that time, “Tití Me Preguntó”¹ has reached “ringtone”-when-I-used-to-commute-two-hours-each-way-to-work levels of listens on my Apple Music account. I’m not saying that I’ve listened to a lot of Bad Bunny in the last ten days to sound cool. I am not cool, nor would I ever even bother trying (which you can’t because trying isn’t cool)². I am also not going to go so far to say Benito’s halftime show was life changing³. But I will say it was certainly the highlight of an evening built around the worst Super Bowl I can remember.

Or, I probably should say “the worst Super Bowl I can barely recall”. Because the game between the NFC Champion Seattle Seahawks and their AFC counterpart, the New England Patriots, committed a sin much worse than simply being bad. They played a game that was boring and forgettable. Part of this was the contest itself, a 29-13 thrashing by the Seahawks over the Patriots, who were a team even further behind their opponent than the score would indicate.

But a not-insignificant portion of the general malaise I felt had to do with the fact that, after spending a weekend watching Six Nations rugby interspersed with the T20 Cricket World Cup (and, of course, DuckTales⁴), I was simply not ready to reacclimatize to what little action occurs during an American football game.

Especially one played between somewhat (but not egregiously) mismatched teams in a neutral stadium with clement weather. This was particularly noticeable when comparing it to the Italy-Scotland M6N rugby match — which was available on the same streaming platform as the Super Bowl, Peacock — played in driving rain that happened the day before.

Just fifteen magical minutes into the battle for the Cuttita Cup, Italy’s side (playing at home in Rome’s magnificent Stadio Olimpico) had already managed to score thrice against a slightly-favored Scottish team (with two five-point tries, rugby’s touchdown equivalent, and a two-point conversion/”PAT”) while buckets of water came down from the sky. Scotland responded with a try and conversion of their own ten minutes later, to which Italy answered back with a three-point penalty (the rugby union version of a field goal) with less than five minutes left in the opening 40-minute period.

For the first half hour of SBLX, the closest thing it had to a “highlight” was the same guy on one team hitting three chip shot field goals. Which makes sense for the opening stanza of a game that broke the Super Bowl record for most field goals and most fair catches by a player (to be clear, these things were done by two separate dudes) while featuring nothing else of any historic or contemporary value beyond deciding the champions for this season.

In the interest of fairness and objectivity, it must be said that the second half of the Super Bowl had more going on in the second half than Italy-Scotland, in the same way a train wreck “has more going on" than a car crash does. Though, despite “only” having one try and two penalty kicks, as compared to SBLX’s two field goals and three touchdowns, Italy and Scotland slamming each other stupid as sheets of rain poured down on their heads was worth watching in a way that the Seahawks’ victory lap simply wasn’t. It wasn’t the players or even the teams’ fault, but seemed like a function of football itself at its, if not worst, “least good”.

And, boy howdy, was the game between the Seahawks and Patriots the “least good” you could possibly imagine NFL football being without getting to “straight up shitty”. It was football played at (nominally) the highest level, but with none of the things that make the sport, at its best, shine. Which is depressing as, it feels important to note, it’s not as though that there’s never been an exciting Super Bowl or that no professional football game is worth watching. Some of the more exciting events in American sports history have been Super Bowls and plenty (at least a plurality) of professional football games can be worth your time in one manner or another.

But at its core, modern American football stands in stark contrast to something like rugby, a version of roughly the same game which is so much more structurally exciting it’s almost unfair to compare the two. Almost. Rugby union, in both its 15s and 7s forms, is full of kinetic energy with both its oblong ball and the players handling it constantly moving towards an end goal during essentially the entire runtime of 80+ minutes. Even the “slowest” parts of the game — scrums⁵ and line outs⁶ — involve essentially an entire team working in unison to gain an incremental advantage against their opponent in ways that are in-and-of-themselves exciting, which should presumably sound appealing to American football fans.

That the sport doesn’t have any kind of foothold in the US (outside of Women’s sevens in the Olympics) almost certainly has to do with things that this year’s “Big Game” made clear: Although it has many flaws, the NFL⁷ is perfectly constructed to be what it needs to be to its broadcast partners and patrons. Unless you have a meaningful rooting interest, though, excitement about that is not necessarily intrinsic to the version of the sport we saw on February 8^th.

This is something that can be difficult to recognize without some distance from watching it week to week and thinking about it constantly in the off-season, as the game has an addictive quality to it. Sundays are the day we all come together to watch this shit, with passions fueled almost entirely by what the sport means and not what it is. Which is why “meaningful rooting interest” can have such a wide berth and captures so many people year after year.

For some (you might even say too many) that idea is tied to money in one form or another, whether it be gambling on game outcomes or the individual performances of that players that fill your fantasy team. And for others, it can serve as, let’s call it an “alternative outlet” for their untreated mental illnesses. Football both asks the question “Why get unreasonably mad at your family for things they do that mildly annoy you?” and answers it with “When this sport allows you to do the same thing, in a socially acceptable way, simply because a bunch of men you don’t know did something that you didn’t like but doesn’t personally affect you in any way.”

The truth is there are so few people on earth that actually like professional football for the totality of the game itself, especially after the League legislated out a lot of the things in the game that fed the bloodlust in our “post-war” society. For the most part, the ones who do love football’s intricacies — instead of, understandably, loving the touchdowns or turnovers; or, simply pretending to care about Xs and Os/Jims and Joes to sound less dumb when talking about their six-game parlay or the staffing decision they made for the flex spot on their fantasy roster — either write about it professionally or coach the game itself.

The enduring popularity of the NFL Red Zone⁸ is a testament to this. In no other single sport¹⁰ is it necessary to only show the good parts of the whole thing in hopes of keeping people engaged with the product throughout the day. So much of what happens in a televised professional football is, well, a whole lot of nothing. Although the game has presumably “improved” in this area¹¹ since the Wall Street Journal study was done over a decade ago, NFL action comes to an average of 11 minutes of in-game action for a three-to-four hour game.

Some of that stop-and-start style is necessary given the complexity of the game, but with nearly a quarter of any contest taken up by ads, at some point the low hum of “is the game actually supposed to work this way or did it gradually change its shape to fill its container?” can turn into a cacophony that makes a lot of games entirely unwatchable. It’s not just football that suffers from the ever-increasing encroachment of advertisers filling every nook and cranny of a broadcast, though. And it’s happened in sports much more inherently exciting than our homegrown version of football.

The NBA All-Star game this past weekend was yet another iteration of a game put together by striping out all the things that make the sport fun in an effort to make it more palatable to an increasingly disjointed viewing public. While this year’s All-Star format — three 12-minute games done round-robin style between three teams representing the American Youngs (Team Stars), the American Olds (Team Stripes) and the non-Americans (Team World) followed by a final between the two best teams out of the three — was an improvement of the biblical shitshow the NBA’s showcase game had become over the last few years, the finale of the entire event still stunk on ice, with the Stars defeating the Stripes 47-21¹².

Blowouts aren’t always boring. France’s massacre of Wales, 54-12, to win the Solidarity Cup¹³ port of the Six Nations tournament might have been the most fun sporting to watch this past weekend that didn’t take place in Milan or Cortina. The French who, contrary to what you might expect, are a bruising, dominant and extremely exciting rugby side that will make you fall in love with the game if you haven’t already were the perfect compliment to a Welsh side¹⁴ that, uh, lacks of all of those things you’d use to describe France’s team.

The experience of getting to such a lopsided score was exciting for the exact opposite reasons that the same kind of result in the Super Bowl and All-Star game finale weren't. Actual dominance by a team working at full strength, even when they do so against an egregiously out matched team is fun to watch because greatness is a pleasure to witness, especially when it doesn’t feel cheap or achieved by default.

In the NBA All Star game, the American Youngs won so handily because, quite frankly, the American Olds were tired after having just played two quarters of basketball in the previous two hours. It was basically the only thing the commentators said for the full twelve minutes the game was on. And the olds weren’t tired because they are lazy/out of shape and it’s not like didn’t try because they didn’t care (which can often be the case in an exhibition game like this). It’s because it’s genuinely pretty hard to play at a high level against the best competition three times in one day.

Which is something that the league was almost certainly aware of when planning this format, so why not split the event over two days, to prevent our best elderly basketball players¹⁵ from soiling their Depends in front of the world? There’s no issue with having enough time or issues related to all the players being in the same place at the same time, as just the day before was the first half of All-Star Weekend.

The problems, of course, is that the two days are filled the brim with what could politely be called crap. From a multi-stage Rising Stars challenge — which features 28 sophomores and rookies split across four teams, all coached by legends of yesteryear — to the godforsaken Celebrity Game, on top of the “classic” three-point, dunk and ‘shooting stars’ contest, the entire weekend is essentially an exercise how much shit you can fit in a ten pound bag if money and integrity weren’t logistical issues.

Which is a problem in an American sports that seems to be without a fix. The entire enterprise of American exceptionalism in sports (and the compensation for the athletes employed therein) is driven by the very same TV deals that make so much of the American sporting world inaccessible (through the spread of platforms required to watch every game) and/or unenjoyable (through structural changes to the sports themselves done to maximize advertising revenue in balance with attention retention) for everyone except the most committed. It’s only when you look outside of our bubble that you can start to appreciate that we don’t have to live like this.

Or this:

Wednesday at 15:00 ET
NCAA Men’s Lacrosse: Fairfield v. Sacred Heart

A battle of two of the most okay schools in lacrosse.  Plus, who’s going to say no to watching a little intra-state battle on a Wednesday afternoon?  Also, it’s the Stags versus the Pioneers, so the team names give it a real “Manifest Destiny” vibe.

Thursday at 20:00 ET
LOVB: Atlanta v. Houston

League One Volleyball continues as 4th place Atlanta travels to take on 2nd place Houston at the midway point of the season.  This will be a battle for playoff positioning as the top four teams qualify for the postseason.

Friday at 07:00 ET
PDC Poland Darts Open

The first Euro Tour event of the year taking place in Poland for the first time. These events are played Friday to Sunday with two sessions per day (typically 07:00 ET and 13:00 ET). The Friday morning sessions are for the real sickos, generally with a more sparse crowd in attendance.  

Saturday at 09:10 ET
Six Nations Championship: Ireland v. England

The hatred that most countries have towards England will usually help distract from the actual expected outcome of a match (England are big favorites at home).  With both teams sitting with a record of 1-1, it’s even more important for keeping pace for the title.

Sunday at 08:30 ET
T20 Men’s World Cup: India v. South Africa

The Super Eight portion of this tournament starts on Saturday, but this game has huge implications (and is on at a totally reasonable time). This round has the final eight team split into two groups of four teams where another round robin is played (each team plays three games).  The top two in each group will then move on to the semifinals, which are played in a straight knockout format

Monday at 23:00 ET
OFC Pro League: South Island United v. Auckland FC

The OFC Pro League is back with its third “tour stop” of sorts.  This portion of the schedule actually kicks off in Melbourne the night of Friday, February 20th and will see 15 games (the original 12 plus three games rescheduled from earlier in the season) played between Friday, February 21st and Wednesday, March 4th.

Tuesday at 15:00 ET
World Jai Alai League: Devils v. Cyclones

Do you guys remember how good of a show “Miami Vice” was? Well this sport makes an appearance during the intro song.  This one is wacky, weird, and absolutely perfect for a weekday afternoon.

This week’s Dispatch will actually focus on something we didn’t get to talk about this week on the Pod, which is the Poland Darts Open ¹⁶. It’s the first European Tour tournament ever in Poland and will bring with it — as it stands now — every member of the Premier League line up for, potentially, the only time this year.

According to the oddsmakers, Luke Littler is certainly the favorite, but with Luke Humphries strong performance with this week’s PC4 victory, Wessel Nijman purple patch to begin the season and Gerwyn Price’s resurgent play, he’ll have any number of potential contenders nipping at his heels. And while Littler has done well in ET events, he’s not quite as unbeatable traveling abroad for this mid-tier matches as he has been in the major tournaments on the PDC schedule.

As for our picks: