What has the potential to be the most politically charged Super Bowl in history will be anything but if the pathologically apolitical National Football League has anything to do with it.
The two-week build-up for Sunday’s championship tilt at Houston’s NRG Stadium between the New England Patriots and Atlanta Falcons has, by twist of fate, been cast against the backdrop of the first two weeks of the Trump administration. The game itself has been dwarfed by a torrent of headlines – the ban on refugee admission and travel from seven Muslim-majority countries, the reported discussion of recreating CIA “black sites”, the proposal to build a wall on the United States’ southern border – that threaten a country’s very identity as a refuge for the oppressed.
But the show must go on – and it shall.
The Super Bowl would appear to be a tailor-made canvas for a mainstream political statement. To be sure, the panic-strewn reports of the NFL’s demise have been overstated. The league remains a national obsession. Last year, 46 of the 50 most-watched programs on American television last year were NFL games, with an average viewership of 22.5m for NBC’s flagship Sunday Night Football telecasts. The last seven Super Bowls have been the top seven most-watched programs in American history. It remains one of the last remnants of monoculture in an increasingly fragmented media landscape.
At the season’s outset, San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick leveraged the platform’s reach by kneeling for the national anthem to shed a light on racial inequities in the country. Dozens of NFL players followed suit. But it’s highly doubtful you will find amplification of that dissent on the sidelines Sunday night: no Patriots or Falcons player has taken a knee during the anthem this season.
Indeed, players for both teams, media-trained within an inch of their lives, have said next to nothing throughout the week’s exhaustive media obligations lest they create a distraction. Not that it would make too much difference if they had: it was discovered earlier this week that the NFL’s communication department was redacting questions relating to Trump from the official transcripts disseminated to media.
No one has been more tight-lipped than the Patriots’ big three – owner Robert Kraft, head coach Bill Belichick and quarterback Tom Brady – the trinity most responsible for the New England’s ascent from perennial also-ran to most successful American team of their generation. All three have shown a quiet allegiance to Trump while stopping short of public endorsement, creating a fascinating dichotomy with their Massachusetts home: the only state in the union where every county in the general election went for Hillary Clinton.
NFL commissioner Roger Goodell, who has earned more than $240m in salary during a decade-long tenure as a human shield for the cadre of billionaire owners he represents, avails himself to the press once a year during the week before the Super Bowl for a state of the league press conference. Wednesday’s session saw the milquetoast cipher pirouetting from questions on Trump, the Muslim ban and the border wall like a scatback slipping tacklers in the open field.
“As commissioner of the NFL I’m singularly focused on the Super Bowl right now,” Goodell said with the footwork of a veteran pollster. “We have a unique position to have an event on Sunday that will bring the world together.”
When pressed on the transcripts removing mention of Trump: “That’s one thing I am not in charge of here.”
It is the apotheosis of the “Republicans buy sneakers, too” mentality that prompted a generation of athletes to keep their heads down when it came to thorny issues, lest they alienate the consumer base. Current events have prompted an erosion of that firewall in other sports – most notably the NBA – but it remains paramount in the establishment NFL, where the owners’ political contributions to Republican campaigns, candidates and Super Pacs exceeded donations to Democratic efforts by a 40-to-1 margin this election cycle.
Sunday’s game will take place on a glorified sound stage before a live studio audience of corporate types; everything but the action on the field will be timed, measured and controlled before the largest American television audience ever. Former president George HW Bush will handle the pre-game coin toss after a joint color service guard run a gigantic American flag onto the field, and the US Air Force Thunderbirds will fly over the stadium to punctuate the national anthem.
The nation it celebrates may not feel united from the ground, but it sure can play one on TV.
