Turn off the hype machine!
This week has already gotten off to a raucous start with my recent thoughts on Ernie Haase and Signature Sound.
I'm still taking in all the fallout from that, but rather than shrink away from posting anytime soon, I'm jumping right back in with more thoughts on stuff going on around me!
Tonight, I think it'll be a far less controversial topic...at least to gospel music fans, anyway.
As most people in the United States know by now, the Chicago Bears and the Indianapolis Colts won their respective conference championships yesterday, and will face each other in Super Bowl XLI(why the Roman numerals has never been explained adequately to me)in two weeks in Miami.
Thus begins possibly the biggest, most sustained media blitz during the year, when we will hear everything that we care to know(and a lot that we don't!)about the Bears and the Colts, about how Peyton Manning and Rex Grossman(the teams' respective QBs)match up with each other, and what a momentous occasion it is that both teams' head coaches are black(the first time that's happened in Super Bowl history), and we''ll be inundated with this and more tidbits about the teams until we get sick of it, or the game starts(wanna bet the first of those comes first?).
Why can't the two teams just play the following week, and get it over with? Football wasn't meant to be played in February...anymore than baseball is meant to be played in November...but this is where we're headed!
I'd be willing to bet that if you asked the players, they'd want to play TODAY...at least next week. But because the media buildup has to be so big for this football game(fans ought to be forgiven for thinking that the Super Bowl is only a mere football game), the game is held back an extra week, so that we lucky fans can learn all there is to know about players like Manning, Joseph Addai, Marvin Harrison, Dwight Freeney, Grossman, Brian Urlacher, Cedric Benson, Robbie Gould, and Devin Hester...I can hardly wait, can't you?
Inevitably, the hype is so huge, and swells to such a degree, that no matter how good the game is, it's an anticlimax. NO football game can live up to the typical Super Bowl hype, except for maybe this year's Fiesta Bowl!
One really tragic casualty, in my opinion, of all this Super hype, is the Sunday evening church service. Our culture has changed to the point that having evening church services is considered cost prohibitive(as if cost ought to be a factor in reaching the lost)or intrusive...so in many places, since the Super Bowl kicks off at 6:20 PM EST approximately, a number of churches don't even try to compete with Super Sunday, opting at best to have Super Bowl parties in members' homes.
Even here in California, churches drop their nighttime services on Super Sunday, possibly reasoning that people are so tired from the reverie of the games that they're in no shape to worship anyway.
So my lonely plea to the NFL hierarchy is this: Cut the hype, it's only a game...and play it the following week and get it over with!
That'll never happen in my lifetime, but hey, a fella can dream, can't he?
Posted on Jan 22, 2007 - 09:16 PM | [7]
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But Jim, somehow I doubt that THAT will be a part of this year's Super Hype...I'd be glad to be wrong about that, thouh!:-)
I did not see Smith when he was presented with his trophy for the conference championship but both Dungy and the owner of the Colts first thanked the Lord for what He had done through them. It was great to see that on national tv. 
