SUPER BOWL MEDIA DAY

The video is fascinating. An aerial view makes the entire scene look like an ant farm in a feeding frenzy.

Take 2,500 reporters, radio go-fers, shock jocks, TV crews, self-styled promoters, and other itinerant lunatics. Give them access to the Super Bowl players and coaches for an hour. Wham! Nuttiness reigns.

That’s the big media kickoff to the Super Bowl. Tuesday is Media Day. Earlier in the game’s history, it was called Photo Day. It was far more sedate and photographers (remember them – people with actual cameras and not cell phones?) got to make the head shots of the players and catch them casually walking around in their uniform jerseys. Reporters asked the usual football questions and the usual mundane stuff.

Question: “You’re in the Super Bowl. How do you feel?” Answer: “With my hands.”

Somewhere along the line it morphed into a clown show countenanced by the NFL, which issues credentials to anyone who can prove he was born on this planet. MTV invaded, with its own goofy brand of non-football questions. A woman reporter from Mexico began showing up in an outfit that could only be described as a body stocking. She certainly got attention from the players. Reporters interviewed reporters about what had become of their old, beloved Photo Day. Questions grew even stupider than the usual mundane football strategy gab, including this classic: “If you were a tree, what kind of tree would you be?”

This used to be the initial access point for reporters to get to the players. It was a good day to work. Now it’s mostly a day to report on the spectacle of excess. The NFL herds the attendees onto buses, brings them to the stadium, gives them a shot at each team for an hour and feeds them lunch in between. Almost every TV network shows the footage of this mass interrogation that yields more heat than light. The herding of humans does yield a few who think it funny to make cattle noises.

The jokers disappear for the Wednesday and Thursday media sessions with the players and by Friday the players are free of these obligations to express their innermost thoughts to complete strangers.
 
 
Post By: Larry Weisman, a longtime sportswriter for USA TODAY, blogs for Twistity.com. Follow him on Twitter @MrLarryWeisman .