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So I will watch the game today having, as has become my habit, avoided the media foreplay the Super Bowl has conditioned us to expect over the past forty-six years. I could care less about the comparisons and the stats- I am well past the age where fantasy football makes any sense to me. (In my 20’s, we played touch football on Sunday mornings and watched the NFL in the afternoon, rooting for our team to win, and not cheering for the performances of individual players on different teams who comprise a fantasy roster. Perhaps I should give more thought to what the emergence of fantasy sports means as a societal signifier.) Likewise, I pay no attention to the personalities involved or their antics. Their job is to hype the game, to attract an audience. It is American hucksterism in the great tradition of P.T. Barnum. When I noticed (via Twitter) the media excitement surrounding Richard Sherman of the Seattle team, I thought of the young Cassius Clay (Mohammed Ali) and even Sonny Werblin, the Broadway producer who owned the NY Jets in the 1960’s and instituted a Hollywood-like star system; “Broadway Joe” Namath was a Werblin concoction.

Setting aside my blasé attitude towards Super Bowl commercials and the halftime show, I just like football. Football is a bizarre amalgam. While all team sports have interactions between the players, friend and foe, football has more  because it has more players on the field. Other sports- soccer, lacrosse, hockey, or basketball*- are continuous action games, and play proceeds in a flowing manner. In football, the action is start and stop: Teams line up, the offense runs a play to advance or score, the defense attempts to stop them. Repeat. Given that the rules stipulate a framework for the deployment of team in possession of the ball (must have seven men on the line of scrimmage, only of the four not on the line can be in motion prior to the snap, etc.), a chess-like strategic component is inevitable. The offense lines up, the defense shifts, or threatens a blitz, the QB shouts out a change of play and a new snap count.

Then there’s the violence. Duffy Daugherty, Michigan State University coach in 1950’s and 60’s, said “Football isn’t a contact sport. Dancing is a contact sport. Football is a collision sport.” The size, speed and strength of players in the game today have intensified the violence. Although belated, the progress in dealing with health and safety issues, especially concussions, is encouraging to those of us who love the game but concede its essential brutality. When the skill, the grace, and the speed of today’s athletes are introduced into this mix of brutality and intellect, the compelling nature of football as spectacle is manifest.

There are a few special individuals in any field who can be called artists. I sure there are computer coders or motorcycle racers who do what they do in such a way and at such a high level so as to change the way we look at that activity. They elevate the ordinary into an art form.

I have that sense about Payton Manning. I have been watching football since the 1950’s. I played and coached football. I have seen all of professional football’s great QB’s over the years- Van Brocklin, Unitas, Tarkenton, Namath, Fouts, Marino, Elway, Favre, Brady. It is a long list. Yet, I have never seen one who commands an offense the way Manning does. He is in control and  he delivers the goods physically, passing with precision.

By all measures, the Seahawks and Broncos are a great matchup- best defense versus the best offense, great running back in Lynch for Seattle, great receiving core for Denver. Either team can win, so who knows what unforeseen game-changing play we will be re-hashing at about 10 PM. I appreciate art, so I will be rooting for the artist, Payton Manning, to lead the Broncos to victory.

*I omit baseball because it either has its own zen (that, or maybe the guy who invented it was a pot head). Each game moves at its own pace, no time clock. The best comparison of baseball and football was made by the late George Carlin.