At some point over the past couple of decades the mainstream sports media got out of the business of reporting the news of sports and into the business of being shills. To some extent, this is understandable. Virtually every major sports media platform is in some type of partnership with the leagues and other entities that they presumably cover. The concept of ‘journalistic ethics and standards’ died a long time ago in the sports media so this is accepted by everyone concerned. In fact, no one ever seems to feel uncomfortable with it in the least.<\/p>\n
Were you completely unfamiliar with the game of ‘American Football’ and decided to tune in to the Super Bowl on Sunday you would have easily been misled into thinking that these were two of the NFL’s stoutest defenses engaged in a titanic struggle for the ages. That was the narrative that ESPN and all of the other media entities beholden to the NFL quickly tried to establish after it became apparent that the offenses of both the Patriots and Rams were as out of sync as a early 1970’s kung fu movie. It was even more comical to watch the jock sniffer media try to spin their way through a miserable first quarter after they had spent the two weeks of pre-Super Bowl buildup alternately proposing pre-emptive beatification for Tom Brady and Bill Belichick in light of their otherworldly excellence and hysterically predicting a arena football like offensive shootout<\/a> for the Rams v. Patriots matchup. This absurd level of histrionics is one of the reasons that the total on Super Bowl LIII opened at either 58 or 57.5 depending on the out–the highest in NFL football history.<\/p>\n The Patriots did manage to prevail 13-3 to win which was good news for the ESPNs of the world since they didn’t have to rework the ‘love letters to Brady\/Belichick’<\/a> game recaps that the wrote before kickoff. This wasn’t a game in which the Patriots defense ‘led the way’ as ESPN gushed. Nor was it a ‘defensive struggle’. It was a matchup of two offenses that purportedly rank among the best in the NFL completely failing to execute on the game’s biggest stage. To be fair, Tom Brady has shown plenty of offensive talent during his Super Bowl appearances. This, however, was a performance that should rank among the most embarrassing of his career. 262 yards, 1 sack and 1 INT was Brady’s line and Rams’ QB Jared Goff was pretty much the same–229 yards 1 INT and 4 sacks. <\/p>\n The most embarrassing offensive performance has to go to the Rams’ rushing game. Los Angeles had the #3 team rushing attack in football during the regular season putting up 139.4 yards per game. Todd Gurley was third in the league in rushing with 1251 yards. His performance on Sunday was pitiful–10 carries for 35 yards–as was C.J. Anderson who went for 22 yards on 7 carries. This was just a horrible game from start to finish. The Rams became only the second team to go an entire Super Bowl without scoring a touchdown. The first time was in Super Bowl VI when Miami’s Garo Yeprimian’s second quarter field goal represented the only 3 points the team would score all day. Of course, the sports media didn’t spend the previous two weeks gushing about the unstoppable offenses of Miami and Dallas–the Cowboys put up 24 points in their winning effort. <\/p>\n ESPN helpfully put up one of their smarmy ‘listicle’ articles with ‘five Super Bowls that were somehow more boring than Patriots-Rams’. This is an effort to look ‘hip’, like they’re a cynical observer of the process and not the NFL’s primary hype machine. The most recent of these games took place 23 years ago. It was a different sport then, but ESPN knows that. They’re just trying to minimize their culpability in what should go down in history as the worst Super Bowl–game, hype, media coverage, event, whatever–of the modern era. Throw in the sad wailing refrain of the New Orleans Saints<\/a> faintly in the background and this was easily the most unwatchable Super Bowl in history.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" At some point over the past couple of decades the mainstream sports media got out of the business of reporting…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":5089,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[129],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5088","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-nfl"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.betonline.ag\/news-room\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5088","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.betonline.ag\/news-room\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.betonline.ag\/news-room\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.betonline.ag\/news-room\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.betonline.ag\/news-room\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5088"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.betonline.ag\/news-room\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5088\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5091,"href":"https:\/\/www.betonline.ag\/news-room\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5088\/revisions\/5091"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.betonline.ag\/news-room\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5089"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.betonline.ag\/news-room\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5088"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.betonline.ag\/news-room\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5088"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.betonline.ag\/news-room\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5088"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}