Reader Peter Kruimer has the floor:
“In all seriousness, can the NFL go any lower? She was spreading her legs giving the audience crotch shots! Pole dancing as Super Bowl LIV entertainment? Little girls should aspire to be strippers?”
Er, ah, well, it certainly seems that way. So let us now raise our cups to even lower standards!
Roger Goodell and Jay-Z �� the NFL’s new, N-wording, women-degrading, vulgarity-rapping Minister of Social Justice and transparent racial public relations — are already hard at work on next year’s Super Bowl halftime:
A Salute to Lap Dancing, sponsored by Cialis.
“Budweiser Bucks” will be distributed so the customers can “make it rain!” or slip a few inside the thongs of barely clothed young nymphs as they gyrate and grind through the stands at the next, no one-under-18 Super Bowl.
Security and police will be replaced by bouncers.
It’s still hard to fathom the why of what the NFL did Sunday. But one consistent truth remains:
The highly inappropriate, female-objectifying Super Bowl halftime show followed the path of the previous shows as conducted with the full approval and invite of pandering, gutless, $42 million-per-year guy Goodell.
Just four years ago, Super Bowl 50 featured a disturbing dance tribute to the murderous Black Panthers. To that, Goodell offered no excuses or even an explanation. He just took the right-headed in the audience for granted.
And he likely knew then that the absence of condemnation for such an act due to media fear of being labeled “a hater” or “racist” by ignorant fools allowed him and the NFL to keep at it.
Last year, the NFL presented two Catch of the Day rappers — I forget their street names, Dough-vah Soul and Herring Bone, perhaps — to perform.
The NFL knew in advance they’d shout or lip-sync vulgar lyrics, but that didn’t deter it from the invite. As the rappers grabbed their groins, their stock-in-trade crudities were bleeped. Thus, this was no “wardrobe malfunction” ambush, this was the plan.
Sunday’s halftime, by design, objectified women as hot, barely dressed, crotch- and rear-end-thrusting, unescorted boobs-bobbing sex kittens. As if the NFL doesn’t have enough problems with how its players regard and treat women, the rank hypocrites. And as if Shakira and Jennifer Lopez don’t know the score.
And of course, Goodell again escaped responsibility. He’d do to the kids in our lives what he wouldn’t allow us to do to the kids in his. Not that we’d ever do what he did.
And once again, America’s right-thinking but vastly underrepresented citizens — by my estimate, the silenced majority among both major political parties — went ignored, dismissed as unimportant and expendable.
And where are all those feminist protesters? Shakira and J.Lo — the latter had her 11-year-old kid on the stage, for heaven’s sake — are too popular to take on?
Under Goodell, the Super Bowl has become Viewer Indiscretion Advised TV.
And to condemn Goodell as merely dismissive of those who would choose right over wrong would be a step up for him. Unless he’s unaware of how prurient his halftime shows have become — as if he’d debate it, video attached, in public — he’s purposefully negligent.
There was another Goodell-encouraged absurdity on display. With the 49ers up 20-10 early fourth quarter, the Niners intercepted a pass, and their defense determined that was the perfect time to pose for an end-zone group shot.
This once would have been a penalty for delay of game or unsportsmanlike conduct, but Goodell issued orders that displays of “genuine enthusiasm” — showboating, showing off, taunting — are good for the game.
That pose included 19 Niners, so Goodell’s invite led to several coming off the bench to act like Goodell-certified, NFL-issue fools.
And now that “photo” has a well-deserved legacy, a prominent placement in the Museum of Dewey Wins! The Niners rushed to pat themselves on the back for a job undone and never completed.
It’s the perfect keepsake as proof of the feckless, Nero Fiddles League stewardship of Roger Goodell. PSL, anyone?
Why should illegal turns be allowed on road to Hall?
So, in the tidal pool of more recent MLB cheating scandals, Pete Rose’s elimination from Hall of Fame eligibility should be lifted? Several fresher wrongs excuse an old one?
Regardless, it’s becoming too difficult to care.
George Steinbrenner, a twice-convicted felon, was twice banned from baseball but returned to be appointed to the board of directors of baseball’s Hall of Fame.
Shoot, the nation’s lead MLB TV analyst is Alex Rodriguez. Let ’em all in!
In retrospect, it’s easy to ask why Chiefs running back Damien Williams, with 1:15 left and up 24-20, didn’t pass the first-down marker, then just fall down, rather than keep running for a TD — something that went unaddressed by Fox’s Joe Buck and Troy Aikman.
But that’s more foresight and in-the-moment awareness than most humans can provide. And lots of folks, starting here, didn’t think about it until asked about it.
Not that Fox was out to show how greed-stricken the NFL has become — it wanted to show that Jack Buck called Super Bowl IV, 50 years ago, while his son, Joe, was on this one — but the event’s escalation of exclusionary excess was stunning.
The graphic showed a ticket to Supe 4 for $15 vs., gulp, $2,500 Sunday.
Players flake on handshake
It didn’t dawn on any of the Sunday coin-flip captains — college men — to shake the hands of the elderly, medals-earned military heroes, several in wheelchairs, who participated?
No one from the NFL advised them that it’s the honorable, gentlemanly thing to do? The NFL just let them sit there like props.
Then again, because everything’s a con, in 2015 under Roger Goodell, teams were paid over $6 million in Department of Defense taxpayer money to conduct patriotic, on-field pregame ceremonies.
How about a swap of the SOI — sons of inheritance — Jeff Wilpon for Jimmy Dolan? What’s the worst that could happen?
A Super Bowl pregame stat on the NFL Network noted that 49ers quarterback Jimmy Garoppolo is “2-0 in postseason starts.” Reader L. Barravechia: “Um, ya think? Had he been 1-1 he wouldn’t be playing.”
To watch these soulful, sensitive commercials starring LeBron James as a kids’ welfare advocate is to wonder if he’s the same LeBron James who hosts HBO’s “The Shop,” regularly loaded with vulgarities from Gutter Street.
Oh, well, football’s over. Now it’s almost time to enter the On The Bubble, Punch Their Ticket to the Big Dance, Brackets-Busting, Road to Somewhere, What’s in Your Wallet? student-athlete tournament.