For two years, the COVID-19 pandemic has managed to move the Olympic Games (Tokyo) and forced the two best hockey teams in America to jump on the ice in the middle of July. During the same period, in the NFL, most stadiums were filled to capacity and there were fewer sanitary masks in the stands than carnival costumes like the cheddar cheese wheel worn by Packers fans. from Green Bay. In the land of the oval ball, more than ever, the show must go on… And, as if to underline this obviousness, the 56e Super Bowl will be held on Sunday in the capital of star system US, in a brand new $5 billion stadium with a record maximum capacity of 100,000 spectators.
This kind of one-upmanship is consubstantial with the February high mass. And everyone has their reasons for attending the hyperevent, because there are several Super Bowls: culinary, advertising, musical… It’s the big “all-dressed” of the ordinary rabid couch potato. But let’s focus now on the strictly sporting aspect of the thing.
To say that four-try football is the most intellectual of team sports is, I know, an outrageous assertion in this land of the pushing of puck at the bottom of the area. It is however the truth, and it undoubtedly explains why it was a professor and critic of literature, Robert Saletti, who, at the end of the last millennium, covered this sport in the pages (yes, yes) of your Duty. “Football, I eat it”, wrote Saletti in 1995.
It is certainly the sport where strategy plays the biggest role. Football offers a unique combination of mental complexity and brutality, the latter being however compensated by a most often loyal, even chivalrous attitude. Such a celebration of brute force married to precision could well have some side effects: the omnipresence of the military institution in the marketing of the NFL ends up becoming a little awkward. And no other major league, to my knowledge, sees so many of its players being singled out for aggressive and criminal behavior off the field. Apart from these bad apples, the picture is impressive: some 1,700 big boys who weigh an average of 90 kilos and who all have a university degree.
Differences (in means, in philosophy) are always a promising ingredient in major sporting confrontations. But the Super Bowl LVI will pit two organizations at odds with each other. On the one hand, the Los Angeles Rams who “packaged a team” in the hope of playing the supreme game in front of their home crowd, and it worked. They first boosted their aerial attack by bringing in Matthew Stafford, a gifted man who had been eating his black bread in Detroit for twelve years, then by offering him one more quality target in Odell Beckham Jr., controversial, temperamental and fickle, in short, in search of redemption.
Another trade allowed them to get their hands on Jalen Ramsey, one of the best cornerbacks in the NFL. And as if Aaron Donald wasn’t terrorizing other teams’ guards and quarterbacks enough already, they added him the defensive front point guard who, in 2016, clinched the title single-handedly for the Broncos by doing nothing but a mouthful of poor Cam Newton from the Panthers: good old Von Miller. Newton had seen stars.
In front of these fellows, Bengals came from nowhere and that nobody expected at SoFi Stadium on Sunday. And that is precisely what makes them dangerous. For more than a month these Tigers, already fulfilled by their first victory in the playoffs in three decades, have appeared on the field without the proverbial pressure that is the lot of the favorites: the Chiefs, the Bucs… and the Rams. Sunday, Joe Burrow, this young quarterback whose icy calm reminds some of the legendary composure of another “Joe Cool” (Montana, four Super Bowl victories), will face, in Stafford, a hungry veteran.
Both men have the right arm to throw the long pass capable of transforming the pace of a meeting, and receivers as explosive as Cooper Kupp (Rams) and Ja’Marr Chase (Bengals) to catch it. Between the intimidating defense of the Rams and the shaky offensive line of the Bengals, there should be played the match.
Now that he has announced his retirement, Tom Brady’s estate could become an issue this weekend. What more can I say about it? Tom, in hockey, would have been Wayne Gretzky and Gordie Howe in one.
Sunday, on the biggest stage in the world — where, if we drop a pass “in the number” or miss an easy field goal to lose our team, it happens in front of 100 million pairs of eyes. multiplied by endless replays and replays — if a 25-year-old Joe Cool had to find a way to win, one would inevitably think of this other young man who, exactly twenty years ago, at the same age, largely overlooked by bettors, toppled the mighty Rams (!) to win the first of its incredible seven Super Bowls. But no. The Rams by a touchdown.