Super Bowl 52, according to Marshall McLuhan

NFL football is America’s most popular sport. Super Bowl 52 baby! The game, New England Patriots versus Philadelphia Eagles, will be played in front of 70,000 fans at US Bank Stadium in Minneapolis. A domed stadium protected from the Minnesota elements. The real audience, however, the group that matters to advertisers, stays home and is watching the game from a couch. Advertisers will pay $7 million or so for a 30 second ad. Just to get those eyeballs on their products.

The Super Bowl has become a national holiday. Legions of football fans will visit the supermarket in the days prior to the game. Mountains of beer, dips, chips, hot sauce, guacamole, burgers, hot dogs and all kind of BBQ meats will fly off the shelves. Fans stocking their freezers like a prepper the night before the apocalypse.

Football has supplanted baseball as the national pastime. Marshall McLuhan, the media guru, saw it all coming. Football’s rise, he suggested, was connected to its compatibility with the TV medium.

It is the inclusive mesh of the TV image, in particular, that spells for a while at least, the doom of baseball.

(Understanding Media, p.238)

I remember watching the NY Giants (“the football Giants“). I peering at grainy black-and-white heroes: Y.A. Tittle, the baldheaded QB, Sam Huff, the tough guy linebacker, Frank Gifford, the golden boy running back, and linemen Andy Robustelli, and Rosey Grier. The images have gotten clearer in 50 years and NFL football has risen to the top.

For baseball is a game of one-thing-at-a-time fixed positions and visibly delegated specialist such as belonged to the now passing mechanical age.

In contrast, America football is nonpositional, and any or all of the players can switch to any role during play.

(UM, page 239)

McLuhan explained that football works differently than baseball. Football has more simultaneous action, more moving parts than baseball. The same guy that blocks might also be a running back. Who knows? Tom Brady might throw an interception and then tackle the defensive back who grabbed the pass. Don’t count on it.

Football, as the very image of the new corporate and participant ways of electric living, fosters habits of unified awareness and social interdependence… When culture changes, so do games.

(UM, page 239)

Instant replay will be a big part of the game. Replays can highlight spectacular plays. They will also be used to review  referee decisions. The referee’s decisions can actually be reversed by “the guys up in the booth,” officials not visible to the fans with the power to change decisions made on the field.

The footage is examined with the care of a rabbinical student learning the Torah. The TV sports announcers argue the possible different interpretations…Did he juggle the ball or have control the ball…. Did he stay in bounds or did his cleat hit the white line…?

The discussion animates the presentation. The TV announcers consider the options with great brio and focus—and then we learn the outcome from the officials. Those decisions may get dissected all week-- by the big time ESPN national show hosts and an army of lesser-known, radio hosts fast-talking from across the hinterland.

McLuhan commented that baseball “has been dislodged from the social center and been conveyed to the periphery of American life.” Football, by contrast “goes very well the new needs of decentralized team in the electric age.”

Think about this when you quaff the adult beverage of your choice and/or dip you chop into the hot sauce. Or maybe not.