Fox’s Super Bowl expertly blended NFL pedigree with thoughtless patriotism

W ith Tom Brady finally, probably off the scene and the age of Patrick Mahomes upon us, this year’s Super Bowl promised a new beginning for football in America, a kind of cultural reset after the Kaepernick-Trump years. Rihanna back on stage for the first time in four years! Two Black quarterbacks facing off for the first time in Super Bowl history! Greg Olsen’s emergence as America’s favorite play-by-play guy and the enduring gap-toothed charm of Michael Strahan! At each turn of the half-day behemoth that was Fox’s pre-game coverage, viewers were handed some fresh invitation to believe that we have entered a new era. But as kickoff grew closer and the jingoism thickened, a darker truth became clear: the NFL has not changed. It’s just found a new and bigger cast of characters to buy into its bullshit.

No country has America’s gift for blending sport, militarism, celebrity, and consumerism into a single package, and there’s no better demonstration of that gift than the Super Bowl. Fox, a network completely at ease with the death cult of modern America, is maybe the perfect home for an assignment like this, its on-air talents blending football pedigree and thoughtless patriotism in perfect, Super Bowl-ready proportion.

Super Bowl Sunday was, we were confidently told from the beginning of Fox’s coverage, “the biggest day of the year”, “the biggest spectacle in the world”. Tom Rinaldi, prowling the State Farm Stadium sideline in a check blazer and sneakers like a kind of Fox Sports Seinfeld, solemnly declared, ““More than 200 million Americans will be united by sports today. That’s the power of football.” All of which is, perhaps, fair enough: the Super Bowl is the biggest spectacle in the world, just as long as you ignore