Super Bowl snooze shows the truth for sports fans: we want heavyweights

The low-wattage Santa Clara game was a tough watch for the neutral - especially on this side of the Atlantic.

Seattle Seahawks defensive end Rylie Mills, right, sacks New England Patriots quarterback Drake Maye. Pic: AP Photo/Julio Cortez

It seems to have been the US comedian Joe Lewis who first coined that phrase about how rooting for the New York Yankees was like rooting for US Steel. You know what? Sometimes it's alright to root for US Steel. Or Manchester City. Or the Springboks.

Your average sports fan comes to despise a monopoly, or anything close to wholesale dominance. Look at Dublin. Their All-Ireland football final win in 2011, their first in 16 years, was met with a discreet but perceptible degree of acceptance and understanding.

Us culchies, were (sort of) happy for them. Some of us anyway.

By 2020, we were sick of the sight. Eight titles, a six-in-a-row included, will do that. Choke holds, like those of the Old Firm in Scotland or PSG in France, proliferate football like Japanese knotweed. And does anyone want to see South Africa win another World Cup?

Such is human nature. It doesn’t matter if the Dubs or the Boks or the Yankees are teams of sublime talents. Sport trades mostly on fickle emotions, on contrasting wants and needs. The drama of uncertainty, new faces and stories, are what keep the price index high.

The meeting of the Seattle Seahawks and New England Patriots in Santa Clara brought together teams with the highest combined odds from the start of any season to the game’s biggest spectacle. New England had gone 4-13 the year before, for God’s sake.

Hurrah for the underdog? There’s actually no such thing given the strangely socialist leanings of the uber-capitalist NFL where the draft system and league’s financial agreements ensure a sort of equilibrium that mitigates against too many dynasties.

Even so, people were certainly ready for a first Bowl in four years without the Kansas City Chiefs. But it dawned long before the game itself that it was missing something - and not just Patrick Mahomes, Travis Kelce and the Taylor Swift phenomenon.

They tried the Drake Maye all-American young hero story. Hard to make that one pay off when the guy is being sacked and forced into fumbles throughout the franchise’s entire post-season run.

Sam Darnold’s rebirth from his days “seeing ghosts” with the New York Jets was the sort of Hollywood tale which Netflix have all but ticked off already with its fictionalised take on former Rams QB Kurt Warner.

It all felt a bit meh, and that was even before a game that left plenty of us on this side of the Atlantic eying the clock long before Bad Bunny took centre stage at half-time, and questioning some life choices ahead of a full day’s work.

Jason Bell did his best on Sky Sports, in his inimitable and excitable style, to pump some energy into the dead of the night for the viewers by declaring his love for a defensive game of ball. He was preaching to the unconvertible. The game was dross.

The Seahawks keeping the Patriots scoreless until the fourth quarter said it all but we kinda knew where it was heading long before the NBC commentator Cris Collinsworth suggested we could be in for a defensive slug in the opening minutes.

Maybe a no-holds shootout would have wowed us. Maybe not.

We tell ourselves we want some new guys, but do we?

When Portsmouth and Cardiff City met in the 2008 FA Cup final the BBC reported a peak audience of 7.6m people. It was 10.4m for Chelsea-Liverpool on the same station four years later. And this in a market where terrestrial viewing numbers are shrinking annually.

Giantkillers are welcome, but know your place, your limits. Think back to World Cups where big nations fell by the wayside earlier than expected and how the giddy excitement gave way to a realisation that we wouldn’t get the heavyweight bouts we wanted.

The 2002 tournament still stands out when the holders France, Portugal, Argentina and a Croatia side that reached the semis in 1998 all failed to make it out of the group stage. South Korea beat Italy and Spain. That novelty wears off.

Think of any PGA Tour Sunday night leaderboard that doesn’t have a Scheffler or a McIlroy or someone of that ilk on it. A tennis Grand Slam where two relatively unknown (to the general fan) players duke it out in the final.

It just doesn’t capture the imagination in the same way.

All of which got us thinking, for some reason, about Jack Nicholson’s famous courtroom speech in ‘A Few Good Men’ when he ranted at the job Tom Cruise’s lawyer had done in exposing him as a cruel tyrant and not an honourable soldier defending his freedom.

“You don't want the truth because deep down in places you don't talk about at parties, you want me on that wall. You need me on that wall.” Like it or not, we want the Kansas City Chiefs on that screen. We need them on that screen.

Maybe next year.