SUPER BOWL FIFTY…
(celebrating a golden anniversary with a privately sponsored street party)

The NFL just celebrated its golden anniversary with a privately sponsored street party. It did so with a promotional hype and marketing campaign rivaling in extravagance anything spent by this year’s political campaigns. In some respects it was proportionately the equivalent of that previous Kardashian wedding (two million dollars for seventy two hours of matrimony).

Don’t get us wrong, we like football. Back in our day we even played it…with modest success…and we’ve always enjoyed watching a good game between two well-matched teams, especially those having wildly exciting running plays, rather than just a few hail-Mary passes now and then. But, frankly, this Super Bowl Fifty game just didn’t match all the earlier hype made for it. It was a rather dull performance, having even less snap, crackle, and pop otherwise found in that popular breakfast cereal, except for a few special moments near the end of the game. All in all it was just another one of those games, with hardly anything to go bonkers about.

The NFL is a highly successful conglomerate, one which has consistently generated billions in revenues for its private ownership. It is a most productive “cash cow”, so much so that even after taking care of all those billions in operating expenses, not to mention whatever local, state, and federal taxes they nominally pay, there are still oodles of boodle left over to handsomely jingle in their pockets. Even so, it is a most curious thing that such a private interest, always seems to need some kind of public funding from the taxpayers for things like building their sports stadiums, or, paying for all the supporting services required for one of their events… like Super Bowl Fifty. In this instance the hosting city of San Francisco, and others, appear to have been stiffed with a $5,000,000 bill to cover the costs of cleaning up after their street party, and for all the security forces deployed for the occasion, the NFL blandly justifying that with sophistries that would gag a Jesuit, that is, such residual costs are more than offset by the billions spent by all those attendees of their street party, thus boosting the local economies; and further, creating future increases in visitors from the exposure these festivities have provided by promoting it as a touring destination of choice, etc., etc., etc..

Well, a lot of folks may not know the way to San Jose but we doubt very few have never heard of San Francisco, so that kind of pie-in-the-sky justification just doesn’t cut it in our view. We hate to think that an enterprise as profitable as the NFL would accept being labeled as a cheap-skate tightwad over such a paltry sum which, for it, barely qualifies as …spare change.

CENTURION