The Biggest Game

Newsletter 2026-02-08

This is a big weekend in my life: It’s the only time my kids willingly and enthusiastically watch a televised sporting event. Given the importance of the occasion, you’d think I would have taken it more seriously. Instead, I have to think for a second when my daughters ask me who’s playing in the Super Bowl this year. They expect me to know everything about football because I supposedly follow it. I can impress them in short bursts since I know just barely more than them. For example, I understand the basic rules of the game. They’re the only people on Earth who are wowed by the fact that I know the point differential between a touchdown and a field goal. I lose them when I try to explain first downs. That amount of technical detail far exceeds their interest level. The girls will watch the Super Bowl tonight because it’s a spectacle that society at large will be talking about in the morning. They want to be part of something big. The fact that that something happens to be a sport is beside the point. As I write this, the big game isn’t for another ten hours. If I prepare appropriately, perhaps I can use this as a chance to turn my kids into my sports buddies for the next year. To get that outcome, I’ll have to do better than last time. The only thing they remember from the previous Super Bowl is the chili cheese dip my wife made for the occasion. I already bought the ingredients for this year.

Photo by Dave Adamson on Unsplash

The main reason I’ve failed to get the kids to share my passion is that I’m a fake sports fan. Children are natural fraud detectors. Around me, their alarms go off all the time. I didn’t grow up with an inherited fandom. I was a true professional sports agnostic. I’ve always excelled at not caring about things. After college, I made a deliberate effort to start liking football to better connect with other men. As with everything else I try for the first time, I immediately overdid it. I went all-in on emotional gambling. My mental state for the coming week was determined by whether or not a wide receiver caught a ball. After a few devastating seasons, I realized I couldn’t allow myself to go through the five stages of grief for millionaires I’d never met. I went from living or dying by the outcome of football games to not watching them at all. My betrayal of my adopted home team proved to be well-timed. The years after I stopped watching have not exactly been a golden era for the Colts. Perhaps, if I had stuck with them, they wouldn’t have had so many losing seasons. Me yelling at the TV was the key ingredient they were missing. If they wanted to maintain their success, they should have paid me.

Years later, I pivoted again. After my first attempt to like football, I had transferred my emotional investment from sports into the news. I was going through the same emotional roller coaster, but with much more real and depressing stakes. I needed an escape. I turned back to sports. This time, I decided to do it in a way my fragile psyche could handle. I accepted upfront that I needed sports not because I cared about the outcome, but because it was a coping mechanism to distract me. It was just enough removed from reality to hold my attention. True fiction couldn’t fill the void. I know the games don’t really matter, but, also, they do. People’s livelihoods depend on them. Millions of dollars in player salaries change hands. A bad game could mean losing your job or getting transferred to a team across the country. There are updates in between games covering personnel moves and scandals, both major and minor. Sometimes someone issues a verbal slight, and other times, they commit felonies. Some college football programs are only a few steps shy of actual terrorism. There’s also a hilarious level of online trash talking that’s a delight when it’s not targeted at one of my teams. There’s enough around-the-clock entertainment there to keep me from doom scrolling—mostly. Every once in a while, I still accidentally click on a breaking news post and lose twelve hours of my life.

This should have been the perfect year for me to fully re-engage with football and take my kids with me. I set myself up for success by taking them to a game at the end of last season. After the Colts were eliminated from playoff contention, I took my family to their final game. Tickets were dirt cheap because the game was meaningless and there was a blizzard in the forecast. My girls had an amazing time. They didn’t care about the broader context. As with the Super Bowl, they were entertained simply because it was a huge spectacle. It was the biggest stadium and largest crowd they’d ever seen. The players played like their jobs were on the line because they were. The game went to overtime, and the Colts won. It was the perfect outcome. The two-hour drive home in the snow for what should have been a thirty-minute trip took the experience to the next level, transforming it into a foundational childhood memory that my kids will be talking about for the rest of their lives. I followed it up by not watching a single game with them this season. It’s not my fault, which, as usual, means I’m entirely to blame.

My preferred scapegoat for my failure to follow the season is the complicated rights for NFL games. The sports I follow the most closely depend on two factors: 1) how cheap and easy it is for me to attend a game in person with my kids; and 2) how easy it is for me to watch on a screen in my home. Buying an NFL package that would let me watch every Colts game would have required me to do hours of research and also take out a home equity loan. I’m still not sure what tier of YouTube TV I needed to pay for before adding on the NFL for a trillion extra dollars. Compare that with the WNBA, which asked me to pay $35 for the year to be able to see literally every game ever played. Even local games that were blacked out because they were on over-the-air stations would appear on the app an hour later, where I could watch them without having to wait through half time and time outs. The value was insane. I very seldom have time to watch sports live. To catch the NFL, I had to be home and at a TV with an antenna that picked up the over-the-air signal. If I was out of the room when a play happened, I simply missed it. I couldn’t pause or rewind. I was living in the Stone Age. If I was out of the house at kickoff, it was like the game didn’t happen. After I missed a few games, I simply gave up. As if I ever need extra encouragement to quit.

It’s not like I’m unwilling to pay to watch sports. I’m just not willing to fork over the equivalent of four years of college tuition. The packages I do have let me watch FC Cincinnati, the Cincinnati Reds, the St Louis Blues, the Fever, and most importantly, the Pacers. I don’t necessarily give every game my full attention, but I at least have it playing where I can see it out of the corner of my eye and can rewind if something cool transpires. That didn’t happen with the NFL. I was fortunate enough to go to two games in person this season, courtesy of a friend who paid for the tickets. After those two, I’d worn out my welcome, both for the season and forever. I paid attention to every play for those two games. But for the rest, if I didn’t schedule my entire day around the game, other things usually got in the way. For other sports, that wouldn’t have been a deal-breaker. I would have caught up that night or the next day. With over-the-air NFL broadcasts, that wasn’t an option. I was so far out of the loop that I missed my chance to get my kids to a meaningless late-season game. I should have taken them to the second-to-last one because the final game was away. It doesn’t matter how cheap tickets are if the seats are in Houston. It’d be hard to drive home in time for school and work the next day.

That brings us to today. The general zeitgeist has done the job that I failed to do. My children are very aware of the Super Bowl. They asked days in advance if we’d be able to watch it. It’ll actually be easy this year. For whatever reason, NBC is the channel we have the most trouble picking up over the air. It probably has something to do with subpar feng shui or our chakras being out of alignment. I’m not beyond magical thinking when it comes to what invisible beams my antenna can and can’t catch. This year, however, we have Peacock, the NBC streaming app that I previously vowed I would never pay for. It was late to the game, and it made me mad when it put one of the previous Olympics behind a pay wall. It was one streaming service too far. I drew the line at nineteen, which, combined, still cost less than paying for one season of watching the NFL. My resolve lasted until NBC offered me Peacock for $2.50 per month. That’s basically free. The best thing about the app is it’s bad at stealing my personal information. It only shows me ads in Spanish. It should know I can’t speak a second language. I can barely handle one.

There’s one added complicating factor with watching the Super Bowl today: My niece has a birthday party. My brother-in-law and sister-in-law usually tie the two events together. It’s every little girl’s dream. The birthday party is at noon. In theory, we could stick around all afternoon and then watch the game there tonight. My kids insist that they want to come home. I can’t blame them. For one thing, we’ll have the cheese dip at home. We don’t want to take that to a party where we’d be forced to share it. For another thing, we have work and school tomorrow. Football fans say we should move one of the lesser holidays to be the day after Super Bowl Sunday. Most would be happy with Columbus Day on February 9th, but I’m sure a few would be okay with shifting Christmas. The far easier solution would be to simply have the Super Bowl on a Saturday. The NFL is terrified that would make ratings drop. I think people would watch it on whatever night it was on. If the NFL is so worried about viewership numbers, maybe they shouldn’t make streaming the regular season more expensive than the GDP of all of Europe. Just a thought.

Anyway, that’s all I’ve got for now. Catch you next time.

James