National Friday League: last football weekend

Living without ESPN means not getting exhausted by Super bowl hype.
I have barely thought about the Patriots or the Giants since the conference championship games--and that's a good thing. Instead of hype inundation, I get to just settle down Sunday and watch real football teams play a real football game. After a two week break (that's fine with me), it's always fun when you see an actual team kick off, an actual team return the kick, an actual team line up to run an offensive play.

It already feels like football season is over at this point anyway. As Kramer says, "In my mind, I'm already gone."

I will provide you absolutely nothing in way of a preview
In previewing the Super Bowl, so many possible angles have been considered and written about. Just about every media outlet devotes resources to covering Super Bowl week. With only one game on the schedule, all the writers and sites devotes to actual football analysis have been able to cover the one game pretty thoroughly.

Basically, there's a lot more coverage previewing the Super Bowl beforehand than there is coverage making meaning of the Super Bowl after the fact. But for me, the previews have a certain emptiness, while the post-game commentary has actual content, real stuff to talk about. Last February I put out five posts on the Monday after the Super Bowl to talk about the game, the coverage, historical contexts, Hall of Fame selection, player legacies, etc. This Sunday and Monday, I'll see if I can top that.

Links
At Epic Carnival, DMtShooter provides "Top X reasons the NFL needs to be taken down a peg." Let me second two of his reasons in particular: the marking of Super Bowls by Roman numerals (I've memorized every Super Bowl winner and loser by year; I have no memory for Xs, Vs, Is, or Ls), and the fact that Instant Replay is not fairly applied (big games get a lot of network cameras, meaning a lot of angles, while less popular games get fewer network cameras).

Jamie Menutis writes about Super Bowl sponsor Bridgestone Firestone's labor practices in Liberia. Dave Zirin also has more on the issue, including Bridgestone Firestone's response.

Remember anoher important football even this weekend: final Hall of Fame selection. Selector Peter King writes about this year's class.

Pro-football-reference.com talks about the history of black quarterbacks in pro football.

How's this for a lousy pre-Super Bowl post?
In this pre-weekend football post, I haven't named a single player that will be on the field Sunday. I also haven't made a prediction. This is an empty, practically useless post. If you'd like, use the comment section to tell me what you think about Sunday's game and what you're looking forward to seeing.