The formal part of Superb Owl Week has been kicked up a day, with Media Day, the traditional degrade-a-thon that usually was held on Tuesday, moved to Monday night to catch a prime time audience of shut-ins, morons, people who lost their remotes and people nailgunned to their chairs for their own good.
It was one more way in which the NFL squeezes money out of a seemingly bankrupt turnip, and it turned out to be one more triumph of the Goodell administration, where the watchword is “Save that chewed-up gum wad. We can sell that.”
And they can.
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And they will continue to do so.
But this Media Day-Turned-To-Night was bound to be different because this is the Bosnia/Herzegovina version of the big game, with San Francisco playing Bosnia and Santa Clara in the role of Herzegovina, and Monday was the dry-run for the intravillage traffic nightmares to come.
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And the verdict after Day One was – relatively okay, if you ignore the fact that the Broncos' bus already got the Highway 101 Howdy after their afternoon practice. All you’ll need on Sunday is an extensive police escort with the power to make huge swaths of traffic move aside at the flash of a single blue and red strobe, and you’re home and dry.
Unless, of course, you're the Broncos and you find out that our freeways only do one thing -- merge into no lanes at the drop of a hat.
But that's all in the hands of the iguana now, of course. Other buses survived with its far-less precious cargo, and it still took 70 minutes to make the 45-minutes drive south at 2:30 p.m. (100 minutes an hour later), and 90 minutes to return, because not even the NFL can do everything. For instance, the bay did not develop strains of leaping dolphins and gigantic blue whales coming off to be petted by toddlers. This sort of oversight will cost someone in Marketing his or her job, you may safely bet.
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But it was the time spent that matters to you, because you will be working escort-free. You’ll be one of the thousands of schnooks who will be shoved aside by the cops while buses of swells and media bully the world aside, and your trip will, well, suck.
It’s just one more price to pay, like the feeling those people in the aptly-named SAP Center got when they handed over their money to watch their favorite mesomorphs be surrounded and dwarfed by gaggles and gagglets of mediatrons, all asking the same questions the same ways. You know, the heart of Media Days gone by.
But as we said, this was a Media Night, a TV show, and nobody ever got a chance to forget it. It was loud (cover band dressed in loudly colored spangly suits singing hits from decades gone by in NFL-modern), garish (though the outlandish costumes of old were replaced by impossibly tight dresses on women and modern schlump on men). It was neck deep in (gasp! bleargh!) production values.
And, it ran the way all things NFL run – with lucrative precision. Roger Goodell’s gifts, and they are considerable, center around the accumulation of assets for his superiors while taking all the abuse for the business’ failing that would better be directed at the 32. Putting Media Day at night and slapping the whole unsightly mess on the league’s network was another mild masterstroke.
Indeed, the days when Downtown Julie Brown seismically shifted Media Day are well behind us, and as a culture we’ve outgrown wacky off-the-peg hijinks. Now all it has to do is bank.
So they opened Media Night In America to a rapt if largely confused audience at $27.50 a head. The fans got to watch the endlessly shifting herd of jaded reportorial cattle meander from podium to podium hoping for that special alone time with the backup long snapper, and they did it eagerly, as though they were getting an inside glimpse at the way the sausage is burned.
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They didn’t, of course, because the NFL only shows what it actually does at owners’ meetings, and the occasional courtroom appearance. Everything else is brilliantly constructed artifice, and it works on all it touches.
Except for the people who just wanted to go home after a day’s work and couldn’t have cared less about Carolina, Denver, Media Night In America, Bosnia or Herzegovina. They were no more disposed to bask in the warmth of the week while jousting with the dragons of 101 than they were to sitting down to a delicious meal of prime rib and Windex.
But they did get taught a lesson – namely, that their job this week is to move aside, because unimportant people are coming through, dammit, and they have unimportant places to go and unimportant things to do.
All in keeping with Superb Owl I – the game in which hilarious vandalism, crap drivers and sketchy weather has taken an early but not necessarily insurmountable lead.