Bernstein: Super Bowl XLIX Outshines NFL's Bad Year
By Dan Bernstein-
CBSChicago.com senior columnist
(CBS) We finally got our reward for sitting through the drag that was the 2014 NFL season, and it came in the form of a Super Bowl that may have been the best ever.
It was great specifically because it bore little resemblance to the desultory taffy-pulls to which we've grown accustomed, as we pay such close attention to a league in conflict with itself both on the field and off. As it should be, the game itself – the real game, the fast and violent one – redeems all else. Super Bowl XLIX was more than two outstanding teams in the Patriots and Seahawks battling to a dramatic end, it was a clear reminder of what pro football must continue to be.
The week leading up was a collective spasm of stupid, from the grandiose moralizing over less-than-turgid footballs to the farcical explanatory press conferences that ensued. It all capped a painful NFL year that had us watching videos of women knocked unconscious, toddlers beaten bloody and an obtuse commissioner in arrogant, twisted denial.
The sport needs men willing and capable of inflicting bodily harm when unleashed to play its war game, yet with that predisposition always otherwise under a nebulous type of control. Some of that governance is expected from within; and no matter the number of pre-draft interviews and private detectives and contractual understandings, the phone call in the wee hours will always bode ill.
External efforts to that end are changing the game, and for the worse. We watch flags fly capriciously to police all kinds of contact now deemed illegal, with the officials' reasoning varying from week to week. Players and viewers alike now don't know which way is up, needing former NFL rulebook wonks on TV and Twitter to make some sense of it.
Impossibly, a sport made of collisions is now terrified by them, with the brain injury risk so obviously endemic to the action for decades now turned into another disingenuous public relations issue. It's amazing the NFL can keep all the phony concerns straight, whether it's the cosmetic attempts to pretend to care about domestic abuse, the black actors in white lab coats trying to reassure youth football moms, whitewashed self-investigations conducted by handpicked cronies or the elaborate system of "concussion protocol" designed primarily as liability insulation.
Sunday let us know once again why we bother with all this and why so much ridiculous dissonance is worth it.
Referees let the teams play, finally. Super Bowls are often languid, attenuated affairs, bloated by commercials and logy with stoppages, but this one seemingly crackled from one hit to the next. A hard tackle and a gruesomely busted arm changed the game early, and two players had to be removed for head injuries, one just temporarily. Julian Edelman was the one who caused Jeremy Lane's awkward landing, and he later found a way to remain in the game after taking a big shot in the fourth quarter that left him dazed.
"The brutality of the game was on full display," analyst Matt Bowen told 670 The Score.
The former NFL safety also noted the impossibility of players being honest about their condition when assessed by trainers on the sideline.
"We're all a little nuts," he said. "Anyone who's played professional football, you're a little crazy for doing it. In that time, on that stage, when you're in the moment of the game, there's no way you're taking yourself out."
For the first time in a long time, a beleaguered fan of the NFL could feel similarly in the moment, aware of that stage and once again connected to it. Instead of just another Sunday of disjointed confusion, replays, challenges and rules interpretations -- or an unfortunate Thursday of under-recovered zombies shambling around halfheartedly -- we got real pro football: enormous, fast people slamming into each other for our sheer amusement with everything at stake. The best at what they do were allowed to actually do it, highlighted by critical decisions that set up star-making plays. Not even the ugly brawl at the end could diminish the buzz.
It was enough to make up for everything else, in a season that made football more a chore than a diversion.
That's what the NFL game is supposed to look like and what it must remain — brutal and electric and powerful, and gloriously unsafe at any speed.
Dan Bernstein is a co-host of 670 The Score's "Boers and Bernstein Show" in afternoon drive. Follow him on Twitter @dan_bernstein and read more of his columns here.