The Trident

Issue date: 1/24/07 Section: Sports

This past Sunday was one of those days that you catch yourself thinking "It's 10:30 PM and I still haven't been outdoors." There were 7 straight hours of football-spelled by some guitar hero and Taco Bell-and not a minute of it was unwatchable. The Bears game, though a delicious blowout in the end, was not decided until Bernard Berrian caught that awkward pass from Rex to make it 25-16. It's not your team's day when a receiver makes a falling down catch on an under thrown ball and does a backwards somersault into the end zone. The AFC championship was easily the more intriguing game on Sunday, and one sentence can really sum this one up: PEYTON MANNING WAS CLUTCH. If you know anything about football, collegiate or professional, you know that this is the first time those words are being put into print. And to make it even more ludicrous, Manning did this against the Belichick and Brady Pats, a certainty in clutch situations rivaled only by the rising sun. But please excuse the above paragraph, because these stories are going to live in and pick at your brain during the next two weeks as we have officially entered the two weeks leading up to the Super Bowl, affectionately known as Football Purgatory.

See, what I wrote last week about always picking against the popular opinions of NFL analysts only proves one thing (other than that I was right about a Colts-Bears Super Bowl): the media controls the way people interact with sports. The case can easily be made that media people run your entire life, but this is a collegiate newspaper sports column, and I don't have the space or interns. More to the point is that other than the games themselves (often killed by asinine commentators), the NFL fan doesn't hear a single thing about a game that doesn't come from John Clayton, Jaws, Sean Salisbury, et al. OK, granted that's the way it works and there's no real reason to complain, right? Well, yeah, sorta. Any other time of the year I can handle it, but not in Football Purgatory. From Week 1 until the two conference championship games are over, there are multiple games every week. There are no weekends off from at least a few teams getting together and trying to pound 11 other guys into saying uncle. As a result, the John Clayton Cartel has plenty of insider information to dish out on a weekly basis on any number of teams. By the way, if you are on a TV show giving out "insider information" to millions of viewers, can that be qualified as insider information anymore? But in Football Purgatory, there's only one game left, only two teams to talk about, and an extra week of airtime to fill. The Bears are my team, and I routinely snatch up every article or Sports Center clip about them, but even I might have trouble handling these next two weeks. How much do you think we will hear about Smith and Dungy being the first two black coaches in the Super Bowl? Or the monkeys on or off Peyton's back? I think there might even be a feature article somewhere about the "regular guy" friendship between Robbie Gould and Adam Vinatieri. They text each other like real people! How human!

I suppose, if I were to pick a sin that put us in Football Purgatory, it would be gluttony of information. Even though I am a slave to all things Bears, Ditka, Urlacher, and by extension this next Super Bowl…can even Colts fans endure the 9 million sightings of Peyton Manning's face in the next two weeks? Can we become too fat from eating out of ESPN's hand? Is this article just a cog in the machine of Football Purgatory? (Please ignore that last question.)

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