Super Bowl

Does it seem these days that everyone you know suffers from a food allergy, sensitivity or intolerance (don’t ask me to explain the difference)? It seems inevitable that eating out in a group entails someone in the party requesting a menu item be made vegan, keto, gluten-free, dairy-free, tree nut-free, sulfite-free, etc. (I usually just hope the meal itself is free). Blame it on seed oils, soil depletion, genius marketing, the Liver King — whatever. The fact is that our toxic world makes party-planning a royal pain. How do you accommodate a bunch of people whose dietary restrictions turn menu-making into a culinary Sudoku puzzle? Fortunately for you, The Spectator associates with a lot of cool, accomplished, clever people — one of whom is Chef Andrew Gruel.

Hosting a Super Bowl party is always challenging, but every now and then — four times in history to be exact — the Philadelphia Eagles represent the NFC in the big game, introducing a next level complication: namely, Eagles fans. As a lifelong Birds fan, this comes from a place of love — brotherly love even — but let's face it: we are jerks. As such, if you have invited any Eagles fans over to watch their team play for a ring, there are some things you should know and be prepared for. I know what you're thinking: Debbie, and Joe, and Hakeem, they’re really nice people, how bad can it be? That isn’t how this works. Oh sure, at work or in the pick-up line at school they're lovely, but put them in front of an Eagles game and that goes out the window.

Two Democratic lawmakers in Tennessee have introduced a bill that, if passed, would make the day after the Super Bowl a statewide holiday. The initial version of the bill also proposed removing Columbus Day as a holiday. With Republicans dominating the state legislature, two Democrats offering a popular, seemingly apolitical holiday in exchange for eliminating a more controversial, clearly politicized one was unlikely to fly. So it's unsurprising they've dropped that stipulation. The idea of a holiday the day after the Super Bowl has been a pipe dream for NFL fans for almost as long as the Super Bowl has existed, and the subject comes up just about every year around this time.

It’s Super Bowl Sunday in New York. You’re at a bar having some beers with your friends, watching the youngest quarterback matchup ever. You think the Eagles have got this in the bag. In fact, you think they’ll win 33-28 — so you hand the bartender five bucks and enter the establishment’s squares gambling pool, where you’re betting on the final digits of what the score will be. Suddenly, the door bursts open. The cops are here. They shout “we hear there’s gambling going on in this establishment!” and slap the owner with a massive fine. A nightmare? Sure.

Few things whip American sports fans into a frenzy more than a downtrodden franchise finally about to get off the schneid. Baseball especially in recent decades has gloried in this, first with the Boston Red Sox ending their eighty-six-year championship drought in 2004 and then the Chicago Cubs breaking the Curse of the Billy Goat that had lasted over a century. That the NFL has its own version of this flies in the face of the league's gushing about its parity of talent. If several teams have gone the entire modern era without sniffing the promised land, surely that parity isn't all it's cracked up to be. Nevertheless, there are a small handful of teams that NFL fans recognize as especially tortured, and few would deny the Buffalo Bills their place as a top woebegone franchise.

There was a time, not long ago, when any NFL franchise with a coaching vacancy was desperately searching for the next Sean McVay. This was explicitly spelled out: we want the next McVay, a literal clone if possible. Now, only six years into his head coaching career and following his first losing season, Sean McVay isn't entirely sure he wants to be Sean McVay anymore; at least not Sean McVay the football coach, at least not for a while. That McVay spent years representing the mold that coaches aspired to had something to do with the cult of the wunderkind. Every few years, there's a new hotshot coordinator or ascendant college coach who is said to be taking the NFL by storm.

“The Big Game” was this weekend. A hundred million or so people of all races, genders, ages, creeds and sexual orientations from Nome, Alaska, to Key West, Florida, to Bangor, Maine, to Monterey, California, and everywhere in between were drawn together, like moths to a plasma screen TV, to tune in to “the most watched TV event in America.” What is it about the Super Bowl? Why does it cause so many of us, even those who don’t really understand the game, to suspend our Sunday scaries and partake in this most sacred ritual of pounding domestic beers, Buffalo chicken wings, and seven-layer dip, partying like there’s no company-wide conference call bright and early Monday morning?