TV Quote of the Day (‘All in the Family,’ As Archie Addresses His Bar’s Customers on Super Bowl Sunday)

Archie Bunker [played by Carroll O’Connor]: “Before the second half starts here, I just want to take the opportunity to express my, whaddyacallit, gratitude and depreciation to all my loyal friends and customers here who are here with me today to share with me in watching this magnificent sportin' event.” —All in the Family, Season 8, Episode 16, “Super Bowl Sunday,” original air date Jan. 15, 1978, 78, teleplay by Bob Weiskopf, Bob Schiller, and Johnny Speight, directed by Paul Bogart

One difference between this Super Bowl and the one 48 years ago: “this magnificent sportin' event” concludes the NFL season three weeks later. Way too long, as far as I’m concerned.

This Day in Football History (Dolphins Vanquish Vikings in Super Bowl VIII)

Jan. 13, 1974—Taking its cue from fullback Larry Csonka (pictured), the Miami Dolphins ran roughshod over the Minnesota Vikings in Super Bowl VIII.

The 24-7 final score was not remotely indicative of just how thoroughly Miami dominated Minnesota, which had gone 12-2 in the regular season (and had given the Dolphins one of their most hotly contested victories early in 1972, in a bruising 16-14 come-from-behind win).

Vikings head coach Bud Grant had made front-page news in the run-up to the game with his complaint about sparrows in the locker-room shower at Houston’s Rice Stadium.

When it was all over, he had two more persistent headaches: how the Dolphins’ offense had pushed around his legendary “Purple People Eaters” defense, and how Miami’s “No Name Defense” had, in the words of Miami Herald sports columnist Edwin Pope, “pounded Minnesota's runners into such terror that the Vikings did not get a first down rushing for an astounding 44 minutes and 17 seconds.”

Among head coach Don Shula’s 347 career triumphs, few could have been sweeter than his Super Bowl victory at Rice Stadium.

His Super Bowl win the year before may have capped an undefeated season and at least temporarily quieted complaints that the veteran coach couldn’t win The Big One.

But this one proved that the earlier success was no fluke. It also put Shula among the elite circle of coaches who have won two consecutive Super Bowls, along with Vince Lombardi, Chuck Noll, Jimmy Johnson, Mike Shanahan, and Bill Belichick—giving the Dolphin coach a fair claim to have forged the closest thing that the National Football League has to a dynasty.

Dolphins dominate

Over the years, the surviving members of Dolphins have been justly proud of their undefeated 1972 season, particularly when the New England Patriots achieved a perfect 17-0 season in 2007 before falling to the New York Giants in Super Bowl LXII.

But, even though the Dolphins’ 12-2 record-season record in 1973 might suggest a slight falloff from their prior magical year, some observers believed that the team was stronger than the undefeated squad.

Unlike the year before, with the Dolphins’ 14-7 win over the Washington Redskins (an outcome suddenly threatened a few minutes before the end when placekicker Garo Yepremian’s inept pass on a broken play led to a Redskin touchdown), the Dolphins never loosened their choke hold over their opponents. Their advantage in time of possession (33:45 versus 26:15) tells only part of the tale.

On both sides of the ball, the Dolphins set the pace early, capitalizing on the Vikings’ inability to get momentum. Miami scored twice in the first quarter on touchdowns by Larry Csonka and Jim Kiick, a rushing pair that, like the Green Bay Packers’ Jim Taylor and Paul Hornung (“Thunder and Lightning”), had earned their own nicknames—in this case, the more colorful (and given their close friendship, more appropriate) catchphrase, “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.”

A Yepremian field goal in the second quarter put Shula’s squad up 17-0 by halftime.

On the other side of the ball, the “No Name Defense” was throttling the Vikings. The major hope that Minnesota had to get within striking distance was crushed when, with fourth and one with a minute left in the half, Miami middle linebacker Nick Buoniconti knocked the ball loose from Viking running back Oscar Reed and the Dolphins’ Jake Scott recovered (one of two fumble recoveries that the free safety had that day).

Another, two-yard touchdown run by Csonka in the third quarter only added to the Vikings’ woes.

Head On, the title of Csonka’s 2020 memoir, tells you most but not all of what you need to know about the running back’s take-no-prisoners rushing style.

First, his initial pattern of running was even more physically confrontational—with more potential for long-term physical injury—before Shula taught him how to lead with his forearm rather than his head.

Second, “head on” doesn’t convey the sheer futility of trying to tackle Csonka. You’d have a better chance of bringing down a Sherman tank.

The Vikings’ plight in Houston, as he rumbled on 33 carries for 145 yards for a Super Bowl MVP designation, was best expressed by linebacker Jeff Siemon:

“It's not the collision that gets you. It's what happens after you tackle him. His legs are just so strong he keeps moving. He carries you. He's an immovable weight.”

The Vikings’ Fran Tarkenton could take only meager satisfaction in becoming the first quarterback to score a touchdown in the Super Bowl. The score came in the fourth quarter with his team down 24-0. With the running game going nowhere, he was under continual pressure all day, dumping off short passes to tight ends and running backs who were immediately surrounded and stopped by a sea of green uniforms.

My rooting interest in the Dolphins

You might wonder how I became interested in this game and this team.

Well, in the early 1970s, when I started watching pro football on a regular basis, the Green Bay Packers had fallen off the high standard set under Vince Lombardi. My area’s New York Giants were even worse, still less than halfway through a 17-year absence from the playoffs. I abominated their divisional rivals, the Dallas Cowboys.

I ended up gravitating to the up-and-coming Dolphins. Their thrilling double-overtime victory over the Kansas City Chiefs in the 1971 Championship game sealed the deal for me.  Their loss to the Dallas Cowboys in Super Bowl VI only made me pull all the harder for them to surmount their last hurdle to glory.

I was glad beyond measure when the Dolphins break through against the Redskins, then again against the Vikings. Great times seemed to stretch far into the future.

The Dolphins didn’t have long to enjoy their victory. Less than a month later, Csonka, Kiick, and receiver Paul Warfield announced that they would be jumping to the upstart World Football League for the 1975 season.

That left only one more season when quarterback Bob Griese could count on his chief rushing and receiving threats. The Dolphins’ loss in the divisional playoffs to the Oakland Raiders, on Dec. 31, 1974—the famous “Sea of Hands” game in which Clarence Davis snared a Ken Stabler TD pass in the final seconds—was dismaying and, in terms of their period of dominance, final.

Changes since Super Bowl VIII

Younger readers who come across this post may have no idea what pro football was like a half century ago, while older ones might have forgotten some details. I can tell you that the Super Bowl was far different then from now, both in how it was played and how it was viewed by a mass audience.

Even by 2004, the ambiance of the “ultimate game” as we know it now was set. So here are the major contrasts between Super Bowl VIII and Super Bowl XXXVIII. (God, save me from this plague of Roman numerals!):

*Passing is a more central part of the game. Testifying to the respect in which he was held across the league, Griese was elected to the Pro Football Hall of Fame, but in Super Bowl VIII he attempted only seven passes, completing all but one. Bill Walsh’s implementation of the “West Coast offense” with the San Francisco 49ers and NFL rules protecting quarters gave passers more room to operate—and, in parallel fashion, decreased the importance of running backs. The last back to be named Super Bowl MVP was the Denver Broncos’ Terrell Davis, back in January 1998.

*Players grew in size. The biggest man on the Dolphins’ offensive line, Hall of Famer Larry Little, weighed 265 pounds. Thirty years later, the heaviest offensive lineman for the Patriots, Wilbert Brown, tipped the scales at 320 pounds.

*The game occurs later in the year. With 17 regular-season games starting in 2003 versus 14 in 1973, along with an additional round in the playoffs, the season is longer. The 2004 Super Bowl, featuring the New England Patriots and the Carolina Panthers, was the first to take place in February. The additional games increase the possibility of injuries that can affect the outcome.

*The game occurs later in the day. Kickoff time for Super Bowl VIII was 3:30 pm ET; 30 years later, it was 6:25.

*The game has become a de facto secular national holiday. Over time, the NFL has realized that, to increase viewership, the inherent drama of the game would not be enough, so it added entertainment elements. The halftime entertainment at Super Bowl VIII, "A Musical America," featured the University of Texas band, along with Miss Texas Judy Mallett. In contrast, the entertainers at Super Bowl XXXVIII were P. Diddy, Nelly, Kid Rock, and the controversial pair that ended up giving rise to the phrase “wardrobe malfunction,” Justin Timberlake and Janet Jackson. Even ads from America’s biggest companies made the game “must-see TV” for more casual football fans, and the average cost of these 30-second commercials skyrocketed, from $103,500 in 1974 to $2.3 million in 2004.

There is one other major difference in football—certainly not apparent in 1973, and only starting to surface in 2003: the danger that players faced with concussions. The NFL first released the results of a five-year study on mild traumatic brain injuries in October 2003.

It was already too late for several members of the 1974 Super Bowl champions. Kiick, Scott, Buoniconti, Bob Kuechenberg, Bill Stanfill, and Earl Morrall were identified as having C.T.E. (Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy). 

These cases, as well as so many others from the era when I watched football avidly week to week, have made me reevaluate how I think about the sport and its ultimate game.

In reading Homer’s Odyssey in college, I don’t think that I properly appreciated the traumas experienced by Odysseus and his comrades in arms as they made their way home after the greatest battle of their lives. 

Now, thinking of them in relation to the Dolphins, it all seems far more understandable to me.

After all, who can bear to watch aging warriors as they prove all too mortal far from the site of their greatest victory?

Quote of the Day (Eugene McCarthy, on How Politicians Are Like Football Coaches)

“Being in politics is like being a football coach. You have to be smart enough to understand the game, and dumb enough to think it’s important.”—U.S. Senator and Presidential candidate Eugene McCarthy (1916-2005), quoted in Darcy G. Richardson, A Nation Divided: The 1968 Presidential Campaign (2002)

Wait, wait…you mean football’s not important?

Forget about challenging a powerful party apparatus stacked against him—that quote might be as good a reason as any why Senator McCarthy—by nearly all accounts, witty and brilliant—never became President. Political consultants talk about “the Nascar voter,” but if you ask me, football voters are far more numerous.

I hate to say it, but football was already beginning to replace baseball as America’s game in the Sixties when McCarthy said this. He just attuned to reading the signs, intent as he was on guiding legislation through the Senate, or reading the poetry of Robert Lowell.

The first two Super Bowls had already been played when McCarthy trudged through the snows of New Hampshire to challenge Lyndon Johnson in that state’s primary. Wilder football fans were wondering why the winning coach in those initial Super Bowls, Vince Lombardi, didn’t run for President himself.

Nothing that’s happened in the five decades since has fundamentally shaken Americans’ love affair with the game. Not steroids, not halftime wardrobe malfunctions, not traumatic concussion-related injuries, not Colin Kaepernick taking a note, not even Tom Brady monopolizing the Super Bowl.

St. Paul has a Winter Carnival. The Super Bowl provides a nationwide version of it, only on the gaudiest scale imaginable.

I’ve become convinced that the sport has become so important to so many, paradoxically enough, because it’s not important.

While everybody worries about something or other day to day—education, health, paying the bills, politicians who not only do stupid stuff but are shameless about it—football gives them a chance to join with other people on something that doesn’t matter because it’s utterly forgettable, with no real-world consequences for them.

Quote of the Day (Russell Baker, On America’s ‘Opiate of the Masses’)

“In America, it is sport that is the opiate of the masses.”—Pulitzer Prize-winning humorist and memoirist Russell Baker (1925-2019), “The Muscular Opiate,” The New York Times,  Oct. 3, 1967

Russell Baker is playing, of course, off Karl Marx's infamous line that religion is the opiate of the masses. But in our age, the Super Bowl has taken on the trappings of a secular religion, even being played on a Sunday, inspiring an unusual amount of reverence for a game that, after all, involves 300-plus-pound mastodons in shoulder pads colliding at ferocious speeds. 

Baker wrote those lines in the autumn of 1967, when the Green Bay Packers were two months away from their second and last Super Bowl under coach Vince Lombardi. The game was already assuming inflated dimensions (why do you think it was called “Super”?), but nothing like the orgy of wretched excess it has become in recent years. 

Growing up, I was never the type of young man uninterested in athletic pursuits that Baker labeled “asportual.” Having checked in on the big game on Sunday, albeit intermittently, I can’t even be said to be one now.

But I am certainly nothing like the teen who could have reeled off the starters of his favorite gridiron teams of the Seventies, the Miami Dolphins and Pittsburgh Steelers. I am all too conscious that a sport that George F. Will defined American as “violence punctuated by committee meetings” has produced a startlingly high number of concussion-related victims. 

Those Roman numerals associated with the Super Bowl—a designation, to my knowledge, not associated with any other sports trophy—may point to more than laughable, over-the-top pretense. 

As corruption and greed took over the Roman Empire, rulers placated their restless subjects with what the ancient satirist Juvenal termed “bread and circuses”—i.e., free food and entertainment. I fear that the American experiment with liberty may have encountered a similar obstacle.

Quote of the Day (Susan Orlean, on What She Learned During Super Bowl Week, 24 Years Ago)

“I learned that the Super Bowl and the week of revelry leading up to it feels exactly like prom week—if you had happened to go to a high school with seventy-four thousand in the graduating class and your prom had been televised to seven hundred and fifty million people worldwide and your parents had been liberal about your curfew and you had accessorized your prom outfit by wearing on your head a piece of polyurethane foam shaped like a thunderbolt (if you were a Chargers fan), or a miner's pickax (if you were for the 49ers). The only difference--which in the case of most Super Bowls turns out to be a minor one—is that most proms don't feature a football game.”— Susan Orlean, “Super-Duper,” The New Yorker, Feb. 13, 1995, collected in her My Kind of Place: Travel Stories from a Woman Who's Been Everywhere (2004)

(Photo of Susan Orlean taken at the 2011 Texas Book Festival in Austin, Texas, Oct. 22, 2011, by ©Larry D. Moore.)

The Beli-Cheat Bowl

“Smiley”—that’s my nickname for Bill Belichick, based on innumerable pictures like this. But I’m afraid that other people have different, less kind names in mind. People like Don Shula, who’s made hardly a peep in the 20 years since he retired as head coach of the Miami Dolphins, but who, about a month ago, in an interview given around his 85^th birthday, referred to the New England Patriots coach as “Beli-cheat.”

That sounds kind of nasty—even, some would say, evincing a touch of jealousy of a man who has won already more Super Bowls than he has. But Shula, the winningest coach in NFL history, is merely venting the same type of justified annoyance that Hank Aaron must have felt when Barry Bonds made some people forget the greatest home-run hitter in history with a surge of brilliance suspicious even for the likes of him.

Oh, brother. Just when NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell thought he might have a couple of weeks when the media would hype the strategic matchup of the Seattle Seahawks and the Patriots rather than question his own leadership on player concussions and off-field domestic violence, along comes a report that could very well call into question the integrity of the Super Bowl: that the Patriots benefited from deflated footballs in their AFC Championship victory over the Indianapolis Colts. 

This wasn't just one ball: It represented 11 out of the 12 Patriot-used footballs that the NFL tested. And it wasn't just minor deflation--it was 20% or less than what the league mandates--enough to allow Patriot quarterback Tom Brady a good grip in terrible weather conditions at game time this past Sunday. And, contrary to what you might hear, not everybody does it: Not one of the Colts' footballs measured that day were deflated.

More than anyone else I know in sports, Belichick has had the word “genius” applied to him. Star Wars had its Jedi Master; the pro gridiron wars, its Hoodie Master. But let’s compare their characteristic statements, shall we?

Belichick: "I don’t have an explanation for what happened." (From his press conference responding to the charges.)

Yoda: “Adventure. Excitement. A Jedi craves not these things.” (From The Empire Strikes Back.)

I think you’ll agree that, though he talks (and looks!) kind of funny, Yoda imparts far more knowledge than Belichick does with his non-denial denials.

I, for one, side with former Super Bowl quarterback Joe Theismann: “Nobody in the game of football should be called a genius. A genius is somebody like Norman Einstein.”

Still, let’s not quibble. We can credit Belichick as unequaled in the arts of anticipation and preparation of diverse pigskin formations.

The trouble, simply, is this: In his relentless search for any edge, Belichick may have become too clever by half—a leader who fancies himself as so intelligent that he is always in danger of overreaching.

In this respect, Belichick resembles not so much a mythic science-fiction hero but a real-life practitioner of the black arts of politics: Richard Nixon.

I admit that the “Deflategate” coinage for the Patriots controversy demonstrates once again the media’s annoyingly lazy habit of conflating all manner of major and minor offenses with the biggest political scandal in American history. But it does make one notice the unavoidable resemblances between the Patriot and the President who gave us Watergate.

As Mark Sappenfield notes in a careful analysis for The Christian Science Monitor, the charges against Belichick have been given so much immediate credence because of the coach’s past history of walking right up to the edge of legality in the NFL. The most frequently mentioned example of this is his 2007 suspension for Spygate, in which the team videotaped opponents' signals.

But just like Nixon—another intelligent but supremely charm- and ethically-challenged guy who hated hated hated losing--Belichick has long infuriated opponents, for such other actions as the following:

* Running unorthodox offensive formations against the Baltimore Ravens in their playoff game a few weeks ago. The NFL dismissed coach John Harbaugh’s contention that Belichick's tactic--declaring certain players as ineligible receivers, then hurrying up his offense--left the Ravens insufficient time to react. But you can bet that the league will very carefully review the rules governing this in the off-season.

*Draping their secondary all over Indianapolis Colts receivers in the 2003 AFC Championship game. The Patriots weren’t penalized a single time for the tactic at that point, but in the offseason the league toughened the rules against it--ample precedent for what it might do about Belichick's tricky maneuver against the Ravens.

*Playing fast and loose with the team injury report. At one point, Brady was listed on the report for three years straight—despite playing 127 straight games.

*Hiring players from opponents who can provide intelligence immediately before games with their old teams.

These are the kinds of actions that Nixon, himself a football fan, might have enjoyed seeing executed. There are other striking resemblances between the two men:

*Each made a fetish out of toughness.

*Each took along a younger man who became instrumental in his rise to the top—Nixon with H.R. Haldeman, his chief of staff, and Belichick with Brady. Each of the latter came to stand at the center of controversies that might define their mentors' legacies.

*Each narrowly lost contests they were favored to win—Kennedy winning out over Nixon in the 1960 election, and the New York Giants’ Tom Coughlin beating Belichick twice in the Super Bowl;

*Each had supporters who claimed that their unorthodox practices were not different, in number or event in kind, from what others in their profession did. 

*Each employed dirty tricks so often that outside investigators were called in.

I don’t hold any brief for Pete Carroll, either, given his egregious violations of NCAA rules while head coach at USC. As my friend Steve points out, with the head coaches of New England and Seattle so infamous for their poor ethics, parents letting their children watch the Super Bowl (and play the sport) might want to think whether the game really does foster ideals of teamwork and dedication—or if it simply demonstrates that cheating is what’s needed to win.

Photo of the Day: Super Bowl Boulevard

I came upon this Super Bowl promotion, Extra Point Kick, in Times Square tonight on my way home from work.  In fact, this was just the beginning of “Super Bowl Boulevard,” running through Times Square down Broadway—the center of all kinds of activity this week as the Denver Broncos and the Seattle Seahawks compete for the Vince Lombardi Trophy.

There’s been a fair amount of mutual mumbling and jousting between New York and New Jersey this week over bragging rights to the game. The latter state, you might recall, is where the game will be played on Sunday night, in the Meadowlands. 

As for me, I regard this as a stupid food fight. I’m not sure that all the outside visitors will sufficiently compensate the residents of this area for the major traffic and security headaches being incurred this weekend. Moreover, with each revelation of another player falling victim to memory loss, dementia and depression induced by concussions, I often wonder why I continue watching this violent sport. 

Without the Giants in it this year, I really "don't have a dog in this hunt," as the saying goes. If pushed, I'll go with Denver because of Peyton Manning's fraternal connection, through Eli, to my home team. But the only thing I'll really be paying attention to during the game, I think, is the halftime show, to see how well Bruno Mars does.