los-angeles-rams

The Super Bowl That Trump’s America Deserves

I’m not really sure why they’re bothering with a Super Bowl this year. Sure, a bunch of people will make a boatload of money, tens of millions of us will reflexively tune in and we’ll find rare common ground over how cheesy the halftime show is. But are we believers anymore? Will we really see the winner as the winner — or just as the charmed survivor of a grossly tarnished process? Be it the New England Patriots or the Los Angeles Rams, the team will have an asterisk after its name. And that asterisk is a big fat sign of the times.

I’m referring, of course, to the miserable officiating that’s arguably the reason the Patriots beat the Kansas City Chiefs and the Rams beat the New Orleans Saints, leading to the matchup in this coming Sunday’s season-finale game. The Rams in particular were blessed by the referees, who failed to note and penalize a glaring case of pass interference in the climactic minutes. I needn’t describe what happened. Footage of it has been replayed as extensively and analyzed as exhaustively as the Zapruder film.

And it has prompted an intensity of protest, a magnitude of soul searching and a depth of cynicism that go well beyond the crime in question. That’s where the feelings about the Super Bowl and the mood of America converge.

We’re still reeling from a presidential election that was colored if not corrupted by unfair advantages, undue meddling and disrespected rules, and here we have a Super Bowl that’s colored if not corrupted by unfair advantages, undue meddling and disrespected rules. Many fans are rejecting its legitimacy — sound familiar? There are conspiracy theories afoot.

Americans are so down on, and distrustful of, major institutions and authorities that we’re primed to declare their fraudulence, and the National Football League and the Super Bowl are on the receiving end of that. They’re not fresh targets, not by any stretch. But this time we’ve lost all sense of perspective.

.. The missed pass-interference call in the clash between the Rams and Saints was certainly egregious, but every football game is a compendium of good and bad breaks; luck is always a factor and often the deciding one. The Saints had home-field advantage, and their fans created enough noise to addle and even paralyze the Rams on offense. The Saints also made errors galore, blowing the possibility of a lead too commanding to be erased by poor officiating. On a recent episode of his podcast, the sports commentator Bill Simmons methodically broke down the game en route to this conclusion: “I really thought the Rams were better.” He added that “if that’s a neutral field, I think the Rams win.”

That the Rams did win, with an assist from somnambulistic referees, has not gone over well in New Orleans. The Louisiana governor wrote a letterof condemnation to N.F.L. Commissioner Roger Goodell. The New Orleans City Council is considering a formal resolution declaring the outcome an “injustice” and demanding that the N.F.L. thoroughly review its rules. One of Louisiana’s senators has called for a congressional hearing on the matter.

Several Saints ticket holders have filed lawsuits against the N.F.L., variously claiming that they have endured mental anguish, lost the enjoyment of life and been defrauded by the league. A movement in New Orleans to boycott the Super Bowl involves the staging of competing events, vows by many bars not to show the game and pledges by many other bars to show, instead, the 2010 Super Bowl, in which the Saints beat the Indianapolis Colts.

Outside Louisiana, there have been murmurs about the fact that four referees in the Rams-Saints contest live in Southern California: Was a secret pro-Rams bias at work? There has also been angst about the speed of players now, the intricacies of the rule book, the ease of instant replay and what all of that portends. “What if this was the moment that blew all of our commonly held notions about officiating to pieces and made us really, truly question whether the game in its current state can really be adequately overseen by referees at all?” asked Conor Orr, epically, on Sports Illustrated’s website.

On Deadspin.com, Tom Ley went further, writing that football today “requires you to sit on your couch for three hours and spend the whole time questioning if what you saw is really what you saw.” The referees, the videotape and the fans have conflicting perceptions and wind up telling diverging stories — not just about the pass-interference bungle but about a roughing-the-passer penalty on a Chiefs player who, to my eyes, did nothing more than fail to blow Tom Brady an air kiss at the end of the play. That decision, too, was possibly game-changing, graduating Brady to a Super Bowl in which he may not belong.

.. Football has never been entirely fair, any more than life is. In the past, the Patriots were caught spying on other teams; the Saints were punished for deliberately trying to injure opposing teams’ players. Critics gasped and the band played on. Maybe the same will happen this time.

Or maybe the post-truth era has found its post-truth sport.