Ryan O’Hanlon suggests that politics inevitably play a role in the Super Bowl:
For better or worse, the Super Bowl is America. More than twice as many people watched last year’s Super Bowl delay than watched the Oscars, the most-viewed non-football event of 2013. And in 2012, the only thing more people chose to do than watch the Giants/Patriots Super Bowl was vote. It’s impossible to remove politics from an event so big and widespread, which makes you wonder why we even try and if we really should. Creating some kind of boundary between sports and politics—or maybe more accurately, imagining that there’s no connection between the two—seems, if anything, just incorrect.
That’s not to say that if Richard Sherman intercepts Peyton Manning in overtime on Sunday and runs the ball back for a game-winning touchdown that it’s some metaphor for liberals wresting control of the racial-politics conversation from their conservative foes. Rather, it’s to acknowledge that, even on Sundays, the conversation exists—and that the guy screaming into your television is right in the middle of it.
Albert R. Hunt objects to painting the contest “with racial (white versus black) or political (red state versus blue state) overtones”:
This is inane. The majority of players for both the Broncos and the Seahawks are black; that’s true with about every National Football League team. Colorado and Washington state, the respective homes of this year’s Super Bowl contenders, both voted Democratic in the most recent presidential election, as did New Jersey, the site of Sunday’s game. So much for any political connotations.
The Dish 