Will The NFL Get What It Needs? » Brats & Beer

January 26, 2006
posted under: NFL, Super Bowl

The new ads for the Super Bowl running on ABC and ESPN have me scratching my head. If you haven’t seen them (just stay tuned, you will), the curious thing isn’t the visual element — just stock footage of past championships dug out of the vaults of NFL Films — but the use of the Rolling Stones song “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.” The ads focuses on the opening of the song in which the choir instructs us not to expect to always get the things that we want before Mick Jagger consoles us with the notion that sometimes we get exactly what we need. In any other season I’d probably just dismiss it all as a cheap tie-in between the game and the overblown halftime entertainment that will feature Jagger and his group of sexagenarian rockers, but given the way this year’s playoffs turned out, I wonder if the NFL is trying to send a not so subtle message.

This whole season was one long-running ad for Peyton Manning and the Colts and the fact that this was going to be their year, and during the run up to the playoffs the hype machine turned its attention to Steven Smith and the Panthers making a second run at the title. Could the league be using this new ad to reach out to all the so-called fans turned off by the fact they aren’t getting the high-flying, long-bomb-throwing Super Bowl they were promised? Maybe the NFL is also trying to woo a nation of sports reporters similarly disappointed in the match up they’re getting? It makes me scratch my head and wonder.