Give me a Super Bowl game with the Seahawks, but you can keep the hype
I love the Super Bowl.
I’m talking about the game, however. I can tell you where I was for pretty much every one of them going back to when I was 8 years old and watched Washington come back to beat Miami on my family’s 13-inch black-and-white TV.
The week leading up to the game, however? I can’t stand it.
This is based largely on my first-hand experience covering the Seahawks previous Super Bowl trips.
I hated how seriously people took Joey Porter’s trash talk 20 years ago.
I hated how seriously people took Marshawn Lynch’s reluctance to talk a little over 10 years ago.
I hate how much the people covering the game talk about the various parties that are staged in the week leading up to the game. That includes one supervisor of mine who was embarrassingly adamant about how he was going to the Playboy party.
These days, my annoyance tends to relate to the way commissioner Roger Goodell is allowed to toot his league’s own financial horn while failing to say anything meaningful about actual issues. This week, he said the league needs to “look at all facts” about the fact that Giants co-owner Steve Tisch sought dating advice from serial sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Don’t worry, though, seems like ol’ Rog is on top of making sure Seattle’s ownership structure is kosher with the NFL’s rules.
But I digress.
My biggest problem with the week leading up to the Super Bowl is how contrived and unnatural it is.
As a reporter, you spend six months around that team on a near daily basis. You get to the Super Bowl and all availability is tightly structured and fairly limited. Players give similar-sounding answers to predictable questions, the transcripts then photo-copied and distributed.
The scrums around the most prominent players become so large that they become part of the stories themselves. At this point, the stories about all the crazy questions that have been asked amount to a self-fulfilling prophecy. People behave ridiculously because it’s expected. In 2008, a television reporter wore a wedding dress to media day and asked Tom Brady to marry her.
To use a contemporary term I hate, none of this is what you’d call organic. It’s a spectacle created so people will call it a spectacle.
That’s the point of the Super Bowl.
That has always been the point of the Super Bowl.
If I was smarter, I might be able to explain how this embodies the hollow and ephemeral nature of late-stage capitalism. Instead, I’ll just observe that the Super Bowl is best understood as a monument to just how much the NFL thinks of both itself and its ability to wring every last dollar out of our collective attention.
There’s nothing wrong with that per se. It is, however, really annoying when your favorite team is involved, because a lot of what happens this week has absolutely nothing to do with the game itself.
For a long time, I thought my distaste for all of this was due to a personal flaw of mine. A cynical streak or perhaps just my Gen X tendencies. I have an innate distrust and reflexive dislike of things I’m told are popular.
I have decided, however, that it’s not me. It’s them.
It’s the NFL and the sports-media complex that have combined to turn everything leading up to the game into what I believe is the second-most obnoxious, unnecessary and bloviated entity in existence. Only Twitter (or whatever the hell you call it) is worse. And yeah, of course I still post there.
In retrospect, my distaste can be traced back to a specific event 20 years ago when I stood amidst a crowd that drew a telling reaction from a future Hall of Famer.
“Holy (something),” Steve Hutchinson said.
Steve is among the more stoic athletes I’ve ever covered, and his reaction spoke to just how many people were waiting for tight end Jerramy Stevens on the Thursday before Seattle’s first Super Bowl.
We were waiting for Stevens because he’d been singled by Porter, Pittsburgh’s linebacker.
Porter had taken a relatively innocuous quote from Stevens and used it as a springboard to call Stevens soft, that Stevens hadn’t done enough to say what he did. Porter also guaranteed a Steelers victory.
This was all part of Porter’s schtick. He was always a combative loudmouth. He was ejected for fighting before a game against Cleveland the year before, and now he’d called out Stevens and everyone wanted to know what Stevens was going to do.
It felt like something straight out of pro wrestling.
Except in pro wrestling, it’s just the promotion that’s pretending to take it seriously. Here, you had a significant chunk of the nation’s sports-media complex waiting to see what happened next.
It still makes me mad, and not just because Porter’s psychological ploy might have affected Stevens’s performance in that game. Yes, Stevens scored the Seahawks’ only touchdown, but he also dropped a pair of passes that would have made a huge difference in the game.
It makes me mad because it was so superficial, so obviously concocted and yet it wound up being considered the big story in that week leading up to the game.
How silly. How stupid. How totally indicative of what it feels like to be there, obsessing over ridiculous spectacles all week until the game feels like more like a bookend and less like a main event.
I still love the Super Bowl. I’m talking the game, though.
You can keep all the rest.
Danny O’Neil was born in Oregon, the son of a logger, but had the good sense to attend college in Washington. He’s covered Seattle sports for 20 years, writing for two newspapers, one glossy magazine and hosting a daily radio show for eight years on KIRO 710 AM. You can subscribe to his free newsletter and find his other work at dannyoneil.com.
This story was originally published February 3, 2026 at 10:25 AM with the headline "Give me a Super Bowl game with the Seahawks, but you can keep the hype."