Hey, NFL: I Won't Get Fooled Again

This is the way I spent the intermission of last season's Super Bowl at Raymond James Stadium in Tampa, when Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, and what seemed like a million people, poured on to the football field to perform a medley of The Boss' best hits: I departed my press seat in the stands with some friends to seek a cup of coffee on the concourse and wound up missing the entire halftime show.

I couldn't have cared less, either.

I don't go to concerts to see football games and I don't go to football games to see concerts.

So it was greatly underwhelming to me on Thursday when Jimmy Traina of Sports Illustrated's Hot Clicks, citing unnamed sources, reported that what's left of The Who -- the Beatles' era rock band that lots of rock heads will tell you is the greatest rock band ever -- had been chosen to play at this season's Super Bowl halftime show in Miami.

It struck me as anything but surprising, too.

What will make my eyebrows raise is when Super Bowl organizers lift the statute of limitations they imposed on halftime performances after the stupid stunt by Janet Jackson and Justin Timberlake at Super Bowl XXXVIII in 2004 at Reliant Stadium in Houston. Five years apparently hasn't been enough.

Indeed, since Jackson and Timberlake dared to, uh, strip the halftime show of its dignity, halftime organizers have refused to invite a contemporary music entertainer anywhere near the game, unless they are contemporaries of baby boomers. So they've served up Paul McCartney at 60-plus, The Rolling Stones led by Mick Jagger at 60-plus, Tom Petty at 60-plus with his Heartbreakers, and The Boss in February at 60-ish.

In between The Stones and The Heartbreakers, Super Bowl censors did allow Prince to perform. It was just a year before he qualified for his AARP card.

I'm not criticizing age. It's growing on me like kudzu. But this continued reactionary policy -- grown from the revival of the culture war this decade by Pat Buchanan -- to what happened five Super Bowls ago is what has grown so old that it's tired.

Who (no pun intended) would've thought that our old national pastime, baseball, would have hipper extra entertainment at its crowning contest, the World Series, than whippersnapper fast football? But that was Jay-Z and Alicia Keys who performed for the Yankees-Phillies' games in New York, busting out that hot "Empire State of Mind" cut.

The antiquated look of Super Bowl halftimes nowadays is probably a reflection of the game's paying audience, too. It isn't the kids who've kept Green Day on the Billboard Top 100 for over a year now who buy face-value $1,000 Super Bowl tickets. It isn't the youngsters who've kept Fabolous and The-Dream on the charts for 40-plus weeks who buy Super Bowl tickets scalped at thrice their face value.

Instead, it's the corporate muckety-mucks and the business partners they want to reward who wind up sitting in most of the seats on that last Sunday of the season, at least most of the good seats in the lower bowl. They can afford the highest-priced ducats and can use the tax write-off.

And who are their favorite music stars? The Who, The Who, The Who, and the like. Wonder if they'll let The Who sing famously:

C'mon, c'mon who? (Who are you? Who, who, who, who?)

Oh, Who the f**k are you? (Who are you? Who, who, who, who?)

The Super Bowl doesn't belong to the loyal every week fan. It doesn't belong to the players, either. They're just a sideshow, unfortunately, taking up three hours out of a weekend of big-money parties and wining-and-dining and schmoozing, and that part of it is a lot of fun, by the way.

The Super Bowl really belongs to business, big business, the biggest that exists on one fell weekend day. The halftime show now reflects what it's shuffling in its MP3 player, not what the players have looping in theirs.

If the Super Bowl halftime was reflective of the athletes who sandwich it, the halftime would look and sound a lot different, like it did in 2004 with Jackson and Timberlake. It would be 20-something rappers and crooners and dancers. They'd mostly be heard on urban radio, too, like Sirius XM's Hip Hop Nation.

It's almost forgotten now, but Janet and Justin were joined in Houston by rappers Nelly and Diddy (he was P. Diddy then) and the rock-meets-hip-hop star Kid Rock.

That was the last Super Bowl halftime I really paid attention to. I remember it like it was yesterday. I was at my buddy Steve Smith's house, he of Penn State and Raiders' fame and now battling ALS, with his wonderful wife Chie and their kids and their friends, including Tim Brown, of Notre Dame and Raiders' lore. All the guys and all the kids and ladies kind of switched seats when halftime started; we stepped away to the buffet and they took our places.

We all wanted to see Janet and focused in as she did her thing. Then there was some shrieking and a few of us looked at each other and asked if we saw what we thought we did. I suspected right then that that would be the last we saw of today's stars in today's Super Bowl halftime.

Who knows when the ban on contemporary entertainment at the Super Bowl will be lifted? But it can't stay on forever. The lead singer of what remains of The Who, Roger Daltrey, is 65. Who are his peers and peers of The Stones, McCartney, Petty and Springsteen? Is Pink Floyd next? How about Led Zeppelin and The Eagles? Fleetwood Mac? Could Aerosmith, which was the centerpiece of the 2001 Super Bowl halftime show, be an encore possibility following lead singer Steven Tyler's surprise appearance earlier this week at a solo concert of bandmate Joe Perry after having fallen off stage in the summer?

Spare me.

Twenty-somethings at the Super Bowl, for now and the foreseeable future, are for watching in the game, not for listening to at the break.

And that's fine by me. You can have my seat until the second-half kickoff.