Best bye week ever

When I was a kid, I thought the bye week before the Super Bowl was just about the worst thing ever. This is understandable — for children and rapidly cycling schizophrenics, two weeks is an epic, unfathomable chunk of time. And in my defense, it’s not like Marv Levy and Bobby Ross were making great use of that extra prep time.

I remember when I was first introduced to the concept of a two-week break before the Super Bowl. It was Conference Championship weekend of that first year I really started following football: I was on my child-sized high horse — like an itsy-bitsy Ron Jaworski — because I no longer referred to touchdowns as “TVs” and could name three players on every NFL team (without a doubt the most hardcore test of the sports IQ for a six-year-old). Midway through the second game, I asked my dad where we were going to watch the Super Bowl the next week, as if he was going to say something like, “Lisbon, Ray. We’re going to Lisbon.” Instead, he told me quite simply that there would be no football to watch next Sunday, prompting me to flip out in a manner that, in retrospect, seems over-the-top considering my dad never, to the best of my knowledge, served on the NFL’s Competition Committee.

Now that I’m older, I realize there are worse things than bye weeks, like intolerance, and college a cappella music. Also, I understand the history of the bye week a lot better and realize it was not the intention of Dr. Leonard Bye to frustrate the masses by forcing them to spend the weekend with their families and loved ones — Dr. Bye conceived of the extra week as an opportunity for the players to help researchers at local universities develop flat-topped cyborgs to fight the Russians. The bastardization of Dr. Bye’s original concept was mirrored several years later by Pete Rozelle’s changes to Professor Josef Media’s original vision of Super Bowl Media Day as an opportunity for players and coaches to speak out on the dangers of the military-industrial complex. Incidentally, despite his later difficulties with the league over allowing his brainchild to become synonymous with the practice of indulging in hooker sandwiches, Dr. Bye encouraged Commissioner Rozelle to abandon the original concept of Media Day, in what league scholars now call the “Geneva Betrayal.”

The point is this: The week before the Super Bowl is NOT just helpful for fifth-string wide receivers with sore hamstrings and androgynous Japanese paparazzi. It’s a time rich in tradition and pageantry that appeals to the unemployed football historian dormant in all of us. So in addition to Cardinals-Steelers, we’ll be exploring the history of Super Bowl week:

Tomorrow: Media Day! Along with a further exploration of the role of Prof. Josef Media, you’ll hear for the first time why the NFL no longer issues press passes to cobras, Terry Bradshaw’s public intervention for his huckleberry addiction, and the controversial bargain struck between zombies and Pat Summerall at Super Bowl IV.

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