How fans can wrest the game away from corporations

What does Katrina Bowden have to do with the Super Bowl? Our point exactly. Frederick M. Brown/Getty Images

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Somewhere along the way, we lost the Super Bowl. Somewhere along the way, the game stopped being about a football championship as much as it was about corporate greed, Hollywood hype and the NFL's ever-expanding international reach.

If you are a real sports fan, the game no longer belongs to you. It belongs to faceless millionaire executives who can afford four Super Bowl tickets and a week in Arizona but couldn't tell you the difference between Sam Madison and Madison Hedgecock. It belongs to the corporate sponsors who dictate how the game is played, when it's played and where it's played. It belongs to the boardrooms of America instead of you and me.

Which is why if you're a true sports fan, your season really ends on conference semifinal weekend, the greatest day of the NFL season. Oh, you'll watch the Super Bowl. At least, you'll try. You might even have some people over Sunday night, although a bunch of them won't even be football fans. And instead of talking with your friends about how Laurence Maroney is having a tremendous postseason or why Kareem McKenzie is developing into a very good right tackle, you'll get questions from your sister-in-law like, "Hey, how many downs are there again?" or "Hey, where's the 60-yard-line?" And by early in the third quarter most of them have left, following an endless day being slammed in the face by giggling TV analysts, dumb billion-dollar commercials and promotions for moronic reality shows.

Super Bowl Sunday now stands for everything that football shouldn't be. Celebrity vs. team. Hype vs. performance. Controlled conditions vs. the unknown.

How we can reclaim it in 2008? Here's eight ways to bring the Super Bowl back to the sports fans, back to the people who made the NFL the success it is today:

8) Let fans decide challenges. The Super Bowl is long enough. There's nothing worse than those interminable four-minute delays while some official watches replay after replay of a challenged play. We're going to trim that down to 30 seconds. Let's set up a system where fans can vote on challenges from their home computers. Eliminate anybody whose IP address comes from one of the participating cities, and we can rule on challenges faster and more accurately than anybody .

7) Make Monday a federal holiday. Nobody gets to work on time the day after the game. And when they do arrive, they're useless. So let's make Monday following the Super Bowl a national (paid) holiday so those of us who like a cold beverage or 17 with our football can enjoy the entire game without worrying about that 5:45 a.m. Monday morning wake-up call.

6) No celebs in the booth. Networks love taking advantage of a large and captive audience by promoting their own idiotic shows during sports events, and this generally leads to disaster as the broadcast crew is so busy either pointing out some dweeb actor who the camera just happens to find after a commercial for his show or yukking it up in the press box with some clown about his new series that they don't even notice Jabar Gaffney taking a quick out and turning it into a 38-yard gain. Under our plan, celebs not only aren't allowed in the press box, they're not allowed in the stadium. Unless it's Katrina Bowden.

5) Abolish office pools. Not because we're anti-gambling. We really don't care. No, the problem with these pools is they turn people who have no business watching football into interested and vocal observers. Nothing worse than sitting there with barbecue sauce dripping down your chin, and it's 3rd and 9 and Eli Manning drops back and fires and just when his pass is about to reach Plaxico Burress, some girl at your party blurts out, "If the Giants score 113 points, I win my office pool. Is that likely?"

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