Two Sourpusses Missing Out On The Hall Of Fame Is The Most Uplifting Story Of Super Bowl Week

The multiple annoyances of having The Big'Un in your town do not really become evident until Thursday, and sometimes even as late as Friday. That's when the rubes show up in their cheap Fanatics knockoff jerseys, clogging the airports and highways, swallowing all the restaurant reservations and generally acting like the kind of people you would emigrate to avoid; a peaceful and moderately civilized living experience is suddenly and overwhelmingly overrun by Americans, with all the turbo-ick that implies. This particular Superb Owl being played in Santa Clara doesn't matter, because everyone stays 40 miles away in San Francisco, Home Of The Thousand Dollar Room Rate. The great failing of San Francisco, contrary to all the fulminating on the topic done by weird rich people and the conservative media that sustains their mental illness, is that everything fashionable/extortionate happens in the equivalent of six square miles, which means that the only ways to get in or out of town are two freeways and two bridges. Moving all those people to Santa Clara and back will be, as Pope Leo said the last time he saw the White Sox in person, "a comprehensive shitshow."

But at this point in the week, the Owl still belongs to the NFL's small world—how the Rooney Rule to help promote the advancement of black coaches went from being named for Art to being named for Mickey, how Roger Goodell is planning to farm out the 32 18th games to different countries ("You are looking live from high above Ljubljana, Slovenia . . . "), and now the return of the high comedy and low tea of the Hall of Fame Conspira-fest. America has not arrived yet. It's still just Football Country out here for the time being.

It's a busy country, too. You already know about Bill Belichick, how he didn't get into the Hall Of Fame and how quickly the voters raced to the internet to violate the deeply-held precept of confidentiality. But having learned nothing while wading through the ashes of that hilarity, the Hall has sustained another breach of secrecy with the report that Belichick's former boss and current bête noire, Robert Kraft, also didn't get voted in despite being even more desperate for induction that his noisome former employee.