Brian Lehrer: Yes, that's Dr. Dre from last night's Super Bowl Halftime Show kicking off the Brian Lehrer Show today. Our first conversation for this week that we're calling Everything About Super Bowl Sunday, Mostly Not The Game. The game was close, pretty entertaining for actual football fans, but it was the cultural and political wrappings around Super Bowl 56 that were more arguably or that were arguably the bigger story this year. The Halftime Show definitely included the protests inside the stadium on that stage, though, sponsored by the establishment that they would be protesting and protests outside the stadium.

The Department of Homeland Security warned of anti-vax mandate truckers, like those in Canada, coming to snarl Super Bowl traffic. By the way, where did you watch the game, the second pandemic Super Bowl and with what if any remaining precautions for yourself? We will talk about all these things.

We are so happy to have with us for this, definitely all-stars in this realm, David Dennis Jr., who is a senior writer at The Undefeated, an ESPN site at the intersection of sports, race, and culture. He's also author of the forthcoming book, The Movement Made Us: A Father, a Son, and the Legacy of a Freedom Ride. You may know the father, David Dennis Sr., who was an original Freedom Rider in 1961 and an organizer of Mississippi Freedom Summer in 1964. Joel Anderson who is a staff writer at Slate, and the host of seasons three and six of Slow Burn: The L.A. Riots. That's the podcast series about how decades of police brutality, a broken justice system, and a videotape set off six days of unrest in Los Angeles.

Last night's Super Bowl besides featuring the hip hop icons halftime show, with Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg, Eminem, a surprise appearance by 50 Cent, Kendrick Lamar, the youngster at age 34, plus Mary J. Blige. She was there in Los Angeles, at the big new SoFi Stadium, so relative to Joel's podcast. David and Joel, so great to have you with us. Welcome to WNYC.

David Dennis Jr.: Thanks for having me. Good morning.

Joel Anderson: Thanks so me for having me, Brian. Yes, it's a pleasure.

Brian: Let me play a clip of Dr. Dre what he said in, I guess it was the official Super Bowl news conference in the days leading up to the game and The Halftime Show. Here he is.

Dr. Dre: This should have happened a long time ago as far as hip hop. Hip hop is the biggest genre of music on the planet right now. It's crazy that it took all of this and all of its time for us to be recognized. I think we're going to go on and do a fantastic show, and we're going to do it so big that they can't deny us anymore in the future.

Brian: David, was that show straight out of Compton or straight out of Hollywood C-suites?

David: Yes. [chuckles] I think my takeaway was that I was supposed to feel nostalgia and feel like these are the songs that I grew up with in my teenage years, which there was a little bit of that, but also it was mostly a reminder of how easy it is to subvert a social justice movement when you got Black folks willing to jump in front and help make that happen. This was a celebration of the NFL, it was a celebration of corporations. It was to help erase Colin Kaepernick, despite what Eminem has pretended to be doing out there. It was furthering the NFL branding that they started when they brought Jay-Z and Roc Nation on.

Brian: You had said before the game even that you didn't like the NFL finally having hip hop-centric Super Bowl halftime show. I guess, even seeing those artists perform up there didn't change your feelings about it.

David: No. I thought that it was a backhanded compliment to have this be The Halftime Show. You have five of the biggest stars in all of music having to share a stage and I think the language is different. You've had like Aerosmith featuring other people, or you've had YouTube featuring folks, but these artists were each big enough and successful enough and have enough hits where they could have done this by themselves. You can't tell me Snoop, or Dr. Dre, or even Eminem, or Kendrick Lamar, Mary J. Blige couldn't hold a halftime show on their own, but having to share it into a song and a half each feels like a backhanded compliment. Feels like that's what you need to reward hip hop with 30 minutes of stage time.

Brian: It's great analogy there. With all those legends on one bill with the NFL ever have asked the Rolling Stones and Aerosmith and you two to share a 30-minute set. Listeners, we want you in this conversation and not just about The Halftime Show. What do you want to add on everything about Super Bowl Sunday, mostly not the game? 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692, or tweet @BrianLehrer. How did you like The Halftime Show? What commercials stood out to you as especially entertaining or off-putting or anything else? Do people still do that?

By the way, I'll ask our guests what they think. Do you still watch for commercials, for high production value, and celebrity, and humor and social meaning in support of selling stuff? 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. If you watched, where did you watch this year? With how many people did the pandemic affect that for you in 2022 as it almost surely did in 2021? 212-433-WNYC, 433-9692, or tweet @BrianLehrer. What did you eat? Chicken wings? Eric Adam vegans wings? I muffle that pronouncer. Eric Adams' vegan wings. What was on your Super Bowl plate? 212-433-WNYC. You can even tell us, those of you who make it a point to avoid the Super Bowl every year, what did you do instead? 212-433-9692 or tweet @BrianLehrer.

I'll throw in one thing in addition. I guess you could say if you bet this year now that online sports betting is legal in so many states, did you just bet on who would win, or beat the spread, or more individual things than that? It's anything about Super Bowl Sunday, mostly not the game, but a little about the game is okay too. 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692, or tweet @BrianLehrer. Joel, what's your slow-burn take on what we saw last night? The venue, how much was this hip-hop halftime show because it was LA and how much do you think they communicated any of that relevant history?

Joel: I think there was a lot of history there. Like in the stage, the set itself had references to common landmarks around that area that may not have existed anymore because of the presence of a stadium itself, but they did try to do some callbacks to an error about 30 years ago. For me, watching it last night, it was more surreal than anything else. Keep in mind, in 1992, for instance, the emergence of Dr. Dre and Snoop, and like West Coast G-Funk hip hop kicked off a national panic about gang culture and Black violence. To a lot of people, and maybe even some in SoFi stadium last night, the people on stage with the exception of Mary J. Blige, were some of the scariest people in the world. What was happening in the neighborhoods around there 30 years ago, terrified people.

Brian: Just to make sure you're communicating what you mean to be, "scariest people in the world to a lot of white America".

Joel: Yes, absolutely. Thank you for clarifying that, and expanding on that, but yes, scary to an awful lot of white people that showed up at the game. They would not have come over into Inglewood in 1992. I would say, though, that if you go back to 1992, that fear was in part a multiracial and bipartisan fear. Even think about C. Delores Tucker, who was a longtime Democratic operative and civil rights activist. She was willing to team up with the likes of William Bennett, who was the former education secretary under Ronald Reagan, to protest against the growing influence of hip hop on American culture.

To see them at center stage at the biggest televised event in the country, a place where hip hop had never had that platform before, it was a big deal, but to David's earlier point, yes, it fall short, because you'd like to think that Dr. Dre and Snoop could have had their own showcase and that maybe next year, Mary J. Blige gets her opportunity to do it herself. For what it was, I'm not going to pretend that it wasn't meaningful because it was meaningful in some ways.

Brian: David referred to this apparently fake controversy about Eminem planning to take a knee on stage to reference Colin Kaepernick and the NFL telling him not to and Eminem doing it anyway. As far as you know, what was real and what was fake there? He did take a knee, the world saw that much.

Joel: I think the NFL later confirmed after the game that there was no such-- I mean there was no controversy, that nobody had told Eminem that he couldn't take a knee. It's the sort of thing that you do when you want to seem subversive and you're really not. It's a sort of thing that isn't actually a protest if it's been signed off on and you've already gotten approval for it.

Look, I'm not going to argue against the need for symbolism and for people to still recognize what Colin Kaepernick did and his sacrifice in his fight for social justice or whatever, but that was agenda of controversy. That's the sort of thing that they wanted people to talk about on social media and the day after. They wanted people to think, "Oh, wow, did they do something that the NFL didn't want them to do?" That was really rebellious, but actually, it didn't seem like it was that big of a stretch for Eminem to have done that last night?

Brian: David, anything more on that?

David: I agree. I feel like if I were a rapper like Dr. Dre or somebody who had come up with at the police and 30 years later, I'm carrying the water for the NFL and people are starting to point that out, one thing that I would like to do for PR is maybe leak a story out that I'm going to do some things that are actually really subversive against the NFL and have people believing so they're looking out for it.

They were looking for Eminem to kneel, they're looking out for me to say I still got no love for police, and when Eminem does it, everybody points and says, "Oh, wow, Eminem's really honoring Colin Kaepernick," and so it worked out. It's PR 101 and it worked like a charm initially, because there are a lot of people on social media who were calling Eminem an ally and doing all that stuff, but it really just seemed like it was a really planned way to make their performance seem like it was more subversive than it actually really was.

Brian: Is there something here, David, on the positive side that even with all the disrespect that's been shown over time and up to the present, and we'll get into the Brian Flores lawsuit in a little bit, the fact that the NFL wanted to hitch its image wagon to hip hop last night shows maybe the power of the culture is bigger than or at least competitive with the league establishment for which way the country is headed?

David: No, maybe I'm just being cynical here and just not finding the silver lining here, but no. I mean they gave a watered down, they gave a few crumbs. There's no, this was all part of some sort of union that was supposed to be happening between the NFL, and Jay Z, and Roc Nation to bring social justice awareness, to bring change to the league, and all of that stuff.

Okay, we're going to give you some Black performers, we're going to give you some hip hop artists, but also, we're going to not really acknowledge the fact that there are more Black folks holding microphones on the stage than they have Black coach in NFL or Black owners or Black GMs in NFL, and we're not going to have any substance changed, but yes, you get 30 minutes, and it's going to increase our ratings, and we're going to get more viewers and we're going to get more money for it, and enjoy your rap songs along the way. This seem to be a very superficial gesture by the NFL that, unfortunately, a lot of these high powered rappers were happy to take.

Brian: Spencer in Berkeley Heights, New Jersey, you're on WNYC. Hi, Spencer.

Spencer: How are you, Brian?

Brian: Good. What you got for us?

Spencer: With regard to last night's event, as a general lay person, I thought it was a great football game, but when you go ahead and you look at all the commercial sponsorship and you look at the halftime event, the commercials were all basically, for me, triggering nostalgia, lots of throwbacks to The Sopranos. You had references to the Cable Guy movie with the Jim Carrey commercial.

When you look at the halftime show, it was a lot more Woodstock Two than Woodstock One. In terms of the idea of social enlightenment or what could have been done to try and move the needle regarding your panelists' comments on Colin Kaepernick, there really wasn't much of that. I'm a white male. I'm in my early 50s. I didn't necessarily appreciate the music, but I certainly could appreciate the talent. There was no real collaboration. It was basically just a few minutes of Greatest Hits and nostalgia, kind of like the commercials that were complimenting it all.

Brian: Spencer, thank you very much. We'll go next to Emily in Flatbush. Emily, you're on WNYC. Hi, there.

Emily: Hi, sorry, taken myself off mute. I thought, I think the political conversation is really interesting, but I wanted to add in and this might be also political, but there was a lot of ads about cryptocurrency and crypto trading. I'm a cable cutter and I don't watch TV with ads, but I've never seen anything like that. I feel like it might say something about the state of the world and politics as well. I would add that to the conversation.

Brian: Interesting. Emily, thank you very much, Joel, you want to weigh in on those first two calls? One interesting contrast is the first caller was picking up on some of the nostalgia themes and some of the commercials, Sopranos, et cetera. Emily was picking up on some very contemporary stuff. I was also taken by how much advertising there was for crypto. Also for electric vehicles. I think there was one like tiny little 10-second spot that was for an electric vehicle charger, so past, present and future.

Joel: To the past, present, future piece of it, when I looked at that performance last night at halftime and I saw a older middle-aged 50 Cent hanging upside down, not moving all that energetically, it was a reminder to me that, "Oh, we're actually old." That hip hop, this isn't some young, fresh act that's on stage that has captured the pop, the zeitgeist right now, this is a Motown review.

If we went back, ask any 14 or 15-year-old, that probably was like watching Smokey Robinson and The Miracles up on stage last night. That part of it, I was like, "Okay, finally, my music has become the oldies," but to the point about the crypto, I don't know what that symbolizes about our future. I think I saw a lot of people say that they don't ever have to run ads for money.

If it was so great, they wouldn't have to run ads for it in that way, and it speaks to the desperation that people have. That people are looking for new ways to survive in this economy and in this post-pandemic economy. That part of it is scary that they're able to massive $14 million and buy a 30-second spot in prime time, the biggest televised event, it says something about what people are looking for going forward, and how to make it through this really tough time.

Brian: David, I kept forgetting to watch the commercials. When the commercial break start, I reflexively hit mute, and I had to keep reminding myself to watch unlike I do on other shows, because that's part of the Super Bowl thing. How about you, anything jumped out for you? Good, bad or ugly from the commercials?

David: I spend most of the commercial breaks just deciphering the Doctor Strange trailer to see what kind of Easter eggs I can get in there. That's what I think speaks to the state of the commercial now. Like the Doctor Strange commercial, I saw it first on Twitter, and the same thing with Nope, with the Jordan Peele movie. A lot of the big movie trailers that you used to gather in front of the Super Bowl, in front of your TV for the Super Bowl to watch, they're on social media already. Those were the big splashes for me, and I was just running them back during the commercial breaks.

Brian: Let's see. Some of the tweets that are coming in: One says, "Crypto, crypto, crypto, oof, maybe a dot-com bubble.| Another one says, "Saw halftime show at rocking Washington Heights Bar, young, old, Black, white, gay, straight, beaming. Did you notice the Scientology commercial?" Someone else, "My girlfriend and I watched an episode of Captain America and The Winter Soldier. I followed that with a few episodes of Dexter, alternative to the Super Bowl." Somebody else writes, "This Super Bowl segment conversation we're having is wrapped in cynicism, justified or not? Curious as to what your guests would have liked to have seen?" That's a good question, David. You want to answer that?

David: I'm torn on this idea about what I want. I think that I try not to disparage artists when it comes to things that they find as personal milestones and things they've always dreamed of doing. A lot of these artists have dreamed of doing the Super Bowl Halftime Show. That's something that they grew up watching. They watched Michael Jackson, all that stuff.

To ask them not to do it in spite of everything going on may not always be the most fair thing to do, but my hope is that hip hop is supposed to be this counterculture thing. It's supposed to be this divisive thing, and it was sort of saccharin, it was sort of like they were just going by the numbers. I think that I would have liked to have seen something that said something. They were just sort of just doing the songs and dancing along and it was just a wonderful review of like the hip hop classics that we love, but I just-- it left me wanting something substantial.

Brian: Listener tweets, "Can anyone explain why 50 Cent was upside down and does anyone know how long he had to be pre-stationed that way before the act?"

Joel: I guess they're not familiar with the In Da Club video, because that's how 50 Cent performs in the In Da Club video that came out in 2003, 2004. That was a throwback to that moment. I saw that there was a lot of confusion as to why he was upside down, but that's why. If you go on YouTube and look up that video, that's how he performs throughout it.

Brian: Listener tweets, "Rather than watch the Super Bowl, my family attended the annual ski jumping championships in Salisbury, Connecticut," which brings us to Tessa in Manhattan. Tessa, you're on WNYC. Hi, there.

Tessa: Hello. Am I the only person who wanted to watch the Olympic Games and not the Super Bowl? From approximately 2:00 PM onwards, CPS showed no Olympics coverage. It was only available on Peacock, which is a paid subscription service. Why does the FCC allow CBS to have this appalling lock on sports coverage and determine that the Super Bowl is obviously more important?

Brian: Well, NBC, just to clarify, not CBS in this case, and yes, networks bid and pay for the right to have exclusive coverage of the Olympics and the Super Bowl and other events. In this case, NBC happened to have both the Super Bowl this year. I'm always happy with any sporting event is done by Al Michaels and team rather than anybody on Fox, and NBC also happened to have the Olympics. Funny, I saw on one NBC affiliate a promo, the Super Bowl post-game show is going to be like nothing ever before seen. It's going to be more sports, the Olympics, and I stayed around to watch the Women's Bobsled after that. I don't know, Joel any thought on that?

Joel: Yes. Of course, they're going to show the Super Bowl and milk as much out of it as they can. Keep in mind, I mean just this past year, NFL games, like NFL regular season games ranked as the top 16, the 48 of the top 50 and 91 of the top 100 top-rated telecast on television this past year. You're going to have to pry that block at programming for them from their cold dead hands because they're not going to do that. NBC, they spend years preparing for that event and of course they're going to blanket us the coverage of it.

Yes, I watched a little bit of the Winter Olympics after. I thought that was cool. I can't remember that ever happened before. I can remember years in the past when you'd watch the Super Bowl and they debut a new sitcom or something like that, but to go right into the Olympics, I thought that was actually pretty cool.

Brian: I was actually wondering, David, I don't know if you know, whether that was planned all along or whether they switched it up in recent weeks when they realized that the Olympics was tanking in the ratings. I don't know if you saw the ratings yet for the Super Bowl. I tried to find it this morning and I couldn't, but the Olympic ratings have been classically bad. I think football, which had declined in recent years really bounced back this year, NFL football. You know anything about the ratings?

David: I have not seen the ratings numbers yet, but I imagine it's going to be massive. The NFLs had one of the most successful seasons that they've had in the last few years, and there was so much interest in the halftime show. Obviously, you have LA, which is a huge market. I would imagine we're going to get a really big number, and to the caller's point, I think you'd be lucky if the entire Olympics added up to what the Super Bowl number's going to be.

Brian: We'll continue in a minute with David Dennis Jr. from The Undefeated and Joel Anderson from Slate, and more of your calls and tweets, and when we come back, we're going to talk about the protests that apparently did not take place outside the Super Bowl stadium yesterday. Stay with us.

As we talk about everything Super Bowl Sunday, mostly not the game with David Dennis Jr., senior writer at The Undefeated, an ESPN site at the intersection of sports, race and culture, and Joel Anderson, staff writer at Slate and host of seasons three and six of Slow Burn: The L.A. Riots.

By the way, David for those of you who don't know is author of the forthcoming book, The Movement Made Us, A Father, A Son And The Legacy Of A Freedom Ride, because it's his father Dave Dennis Sr., who was an original freedom rider in 1961 and an organizer of Mississippi freedom summer in 1964 who collaborated with his son now with The Undefeated on that book. David, you want to digress for just a second and talk about that book and you and your dad and how your family legacy informs how you report on sports.

David: Oh, yes, I'd love to. By the way, the book comes out in May 10th. All pre-orders are welcome. My dad is a pivotal member of the Civil Rights Movement as you mentioned, joined the freedom rides in '61 and pretty much was in Mississippi and the trenches through the '60s. We moved to Mississippi when I was six-year-old and he sat down and showed me eyes in the prize and showed me what he fought for, what he fought against, and it has really informed the rest of my life. I've learned a lot about what it takes to have conviction to believe in something bigger than yourself and I feel like writing and telling the truth is part of that.

That's my ministry in this whole thing. My dad is a organizer at heart. He's great at organizing, I am not. I can write, I can gather information, and that's what I hope to do as my contribution. This book is told from his perspective about his time there and also my perspective and what it's like being raised in the movement, raised by him, and the PTSD and the struggles that he had as a father and husband and our relationship and how we've come together to put this book out.

Brian: Here's one for you. The anti-vax mandate truckers bollocks-ing up the supply chain to make their statement in Canada, and the US Department of Homeland Security warning that they could bring that traffic snarling to the Super Bowl. Maybe not as fake a story as Eminem taking a knee being rejected by the NFL, but a media narrative more than an actual event as it turned out. Are either of you, Joel, you want to take this first, are either of you aware that actually having happened at all last night?

Joel: My understanding is that that did not happen, that there was not much of a presence of truckers, anything like that or a convoy, but I think it's same thing. Although the difference between the Eminem story and the protest is different from this convoy, which is actually happening in Canada and was encouraged by Senator Rand Paul. Like this is something that he wanted to happen.

Brian: In fact, I'm going to play that clip right now, and yes, not as fake as the Eminem taking a knee, being allegedly disapproved of by the NFL, because this actually came from the Department of Homeland Security. This warning not just somebody on social media, but here is libertarian Republican Senator Rand Paul on the conservative, The Daily Signal, hoping last week that the truckers would mess up Super Bowl traffic.

Senator Rand Paul: I'm all for it. Civil disobedience is a time honored tradition in our country from slavery to civil rights to you name it, peaceful protest, clog things up, make people think about the mandates, but I hope the truckers do come to America, I hope they clog up cities.

Brian: David Dennis, I have to get your reaction to that because as we were just discussing, your father was in the freedom riders, the truckers have this reminiscent name, the Freedom Convoy, does it just gross you out? Or do you have some sympathy for Rand Paul aligning with civil rights protestors to support nonviolent civil disobedience and opposition to vaccine mandates even if you don't support the cause?

David: It seems as though there's only like a one type specific type of protests that somebody like Rand Paul is in support of, because I do recall him calling Black Lives Matter protests like crazed angry or something along those lines. It seems as though a lot of these folks like to bring up the names and the acts of civil rights leaders of the past, which they are also actively trying to keep out of our schools to keep it for our children don't have an understanding of what these heroes did, but they always like to bring up these names when it's convenient for them.

They like to bring up Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks and protest when it's about something that they believe in or something that is mostly for white folks, but when Black folks are doing this, we're something else and they want us to throw us under the jail, so it's quite a convenient sort of 180 when they do this.

Brian: Let's do another set of calls here. Victoria in Montclair. You're on WNYC. Hi, Victoria.

Victoria: Hi. How are you?

Brian: Good. What you got?

Victoria: I wanted to speak about the cryptocurrency comment from before, the commercials. I've noticed that there are discussions about how cryptocurrency is mostly being marketed to Black people and how maybe the ads thought that because of the performances, there would be more Black people watching the Super Bowl and they were trying to gain exposure that way. Those were just my thoughts.

Brian: Interesting. David, do you have anything on that?

David: Well, I did notice there was a LeBron crypto commercial that really caught me off guard because I thought it was a Nike commercial. I thought it was LeBron talking to his younger self and it was really cool commercial and it really threw me off guard that they were actually talking about crypto. That whole crypto world is like foreign--

Brian: That was his son, right?

David: What's that?

Brian: That was his son in him, right?

David: Well, it was a CGI kid LeBron that he was talking to. He was talking to his younger self and prepping him for what the world would be, and I thought it was a really sort of heartfelt commercial up until the world crypto.com popped up. That's sort of my crypto take, that whole thing is monopoly money to me. I don't understand it at all.

Brian: Larry in Manhattan. You're on WNYC. Hi, Larry.

Larry: Hi, good morning gentlemen. Before I weigh in, I like to mention to you that NBC will also be carrying the World Cup in November. Can you imagine that?

Brian: They've been doing some good bidding.

Larry: Yes, but I wonder why they are and if they allow that. Come on, they shouldn't have granted them the rights yet, it's too much, but anyway, moving along. Two good points, the game. The game wasn't all that spectacular. It was obviously keenly contested. I think that NFC and AFC championship games were more Super Bowl games than Super Bowl itself. There were no anything spectacular about the game. For the ad, as I said, [unintelligible 00:32:20] it was an ad that that's one very disturbing. The one called Liquid Death, which turns out to the water. Are you there?

Brian: Yes, I'm listening,

Larry: Showing kids, a pregnant woman popping what would look like beer cans or margarita cans, and the name I think is Liquid Death, and kids popping and drinking it and a pregnant woman popping and drinking it. Then they made a disclaimer, "Oh, it's not what you think, it's water." I don't think that was cool.

Then there was, I couldn't understand that T-Mobile and that Uber Eats commercial. It kind of had me thinking what was really going on. Finally, we got on the halftime show. You had five guys and a lady who was booked to perform. There was imbalance there. It should have had two female and three females. Then they have a surprise artist, 50 Cent, another male. Why couldn't they get a female?

Brian: It certainly was gender imbalance. That's for sure. Larry, thank you very much. Desiree in Brooklyn. You're on WNYC. Hi, Desiree.

Desiree: Hi, Brian. What I was thinking was that with the halftime show and with the Black National Anthem that was done and so forth, it seems like the NFL was trying to win back some of the Black viewers they, I know, did lose with the whole Colin Kaepernick situation, with the controversy surrounding the taking of knee. Then more recently, the issues with the representation in the NFL in the upper ranks. It seems like it was not very well-veiled attempt to sort of drawback Black viewers to football.

Brian: To watching the game. Desiree, thank you very much. I think a lot of what the media talked about after Colin Kaepernick first took a knee in 2017 was white viewers fleeing from NFL games because they didn't like it being politicized. Joel, correct me if I'm wrong about that fact, but I saw you tweet a reference last night to a rush from mega media figures, Trump world media figures, to performatively condemn the halftime show and how much that shows what you call ginned up white grievance. That glue is the glue holding the right together.

I guess even the question that David and others have raised about this being so late, Black icons being grouped together like white icons would never be asked to do. The question of what constitutes respect wouldn't even occur to whoever these mega people were, who somehow felt dissed by even the hip hop oldie show that they had last night. Why do you say ginned up white grievance?

Joel: I'm not sure if I tweeted that one. David was that you? That might not--

Brian: I thought maybe you retweeted. Maybe I saw it wrong, I apologize.

Joel: No, I may have retweeted that, but definitely there's no real way to quantify what happened when the NFL's ratings dipped post-Colin Kaepernick. I've always thought it was just as likely that Black fans tuned out in the way that white fans said they were going to tune out. There's been a lot of talking about who had enough with the politics of the NFL and the way that it expressed itself in the game, but I don't think that any of that has necessarily borne any real fruit. To be honest, there was this LA Times story, a poll that ran last week that talked about how 45% of Republicans believe the NFL is doing too much to show respect for players.

Brian: Too much to show respect for players.

Joel: Too much respect. The thing is, is that if Republicans' feelings are real about this, it's not reflected in the ratings, because as we mentioned, the NFL had its highest ratings since 2015 this past season. They're telling people one thing and showing up in another way. The season's numbers tell a different story. I just wish more media outlets had picked up on that as much as they did the Republicans alleged increasing disinterest in the game. It's just a story they tell people. They have no real conviction behind all of that tough talk, even if they resent the Black players who are providing them with that entertainment.

Brian: David, what's happening with the Brian Flores lawsuit, as far as you can tell? Is it having an effect or is it affecting hiring at all or anything else out of court? Certainly, the NFL has denied the allegations and put forth what they see as some competing pieces of evidence, like I think John Elway from the Denver Broncos, one of the teams that allegedly didn't take Brian Flores coaching application seriously, taking a late-night flight to get to his interview with Flores for the coaching job he didn't get. I don't know. How do you see the state of that lawsuit a little less than two weeks after it was filed?

David: The thing about the lawsuit is that it's caused a whole lot of hit dogs to holler in the NFL, and it is cause of calamity with two franchises, in particular. The Miami Dolphins obviously who fired Flores. They went out and hired Mike McDaniel who doesn't have a long track record of doing much coaching. Definitely was never a head coach, a coordinator. They hired him and his dad is Black, but he has always sort of called himself multiracial, sort of never really identified with that part of his identity. He's gone on sort of this press run to sort of talk about where exactly he identifies, but he still counts as a person of color.

Then the Texans who Flores was in position to have a job for who just fired a qualified Black coach, who was also under fire for doing so, they wanted to hire Josh McCown who was an unqualified white guy, and they couldn't because of the Flores spotlight. They went out and they hired a Black coach who also is not really that qualified, who's had a few bad runs in the NFL, but hey, they got a Black guy. The NFL is just sort of scrambling right now.

We're going to see what happens if they get to any discovery, if any more black coaches come out and say things, but I think there is a sense of trying to move past this if you're the NFL, which is one of the reasons why they had so much stuff going on the Super Bowl for Black folks to sort of put some bandaids on it, but Flores, this thing is not going away. He's understood that his career is probably over in the NFL. I don't see him just tossing this aside or taking the settlement. NFL has a long fight ahead.

Brian: All right, guys. Before you go, where do you watch and what did you eat, Joel?

Joel: [chuckles] Well, I watched it home. I'm still abiding by the idea that there's a deadly pandemic going on, so I was here at home with my wife.

Brian: The first time the word pandemic has been spoken by anybody but me in the introduction in the whole 43 minutes of this segment.

Joel: We have some health concerns around here, so we're keeping it close to the house. I'm here on the West Coast and so we ordered some bulgogi fries and Korean-style tacos because that's how we do out here on the West Coast. That's how I did it. That's how I always prefer to watch the Super Bowl. I'm a weird football fan in that way in that I actually want to watch the game and don't like a lot of distraction. Just sitting in my own living room is the best way to experience the game for me.

Brian: David, same question.

David: I'm still believing in this whole pandemic thing and understand that it exists. Family stayed in the living room, watched TV, had some tacos. I'm on deadlines, so I was typing while I was watching.

Brian: That's right, you were working.

David: I was working and watching, of course, it's part of the job. You got to be in tune to the stuff that goes on during the Super Bowl. Yes, it was pretty much low key and I'm a washed old dad, so I felt asleep probably right after the final buzzer.

Brian: You missed the women's bobsled. Joel Anderson.

David: I have to catch it on the Peacock app.

Brian: We thank Joel Anderson who's a staff writer at Slate and the host of Seasons 3 and 6 of Slow Burn: The L.A. Riots. That's the podcast series about how decades of police brutal, a broken justice system and a videotape set off six days of unrest in Los Angeles. David Dennis Jr., who is a senior writer at The Undefeated, an ESPN site at the intersection of sports, race, and culture. He's also the forthcoming book, The Movement Made Us: A Father, a Son, and the Legacy of a Freedom Ride. David, please come back when the book actually comes out in May, and thank you both very much for joining us on this morning after the Super Bowl.

David: I'll be happy to. Thank you so much.

Joel: Good. My pleasure, a lot of fun.

 

 

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