I watched everything except the Super Bowl

Who did you cheer for in the Super Bowl last night? The asteroid? Evan McMullin? (OK, let’s not go too crazy.) Rarely has a third-party option looked so good. This was one of the least appealing Super Bowl match-ups in NFL history—and it’s the second time these two teams have met in a championship game in just three years.

In one corner, football’s new dynasty, the Kansas City Chiefs, like the New England Patriots of yesteryear except everyone has a make-up artist on retainer. The Chiefs might play on the wind-swept plains but they’ve imported Hollywood into the NFL like never before.

From Taylor Swift in the luxury box to Travis Kelce in that one commercial to Patrick Mahomes in literally the next commercial, the Chiefs have somehow managed to oversaturate multiple markets at once. Give them a decade and they’ll have at least two reality shows and a Fox Nation miniseries.

In the other corner, the Philadelphia Eagles, who themselves are a likable enough bunch. Jalen Hurts is a talented quarterback and it’s been fun to watch Saquon Barkley wreak havoc on his home team-turned-division rival.

The problem with the Eagles is, of course, their fans. This is the fan base that somehow managed to punch not one but two police horses in the face in the same season. It’s the fan base that’s jeered both Santa Claus and a ninety-nine-year-old woman from Minnesota named Millie.

The worst part is that they’re proud of all this, embracing obnoxiousness as some hallmark of working-class grit. “Fuck you!” they yell at no one in particular as they burn the opposing team’s jerseys and shimmy up greased lampposts and throw batteries at fire department Dalmatians all while the rest of Pennsylvania motions toward Pittsburgh and mouths “we’re with them.”

No wonder the rest of America just couldn’t get excited. This was the Iran-Iraq War of Super Bowls, right down to the mustachioed strongman on one of the sidelines.

Which got me thinking: what do the other networks do during the Super Bowl? If you don’t want to watch the big game, what else is on TV?

For the other channels, Super Bowl Sunday is, to borrow a football term, garbage time. Last year’s game hauled in 124 million viewers, or just over a third of the entire US population. (If you want to know where the nation’s priorities lie, the presidential debate between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris got only 67 million viewers.)

You can’t possibly compete with that. So if you’re a network other than Fox, what do you do?

For NBC, the answer was to surrender respectably. They opted for something called Deal or No Deal Island, the premise of which seems to be: the game show Deal or No Deal set on an island. After that came a predictable but tempting showing of Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom.

ABC tried a different approach. Rather than lean into defeat, they offered an intellectual alternative with an all-night Jeopardy marathon. If watching dudes the size of ice cream trucks plow into each other isn’t your thing, you could always try to beat the contestants in identifying which governor of the New England Dominion shared a name with a Starfox villain. Perhaps in a nod to the Chiefs, though, ABC did go with Celebrity Jeopardy.

PBS decided to damn the torpedoes and unleash an uninterrupted two hours of The Black Church: This is Our Story, This is Our Song. TBS had the Big Bang Theory marathon you assumed every channel would air. TNT tried to one-up the NFL’s blood sport with The Hunger Games: Mockingjay, Part 2.

Comedy Central had a South Park marathon and the Travel Channel had a Ghost Adventures marathon. But it was Animal Planet that proved wisest of all. They aired nothing but back-to-back-to-back-to-back Puppy Bowl XXI until 4 a.m.

My favorite, though, was the NFL Network, which despite being owned by the league that put on the Super Bowl didn’t have the rights to the game. So they settled for a glorified version of the ESPN app, showing the score, clock, win probability, X’s and O’s moving on a rendering of the field — everything except video of what was actually happening.

I want to meet the people who chose this over Fox. I like the Super Bowl but real-life human interactions trigger my anthropophobia.

What to choose? Mostly I just watched Celebrity Jeopardy — someone I’d never heard of before beat Neil DeGrasse Tyson, which was kind of cool. And while I bow to no one in my love for the first Jurassic Park, watching a volcano kill all the beloved dinosaurs from my childhood held some interest.

But ultimately I found myself gravitating back to Fox. Not because it was a great game — the Eagles obliterated the Chiefs; some are calling it the worst Super Bowl in history — but because it was an undeniable spectacle. That’s the thing about the Super Bowl: even when it’s bad, it’s hard to look away. And all the more so since it’s a shared experience; everyone else is watching.

We all have a little of what the Australians call Tall Poppy Syndrome, wanting to see the biggest and proudest guy get torn down. That was the gut appeal of last night’s game (even if the Eagles are hardly a David to anyone’s Goliath). The NFL’s biggest death star went bang. Even Taylor Swift got booed, which I thought was against the law.

So congratulations to the Eagles and — *swallows hard* — their fans. There might be no third ways in 2025, but you can always pick the lesser of two evils and enjoy the show.