Super Bowl XLVIII is less than a week away and by now, everyone has probably drummed up the marijuana storyline to the ground. There’s good reason for doing so because the two teams playing the Super Bowl – the Denver Broncos and the Seattle Seahawks – are both from the two states who currently allow legal recreational use of marijuana.
The topic of marijuana has been so prevalent that no less than NFL commissioner Roger Goodell and Seattle Seahawks coach Pete Carroll sounded off on the possibility of using marijuana to treat head injuries among NFL players. Goodell said he was open to the idea “should the science support it” while Carroll, who looks the part of a middle-aged hippie, expressed his openness to how medicinal value of the drug should be examined.
No other SuperBowl in history has ever had marijuana as a significant storyline leading up to the game and here you have one of the head coaches of one of the teams involved and the freakin’ commissioner himself spending precious moments with the idea essentially giving marijuana free publicity time.
Only in Super Bowl XLVIII (or Weed Bowl I, depending on how high you are), ladies and gentlemen!
The media has taken hold and seized the opportunity to talk about because everybody seems willing to have a dialogue at it. Some people have even take it on another level, including doobie-inspired wagers between the Washington and Colorado chapters of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML). Even the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) took to Twitter a few days ago to promote its recipe for vegan “Colorado catnip” brownies, while also throwing out a few caveats along the way to ensure that the said recipe should be come with “legally obtained marijuana”.
It’s so easy to make fun of the situation and throw all kinds of marijuana puns to anybody willing to listen. That’s one of the novelties of this particular Super Bowl and really, you wouldn’t be remiss if you somehow made a reference to the game as the Doobie Bowl, the “Super” Bowl, and hell, even the Stoner Bowl.
Believe it or not, even Las Vegas is jumping on the proverbial doobie-wagon. Prop bets involving marijuana are being offered by numerous sportsbooks, including one on whether the announcers – Joe Buck, Troy Aikman, Pam Oliver, and Erin Andrews – would mention “marijuana” during the game. In full disclosure, a “yes” has 11/2 odds while a “no” has 1/9 odds. Imagine how awesome it would be to be stoned out of your shorts with a wager down on a “yes” and waiting the entire game for that precious word to be mentioned by the quartet who would be calling the game and reporting from the sidelines.
Zoning out and forgetting there’s an actual game being played is a real, if not hilariously awkward possibility.
In the end, though, the significance of the game shouldn’t be underscored in favor of all the marijuana references. This is still the Super Bowl, after all.
But the real challenge is trying to convince somebody of that if he’s inhaled one too many of the good stuff.
