When the news broke that President Joe Biden was skipping the pre-Super Bowl interview for the second straight year, the immediate reaction was mostly folks doing the political math. That figures. The idea of a president doing a sit-down in advance of the NFL’s biggest game of the year is, after all, inherently a political calculation.
But setting aside for a moment the election-year implications of Biden turning down CBS’s offer of free air-time, let’s take a moment to celebrate. This is a victory for the rest of us.
The Super Bowl is a spectacle, sure. It’s an over-the-top production that long ago shucked the idea of any self-constraint or, say, modesty on behalf of the NFL. It’s a massive showcase — by far the most-watched TV event in the United States every year.
It is also political in its own right, without a doubt — at least in terms of what the NFL thinks it can imprint on the minds of viewers. Or did you think that the league rolls out football field-sized flags and hams up the patriotism angles every year just for giggles? America’s sport, indeed.
But presidential interviews during the pre-game? Let’s draw a line in the sand.
They aren’t of any particular benefit.
They are not, contrary to anything you’ve read over the past week, a tradition.
And they just kill viewer momentum. Kill it dead.
Biden did CBS a favor. There’s nothing weirder than watching an hour — or hours — of pregame coverage sizing up Super Bowl opponents and featuring in-depth looks at certain players or stories, only to suddenly be zig-zagged over to a straight news interview with the President of the United States in which we’re hearing about real-world issues and crises.
It feels disorienting because it is. There is nothing trivial about the recent U.S. strikes on Iranian forces in Syria and Iraq in response to the killing of three American soldiers in Jordan, or the conflict between Israel and Palestine in the Gaza strip. Planting such serious discussions in the middle of a football game pre-show was always a strange idea — it just happened to gain a little traction for a while.
You heard a lot in recent days about Biden foregoing the “traditional” Presidential Super Bowl interview. Let’s slow our roll on that. Before Barack Obama in the late 2000s, no American president had ever done such a thing, and the Super Bowl has been broadcast since 1967. The closest any previous president came was George W. Bush, who took part in a coin toss in 2002 and did a sports-centric couple of minutes with Jim Nantz in ‘04.
Since then, the interviews have become the province of the host network’s news division – and grown far less lighthearted. Presidents and their advisers have adjusted accordingly.
Biden said yes to CBS in 2021 and also to NBC in 2022, then skipped last year’s pre-game on FOX and turned down CBS this year. The president’s advisers are reported to have been concerned about the number of voters who say they already have election-year fatigue, and thought viewers might resent the injection of politics on game day.
“We hope viewers enjoy watching what they tuned in for — the game,” said Ben LaBolt, a White House spokesman.
Donald Trump did a couple of pre-games, but he turned down NBC in 2018, meaning that the short history of this particular event is already spotty. Obama, seemingly always at ease in the world of sports and comfortable in a sit-down interview setting, is the only president who made an unbroken habit of pre-Super Bowl appearances. His advisers clearly viewed the window as valuable, and perhaps even as a bit of a pre-State of the Union warmup.
But that’s just the thing: The actual State of the Union generally falls just a few weeks after the Super Bowl. This year it’s March 7, and on that evening President Biden will reach well more than twice the number of Americans who might happen to see him on a pre-SB hit.
That’s about all it is, by the way — a hit. Although the interviews themselves usually run around 15 minutes when they’re recorded, only three or four minutes make it into the Super Bowl pre-game show in the years they’ve run. Viewership is comparatively low, too: While the Super Bowl itself may reach 115 million U.S. viewers or more, only an estimated 10.2 million watched Biden’s pre-game interview on CBS in 2021. Meanwhile, 27.3 million watched the president’s State of the Union address last year, and 38.2 million the year before.
Again — political calculations. What matters to us, the viewers, is that this Sunday’s pre-game show on CBS will be delightfully devoid of that strange shift in the weather, when we’re all suddenly asked to step out of our football escape and re-enter the complicated real world around us. As if there wasn’t time for that afterwards.
It’s interesting: Back in 2015, NBC anchor Savannah Guthrie was preparing for her Super Bowl interview with President Obama, and it hit her how difficult it is to actually do these things.
“You have to remember, this is an interview that takes place in the Super Bowl pre-show,” Guthrie told Variety a year later. “The last thing everyone is thinking about or wanting to talk about is politics.”
Well said, and amen. Adults in the room generally have no problem distinguishing between the fantastical world of spectacle sports and the often-grim reality of what lies outside. That doesn’t mean they need — or want — the two conflated on game day.
Mark Kreidler is a national award-winning writer whose work has appeared at ESPN, the New York Times, Washington Post, Time, Newsweek and dozens of other publications. He’s also a sports-talk veteran with stops in San Francisco and Sacramento, and the author of three books, including the bestselling “Four Days to Glory.” More of his writing can be found at https://markkreidler.substack.com. He is also reachable on Twitter @MarkKreidler.
