While we’ve been busying ourselves with the discussion of Superbowl betting, the mainstream sports media has been rooting around like a pig in slop trying to find anything that approximates ‘news’ coming out of the pregame week.  We’ve had the Dwight Freeney injury reported as if it were an impending meteor strike, the Reggie Bush/Kim Kardashian relationship discussed as if it were a major peace accord and beaten over the head with feel good ‘Katrina recovery’ metaphor storylines about the New Orleans Saints.  Today, they’ve apparently been scraping the bottom of the barrel pretty hard as a major ‘news story’ on ESPN and other websites reported the new Superbowl logo unveiled by the NFL.

Here’s the hook–in the past, the Superbowl has had a logo every year but the *new* style logo is more uniform in format.  That’s because…uh…logo uniformity is crucial to the smooth operation of a professional sports league.  Apparently this was a very weighty decision in the NFL’s executive suite, as 8 different logo designs were considered and the winner only unveiled to North Texas officials (the 2011 game will be held at the Dallas Cowboys’ new stadium) last week.  Here’s the reaction of Bill Lively, who is the head of the North Texas Superbowl Host Committee:

“It’s a unique mixture of icons that represents what this whole thing is all about. It’s well done,” said Bill Lively, the president and CEO of the North Texas Super Bowl XLV Host committee. “We’ve approached our mission not just for 45 but for many, many [Super Bowl] games to come.”

To make sure that there is no vestige of the NFL that isn’t properly uniform, other league logos and championship trophies will also be reworked in the new format.  Were Bill Lively’s comments not enough meaningless corporate babble for one day, here’s NFL chairman of marketing Mark Waller to lay it on even thicker.  He’s apparently at a loss to explain why these new logos were needed so he focuses on the dubious rationale that Superbowl 45 is a ‘special year’, presumably because its 5 years before the golden anniversary of the big game:

“We feel that 45 is a special year,” said Mark Waller, chairman of marketing for the NFL. “It feels like it’s the perfect time to launch it.”

In other words, there was nothing else for the mainstream sports media to write about today on the Superbowl beat.

NFL unveils new standard logo for Superbowl XLV at Cowboys’ Stadium

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