Scooter Hobbs column: Super Bowl begs for better questions — every time

Published 5:08 pm Thursday, February 12, 2026

A few thoughts before tossing this football season into the trash can:

If we’re going to call it the Super Bowl, complete with Roman numerals and controversies for halftime shows, the media is going to have to step up its game — particularly the ones entrusted with microphones.

I had a particularly excruciating postgame Sunday night as I drove home from Houston shortly after the game ended.

So this was a somewhat different post-Super Bowl experience. I’m more used to whatever TV dishes out after the big game.

This postgame, me being on the road, was confined to radio.

Still, I was hoping for something a little better — at worst, something different.

Instead, if anything, it was worse, as listening to the postgame I was tortured with two and a half hours of “reports and reaction from the locker-room” at Levi’s Stadium, some 45.7 miles from what most of us think of as San Francisco.

More of the same.

All it was, was two and a half hours of (at last count) 979 occasions of someone sticking a microphone in a sweaty face and uttering three or four different versions of …

 “How does it feel?”

No player or coach ever seems to have a suitable answer, let alone an original response.

Yet the microphones keep appearing, with the more creative holders of them maybe digging up some game-note nuggets on the player for a “This is Your Life” prelude to the inevitable …

“… So how does this feel now?”

And the answer would be: Blah, blah, more blah, blah-blah-blah, blah-blah.

Just once, I’d like to hear a player answer with: “Actually, as much hard work as we put into this, as much love as I have for all these coaches and teammates, I really thought it would feel a lot better. I thought my skin would be tingling. This doesn’t really feel much different than beating the Jets … except for the confetti.”

Or maybe …

“Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, and sometimes the whole halftime show is in a foreign language.”

Or, what they’re really thinking deep down …

“It’s OK, not downplaying it, but it will feel a whole lot better come contract time. Open up the vault, baby.”

It never seems to change.

But as long as we’re unloading personal pet peeves here, try these triple-Ps on for size:

This one has been festering inside me for a long time, and I can’t name a specific instance from last Sunday. Yet the most irritating thing TV announcers say —usually the color commentators — comes after a penalty when they announce: “They’re going to call that every time.”

Sorry, ex-jock. You played the game. You should know that there is nothing — nothing — that they’re going to call every time.

Sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t, and sometimes when they don’t the Saints are one P.I. call from reaching the Super Bowl.

That said, the best thing game telecasts have added since instant replay is the guy in the booth to comment and clarity the officiating trials and tribulations. Those guys — ex-officials who’ve been in the trenches and know the game the way you think you do sitting on the couch — always seem to be the most honest and impartial people in the stadium.

And they all agree that there’s nothing that they call every time. I just wonder if they’re allowed to go to zebra reunions.

By the way, kudos to the NBC telecast Sunday for going above and beyond in letting viewers know not only what school a player went to, but where he grew up.

It’s a small thing, maybe, but saves you a lot of Google time.

I just wonder if in the future, they’ll try to list all seven schools that this 37-year-old rookie portaled in and out of before getting his biggest shot in the biggest game on earth, so in the end …

How does it feel?

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Scooter Hobbs covers LSU athletics for the American Press. Contact him at scooter.hobbs@americanpress.com