I didn’t get to watch the Super Bowl this year.

It’s not that I cared about the game. The Patriots and the Seahawks are both “meh” to me. Had I watched, I already intended to mute the TV during Wascally Wabbit’s (Bad Bunny’s) halftime show. The commercials were available immediately after the game.

But watching the Super Bowl has become a cultural phenomenon. Everybody is talking about it and you need to see it to be part of the conversation. If you know a journalist in your life, you’ll know that we want to be part of the conversation.

I used to feel that way about the Academy Awards until idiotic actors started insisting on spewing politics from the awards dais. Think about that. People whose entire career is pretending to be other people insist on giving us the benefit of their political and social wisdom?

I digress. So how did I arrive at this Super Bowl desert?

Some months ago, I got tired of paying over $200 per month for cable TV while the channels it provided continued to shrink. In order to be able to watch sports without cable, I subscribed to Fubo. Even with that $100+ subscription, I still missed three Broncos games this season because they were exclusive to other streaming services.

All season long I had access to NBC via the Fubo subscription. But, according to Fubo’s website, they wouldn’t have the Super Bowl because NBC didn’t offer a “fair carriage deal.”

It was suggested that Fubo subscribers get a “free trial” to Peacock, NBC+ or Hulu+ to watch the game. While this seems pretty benign on the surface, I’m not a fan of giving anyone my credit card number for their “free trial.” It’s a lesson taught by experience. I once had to close my bank account and reopen another in order to remove a recurring charge. The same thing has happened to my wife, Renee.

It’s a predatory practice. I’ve experienced similar problems in other areas.

When my father-in-law passed away, his cell phone service wouldn’t cancel his account. We called repeatedly to report he had passed away. We sent them copies of his death certificate. Despite that, the company continued to bill his card.

This puzzled me since he was clearly incapable of paying and we could not be compelled to pay on the account. They made no attempt to sue his estate. It would have been fruitless since his estate had no assets at the time of his death, but they didn’t know that. So why keep billing well after his death?

The best I can theorize is for tax purposes. Companies can charge off losses against their profits. By accruing several thousand dollars of delinquent debt on service they didn’t have to provide, they are able to protect more of their profits.

It’s a legal scam. At least that’s my theory.

Anyway, back to the Super Bowl.

Long ago, we watched the Super Bowl on one of the three or four channels we got on our analog TVs. We had either rabbit ears on the TV set or an antenna on our roof.

Then we were convinced to purchase cable TV. The biggest draw was that we didn’t have to watch the commercials. There was also the benefit of more channel options but those were limited in the early days.

Not long afterward, commercials started appearing on cable TV. Congress helped them put an end to analog altogether, making rabbit ears extinct.

Now we live in the world of streaming. You have to have multiple services to watch football now. You need multiple services to see much of anything. Behind boardroom doors, young men in suits strategize on how to get more and more bites of your tiny apple.

It’s greed gone wild. Billionaire media magnates who will never, ever have enough and never will.

So I didn’t watch the Super Bowl this year. In the current climate, I may never watch it again.