This week brings about the most ridiculous spectacle in the sports media calendar: Super Bowl Media Day. If you don’t know what media day is, it’s the Tuesday before Super Bowl Sunday, wherein the Super Bowl’s host stadium turns into a beehive of meandering media types who may or may not know something about football.

Last year, this media pageant — where, don’t get confused, no actual journalism takes place — began selling tickets so fans could lose money (about $25) to watch a bunch of sheep ask questions to players and coaches who view the affair as the silliest component of the most serious week of their careers.

On the one hand, more than 100 million people watch the Super Bowl, so it’s important, and it’s the most culturally unifying event crossing airwaves in the United States, as sadly as that may reflect on our culture.

But does the Super Bowl warrant the glory of its media bonanza? 

The hype surrounding the Super Bowl is even more ridiculous when you consider how little anyone cares about the precursory rounds of the playoffs, comparatively speaking. Americans like it simple, so they only tune in when it’s two teams — it’s easier that way. That being said, 48.7 million people still watched the AFC championship game last Sunday, but a larger constituency who didn’t watch that game will watch the Super Bowl. Clearly it’s not the football we care about here — it’s the pageantry, the party.

Media day is a product of that pageantry. Something that fulfills a musing in the American public. People won’t remember all these players in five years, but we like to feel like we know them for those 3 ½ hours Feb. 3, when the lights shine brighter than ever and the flash bulbs make your eyes wince.

Everyone feels like the Super Bowl is relevant to their life. I can very nearly promise you, The Daily Illini will produce Super Bowl content in its news, features and opinions sections in next Monday’s paper. Most newspapers in America will attack the game on all fronts. People feel tied to the Super Bowl, whether they should or not.

Twitter will surely be on fire during the game, whether it be during gameplay, the commercials or the carrying out of such a tired concept as 10-minute halftime entertainment.

All this attention being paid to a television program. There are serious arguments out there for making the day after the Super Bowl a holiday. It’s a big deal. The biggest.

Does there need to be a day when we bug the players about football, their personal lives and generally random stuff? Some of the questions for media day sound like they’re coming from the 10-year-old girl from those Ray Lewis Visa commercials. Does Colin Kaepernick love puppies?

Hype and spectacle are two very different things. The Super Bowl is deserving of all the hype it receives; being the conclusion of a 267-game campaign, it is the climax of America’s favorite season. But to bring it to the level of deifying the players, following them around like apostles and boxing out the other bumblebees just to try and get your piece of larva so you can ask Jacoby Jones whether he could succeed with Tim Tebow as his quarterback.

It’s not relevant. It’s not interesting. And it’s done just for the sake of doing it, just because it’s the Super Bowl and the media feels like they have to do something drastic. It’d be different if it were the same places that have covered these teams through the year, but it’s not. It’s everyone who can con his or her way into a credential. And it’s silly. And now they charge to see it. And people purchase the tickets.

Super Bowl Media Day is the epitome of athlete glorification, the quintessence of media suckerdom, and for whom?

Other than the unintelligible ogling gossip “superfan,” I can think of no one.

Eliot is a junior in Media. He can be reached at [email protected].   Follow him on Twitter @EliotTweet.