A halftime show is the wrong way to go
Published 6:12 pm Tuesday, December 19, 2017
It was just announced Tuesday that the College Football Playoff Championship Game will feature a halftime performance from Kendrick Lamar, a popular rap artist.
We are all familiar with one other major sporting event with a halftime performance, the Super Bowl. Every year, the hype and anticipation (or lack thereof) for who will be performing at the Super Bowl seems to dominate social media. We see commercials, alerts and headlines.
Fans of the artists, some of whom couldn’t care less about football, turn on the halftime show just to see the performance and over-the-top visuals. Then, once it’s all over, everyone complains about how bad it was, funny images and memes are spread around the internet and everyone forgets about the show completely.
Then next year comes, rinse and repeat.
A halftime concert is not the last thing the National Championship game needs, but it’s pretty high on that list.
In a sporting world that’s becoming more and more commercialized by the day, can we not have an American event like the college football National Championship be about the football and not about the other distractions? A concert is all well and good, but I don’t think many folks in attendance will necessarily care about Kendrick Lamar rapping on a hastily constructed stage at halftime.
Then again, it’s not really about the fans in attendance. If I had to guess, this is more about TV ratings. Getting a nice bump in viewership at halftime, a 20-minute stretch where most viewers mute the TV and do other things, is seemingly the goal.
It’s just one more step toward commercializing a sport that is already on the verge with petitions to pay players and naming bowl games after bigtime sponsors.
Unfortunately, college football has become less about developing young men and more about the bottom line. I’m not sure how to fix that, other than getting in a time machine and heading back to the 1950s when the sport was much purer.