The Super Bowl is less an athletic contest and more a TV show. Endless plotlines and character development fill the two weeks of hype needed to get 120 million viewers.
The MVPs go to Disneyland. The winners of the game are instantly transformed from terrified contestants risking all they can do in dangerous, often failing efforts into champions who were always going to be triumphant. Because they won. Only because they won.
But half of those playing are on the losing team. TV reveals their sadness, and we are sad. The whiff of humanity is brief, as the tears and self-loathing are but a momentary contrast to the exultation of the winner — reveling in superiority and deserved triumph.
But some losers are deemed villains.
In the 1991 Super Bowl, the kicker of the Buffalo Bills, Scott Norwood, was set to win a frenetic game where the clearly superior Bills were behind the New York Giants with seconds to go. A heroic drive, led by the devotion of running back Thurman Thomas, left the Bills needing a 47-yard field goal to win.
They missed. They were losers. And Scott Norwood was, and is, the villain.
Now vilification has descended on a previously ignored left offensive tackle, Will Campbell. An absolute star from youth football to high school to college, he played well enough in the first 16 games of this season. But the rookie 22-year-old Campbell had never played 19 games in a professional season.
The New England Patriots had invested millions of dollars in and given a starting role to a very young man in order to protect another young man, their quarterback, Drake Maye.
Both men saw the world of extreme success they had made for themselves simply vanish before hundreds of millions of viewers, as Campbell allowed the relentless pass rush of the Seattle Seahawks defense to sack or pressure Maye fourteen times.
In the calm of a completed game, the repeated failures of one human became the source of derision, memes, and commentary, as a team’s failure was ascribed more to him than to any other player.
The villain. The scapegoat.
The Patriots commentator Mike Luciano summarized the debacle: “Campbell allowed a whopping 14 pressures on just 53 drop backs in this game, a mark that stands as the most any offensive lineman has ever given up in one game.” A viral TikTok compared him to a Pee Wee player. USA Today wrote an article about the flood of memes after the game ridiculing the rookie’s ineptitude. The website Sportskeeda published unending anger at his performance: “Disgustingly bad,” “needs to be benched,” “a bust first-round pick.” And that was just a sampling of the vitriol.
But we are all God’s creation. We all try to live in accordance with who we believe ourselves to be — and some of us, a few, have stratospheric success, like Will Campbell did for the first 22 years of his life.
But we live in a world that feeds on failure. The failure of others justifies our own inadequacies, softening what might otherwise be judged in a harsher light. But in the Super Bowl, culpability is inescapable — just as it is in life, whether it be a physics course, a marriage, or fledgling career spent toiling in mediocrity. The image we see in the mirror doesn’t tell the whole truth, but it rarely lies.
We are not God, not even the Super Bowl MVP. And we do not define villains either. Though we believe our righteousness demands we pick up stones to hurl at the guilty, every one of us fails.
Rather than hearing that Will Campbell or any other failure is given the grace of God, we are told to live with the consequence of our failures, and the villainous evil of our judgments knows no bounds — often of everyone else but ourselves. Or only ourselves.
But we are who God made us, no matter what we make of ourselves. We are God’s gift even after we fail. And we know that gift if we listen. Hard to do in a screaming world of judgment.
We judge from the stands and from the comment threads. We judge when the clock hits zero and the scoreboard stands unchanged. But the judgment of God is different from the world’s, made in each of us at the time of our making. It is different from social media, the talking heads, and the voice we cannot shake in the small hours of the night. We are loved, and failure is never the last word.
