Butker Shrugged

Harrison Butker's Super Bowl Opening Night press conference was light on sociopolitical fireworks. Except for one cherry bomb.

NEW ORLEANS — I stood at Harrison Butker’s podium for an hour on Super Bowl Opening Night.

I didn’t do so to pearl-clutch at his third-rate X-Men-villainous worldview, nor to debate point-by-point the political opinions of someone who thinks The Handmaid’s Tale is a romcom, nor to drag this lowly Substack by its hair into any culture wars. It wasn’t even an exercise in self-torture, at least not consciously. I just wanted to revel in the sheer triviality and inanity of the experience.

Triviality? Inanity? Why, the Super Bowl is the largest cultural event in the English-speaking world! And the NFL just platformed an individual who probably thinks that women should not be allowed to ride bicycles after they reach puberty. (“It ruins them,” he whispers knowingly to you at a cocktail party, and you drop your hors d'oeuvres and leap through a window to escape him.) What could possibly be trivial and inane about the amplification of controversial and divisive messages?

First, consider the venue: Super Bowl Opening Night, a grand guignol satire of journalism itself in which the NFL uses dedicated professionals like myself the way Cecil B. DeMille used extras for the golden calf scenes in The Ten Commandments. This is an event where I literally once fondled a brassiere. While working for the New York Times.

This ain’t the Athenian Agora, folks. It’s fraternity pledge day in the quad. Actual communication is almost impossible amid the noise and chaos, let alone reasoned discourse.

Now, consider Butker. No one should care what a kicker thinks about the Cover-3 defense or the Brotherly Shove, let alone tariffs or gender roles.

Sure, Butker is a public figure, and therefore has more influence than, say, your neighbor with the giant flag in the bed of his pickup truck. But there are at least 10,000 Twitch streamers offering their unique perspectives on some highly charged topics to 12-year olds while playing Fortnite with far more influence than the guy who trots onto the field after JuJu Smith-Schuster drops a pass on third-and-2.

Anyone who finds Butker’s views on gender roles abhorrent – as I do – has much bigger fish to fry. Anyone seeking validation from a kicker needs to ask themselves why they must reach that deeply into the validation barrel.

What I expected to hear at Butker’s podium on Monday night – what I craved like some dangerous narcotic – was a mix of dumb boilerplate football questions and wordy, awkward, wishy-washy cultural questions from folks who are barely comfortable asking dumb boilerplate football questions.

A bolder journalist might have primed the pump right off the bat: Harrison, what are the Chiefs’ keys to victory on Sunday? And also: should colleges ban women? Said journalist would also risk seeing his credential shredded. Furthermore, as previously stated, I don’t care what he thinks, or at least I don’t think I care. I chose instead to be a mere chronicler and tabulator. How many people came to Opening Night to ask Butker something bold and spicy? How would he respond? And how many IQ points would I lose standing there waiting for stray shots in the culture war to be fired?

The Tally: I kept track of 80 questions that reporters asked Butker during his one hour availability. I missed a few, and it can sometimes be difficult to differentiate one multi-part question from three small ones, a clarification from a follow-up, and so on. Whatever. Here is a breakdown of those 80 questions by category:

• Chiefs questions: 19

• Christianity-related questions: 13

• “Controversy” questions: 6

• Injury questions: 3

• Miscellaneous questions: 39

Six questions out of 80 works out to 7.5%. If the amount of sociopolitical questions lobbed at Butker were alcohol, the press conference was only a little stronger than an IPA.