Slashdot Mirror
NFL's IT Chief Gears Up For His 25th Super Bowl
BobB-nw writes with this excerpt from NetworkWorld:
"NFL IT guru David Port claims he doesn't have a favorite football team, but on Sunday he'll be working his 25th Super Bowl. As the league's vice president of information technology, Port and his IT staff are responsible for building a temporary network to support NFL staff and thousands of journalists during Super Bowl week. Port starts preparing for each Super Bowl two years in advance, working with the city and venues where IT operations and media professionals will be based. More intensive planning starts about 11 months before the big game. Port explained that the NFL essentially built a small data center with IBM blade servers at the temporary headquarters in a local Marriott near the Super Bowl site. 'We built out an infrastructure with approximately 300 computers, PCs and laptops, and wired and wireless networks that are used for NFL core operations, for game production and business operations. Much of it is also for media,' Port said."
CNet is running a related story about the technology behind the Super Bowl, focusing on some of the visual effects viewers will see, as well as the hardware that makes everything happen.
I want to add a few things I have noticed. In the world series, you can lose one game by a very large margin, say 20, and still be the winner. And if the teams are equally good, you have SEVEN! games over which the decision is made. In the superbowl, the game will be finished today. That is it, no do over, no bad day. If you want to watch the superbowl, it is one day and one day only. The first few games of the world series aren't interesting to many, and if one team is better, the later games aren't that interesting either.
The Super Bowl without ads is like an adult movie on American network TV. Even avid football fans find the game boring. The neutral-site stadium is filled with disinterested corporate types, the pace is even slower than a typical NFL game, and the teams tend to play very conservative. The game must be unwatchable for anyone without a rooting and/or monetary interest.
So why do so many Americans watch it? The ads, parties, beer, salted snacks, and gambling. Don't get me wrong, Americans love football, but Super Bowl Sunday has evolved into a national holiday. Football is as important to the Super Bowl as Jesus is to Christmas.
I am sure that the football programs lose money. They are not intended to fund themselves from ticket sales. But, a lot of alumni come back to the colleges to watch the games. This makes them more connected to the college and more likely to donate money to the college. I do not have a cite, but I remember reading about the correlation between alumni donations and football wins and it was definitely a positive correlation. I don't think that we wouldn't have colleges without football, but they would have to find some other way to get their alumni involved to get them to donate or raise tuition.
Most of us Americans feel the same way about soccer (or football, if you prefer). Watching a soccer game is like watching a seemingly never-ending slog towards someone FINALLY scoring a single fucking goal. But, then, we all see our favorite sports through our own eyes. To each his own.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.