I was so, so sorry to hear of the death by gunshot wound in an apparent suicide of linebacker Junior Seau, who played for the Patriots between 2006 and 2009. It’s too soon to know whether Seau’s death is linked to brain injury—the Boston Globe points out that Seau appears to have shot himself in the chest rather than the head, as did late Bear Dave Duerson, who wanted to preserve his brain for scientific study—or a sad conclusion to other troubles. Seau was hospitalized after falling asleep at the wheel in 2010, and arrested on assault charges. No matter the cause, it’s sad to see someone who gave me so much pleasure leaving football to something other than a happy, fulfilling retirement.

ESPN has an interesting, if somewhat general, piece about whether the NFL could use more female scouts to avoid groupthink in the draft, and to help teams avoid players who might end up making a team atmosphere toxic, rather than helping a squad cohere:

Women, on the other hand, are much less likely to have blinders when it comes to big moves. They also do a better job placing choices in context. In football terms, female scouts might have seen that Vince Young, for all his awesome talent, was not a good fit with the team, coaching staff or scheme in Tennessee.

Another place where the NFL could really use a woman’s touch is with the impossible task of predicting how a newly minted 21-year-old millionaire will behave once he hits the league. Most teams use personal interviews to gauge a potential player’s intangibles — work ethic, leadership, motivation, teamwork — but the results would likely be more reliable if women were leading this process. Shrira says studies show that women are intuitively better at discerning and exploring a candidate’s character. Adds Spencer, “This is the unique dimension women would add to the draft: getting to the absolute heart and soul of a player.”

A lot of the piece is based in general business psychology, rather than in the track records of the very few women (like Linda Bogdan, pictured here) who have gotten a say in NFL. But that research and the evidence of other successful businesses do make a compelling case that any organization might want to consider diversity not simply for its public image, but for its bottom line. Different perspectives can bring not just different ways of making decisions, but different costs and potential problems to light. Myra Kraft famously convinced the Patriots to release Christian Peter after the team drafted the man even though he had a horrible record of violence against women. A scouting corps that included more women might be more likely to weigh past records of such allegations more seriously, not just because abusing women is bad, but because players who get in trouble outside of the stadium lose playing time and mental focus.

There’s no question that it won’t be easy to get more women in the scouting and executive ranks. It’s not like there are no women who are substantially interested in football, but it is a specialization beyond general business acumen. And if, as the article points out, women tend to get powerful positions in NFL teams only if they’re related to the owner, even if they perform well, that’ll likely be a hurdle to convincing other teams that they got their on their own abilities, no matter how sterling those abilities are. Allegations of nepotism tend to stick, even if they’re utterly unfounded. I’m not sure what the way in will turn out to be. But, rooting interests aside, I’d applaud whatever team decided to seek new insight and get some women in the mix. Neither men nor women are collectively perfect decision-makers. But new eyes and new perspectives are rarely a bad idea, and it would be interesting to see how female scouts challenge the existing consensus about what’s valuable in the NFL, and in other sports.

It’s awful to hear the news that the during their recent great years, the Saints were involved in a system that offered players bounties if they injured the players on opposing teams. The scandal is a setback for the NFL’s efforts to make football a safer, more sustainable game, showing that team and player cultures are fiercely resistant to that league-wide imperative. But it’s also a failure of the NFL collective bargaining agreement by the players who ought to be protected by it, and an illustration of the difficult web of financial incentives players negotiate.

The explanation of how the bounty system worked is a fascinating look at the financial stratification within NFL teams. The bounty system was organized by the Saints’ former defensive coordinator, Gregg Williams, and he kept running the system even after he was specifically ordered by the team to shut it down. But the bounties themselves were offered—and paid—not by the team but by Saints players to Saints players. And they worked as incentives because special teams players who are in a position to inflict those injuries make less than the teammates who offered them the bounties. And that doesn’t even always work out. As Deadspin pointed out, the fines Bobby McCray was assessed for a hit to Brett Favre probably cost him more than he made based on the report’s assessment of what he would have made in bounties.

But however complicated the financial interests are here—and even scarier than the fact the bounties were being offered in the locker room is the news that folks outside the team appeared to be ponying up money—it’s a worrisome illustration of how the league’s compensation patterns could make bounties seem worth reaching for, and could lead to them violating their own collective bargaining agreement. It’s hard to believe that the Saints or any other team would offer bounties in the expectation that they were the only team doing it. And if everyone’s ignoring the collective bargaining agreement’s ban on bounties, then everyone’s ramping up their own risk of being injured by participating in the system. I don’t envy the NFL and the players’ union the task of tweaking those incentives and enforcement to try to make the ban on bounties operative.

Especially since players are coming into the NFL after years of a training that incentivizes hard hits, even if there pride rather than money at stake. I do think that there is a difference between a reward for making a good play and a reward specifically for injuring someone. But I don’t know how meaningful that difference is. I love football, and I struggle with that love and my questions about whether the game as played can be made safer while still remaining exciting.

I suppose it’s nice for New York Giants running back Brandon Jacobs to apologize for telling Gisele Bunchen, the model who is married to New England Patriots’ quarterback Tom Brady, that rather than expressing her upset about the Patriots’ Super Bowl loss that “She just needs to continue to stay cute and shut up.” But I’d rather he apologize to Gisele than to Brady:

“Given the fact that it’s a colleague of mine’s wife, I do apologize for saying that, because I shouldn’t have said that,” Jacobs said of Tom Brady’s spouse in an interview on “The Doug Gottlieb Show.” “It’s his wife and I should respect that just as much as anyone else.”…However, while Jacobs apologized for telling Bundchen to hush up, he refused to express any remorse about calling her cute, saying that Brady should “take that as a compliment.” “If he finds something wrong with that, then that’s his problem.”

Which means he really doesn’t get what he did, and why it was wrong. Jacobs’ comments were obnoxious not because he was impugning Tom Brady’s wife. They were obnoxious because they implied that the role of a woman was to be attractive, rather than to have opinions. The question is not whether Tom Brady has a problem with his wife being reduced to her looks. It’s whether Gisele does.

And I’ve honestly been dismayed by the idea that Gisele is obligated by contract or custom not to speak ill of her husband’s teammates or the team’s performance. Tom Brady is her husband, not her keeper. She is an independent woman who makes an income that does not leave her dependent on the Patriots. Whether she speaks publicly about his work is a matter for their marriage, not our judgement.

It’s an attitude that treats women who are married to athletes as if they’re like another set of women who are often treated as if they’re helpmeets first, and individuals second: political wives. No matter how accomplished Gisele or Hillary Clinton are in their own fields, as long as their husbands are or were preeminent figures in their fields, what Tom or Bill were up to was understood to be the priority—no matter what role those men feel comfortable having their wives take on. God forbid Gisele have opinions about football. God forbid Hillary have something to add on health care. I understand that it makes strategic sense, given the persistent and virulent sexism directed at women in politics, particularly those cast as if they’re malevolent powers behind the throne, for political wives to take on anodyne issues that are removed from the substance of the political mainstream. But that norm isn’t something we should be proud of.

After Gisele got— I think understandably—upset about the Patriots’ inability to catch some key passes during the Super Bowl, the Giants Brandon Jacobs, who would you think would gleefully agree with her, wants her to know that ““She just needs to continue to stay cute and shut up.” Because ladies couldn’t possibly have a valid opinion about sports, or investment in the game of football other than to be totally supportive arm candy for their dream quarterback husbands, amirite? But it’s all part of a larger culture that sends hugely confusing messages about how women are supposed to talk—or not talk—about sports.

Take the role of the sideline reporter. I don’t think it’s a problem for sideline reporters to be attractive—being physically attractive doesn’t inherently mean you can’t be intelligent, and television reporting of all kinds is one of the few professions where men have to meet at least some of the same physical beauty standards as women. But I think that sports networks and teams have created an environment where even intelligent female sideline reporters are treated as if they’re merely eye candy because there are enough cases where it’s impossible to imagine what other criteria a reporter was hired for other than her looks. And hiring in a way that suggests that appearance is the most important criteria gives the impression that either there aren’t qualified and attractive women available who can do things other than take rides on outfield trains and ask soft questions, or that even if said women exist, it doesn’t make sense to hire them to deliver the character fluff that is the designated role for women in sports commentary. If you’re hired (or expected) to be entertaining first and substantive as a bonus, people may react badly when you turn out to have ideas, or feel weirdly entitled to prioritize your role as an object of desire.

That kind of structural message means that within the context of sports, it’s apparently perfectly appropriate for men to behave in ways that women would be excoriated for. In a recent interview, Erin Andrews talked about dealing with harrassment from “fans” and detractors alike. When the Cleveland Plain Dealer asked her “On the college campuses, in particular, how do you handle the goofus—or 10—who yells, ‘Erin, will you marry me?’” She said, “Unfortunately, it gets a lot nastier than that. It’s why I would never bring my father or a boyfriend to the game. I’ve had security guards who followed me and said, “It’s bad that you have to listen to this.” I tell them, “I don’t. I have earpieces.’” If a female fan got all gushy over an announcer or player, it would be taken as a sign of their unseriousness—there’s even Baseball Boyfriend , an app that lets women store picks in a “Little Black Book,” and instead of trades and pickups, treats players you shed as your “exes.” But apparently you can sexually harass Erin Andrews and still retain the impression that you’re totally focused on the substance of the game.

And this is how we get to Gisele. She couldn’t possibly be upset about the game because she’s come to care about football, in addition to caring that her husband is upset. She’s just a dumb broad who’s ventured out of the spot that’s designated for her: looking cute in the owners’ box. I wish I could say that Brandon Jacobs was an isolated sexist and a weirdly sore winner. But his comments about Gisele are in line with the primary role designated for women in sports commentary: look good, and don’t have inconvenient opinions.

Predictably, but ludicrously, NBC has already apologized for M.I.A.’s bleeped use of the word “shit” in a verse during last night’s Super Bowl halftime show and for her flipping the bird in a gesture so fleeting it barely registered during the sound and the fury and the chariot bearers and the church choirs. I profoundly wish they hadn’t. The incident was so fleeting that to argue it impacted innocent children doesn’t just strain credulity but snaps it. And groveling to the forces who are massing to make hay of a minor slip gives unfortunate credibility to decency mavens everywhere, who are complaining that it violates Madonna’s promise to have a clean show (a promise she essentially kept in her own performance) and to argue that it’s clearly a legitimate controversy because lots of people have written about it in a scramble for post-Super Bowl page views.

I’ve always thought M.I.A. could be sort of irritating in her striving to be controversial, but I also assume that combination of pop-culture it-girl factor and rebelliousness is precisely why she ended up on the bill with Nicki and Madonna. Flipping off a fairly distant camera in a busy shot during a performance with a lot of pelvis bumping seems entirely consistent with that image. NBC got what they paid for, a well-executed performance with a frisson of danger, and I’m not sure why they should be sorry for that.

And NBC shouldn’t take seriously the idea that artists shouldn’t be allowed fleeting obscenities, or that obsessive monitoring outweighs creative and mildly risky programming. The publication of articles about the fact that M.I.A. did something entirely in character is not the same thing as demonstrating that harm came from her performance. In the absence of any remotely compelling evidence to the contrary, I seriously doubt that millions of American families are going to have to have tough conversations over their orange juice this morning about what that thing that lady did on stage means and why we don’t do it in polite company.

If they do, part of that conversation should include the fact that sometimes people gets excited or overwhelmed and act out, and that self-control is an important thing, whether you’re Meryl Streep getting overcome during the Golden Globes and letting an obscenity slip or M.I.A. on a Super Bowl stage getting caught up in the excitement. Humanity is a rough, obscene thing, and this is one of the gentlest possible ways of dealing with it—certainly much more gentle than the New Yorker story about the sexual assault and murder of toddler James Bulger by two ten-year-olds, which I read not knowing what I was getting into when I myself was ten, and which left me gravely shaken for months. By the time children are old enough to understand obscenity and indecency in all their forms, they’re also nigh-impossible to protect entirely. The issue is not preventing them from seeing anything, but giving parents the tools to discuss whatever their children might encounter in a meaningful and supportive way.

And frankly, if parents are going to take on the futile quest of establishing a zero-tolerance policy against anything that might potentially get obscene, it makes no sense that they’d allow their children to watch the halftime show in the first place. Justin Timberlake’s exposure of Janet Jackson’s breast (something for which she was unfairly pilloried) was, to at least half of that duo, a shocking and unexpected accident. Prince may not have gotten naked, but his guitar-and-groin silhouette made a sexual statement on a vastly larger and clearer scale than M.I.A.’s finger against a busy background. Bruce Springsteen, who may be extremely sexy but is hardly a legendarily lewd performer, crotch-slammed a camera. The Super Bowl halftime show has a well-established reputation for being a place where people like to get a little controversial and even if they don’t plan it, do so by accident. And the game itself is a violent spectacle in which men are sometimes injured in a way that’s uncomfortable to watch and to discuss, even for adults.

If I were worried about my kids, promises or no, I’d keep them away, particularly in a year that featured performers famous for taboo-defying performances that suggest oral sex; a singer with a blow-up doll persona; and singer famous for being a a global-citizen authority-bucker who has been criticized for her praise of the Tamil Tigers, all of whom were announced in advance and all of whom are exceedingly Googleable. Kids who are young enough to be damaged by their first exposure to a fleeting obscenity or gesture probably shouldn’t be up late enough on a school night, and if kids are staying up because they’re already passionate Madonna, Nicki Minaj or M.I.A. fans, nothing in that performance was something they wouldn’t have absorbed from the music.

Whether it’s Prohibition, SOPA, or efforts to crack down on Janet Jackson’s nipples, policies that try to get to zero on things that most of adult society is either not horribly offended by or rather invested in having access to are doomed to failure. In particular, in a world with wildly differing standards, you’re never going to get society to protect you or your children from everything you find harmful—that’s work you have to do on your own, even if it means opting out. Whether you’re really willing to do that is a good test of how far your commitment extends.

First, let me note that taunting your blogmistress when she’s in emotional extremis is both ungentlemanly and unladylike and a quick ticket to outer darkness. But, congratulations to the Giants, who just played a superior game of football tonight, and consistently outplayed us this season. And to Chris Ashley, who wins our pool, and gets to make me write about the piece of culture of his choice.

Off the field of play, which was tense and exciting, and I think missed being a truly great game because of some sloppiness on each side, this seemed like a rather slack event to me. There was no standout ad (though I thought Budweiser’s shoutout to rescue dogs was cute). GoDaddy has reached (or, really, reached several years ago) the same point as Lady Gaga where doing something demure would be more shocking than any way they could find to comment on the female performance. I do, however, appreciate anything that lets me see Det. John Munch dance:

and Clint Eastwood’s Obama ad. But overall, I thought it was a lackluster year.

Madonna’s performance was, I thought, both a display of professional showmanship and a reasonably canny nod to the straight dude demographic once it shifted from chariot bearers to cheerleaders. And how great is it to get to see a woman do the greatest hits show that white dude rockers are regularly entitled to without comment on their age or creakiness? Nary a crotch-slam into the camera for the Queen of Pop:

I also think of all the judges from The Voice NBC could have brought out for the show, Cee Lo Green was the best and most gratifying choice. He’s a great fit for the gospel riff, and it’s so much fun to get him to see him dust off and re-sequin his “Closet Freak” robes:

Sometimes, the right people get to make the big money and stand under the bright lights.