This past week I watched the Super Bowl, and felt a little odd as opposed to years past. Back home people are big football fans: even if you don’t play, its not really an option to not watch the Super Bowl. But here at Cornell there are a lot more people who aren’t familiar with American football or just aren’t into it, and even though I don’t consider myself a big football person I found myself being *more* knowledgable than some of my friends who were watching with me.

The advertising is always a popular topic with the Super Bowl, but this year something caught my eye that I have never really paid too much attention to, which was the prevalence of military symbolism and veterans at the game. At the coin toss this year 15 Medal of Honor recipients were honored (https://chicago.suntimes.com/sports/super-bowl-nfl-honor-military-veterans-medal-honor/) and several military planes flew overhead. This strikes me as all the more odd in light of the recent kerfuffle about black players protesting racism by kneeling during the national anthem. Many opponents of these protests said that a football game is not the place for politics, and yet displays like this are clearly a political statement. Tacit endorsement of the U.S military and its activities is not an uncontroversial opinion in 2018. This also makes me wonder how common such a display is; whether other countries regularly have these clear endorsements of the military during privately run events like sports games.

This is an excellent article that analyzes the close ties between the military and sports in the US (https://www.huffingtonpost.com/william-astore/the-militarization-of-sports_b_912004.html)