Perhaps we don’t readily associate football and 9/11 because the crowning event of the NFL season didn’t take place until five months after the attacks.
Super Bowl XXXVI was played between the upstart New England Patriots and the juggernaut St. Louis Rams on February 3, 2002. By then, Fox News, the cable arm of Rupert Murdoch’s media conglomerate, had been banging the war drum for months. A New York Times report from 2008 eventually disclosed that the Pentagon had been planting pro-war “analysts” on the network. When NFL on Fox got its paws on SBXXXVI, it turned the game into a staging area for a steroidal brand of partisan patriotism.