Youre better off not watching football this weekend.
  • Ken Durden/Shutterstock
  • You’re better off not watching football this weekend.

For those of you newly insufferably hooked on football, I have a dire warning:

You’re in that bye weekend before the Super Bowl, where you know there’s no football. You’re going to be aimlessly flipping around TV looking for football, and suddenly you’ll see something glimmering on ESPN. Professional football players? Playing football? It can’t be. And you’ll rub your eyes, and the football players will still be there. And you’ll think to yourself, “whatever this is, I should watch it.”

It’s the Pro Bowl.

Don’t watch the Pro Bowl.

Seriously. Whatever you do, don’t watch the Pro Bowl.

The Pro Bowl is the NFL’s All-Star game, featuring whoever is healthy and willing to show up, playing a game just hard enough for people to get hurt, but not hard enough to be entertaining. It stands for nothing, except for filling the dead air between the playoffs and the Super Bowl. In the past they at least sent players to Hawaii. Now they send them to the same site as the Super Bowl. Which means that this year the reward for being great at football, but not good enough to be in the Super Bowl, is a trip to Phoenix. Who wants to go to Phoenix?* Probably no one.

The only good thing about the Pro Bowl is that for two straight years, no Seahawk has had to participate in it.

Now let’s run down the late week Seahawks Super Bowl news:

• Earl Thomas was upgraded to a “limited practice participant” after not practicing all week with a shoulder injury he suffered against the Packers. Richard Sherman practiced in full all week. This is good news. In fact, the only player held out of practice all week was lineman J.R. Sweezy, who rolled his ankle in the NFC Championship game and is considered likely to play in the Super Bowl. Score one for the good guys!

• Let’s check in with the bad guys:

• The coolest piece of Seahawks Super Bowl swag I’ve seen is Derek Erdman’s “You Still Mad Bro?” sweatshirt made for Cairo. The coolest piece of Seattle sports swag generally is the Mariners’ new off-white throwback alternate jerseys with striped stirrups. If the NFL can tell its players what shoes they can and cannot wear, then Major League Baseball should make all baseball players wear stirrups.

• The NFL’s Turning Point coverage of Sunday’s win is out, and it’s a doozy. My favorite bit is from the overtime portion of the show. Russell Wilson said in his postgame comments that he told offensive coordinator Darrell Bevell that he was going to win the game on a check to Jermaine Kearse, to which, I thought to myself, “Okay, I’ll believe it when I hear it.” And now I’ve heard it. Word for word. It’s awesome. My second favorite bit is everything Kam Chancellor said.

• When the Seahawks use creative offensive principles to exploit an opponent’s weaknesses? That’s a Bevell’d Edge.

• I feel like we haven’t talked enough about how good defensive lineman Michael Bennett was down the stretch against the Packers. He was so good. Last year, because the Seahawks had unlimited depth, Bennett was able to play 60 percent of the team’s snaps in order to stay super fresh to rush the passer late. This year, due to injuries, he’s playing almost 90 percent of the team’s snaps, and he still was fresh enough late to blow up Eddie Lacy on three straight runs late, where a first down meant the season was over. Black Santa never stops giving gifts.

• And finally, the most insufferable way to end this week’s coverage is with an absurd request. We here at The Stranger do not have a press pass for the Super Bowl as you had to request one in November and we weren’t going to be the assholes who jinxed the Seahawks making the Super Bowl. And for me to buy a ticket for a few thousand dollars on the secondary market and to not be able to even interview the players was an expense deemed, “come on, we’re a free newspaper.” That said, if you have a cheap/free ticket to the Super Bowl you want to give us (and by us, I mean me), please contact me on Twitter (@spikefriedman) or the editors here at The Stranger. I will get down to Arizona and use it. That’s my promise to you. I will watch the Super Bowl.

• And if not? See you guys at Pike and 10th late on February 1st. I’ll bring the BeastMode OG, you bring the yelling.

*To be clear, I want to go to Phoenix.