Sometimes readers need a lighter column, one that diverts them for a wee while from our current political messes.  No one wants to dwell endlessly on the fact Australia’s economic performance is the worst in the OECD over the last decade. Or look overly long at our GDP per capita, which has declined in nine of the last thirteen quarters. Or ponder our woeful productivity numbers. Of course, when Team Albo artificially inflates jobs numbers by hiring public servants with an unchecked abandon you can be sure they will lower, not increase, Australia’s productivity. And certainly no one applauds our world’s-highest per capita immigration numbers. Do you know what this flood of people correlates with near perfectly? Rising housing and rental costs. Canada under lefty Mark Carney faces a real opposition up there, an actual conservative named Pierre Poilievre, and because of that Carney has slashed Canada’s second-highest-to-us mass immigration intake. This has already seen rents go down. Putting all of the above more succinctly, Australia has suffered the biggest drop in living standards in the developed world while tearing asunder our social fabric.

Then there are the frontal assaults on free speech in this country. There is the dire state of the Liberal party which hasn’t been remotely conservative in any way since defenestrating Tony Abbott. Lefty or cowardly Liberal leaders since then (most definitely including you, ScoMo and Dutts) have listened to an advisor caste that insists on a small target, ‘park yourself a centimetre to the right of Labor, even as they move left at warp speed eight’ approach that wholly excludes upholding the values of freedom, small government, and low taxes and spending. As a result, the polls right now are dire for the Libs and, boy oh boy, do they deserve to be obliterated. (At the time of writing there has yet to be a spill but surely Sussan Ley and the polls she has induced will see her imminent removal. But it could be too late. Certainly I am now onboard with One Nation and big-time disruption to the woeful ruling consensus.)

Oh, and there is our failed multiculturalism, our catering to Islamic sensibilities, our near-invisible defence capabilities, our activist top judges, our genuflecting before DEI affirmative action idiocies, our universities, wholly captured by the left with nearly no conservative academics remaining, busy spouting endless ‘acknowledgements to country’. The list goes on and on.

Yes, we can turn things around. But it will be brutally tough and, yes, it may require the destruction of the once-great Liberal party and a mass migration of conservative voters to One Nation. Meantime, however, how about a bit of a diversion? And nothing is more diverting for me than sports – because sports are the ultimate meritocracy.  The goal is winning and no good coach cares about your race, how rich or poor your family, or any DEI balance on the team. They care about how good you are. I’ve played competitive sports most of my life and I love them.

So let me alert readers to the looming Super Bowl, one of the biggest annual sporting events on the planet. In North America (well, the US and Canada), NFL football is the king of sports. And the queen. And all the princes and princesses too. If you look at the hundred most-watched TV shows of 2025 you will see that over 85 of them were NFL football games, the top being last year’s Super Bowl. Rounding off the other top shows were a bunch of US college football games and a very few other shows. The dominance of NFL football in the US is all-conquering. This coming weekend’s Super Bowl game is expected to surpass last season’s average viewership of 128 million (it peaked at just under 140 million). Sure, the soccer World Cup final will get eight or nine times more watchers globally. But in the US and Canada, the NFL is massively more popular than soccer. Heck, when I was growing up in Toronto any boy playing soccer after the age of about twelve might as well have been enrolled in ballet. It was ice hockey, American-style football and basketball. That has changed with mass immigration, true. But the NFL still dominates. It can charge advertisers whatever it wants. The cost of a short Super Bowl TV commercial is astronomical.

Let me also say that for the last decade or so my wife and I have had the Fox Sports package that includes ESPN. Yes, I like to watch PGA golf and rugby and cricket (talk about assimilation!) and the odd baseball game.

But my favourite TV sport is the NFL. During the season I will get up about 4 a.m. on a Monday to watch live the Sunday-afternoon-in-the-US games. And yes, compared to rugby, the NFL games are slow. Play stops with every tackle. You can think of it as part Adam Smith’s specialisation of labour – players specialise in highly particular roles, meaning that some Aussie AFL player who will punt the ball maybe twice a game, but do it better than anyone else, will be lured across and paid over a million US a year. Then throw in a huge coaching staff whose job is to out-think the other coaching staff at each break of play because they can send in plays to the offence and the defence. The athletes are unbelievable. Take a linebacker, one of the hardest defensive roles. These guys have Olympic speed over 40 yards and can bench-press a house. And before you laugh at all the protective equipment they wear it is because so many get hurt each season. Why? Because unlike most all other contact sports in the NFL a player can get hit who doesn’t have the ball.  There is blocking for the ball runner. And hitting non-ball carriers. The most important position is that of quarterback and over a quarter of them will not make it through a 17-game season. (And this is with rule changes that give quarterbacks much more protection than they had a couple of decades ago.) Oh, and the best of those quarterbacks now earn over US$50 million a year. They also have high IQs because they run complicated stop-and-start offences and before the snap, starting a new play, these quarterbacks have a second or two to assess what the defence is doing and make a series of complicated choices.

Then there is American sports’ most ruthless, enforced salary cap that ensures all teams have the same resources. The NFL brags that any of its 32 teams can win any year – it’s not the English Premier League or professional baseball where a top few teams have infinitely more resources. Nope, NFL teams share equally all TV revenue. It’s competitive equality only undone by supremely good coaching or personnel choices.

Anyway, despite all my teams bombing out this year I’ll be watching this year’s game along with over 130 million Americans (plus a huge number of Canadians and pockets of fans around the rest of the world).

Enjoy! It’ll take your mind off how our political caste these past couple of decades have driven Australia down the road to perdition.