On Pro Football
By JOHN BRANCH
PHOENIX — Most of what makes the setting of this Super Bowl different from all the rest is a climbing wall meant to evoke the Grand Canyon. In a downtown parking lot, visible from the raised set of the N.F.L. Network and near a giant light-up cutout of letters reading XLIX, the wall, made of fake rock, has an enormous video screen in the middle that plays commercials.
The wall appears to make kids happy, but its higher, unintended purpose is as metaphor. It is artificial and audacious and demands attention just by existing.
That fits Super Bowl week.
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In the end, of course, the Super Bowl is a television event, and everything preceding it is merely meant to fill the void before the game. The people milling around downtown are not the primary audience. There will be only about 60,000 at Sunday’s game, but more than 100 million watching from home.
For decades, the games themselves rarely seemed to match the hype that preceded them. But for the past dozen years or so, the league has been blessed with an unusual array of crazy, competitive games highlighted by some of the Super Bowl’s greatest plays.
You might remember the catches of David Tyree, Santonio Holmes and Mario Manningham, the kicks by Adam Vinatieri, the goal-line stand of the Baltimore Ravens.
You probably do not remember where those games were held. But you can be sure that none of them had a rock wall like the one here in Charlotte.
A version of this article appears in print on February 1, 2015, on page SP1 of the New York edition with the headline: At Age XLIX, Outsize Event Increasingly Feels Generic . Order Reprints| Today’s Paper|Subscribe
