Sunday afternoon’s NFC Wild Card game between the Bears and Saints is being broadcast on Nickelodeon, an NFL ploy to ensure its product has some future buyers in the pipeline. (Pity the kid whose introduction to football is the Chicago Bears.) Over the course of the game, America’s impressionable children have learned point values for different plays; the relative risks of going for it on fourth down (15-year-old announcer Gabby, who has apparently never watched a football game, seems like she'd be a better playcaller than Mike Vrabel); that Drew Brees and Taysom Hill are a “dynamic duo” akin to Spongebob and Patrick; and the definitions of various penalties, presented by Young Sheldon. They were also treated to a surprise vocabulary lesson courtesy of Cordarrelle Patterson, who very clearly yelled “What the fuck?” within earshot of the broadcast.
Hopefully, they were too busy voting for the "Nickelodeon Valuable Player" to notice. As of the fourth quarter, Mitch Trubisky, who had thrown zero touchdowns and was 10-for-18 for 107 yards, was leading the polls with 37 percent of the vote.
