The Super Bowl is Sunday.

Big deal.

Call this my annual Super Bowl rant. I go through this every year because people continue to ask me if I’m going to watch the annual event. For years it was the same thing with the Saints. As soon as people found out I was from Louisiana they’d start asking me about “my” Saints. It took me multiple statements of “I am not now, nor have I ever been, a Saints fan,” to stop the questions.

I guess I probably should watch the thing this year since both teams will have LSU alums, but I’m not going to succumb to temptation. I haven’t watched a Super Bowl in 27 years, and I won’t this time.

That last Super Bowl was in 1995 — a 55-17 (I believe) stomping of the San Diego Chargers by the San Francisco 49ers.

For those of you who are not familiar with my aversion to the Super Bowl, let me explain that I am a football fan. I love to watch college football, especially the SEC, and my phone and computer have several college football websites that I read over daily. I also enjoy the Canadian Football League with its expanded field, 12 men to a side and backs going in motion toward the line of scrimmage before the snap.

I do not, however, watch or enjoy the NFL. I haven’t watched professional football south of the Canadian border in several years. I got tired of the prima donnas, the overhyping of games and team owners hurting loyal fans by threatening to or moving to another city. I guess what really did it was when the late Bud Adams, then-owner of the Houston Oilers, packed the team up and moved to Nashville.

You see, I was an Oilers fan, and the move hurt. Growing up in the 60s, Houston was my AFL team; the Oilers were close to Baton Rouge, one of their first picks was Billy Cannon and we almost could watch them every week on NBC. We were Green Bay fans in the NFL but you couldn’t watch the Packers every week.

Another reason I stopped watching the NFL was the merger of the two leagues. In those early years when the upstart American Football League was making waves and there was always that question of which league was the best. The NFL had the better of it during the early Super Bowls until Joe Namath and the Jets beat the original Baltimore Colts. After some more AFL Super Bowl wins, the merger was not far behind.

Now, it’s just not the same. Back in the early days with two separate leagues, the Super Bowl meant something. Now the odds are good that the two teams competing for the Lombardi Trophy may have played each other during the year. There’s no mystery; they know each other too well.

So come Sunday, I’ll kick back in my recliner and watch movies or NCIS reruns with my wife or maybe put on a CD and read. But I won’t be watching that game.