If those of you have not been to a Super Bowl as a journalist or a fan … this may not come as a newsflash:

It can be pretty dreary. And shockingly expensive.

If you’ve done one SB in person, that’s probably enough. It is so much better to watch on TV. I promise you. Fans not sitting in corporate suites are abused, and journalists don’t get even a morsel of information that they don’t have to share with every accredited person in the place.

Meanwhile, in this column for the Washington Post,  Sally Jenkins appears to have maxed out on the conspicuous consumption of the event. A column which could have been written a couple of decades ago, but this is when she snapped, and she did a good job of rounding up some of the particularly obscene specifics of Super XLV.

She has it right, of course.  The Super Bowl, up close, is just wrong on a lot of levels. Even in the context of the wealthiest nation on Earth. It is so far over the top …

But it’s been that way for a long, long time. Way back before the groundbreaking for Cowboys Stadium.

The Commissioner’s Party, which happens on Friday night, and to which many sports journalists were invited until the past decade … has been going on nearly from the start, and I went to enough of those to be both fascinated and repelled by it. You know, all the shellfish you can eat, all the alcohol you can absorb, four or five themed eateries inside some huge convention center with 5,000 of your best friends … maybe that really isn’t a good thing.

I’m not sure journalists really know what goes on at the big Friday party anymore — they have over the past decade been shunted off to their own, NFL-sponsored party which is, I believe, on Wednesday night. A sad affair, but not cheap. Food and drink, sure. But how cool can it be when the only people there are from the media?

The Super Bowl has suffered from gigantism for at least 30 years. It’s too much of everything. Certainly too much to process, and too much to do a good job as a reporter. For fans, it’s a week-long New Year’s Eve party, and doesn’t that sound like a really bad idea?

So, anyway, one more journo reaches the “gag me” threshold. That should be just about all of them now.