I was thinking of a headline along the lines of “Not Missing Super Bowl Media Day,” but that could be misconstrued. As in, I didn’t miss it; I was there. When I meant “I am so not missing the mockery of a sham that is Media Day.”

Look at your local newspaper tomorrow morning. Or at espn.com right this minute. One or both will have a photo that gives at least a sense of the faux-journalistic mayhem that is Media Day. Generally dozens and dozens or hundreds of civilians holding up tape recorders with a player somewhere in the middle of that unholy scrum.

Man, do I hate Media Day.

I need to go back and figure out how many Super Bowls I covered. OK, wait a minute. I’ll pull up the list of SB final scores and see if I can figure this out. Excuse me a sec …

OK.  I think it’s 11 Super Bowls that I covered. It just seems like more because if you’ve covered one, you’ve covered them all. The schedule for the week before the game is always the same and has been since at least 1980, when I covered my first — SB XIV, Rams and Steelers, at the Rose Bowl. (Since then: SBs 17, 21, 22, 27, 29, 30, 31, 32, 37, 39, 42. Wait. That’s 12 Super Bowls. I forgot for a moment that I saw No. 39 in Jacksonville, the year my daughter Drew and I drove across I-10 and did a daily diary,  from Quartzite, Ciudad Juarez, San Antonio, New Orleans and Talahassee. I missed Media Day that year!)

The same stuff happens on the same days, at the same time, in the same ways. And it’s awful. Claustrophobic and overcrowded and meaningless.

But the worst of all the events if Media Day. Which I am capitalizing for no good reason. It ought to be lower case. Lower, lower case.

What is wrong with Media Day? So much to choose from.

–Too many journalists, not enough stars. Let’s say each team has a half-dozen guys the public is vaguely interested in. Well, those half-dozen guys are going to be surrounded by hundreds of reporters. The NFL can put the players on platforms with microphones (and does), but for a Peyton Manning the repertorial crowd will be so enormous that if you arrive late and are on the periphery — you can’t hear the cliches the star is mumbling because you’re physically closer to the speaker amplifying the mumblings from the next dumb jock over.

–Anyone can get in. Well, almost anyone. Anyone with the least significant possible Super Bowl credential. That includes TV crews by the dozens. Including clownish foreign TV crews. This is bad for print guys because TV crews require about five people, and they take up a lot of room around a dais and can conk you on the head when the camera guy turns around and the camera on his shoulder becomes a sort of suitcase-shaped billy club. The TV guys are barred from several of the other pointless Super Bowl media events. Such as the roundtables on Wednesday and Thursday. But at Media Day, the TV goofs are everywhere. (And your favorite local sports anchor? He looks like hell in real life; wrinkled, too tan and vaguely mummified.)

–The freaks. Every Media Day for three decades has had them. Not Serious Journalists who hope to parlay some sort of shtick into making themselves the story. Hence, David Letterman sends Biff Henderson. Someone else sends a 5-year-old. Or a man in a clown suit. A Mexican TV station sends a woman in a wedding dress who asks some player to marry her. The No. 8 sidebar guy for one of the hometown papers of the participating teams goes to as  many players as he can find and asks each one the same silly question. Something like, “if you were a tree, what type of tree would you be?” Except dumber than that. Again, if you have even a vague notion of trying to do real journalism here, the freaks make it even harder. Logistically, and because you realize that their unprofessionalism gets all over everyone, leaving a sort of stink of phoniness on your clothes that persists for days.

–The crowd. Did I mention the crowd? The NFL credentials far too many people, and every single one of them goes to Media Day. They arrive in 50 buses, and then swarm into the stadium. I’m sure more than one player fears for his life when he sees that mob streaming down to the field like fat guys who have just spotted a buffet. You really do not want to be in that mob. Because you then are just another cog in a mob. Which is not what most of us got into this for. The cog thing.

–The players becoming part of Media Day. In the past decade, many of the guys who won’t get much attention bring their own video recorders and take pictures of guys taking pictures. To have something to do, as often as not. And then someone takes a picture of the guy taping the people asking questions, and then it becomes a sort of media version of nesting dolls — one inside the next inside the next inside the next …

–The same story lines. The Guy Who No One Talked To. The Third String Quarterback. The Shortest Guy. The Fattest Guy. The story on the Weird Journalists. The story on the Dumbest Question. I have read them all about XL times. There are no fresh ideas at Media Day. None.

–All the other annoying stuff. Having to get up early for a meaningless event. The bus rides. The same breakfast between the first team being on the field and the second team being on the field. The bus ride back, and the realization that you have nothing of significance. Of course. Just one quote from 25 guys because you never got close enough to any player to ask a question, and nobody was saying anything interesting anyway, so you just kept moving and ended up talking to other reporters you know and complaining about how horrible Media Day is … and that was worth half your day? It annoys me even to think about it.

So, for sure,  I am so not missing Media Day … even as I miss it. Won’t be popping over from Abu Dhabi for that.