Well, yes.  This happened.

Yesterday was the first Sunday of the 2014-2015 NFL season, meaning the season began in earnest.  A dozen games, big HD screens a-plenty, hot wings, lagers, good fun, gooder friends, willful misspelling, these are all the types of things that lead to successful NFL Sundays; FYI: if I ever seem upset because of it, its because I can’t properly experience it.  That being said, I was raised a Dallas Cowboy fan (and thus will always be one) and for the past few years I’ve cheered the Seattle Seahawks (sometime around 2008, but the interest was spawned a few years before), so while I was unsurprisingly pleased on Thursday, I was unsurprisingly disappointed come Sunday.  Couldn’t hear the game, which was probably a blessing, and I stayed off social media, which was certainly a blessing, but between the 4:30 and 8:20 games I reclined and thought back on the fine tradition of football players who have gone into the world of music.

There’s Deion Sanders.

Well maybe “fine” isn’t the word.  Truth is you don’t pay attention to a football player for what they can do with musical tools.  You pay attention to how well they play, or how many points they afford you in your fantasy league.  You pay attention to the coaches and staff, marvelous at their prowess behind the clipboard or shunning their decisions when they put a safety in a punt return spot, or something like that.  Who cares that Deion Sanders is a musician?  No one!  Not even him, because that CD was awful.

But I live by a simple notion: when you win a Super Bowl, you can do whatever you want.  Back in 1985, the Chicago Bears took it a step further.  When you KNOW you’re going to win a Super Bowl, you might be seen as arrogant.  But when you do pull it off, it’s just a wonder to watch.  Thus we have the “Super Bowl Shuffle”.

If you haven’t heard of this before then don’t worry.  It came in 1985, which is before my time, and thus I assume before the time of a few people who follow this humble website.  It took a huge chunk of the Chicago Bears (nearly everyone, but notably absent was DE Dan Hampton, who said the song was arrogant) and divided them into three groups.  You had the band, the chorus crew, and the “singers”, who fell somewhere between the realms of singing and rapping.

You’d think a song like this would be terrible.  You’d think it would be the worst thing the NFL has ever done (next to screwing over Hasselback in the Super Bowl).  You’d be justified for thinking these things, but, critically and commercially, the “Super Bowl Shuffle” was a solid track.  Part of it is the campy appeal.  These guys aren’t musicians.  Many of the “singers” had no flow or sense of rhythm, the actual shufflers were a mixed bag of people who could and people who couldn’t, and I can’t verify it but I’m pretty sure none of the musicians outside of the drummer could actually play an instrument.  Thus you had the chorus, a squad of eight men in their deepest voices, chanting:

We are the Bears Shufflin’ Crew/Shufflin’ on down, doin’ it for you/We’re so bad we know we’re good/Blowin’ your mind like we knew we would.

You know we’re just struttin’ for fun/Struttin’ our stuff for everyone/We’re not here to start no trouble/We’re just here to do the Super Bowl Shuffle!

Arrogant indeed, but all around clean entertainment.  We get ten verses from ten distinct players, some funny, some off the beat, all of them entertaining, because I can only imagine Mike Ditka standing behind the cameras with his trademark scowl, getting equal parts upset and amused at the beautiful mess playing out before him.

This is rap at its most comical.  It isn’t comedy rap, but its old school, basic A-A-B-B-C-C-D-D rap, and there is a chuckle worthy novelty to hearing Walter Payton and Otis Wilson drop some bars.

To make this even more fun, it was Grammy nominated, for best R&B performance by a duo or group (we have to remember that hip-hop/rap didn’t come into the Grammy categories until 1989), though it lost to “Kiss” by Prince.

And there is no shame in losing anything to Prince.  One day I’ll go into why Prince might be the greatest human being to ever live, but until then just remember: it took PRINCE to beat the Chicago Bears off the field.  PRINCE.

Looking back on the history of music in the NFL, San Francisco did something similar a year before with a single they recorded, and they too won the Super Bowl that year.  Later in the 80’s they attempted to do it again.  They didn’t win the Super Bowl.  The Denver Broncos running back did something similar in 1977, and in 1978 they lost the Super Bowl.  There’s more to NFL music than Deion Sanders (praise the Lord) but none have been even as remotely successful as the Bears were.

I remember seeing Kicking and Screaming, that family film remake starring Will Ferrell and Robert Duvall, and asking myself why Mike Ditka was in that movie at all.  In one scene he showed off his Super Bowl rings and I immediately thought about the “Shuffle”.  When you win a Super Bowl, you can do what you want.  When you KNOW you’re going to win a Super Bowl, you can do anything and no one can judge.  The 1985-86 Chicago Bears might well be the greatest football team of all time by that logic.  They only lost twice that year: to Dan Marino’s Miami Dolphins, and to Prince.

Prince.

Your move, Belichick.