If you’ve watched any NFL preseason game this year (and we pray that you haven’t — they’re worse than ever), you’ll have noticed the 50-yard marker on both sides of the field are painted gold instead of the usual white. What’s the deal with that? Is it the NFL boasting about its riches? Did Dan Snyder successfully petition the NFL to get half the Redskins’ team colors onto every field? Is this the start of Roger Goodell’s Scrooge McDuck phase, obviously culminating in this?

No, no and no. The reason all 50-yard lines are gold is because the NFL will have its 50th Super Bowl this February and since the league is actually writing out the arabic numerals for the game (Super Bowl 50) instead of the usual Roman numerals (goodbye, far cooler Super Bowl L), it’s using every opportunity to remind people of this, because nobody self-promotes like the NFL. That’s why were stuck with gold-painted 50-yard markers for the entire season, though why they didn’t go for the gusto and paint the whole line gold, I don’t understand.

(USA TODAY Sports Images)

So there’s the reason for that, but let’s talk about this Super Bowl 50 for a moment. Someone made this point on Twitter and I apologize that I can’t remember, nor find, who it was, but the gist was this: The NFL is basically whitewashing its pre-Super Bowl history. All it wants fans to care about is the Super Bowl era, not the decades that came before it. While other sports celebrate their early years, the NFL encourages fans to forget about them. People in Cleveland and Philadelphia lament that their teams have never won a title, yet they have — multiple ones! Cleveland has four NFL titles (1950, 1954, 1955 and 1964), while the Eagles own three (1948, 1949, 1960). Yeah, the Cubs haven’t won a World Series in 117 years, but they’ll be damned if they’re going to take down that 1908 World Series pennant.

The merger with the AFL was a seminal event in the history of the NFL and changed the game forever, so it’s natural that the AFL-NFL Championship, later called the Super Bowl, would be a good starting point for a new era of the NFL. It doesn’t mean the other era didn’t happen though. Can you imagine if baseball ignored everything before 1966? The NFL acknowledges pre-Super Bowl stars such as Jim Brown, but he’s one of the few. In most cases, it’s like the league began on Jan. 15, 1967 (the day of Super Bowl I), even though the Game of the Century was in 1958.

(AP)

But that’s not what we’re talking about. We’re talking about the NFL slathering everything in gold for Super Bowl 50. It’s too bad the NFL didn’t start celebrating Super Bowl anniversaries with tradition earlier. Having a wooden 50-yard line in the year of Super Bowl V would have been great, just as dressing the players in ruby slippers for Super Bowl XL would have been too.