Michael Jordan Enters the GOAT Discussion for... Sunday Night Football ?
Over the weekend, NBC rolled out a promo for next week's Sunday Night Football game between the New England Patriots and the Green Bay Packers, which will feature two of the best quarterbacks of all time, Tom Brady and Aaron Rodgers. They both happen to wear the same jersey number, and that's the setup for a wink-wink ad starring ... Michael Jordan. Take it away, MJ:
The joke is that Jordan also shared a jersey number with a legend, in this case LeBron James, who most basketball fans agree is at least in the conversation for GOAT. (And for the record: This is a good commercial! It's funny! For about 20 seconds you actually wonder if Jordan bought airtime to challenge LeBron to a game of one-on-one! Which is not exactly an impossible scenario.)
So why, exactly, is Michael Jordan appearing in an NFL commercial? Ad Week provided the alleged answer.
Because the former NBA star is close with NBC Sports president of programming, Jon Miller, the company was able to successfully pitch him on the idea.
A few hours after the promo dropped, King James weighed in with a tweet:
Again: A good tweet! Also funny!
Let's go further down the rabbit hole—a Bugs Bunny rabbit hole, if you will. Based on all the evidence (a few tweets), I have developed a completely unfounded theory: this is some sort of Space Jam 2 setup.
Now, LeBron could win the next six titles with a team full of dogs who failed their Air Bud audition and Jordan would still issue a series of expletives while chewing on a Cuban cigar if you even dared to raise the suggestion that he's been surpassed. But it's in his interest to play nice for some sort of CGI'd spot where he catches an alley-oop from LeBron while Daffy Duck spits wildly and Elmer Fudd says something problematic. The original Space Jam—and this is honest-to-goodness true—grossed more money than any other basketball movie in history. Yes, more than White Men Can't Jump. And Hoosiers. And Coach Carter. And Love & Basketball. Jordan, of course, is worth $1.7 billion dollars. That said, one thing extremely, unfathomably rich people enjoy doing is making even more unseemly amounts of money when a golden opportunity presents itself. Jordan and his shoe brand get a chance to appeal to a youth-heavy audience who only knows him as the creaky old guy who played for the Wizards.
This isn't just totally speculation, for the record:
Whatever the reason for Jordan's decidedly unusual NFL promo appearance, he ought to fess up quickly, or else he'll be rhetorically struck down by the full fire and fury of Skip Bayless.
A fate truly worse than death, and being forced to live out your days playing basketball for tourists at Moron Mountain.
