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The title of this post shouldn’t be anything surprising to any of you, but I thought it was the most appropriate way to sum it all up. This past week, word came out that the New York Yankees’ Alex Rodriguez had come up positive for an “on the down low” steroids test that baseball ran back in 2003, when he was with the Texas Rangers. Upon hearing the news, I was actually a lot less surprised than I’m happy with – and I am guessing I’m not the only one, based on what talk radio has sounded like overnight.

This morning, I was listening to Richard Neer on WFAN, and he downplayed some of the “negative” news that had been buzzing around town with the release of former Yankee manager Joe Torre’s book, but said that wasn’t such great news. In fact, “devastating” was the word he used, I believe. I’ve gotta agree, unfortunately.

Unless some report comes forward saying that Rodriguez officially didn’t do steroids at any point, this interview with Katie Couric in 2007 is pretty damn harsh for public perception. Here’s the money lines that WFAN and others have been running all weekend:

“You never felt like, ‘This guy’s doing it, maybe I should look into this, too? He’s getting better numbers, playing better ball,’” Couric asked.

“I’ve never felt overmatched on the baseball field. I’ve always been a very strong, dominant position. And I felt that if I did my work as I’ve done since I was, you know, a rookie back in Seattle, I didn’t have a problem competing at any level. So, no,” he replied.

Ugh.

I hate to get all “childhood” cheesy on you, but I’m going to. Recently, my mom had told my fiancee that she’d dug up this big box of baseball cards (the ones that’ve survived) and wanted to give them to me (read: get them out of her house), and the first thing that cropped into my head was all the Mark McGwires, Jose Cansecos, and so on that would be in there for me to pretty much do nothing with. For those of you who’ve collected baseball cards, you can probably relate to the sentiment I’d love to describe here. For the rest of you, it’s basically like a big mental groan. With McGwire probably not making it into the Hall of Fame anytime soon, and he’s not alone. When I was a kid, or hell, seven or eight years ago, I never would have thought I’d see the day when Roger Clemens, Barry Bonds, McGwire, Rafael Palmeiro, and a host of others would be unwanted (though Olney’s use of “persona non grata” is, frankly, much more appropriate than “unwanted”) at MLB clubhouses or be almost laughed at when considered for baseball’s vaunted Hall of Fame.

But as ESPN’s Buster Olney says in the above-linked story, “this is a scarlet letter that really will never go away.” And it sucks. I hate to say it was a joke to think that the Yankees would have landed Alex Rodriguez and jam him into the left side of the infielder with future-HOFer Derek Jeter, whom I got to see in his rookie season in 1995 before he was “Derek Jeter” that we all know and (if you’re a Yankee fan, at least) love, but it was. I had gone to a game against Texas with a good friend, and we were joking about the craziness of free agency wins for the team, and how funny it would be if Rodriguez joined the team. I really never thought it would actually ever happen. And now, I can’t say it was the good moved that it’s felt like over the last few years, let alone to what it does for the waiting (because that’s what we’re going to do now) on the rest of the people on that list of 104 MLB players that tested positive for steroids during that fateful year of 2003.

SI’s John Heyman, who has been all over this, has more facts in a row than I think we’re all comfortable with knowing, has some great points about the list and how union COO Gene Orza is at the core of this situation:

All 104 players who tested positive were now at risk.

“He wouldn’t give up the BALCO names,” one baseball person said of Orza, “so instead, [the federal government] got every name.”

Richard Neer mentioned the fact that all of us were pretty confident that Alex Rodriguez – cleanly – would probably break some of the bigger records in baseball, including the home run crown that Barry Bonds holds right now, and I’ve gotta say that instead of us having something positive to look forward to in the next 5,10,15 years, we’ve got 5,10,15 years of new questions and frustrations to sit through. And that sucks.

A couple of days ago, I received my daily AdAge newsletter, and it included a link to this survey, which asked about whether or not pre-Super Bowl buzz for advertisements during the game was down. After seeing it, I immediately pinged Chris Thilk, and he responded with the same resounding (if anything can be resounding on IM) affirmative that I had thought in my own head. I’ve gotta say, it was strange to me that buzz had actually dropped down this year – and no, I’m not kidding.

The funny thing about marketing during a bad economic time is that you don’t stop doing it. Sure, you might make a point to make those dollars “go further” than they might have during a less risky time, but you still do it. Did NBC land some pretty good ads that cost millions of dollars to place during the game? Most certainly. Did anyone do a truly outrageous job of sharing those ads with bloggers and the public in advance of the game as they had done (with great success, if you ask me – and yes, I’m biased, having done this for a couple of years prior to this one) in years past? Nope, well that’s not totally true. I’d say the movie industry did a bang up job, but that’s about it.

Why would it work this way this year? My first inclination is that companies, especially some that had been heavily criticized for taking private jets to government hearings, for one, wanted to take a low(er) profile. Others, such as perennial USA Today Ad Meter winner Anheuser-Busch did indeed place their ads online, but I certainly didn’t see the almost two weeks of buzz about specific ads that I’d seen the previous two years. Of course, I was super close to it as the aforementioned Mr. Thilk and I had been a part of the work surrounding ad previews for the company during the 2007 and 2008 Super Bowl seasons. Was A-B’s merger with InBev part of a change in strategy around the game? One industry executive Larry Novenstern, executive vp, director of national electronic media at Optimedia made such a suggestion that if it hasn’t started happening, it could in the future in a recent ADWEEK article.

Now again, I have some understanding of the “cost” – and I mean that in dollars and sense, along with time spent – of creating some buzz about your efforts around something like the Super Bowl, and in a time when you’re cutting back on other things, the fact of the matter is that most social media efforts continue to be relatively inexpensive compared to other public relations / marketing efforts. And, if during that same timeframe, you’re aware of possible criticism of your strategy changes and how shareholders might react (buying less ads sounds good at face value, but if the continued support through branding / advertising of major events were to add value or create a baseline for your brand’s worth in the community, sometimes those dollars saved might not pay off long term).

But what does it all mean? It’s not certainly as easy as just picking a brand or two and saying “howcome they didn’t get some branding?” It was just a couple of years ago that it was a GOAL to get people to talk about your whole ad, punchline and all, and now we’re not even generating buzz at all, until two or three days before the game? To me, it seems like such an easy mark to go after starting this discussion a couple weeks out. Two weeks out, the NFC/AFC championship games are finished, and there’s a whole week (some would argue two, even counting media week at the Super Bowl) of nothing but “my team is better than your team” on sports radio going on, especially within the football set. Why not take advantage of that?

I could go on with this post, but instead I’ll just stick to that last question – why not take advantage of that?

For the first time in a number of years, I might actually end up watching the Super Bowl, rather than sorta watching while typing furiously online to cover the ads in one place or another online – and I kinda like it. Of course, I’m sure I’ll have the laptop open because it’s fun to watch the buzz over things, but I might just save my online time for after the game, to discuss a few things.

One of the things I’m definitely digging on is the batch of movie trailers that are going to run. It’s not the “most” in any game, but it’s certainly a lot, and I think a number of these flicks will pull big numbers this year. Either way, checking them out on a 50″ plasma is going to make me happy.

Enjoy your Super Bowl this year, all, and don’t blog too much.