INGLEWOOD, Calif. — Apologies in advance. Honestly. You know how awful our professional football teams are. And I know that you know how awful our professional football teams are. And if I can bring Ralph Kramden and Ed Norton into the conversation: You know that I know that you know how awful our professional football teams are. 

So you probably don’t want another reason to be reminded how awful our professional football teams are. But I’m going to do it anyway. Again, sorry. 

But I’m writing this from the corner of the end zone at SoFi Stadium which bore the Rams’ logo Sunday for Super Bowl LVI. I’m here after taking the nickel tour of both the outside of the stadium and the inside. And let me tell you a little something about SoFi Stadium. 

It’s magnificent. Honestly. It’s the first indoor-outdoor stadium ever built. There is an overhead scoreboard that is unlike any you’ve ever seen before, even that Texas-sized one at Jerry Jones’ palace in Arlington, Texas. The concessions are unlike anything you’ve ever seen in another sports facility. I’m honestly not sure how Rams and Chargers security personnel get people to leave here every week. 

“It is basically a 22-acre patio,” is how Rams COO Kevin Demoff described it a few years ago, when it had yet to jump off the blueprint and into real life. 

Here’s how I’d describe it: Disneyland for Football Fans. 

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And that brings us back to us, back to New York, back to East Rutherford, N.J., where MetLife Stadium sits in sleepy exile for another seven months. It’s hard to find new ways to describe just how awful, just how terrible, just how miserable, just how horrific MetLife Stadium is so let’s just recycle the old standbys. 

It’s an eyesore — it looks like a pile of Venetian blinds stacked high on top of one another. The concessions (and not just the odd medium-sized Pepsi buyback by the Giants’ suits) are redundant and basic. There is absolutely no sense of New York football history; in opting for neutrality since the Giants and Jets both own the joint, you have no idea where you are until you look at the field. 

(And you’ll notice I purposefully left out the unfair category of “weather,” because we’re the ones who choose to live in a place where we can — ahem — “enjoy the four seasons” and not someplace where it’s 80 degrees and sunny roughly 333 days a year.) 

Calling MetLife and SoFi by the same name — “football stadiums” — is like saying Jake and Elwood’s apartment in “Blues Brothers” and Tom Brady’s mansion on the water in Tampa/St. Pete are both “domiciles.” 

And, of course, it isn’t just SoFi. 

Every time a broadcast crew goes to Las Vegas’ new Allegiant Stadium it takes them till the middle of the first quarter to start play-by-play because they spend the first few minutes writing sonnets in real time about what an incredible place it is (the Super Bowl is there in two years). The past few years the Super Bowl has showcased new homes for the Falcons in Atlanta, the 49ers in Santa Clara and the Vikings in Minneapolis. 

MetLife Stadium was outdated five minutes after it opened. 

“We wanted a uniquely Los Angeles building,” Demoff said back in 2017. “You start with the fact that it is the world’s first indoor/outdoor stadium. We wanted to have weather protection so we could host every event under the sun, not only Super Bowls but the Grammys, the Academy Awards, concerts, everything you can imagine.” 

We will never understand quite why MetLife was built without a hat. The NFL did the Maras, Tisches and Johnsons a huge favor by awarding them Super Bowl XLVIII in 2014, and they somehow managed to escape (with less than 24 hours to spare) a massive weather issue. It is impossible to believe the game will return anytime soon, if ever. There will be no Final Fours, ever. There will never be a shot to be in a future college football championship rotation, ever. 

Ah, well. At least we don’t have to worry about going any more than we have to, the way poor Angelinos will for the next few years thanks to Matt Stafford and the Rams, Justin Herbert and the Chargers. You take the small wins where you can.