Top 5 favorite Super Bowl Opening Night tweets

I watched all three hours of Super Bowl Opening Night on NFL Network on Monday, then I went to social media to see what I wanted to see again and what I didn’t see as the Carolina Panthers and Denver Broncos met the media in San Jose, Calif., days before the Golden Anniversary Game in Santa Clara.

There was a lot I wanted to see again and a lot I never saw. I couldn’t get to everything, so I will share with you the Top 5 things I found on Twitter carrying the hashtag #SBOpeningNight.

It was a historic night for the NFL because it was the first time the league has staged Super Bowl Opening Night after all the years of Tuesday morning Super Bowl Media Days. It was a night well spent. An hour after the show, I started working on this Top 5.

1. Panthers cornerback Josh Norman in a video clip from his interview with NFL Network analyst and Pro Football Hall of Famer Deion Sanders.

The Norman-Sanders interview was by far my favorite of the night. It featured an exchange about New York Giants wide receiver Odell Beckham Jr., who took fighting to an extreme in a combative daylong matchup with the trash-talking Norman in the Panthers’ 38-35 victory against the Giants in December.

You can read all about the interview at foxsports.com.

You can go to sports.yahoo.com for a longer clip from the interview.

James Parziale, the writer of the foxsports.com story, said:

Norman explained that he does indeed enjoy jawing with receivers, but feels like he got a bad rep after the Beckham scuffles.

2. A Broncos beat reporter from a small Rocky Mountain outpost?


3. Actor and comedian J.B. Smoove was a credentialed member of the media.

4. Miss Universe was also a credentialed member of the media. Pia Alonzo Wurtzbach of the Philippines was reporting for “Inside Edition.”

5. A kid reporter talks to Panthers quarterback Cam Newton.

Written by Billy Joe Jessup

Billy Joe Jessup, 66, is a Mississippi good old boy who saw himself as the Southern Richard Meltzer back in 1974 and 1975. Jessup wrote two satiric sports articles for the rock music magazine Zoo World when he was in his early 20s, but ZW rejected his third article, killing his confidence so much that he battled writer's block for more than four decades until his Guy Hut breakthrough in March 2018.