Two good non-Super Bowl Super Bowl articles

Here are a couple non-sports stories that ran in the NYT this week in lead up to the Super Bowl. Good example of a paper using a news peg to tell undertold stories. Not sure if this is a good or bad thing--shouldn't we be reading stuff like this even if the NYG aren't in the Super Bowl?

For Just a Few Dollars, a Big TV and Years of Debt: Rent-a-Centers using the event of the SB to sell TVs at usurious interest rates to low income Giants fans. My dad tells a story about how he bought our first modern big television after the Giants beat the 49ers en route to SB XXI -- if we were poor, he probably would have been tempted by this...

If this were set up as a loan, the interest rate would be 71 percent and illegal under the usury laws. But this deal is called “rent to own.” In all other particulars, it is much like a subprime mortgage for pull-out sofas and television sets.

In the Town Where the Giants Play, a Sense of Being Overlooked Short article on East Rutherford, a struggling post-industrial town where the Giants (and Jets) play. More of a culture piece (and goes into some silliness on NYC-East Rutherford divide), but has some good stuff on the importance of the stadium as tax revenue for the town.