Gangly semi-jock Conan O’Brien shored up his sportsman bona fides just a bit last night with a new segment of his popular Clueless Gamer series, in which he and Super Bowl players Josh Norman (The Carolina Panthers) and Von Miller (The Denver Broncos) took turns playing id Software’s upcoming splatterfest Doom. As usual, O’Brien’s major interaction with the game was the variety of shocked and stunned faces he deployed, as Norman and Miller took turns indulging in the game’s over-the-top, chainsaw-heavy violence and gleeful, blood-soaked decapitations. (He also served wine.)
The sequence was actually a sequel to one that O’Brien and his team put together before the Super Bowl last year, when the Patriots’ Rob Gronkowski and the Seattle Seahawks’ Marshawn Lynch faced off in Mortal Kombat. Hence Lynch showing up halfway through the video, to offer moral support and toast “his two Africans”—a toast O’Brien sheepishly joins. In the end, though, the host pitted Norman and Miller against each other in an ultimately meaningless, needlessly violent competition, in which the final outcome was determined more through manipulation of the rules than actual skill. But hey, at least they got through it without anybody picking up a concussion.