By Debbie Schlussel

Where is Marshawn Lynch’s father? You can probably guess the answer, since it’s sooooo typical in today’s NFL. He’s absent and always has been. And he’s serving his latest prison sentence. This time it’s a 24-year stay in the big house.

So, now, the Super Bowl is over, and the New England Patriots won. And Lynch’s Seattle Seahawks weren’t victorious. But Lynch, the Seahawks running back who answered all media questions with, “I’m just here so I won’t get fined,” lost something far more important. Like many NFL players today, he had no father in his life. His father was an absentee sperm donor and drug addict who was in and out of prison doing time for crimes he committed to get drug money. Sadly, this is the norm in Black America and quickly becoming more and more the norm in White America, which slavishly follows the trends in the hip-hop culture, constantly pimped in the media and pop culture as the thing to do. It’s sad, and it’s taking a tremendous negative toll on America in every aspect.

Marshawn Lynch is playing himself in a movie about his life, titled “Family First the Marshawn Lynch Story,” and a list of roles to featured in the film has a noticeable omission. There is no father. Lynch’s dad, Maurice Sapp, is serving a 24-year sentence for burglary and been convicted six times, twice on felonies — grand theft and burglary — according to records reviewed by USA TODAY Sports. He is absent from the movie that’s in post production, just as he was absent from much of Lynch’s life. . . .

Lynch and Sapp last spoke by phone a few months ago. This week Sapp called USA TODAY Sports from Tallahatchie County Correctional Facility in Tutwiler, Miss., used by California because of its overcrowded prisons. He declined to comment and referred questions to [his sister Bernice] Feaster, who said she speaks frequently to her 53-year-old brother. “He wants a better relationship with Marshawn, but he doesn’t want Marshawn to think he’s reaching out to him just because he’s a famous football player,” Feaster said. “That’s a sticky situation.”

The situation, according another of Lynch’s aunts, Sarah Bridges, has been strained since the separation of Sapp and Lynch’s mother, Delisa Lynch, in the early 1990s. They said their brother had begun to steal from Lynch’s mother to support his drug habit that led to criminal behavior. . . . Over the years, he was arrested on the charges including unlawful transportation, distribution and importation of marijuana; possession of narcotic paraphernalia; grand theft and burglary.

Feaster said although her brother was well liked and talented, he was notoriously unreliable — especially when he’d made plans with Lynch. She said she thinks that contributed to Lynch’s distrust of people. “I think that does have a part in it because Marshawn would be sitting there and he’d be anxious waiting on his dad,” Feaster said. “Sometimes his daddy would show up, and sometimes he wouldn’t.

I can’t even imagine what that would be like. I was lucky to have a great father who was very involved in my life. And the Super Bowl was full of ads about caring fathers (except for the strange Nissan ad featuring the old Harry Chapin ditty about an absentee dad).

But, again, sadly, America is being ripped apart by serial babydaddies and babymamas who don’t take responsibility to be in the lives of the children they produced.

And Marshawn Lynch is lucky that he succeeded and became a multi-millionaire. How long will his money last? Many of the kids of absentee dads repeat the cycle and they also spend money like it’s water. How many kids out of wedlock does Lynch have? So far, he’s supposedly child-free, though there is a rumor that his girlfriend is pregnant with his kid.

And there’s plenty of info on his legal troubles, including having his license revoked after he was involved in a hit and run accident, hitting a woman with his Porsche and leaving the scene. And he was arrested for driving under the influence in 2012. And he already throws oodles of money away on expensive, precious metal mouth grills a/k/a “grillz”, including one that is has a Seattle Seahawks theme.

In 2011, Lynch signed a four-year, $30 million contract. Ten years from now, will Marshawn Lynch still have any of the money he made in the NFL? If the answer is no, you can blame that in part on the culture in which he was brought up . . . and in which he wasn’t brought up with a dad in the picture.