As the Super Bowl approaches, I find myself becoming more and more apathetic toward the whole enervating spectacle the National Football League and major television networks love to throw at us in lieu of an actual football game.
Maybe it’s because I’ll be locked in the Guardian office on Super Bowl Sunday or because neither of the Bay Area teams even came close to the championship. Or maybe it’s because this year’s Super Bowl promises to be just plain boring.
The St. Louis Rams have all the personality and creativity of a machine. Their game plan consists of a Warner quick slant to Bruce or Holt or Faulk or one of their other track-star receivers, then outrunning the defense for a touchdown. Then the defense creates a turnover and returns it for a touchdown.
Occasionally they do like to mix it up and instead hand the ball to Faulk and let him run over, around, through and past the opposing defense.
What’s perhaps the most depressing is that this strategy will most likely earn the team its second set of Super Bowl rings.
The Patriots are another story. They definitely have character. They’re scrappy; they play hard; they have two capable quarterbacks, and they’re riding an incredible hot-streak after starting the season 5-4. They’re also going to get killed.
But when they do, it won’t be due to lack of support. Lately, I’ve been asking everyone who they’re rooting for on Sunday.
The majority of the responses favor New England and, when pressed to give reasons for that choice, the standard response was, “”Because they’re the underdogs … you gotta root for the ‘dogs, man.””
And this all-too-common attitude made me think: Why exactly do you have to root for the underdog? What is it about them? When you think about it, supporting a team that’s picked to lose is sheer folly; it’s hopeless heartbreak for sports fans just waiting to happen.
Yet you can’t really shake that feeling, that nagging itch in the corner of your brain whispering that maybe they can pull it off. Maybe this time it’ll be different. Maybe this time heart and determination will finally beat overpowering skill.
It’s so interesting, the psychology of the sport and the culture that brought about this mindset.
Football has traditionally been the working man’s game, the get-down-and-dirty, in-your-face game, the knee-buckling, hard-hitting, expletive-laden sport. It is a brutally simplistic contest in which you lace up your shoes and try to pound your opponent for the next few hours.
So naturally the masses will identify with lesser-known teams, the lower-tier teams that don’t have free-spending owners to buy their way to the top of the league. By rooting for these “”middle-class”” teams, the average Joe can vicariously triumph over society’s elite through his champion.
Along with this socioeconomic class element, is the belief, the need to believe in the sports/life metaphor. This belief has been prevalent in society since the dawn of sports, and keeps working to perpetuate itself.
Before the season even started, the Rams were picked to win the Super Bowl. They have the chance to do that Sunday.
That this could be predicted doesn’t settle well in the sporting world. Life is unpredictable, and sports should be too. When the world of sports is to the point when it can be predicted, it ceases to become a magical world and instead is relegated to the equivalent of a boring board game to be discarded after it is played out.
I dearly hope the Rams do not win on Sunday, for if they do, football and thus sports will lose its equalizing uncertainty. If you can predict a winner before the race even starts, then what’s the point of the race?