It is not very often that we see a game with such magnitude have such a wide variance to the size of the predictions being made on it. At FanYard, we have people picking the Patriots to win from anywhere from a safety to over 30 points. On the New York side of the ball, no one is predicting a 30-point romp over New England, but some are going as high as a ten-point upset victory. That is more than a 40-point swing for Super Bowl predictions.
Why such a wide swing of point predictions for this game at the awesome University of Phoenix Stadium (above), which normally houses the Arizona Cardinals? Well, there are obviously a certain segment of American society that will always pick against the Patriots, as they have come to think of them as some sort of Evil Empire to rival that of the New York Yankees of baseball. Which seems kind of a stretch to me, as the Patriots do not overpay, nor do they fill their roster up with every high-priced free agent that comes along. Nor do they trace away huge chunks of their future picks for a small number of players, knowing they will simply open up the purse strings to make up for it at a later date.
People always need something to hate, and teams that approach the pinnacle of what can be done in their particular sports always attract cynics and others who just need that bit of anger in their lives in order to feel more fulfilled. New England had its share of haters long before the whole, sordid spying mess that some have come to rally around as such an injustice that they feel the need to spout off everywhere and anywhere that people will listen, just hoping to find a connection with someone out there; anyone.
It is human nature to feel the need to find a sticking point, which you can point out to show the moral superiority of yourself and/or your team, and there’s nothing wrong with it. Better to vent anger at something as meaningless - in the broader sense of the world - as a game than to have people actually hating each other. Maybe it is the best thing about sports - it gives people an arena into which they may vent very real frustrations with life without causing anyone any real harm. Where would we be as a society if people did not have this forum for release?
Some might argue that the advent of sports was a major stepping-stone in bringing the hunter-gatherers together from small groups into bigger groups with a connection that helped fuel the onset of civilization as we have come to know it.
The Romans were acutely aware of this and organized sports were instituted across the Holy Roman Empire as both a way to appease the public with some entertainment for the taxes they had to pay and as a means to bond citizens of one region into a mutual feeling of community versus the citizens of other regions. While we have all heard of and the Coliseum, there were hundreds, if not thousands, of smaller sporting arenas ( pic: Roman Coliseum in El Jem, Tunisia) that predate the building of the mammoth Coliseum dotting the wide swaths of land ruled by Roman hands.
Much of the real and terrible violence that use to be a part of sports has now disappeared from much of the world’s arenas. In its place, we have ‘civilized’ sports to the point that the rule book on what I see as the penultimate sport, gridiron football as personified by the NFL, is over 200 pages long and reads like a law manual. There are so many rules that even the people hired to know them and enforce them on field sometimes have to be reminded of certain clauses.
Thankfully, even with all the rules we have made, no matter how far things go, we will always be able to predict outcomes in advance, regardless of how outlandish out predictions may seem to some. And, we will always be able to choose the teams we love, without having to explain our reasoning to anyone. We will also be able to hate other teams as much as we want. It is what makes us love the game…and keeps us human.
My favorite Super Bowl prediction is that the outcome will not convince any Patriots haters to start loving the team.
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