We Haven't Learned A Thing

If there's one lesson we should all have learned from the Super Bowl it is that we don't learn any lessons in sports.

Consider this: the world of football analysts, which bubbles over like soup in an uncovered blender, spent 24 hours-a-day for two full weeks analyzing a single contest. They scrutinized each player and coach down to the mitochondria in his left elbow hair follicles. They tracked the weather with the ferocity of a meteorologist in the path of a hurricane. They investigated the emotional state of the competitors like Karl Jung on amphetamines. They compared and contrasted as profoundly as a comparative literature dissertation. They considered every possible variable in this upcoming game, discussed them interminably, examined months of tape and then boldly predicted absolutely nothing like the ultimate outcome.

Seriously, I am not aware of a single "expert" who suggested before the Super Bowl that Denver didn't belong on the field with Seattle. (Perhaps there was one or two, but they were they outlyingest outliers, and probably reside in the Pacific Northwest.) Although many picked Seattle to win, they were still wrong, because none of them proposed a blowout unworthy of your viewing time.

Football analysts aren't stupid, lazy or naive. They are simply guilty of reckless disregard of an obvious truth -- that anything can happen in one game that makes analysis of past games utterly irrelevant. And the consuming public of this analysis -- i.e., sports fans -- join them in that negligence. We all conspire to ignore a fact proven repeatedly, that tiny advantages, even if piled up high, even if all accruing to one contestant and not the other, even if beyond debate, convey only tiny advantage, which can be completely overwhelmed in the heat of battle.

Think about baseball playoffs. We see the same kinds of analysis built on houses of sand and fog -- one team has home field advantage (a 55% edge in one game if and only if the teams are tied after six); one team's top two starters are superior (over the course of the season, though perhaps not over the next two starts); one team has more experience (which has been demonstrated repeatedly not to matter one iota of a scintilla of a bit); or any other matter of considerations that reasonable people could agree amount to an amoeba on a whale's back.

We go through this annually with clock-like regularity, as if stuck in an endless loop we can't escape. No one ever reminds the ESPN host that he's ignoring history and wasting his breath.

If the games were predictable they would be . . . the early rounds of the NBA playoffs. A big yawnfest. Thankfully, they're full of surprises.

When asked, in the weeks leading up, who would win the Super Bowl, the only correct answer was, "the team that scores more points." Any other answer was, well, pointless.