Let the Silly Season Begin!

Now that the wonderful college football season has ended with my home state's flagship university atop the mountain, the sports world turns its full attention to the NFL.

Having narrowed down the field to the final two, woe is us.

We are now in the middle stages of the interminable Stupid Bowl run-up, during which analysts throw every possibility against the wall in their aggregate effort to demonstrate their collective ignorance about how the game will play out. Primarily, they will wax in a continuous loop for a fortnight about the contestants' past performances, which we already know will have little bearing on the contest. 

Indeed, one of the two combatants is legendary for their weekly overhauls that render all that came before as credible as a presidential tweet.

The dreariness will not end there. Once Disneyland gets its annual plug and the postmortems are rung out a week later, we will be subjected to a sports universe whiling away the next several months obsessing about NBA regular season and early playoff irrelevancies, as if they will have any effect on the inevitable Cleveland-Golden State championship. You will hear more about who finishes seventh in the West -- some mediocre outfit of no consequence -- than about global poverty.

(During this time, the preliminary NHL season will conclude, and its months of playoffs will drag on, but you don't have to worry about sports media wasting any airtime on the sport. If you want to see the games, try the Elbonian Music channel, number 657 on your satellite package.)

Thankfully, the college hoops season will offer a consequential interregnum in February and March. Because it actually does matter to fans, alumni and locals who emerges victorious from some third rate conference and gets to go dancing against some big conference bully, the league playoffs will inspire huge interest around the nation. And unlike the early months of the NBA playoffs, round one and two (the real rounds one and two, not the Dayton-based play-in games euphemistically called Round 1) will actually matter, and provide noteworthy drama, as upsets provide some smaller conference teams and their school communities with their own Super Bowl moments.

The Final Four kicks off in Phoenix just as the Major League Baseball season -- thank God! -- finally resumes in April. It's always darkest before the dawn.

Super Bowl Sidebar

Psst. Wanna make a quick buck? Bet on tomorrow's Stupid Bowl.

I don't know who's going to win or by how much. In fact, that's the point: no one does. That's why you should make my bet.

Have you ever listened to football analysts? They are pigskin encyclopedias. They are strategic savants. They can tell you about dime packages and zone blitzes and all manner of esoterica. But they are no better at predicting game results than a blind monkey with a three-sided coin. They are not only notoriously bad predictors of which teams will win and by how much, but even of the general flow of games.

It's not their fault. In the NFL, past results are not necessarily indicative of future returns. 

So why should the one game tomorrow be any different? The experts can parse this contest down to Reggie Bush's nose hairs, but then some third-string linebacker intercepts two passes. They can atomize the effects of Dwight Freeney's ankle injury, but then some guy you and I never heard of blocks a punt for a touchdown. The game, like the ball, is spheroidal and bounces in strange directions.

So the experts say these two prolific offenses will make the game a track meet and have bid the over/under to 57. I'm sure that's warranted based on the information available. But the only way that happens is if the experts are right, in spades, because that's a boatload of points.

So bet the under. In fact, put some money on under 49, which would yield two-to-one. I'm not guaranteeing you'll win, just that the odds favor you. The line is based on what the experts know, which is far less important than what they don't yet.
b