Annual Wrong Pick

'Baseball is fathers and sons.  Football is brothers beating each other up in the backyard.' -Donald Hall

It's Super Bowl time again.  Now, I think that football is overrated and people get way to invested in it, but I'll still watch it occasionally during the season.  Usually when the Lions are on.  I don't find myself up on a Sunday morning tuning into a Chargers/Raiders game.  But this country is just over the moon about football.  From high school (or younger) through the NFL.  Leading the charge is ESPN with their hundreds of football analysts and televised high school games.  Tomorrow is the Super Bowl.  Then there will be at least a week's worth of coverage about what happened at the game and whether or not Tom Brady is the best quarterback in the history of the NFL.

Because the Lions will never make it to the Super Bowl, I will never have a vested interest in the game.  Sure, it's nice to cheer for a team that has never won or won twenty years ago or something like that.  Or to cheer for a team a relative or a friend cheers for because you like to see them happy.  Those are the teams I have a tendency to root for if they make it to the Super Bowl.  Yes, it would be nice to see Brady win another one because he played at Michigan and that's the big name college team I follow, but Matt Ryan has never won one.  This could be his only chance in his entire career whereas Brady and the Patriots seem to make it once every two or three years.

Based on my rooting for teams that are playing in the Super Bowl for the very first time or for the first time in a long time, I have a tendency to root for the team that loses.  I am very bad at sports sometimes.  I think over the last five or six years, I have wanted the team that ended up losing the game to win at least half of them.  I think if you took a national poll, you would find that most people would like to see the Falcons win.  The Patriots are like the Yankees of football.  They seem to always be winning.  The public doesn't like the manager or most of the players.  That's what happens with success in sports.  If you're successful over a period of time, people start to resent you.  I don't resent them for winning constantly.  It's that I just like to see others win.  Sure, if the Lions were the team that was winning twelve games a year and reaching the Super Bowl half a dozen times in a ten year span, you wouldn't hear any complaints from me.  You wouldn't see me cheering for a team playing the Lions, because that's my team I root for.  When you don't have an allegiance to either team, you want to see the underdog come up and win.  That's what is great about sports.

Above all else, above wanting to see the underdog win, above wanting to see if Brady can win another Super Bowl, I want to see a good game.  I want it to be entertaining.  I don't want a blow out like we saw when Seattle beat Denver several years ago.  Seriously, I watched maybe half a quarter of that game.  We want to see a game that comes down to the last play.  Like when St. Louis beat Tennessee back in the late 90s.  Those are the great games.  With all that said, I want to see Atlanta win the game tomorrow.  The organization has never won a championship.  I'm not talking just the Super Bowl, I'm talking the championship.  Before the Super Bowl, there was just the championship.  Hell, even the Lions won one of those (well, four to be exact).  I hope it's a close game, I hope it's an exciting game.  No one likes to see a 10-7 defensive game.  Those are boring. 

Atlanta-28
New England-17