February 3, 2010 | Sports
The Superbowl is coming and will feature not one, but two teams vying for football supremacy (this makes deciding a winner that much easier).
As per custom, the victor (seen here), will be launched out of a small plane in the vicinity of the field, where they will land in front of a large inflatable football.
The Superbowl is so steeped in tradition that the Pro Football Hall of Fame even offers daily historical reenactments of the very first game (if you mention the Shark Guys sent you, they’ll they’ll look at you quizzically at which point you’ll have to haggle with them to get your parking validated).
Purists will concede that while the game was first played on concrete, the switch to grass and AstroTurf has resulted in a fourfold decrease in cement-related abrasions and concussions. These of course were the days preceding helmets when men were men, boys were boys who would soon become men unless they were girls— in which case they would become women.
a Big Easy victory for the black and gold? In a word, maybe.
In the history of the Superbowl no team that was not a professional football team, has ever won the big game. Early and quite exacting rules stipulated that the contest be held between two professional football teams, leaving a rag tag squad of stick-ball players’ legal appeals grounded.
The New Orleans Saints will play the Indianapolis Colts.
An interesting factoid about the Colts is that they are among 3 teams with equine nicknames in the NFL, the others being the Broncos, and the Chargers—-whose helmet was changed to a lightning bolt when the team’s original mascot, an Arab charger Skippy, perished in an electrical storm.
Speaking of inclement weather…The Saints are ironically named, as depending on who you believe, the city was divinely targeted by Hurricane Katrina as punishment for letting le bon temps rouler (French for rolling bones at the craps table). Jesus himself once said of a Las Vegas casino: “Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s” (Matthew 22:21), a clear and damning indictment of gambling if we’re interpreting this correctly. For this, the city was punished.
The Saints have never won a Superbowl but once had a field-goal kicker who was born without toes, which some considered not only bad luck, but a form of cheating as he was equipped with a shoe that had a flattened front. This made it easier to topple garbage cans as well as kick field goals which lead to the so-called Tom Dempsey rule:
“Any shoe that is worn by a player with an artificial limb on his kicking leg must have a kicking surface that conforms to that of a normal kicking shoe and, during the course of a game, an artificial limb cannot for comedic purposes, be waved around anywhere near the vicinity of the field.”
The Colts come from Indianapolis, which is the capital of Indiana. In the history of the Superbowl only two teams from state capitals, Denver and Indianapolis, have ever won the big game, a fact that would resonate with a statistician, provided you screamed it in their ear.
As compulsive gamblers, we know that the current line is Colts – 5 1/2, but this could change, especially if a half dozen or so of their team is felled by eating undercooked shrimp (of note, the game is being played in Miami, so the probably of this occurring is quite a bit more than if the big game was in a landlocked state like Kansas, where shipping seafood is much more risky not to mention expensive).
Our prediction: The team with more points by the time the clock runs out, will have their hands raised in victory and this team will come from the state of Louisiana. Final score: Saints 57, Colts 3.
