Idiots Write About Sports

I’m not a fan of any professional football team. I root for the San Diego Chargers.

That means two things: 1) I lost interest in this particular postseason about a month ago — about the same time that Marty Schottenheimer opted for the bold strategy of falling down face-first on the football three times before sending in a rookie kicker to try and win the game with a 40-plus-yard figgie on a sloppy field. (MSNBC asks in a story posted just prior to that Chargers-Jets game: Can Schottenheimer Finally Break Through? The answer: Apparently Not.) 2) Come this time of year, I generally don’t have any dog in the Super Bowl hunt.

There was one exception, of course — a decade ago, in January 1995, the Chargers stunned the Miami Dolpins in the divisional playoffs, stunned the Pittsburgh Steelers even further in the AFC Championship, and found themselves, much to the shock and delight of all us Bolt Backers, in the Super Bowl. Unfortunately, they found themselves on the opposite side of the field from the San Francisco 49ers.

These were not the currently sadsack version of the Niners that John York opts to field in what can only be some sort of elaborate tax dodge. These were the 49ers when they were owned by Eddie DeBartolo Jr., who prized winning above all else, up to and including adherence to the rules of both the NFL and the federal government. And heading into that 1994, four Super Bowls had passed since the Niners had stomped on the bones of John Elway and the Denver Broncos with nary a return trip to the Big Game. Which drove Eddie just a little bit nuts, and soon he was amassing top talent — Ken Norton Jr., Deion Sanders, Tim McDonald — to augment the galaxy of stars — Jerry Rice, Steve Young, Brent Jones, Ricky Watters — already in his employ. Heading into that Super Bowl, things seemed to be stacked against the Boys in Blue and Gold.

And yet, I would have none of it. Oh sure, at the start of the two-week Super Bowl build-up, I was in full-on just-happy-to-be-here mode. But then the hype machine kicked in, and the analysts began to make a case for how a team featuring Stan Humphries, Natrone Means and Alfred Pupunu could hang with the likes of the 49ers.

And I believed.

I believed so much, in fact, that I was moved to drive from my remote cabin in the mountains of Riverside County to Tijuana, Mexico to place a bet on the Chargers at a south-of-the-border sports book. (Q: Phil, considering that you were four, maybe five hours away from Las Vegas, why didn’t you just go there? A: Uh… shut up!) I forget what the spread was — 17 1/2 sounds about right — but I was convinced that even if the Chargers didn’t win (Pah! As if that was a possibility!), they would certainly hold their own against the 49ers, as the TV talking heads had foretold.

Final score: San Francisco 49, San Diego 26. It was a hell of a game up until the National Anthem.

The lesson here is not, as you might imagine, to avoid betting substantial sums of cash when your hopes and dreams are riding on Stan Humphries and Natrone Means. (That lesson is self-evident, I figure.) No, my takeaway lesson was to never again pay any amount of never-mind to anything said by any football analyst in the interest of fooling us into thinking that the Super Bowl was going to be a competitive or compelling football game.

Because usally? It isn’t.

The way I figure, about 12 of the past 38 Super Bowls can be classified as good to great, and the only reason the figure’s that high is because the New England Patriots have been kind enough to give us two pips of a contest in the last three years. Four of the games were pleasantly mediocre. And the other 22 were varying degrees of unwatchable and unpleasant. And as nifty as the Eagles may be, Sunday’s game against the Pats doesn’t figure to turn out much differently than other past mismatches.

But don’t take my word for it — I’m the guy who places bets on the Chargers, after all. Ira Miller of the San Francisco Chronicle knows a thing or three about football (as the Hall of Fame induction might suggest). And he seems to think that talent favors the lads from Foxboro.

Those numbers and the record make the matchup appear close, but the teams are not close, because the Patriots got theirs in the AFC against much tougher competition. The Patriots are about to establish themselves officially as the first dynasty of the free-agency/salary-cap era.

But even if that article doesn’t sway you, consider this obsveration from Miller:

Fifteen of the last 20 favorites have won the championship, by an average of nearly 20 points a game. And some of the games that were betting upsets at the time have been shown, with hindsight, to be anything but surprising, like the Patriots’ victory over the Rams three years ago.

Further, many of the closest games have occurred in those rare years when, because of scheduling considerations, the Super Bowl was played only one week after the conference championship games.

This year’s game is back on the two-week schedule, plenty of time for the Eagles to hear and read repeatedly that they have no chance, a factor that “is self-fulfilling in many ways,” former 49ers quarterback Steve Young, the Super Bowl MVP 10 years ago, said Sunday.

So you give teams two weeks to prepare, and the best-coached team with the most talented players tends to win, more often than not. If I bet money on football games — and recent history indicates that’s a bad idea — I’d put it on the Pats without thinking twice.

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