TROUBL

I’m rich! My little brother called me near the end of the early games on Sunday. After all of my crappy bets on the Bears, I’ve finally made it back!

You fool, I yelled, Never bet on Chicago. We are too invested in the team–betting your passions is an easy way to get suckered. You got lucky. That’s all.

Hell no, he replied, I learned my lesson there. I didn’t bet on the Bears. I bet against the Cowboys.

It’s the same thing, I explained. You hate the Cowboys as much as you love the Bears. You are still betting with your heart.

But look at the score! At 4-1 against the Rams, I can buy a new TV!

He was right. The Cowboys had fallen a third time, and the Rams were once more ascendant. I turned my head from the television I had been watching, where the Bears were valiantly holding off a Minnesota rally in a 48-41 win, and watched Wade Phillips cry like a small child whose ice cream had just teetered off the cone in a strong breeze. The Bears were rising and the vaunted Cowboys now matched their record. Once more, I loved this game.

[must be nice...] I very nearly placed a bet-of-passion of my own, taking the Colts to trounce the hated Green Bay Packers. But I remained cool and remembered that putting any money down on an AFC team this year is a riskier proposition than doubling-down on your 401K at the moment. It was the right decision–the Colts once again look like losers, and even I am forced to admit that the Green Bay Packers, who I’ve been deriding as fake, have something going on, after all. Peyton Manning is no longer able to put the entire Colts team on his back and carry them to victory and pathetic attempts to do just that leave him completing more scoring passes to the opposing defensive backs than his own receivers. The Packers can be scary, and it’s certainly a reminder that, in a match-up between a NFC and an AFC team, the former is likely to triumph.

At the end of Week Seven, the only teams in the AFC above .500 are the respective division leaders–the Bills, the Steelers, the Titans, and the Broncos–as well as the desperate New England Patriots. So, regardless of where your passions lie, one thing is clear: the AFC is the haven for losers in the NFL right now, and any team that surges in the second half of the season is as likely to go to the Super Bowl as any other. New York, Miami, Cleveland–even Houston. Like the Colts and the Chargers, they’re all as likely to make the playoffs. If you want to take a particularly bold bet, find someone to draw up the odds on the two wild card teams that both have 7-9 records. It’s certainly possible, maybe even likely. I’ll take the loser Dolphins to secure the AFC Championship, given the right odds…

[speaking of the dolphins] Know anybody with about $700 million to spare right now? If so, they’re right on the verge of being able to own an NFL franchise. In a move that seems custom-made to deliver Florida to the Democrats in this year’s election, Dolphins owner Wayne Huizenga has vowed to sell the team by the end of the year if Barack Obama wins, believing that his new tax structure would cripple him financially if he were to wait. Well, shit–when was the last time the Dolphins finished a season with a winning record?

It’s an odd billionaire’s gambit, an attempt to rally support for his candidate by using the platform that a man of his stature has to use. He has to make sweeping proclamations designed to highlight how serious a situation is. Unfortunately for Huizenga, I suspect that it’ll have the opposite effect of his intension: it seems unlikely to me that most Florida voters will be convinced there is much at stake for them because a billionaire fears a new tax code, but what self-respecting Miami Dolphins fan wouldn’t love to see Huizenga finally out of their team’s way?

If it’s reverse psychology, it’s pretty damn clever. Right now, the Florida political scene is dominated by Jewish retirees and Cuban exiles, both generally reliable voting blocs for the Democrats and Republicans, respectively. What happens when you throw hundreds of thousands of Dolphins fans into the mix, being given a sudden chance to turn the page on this tragic era in the history of their once-proud franchise? Dan Marino may be a staunch McCain supporter, but it’s been a lot of years since he wore the jersey, and if my team’s fortunes had dwindled the way that Miami’s have over the past decade or so, I might be willing to swing from undecided to leans obama at the prospect of something to celebrate on the field in the hard years to come. We are a teetering empire now, and we’ve been conditioned to cherish our bread-and-circuses. Crushing poverty and rampant hunger may be inevitable regardless of who wins the election, but if a vote for one guy over the other means we’ll be able to keep warm at night with the thought of a Super Bowl ring, well, hell… Why not take that chance?

[no, seriously] To be certain, I’m one of the seemingly rare Americans who does not expect to be eating out of trash cans eighteen months from now, and I’d be surprised to see the bulk of the country revert to an agrarian economy rooted in the barter system. Furthermore, I’ve even found myself called out in this space for believing that there may be some substantive difference between Barack Obama and John McCain. But, that is all beside the point: American Presidential politics and American football have always been linked inextricably, and this stunt from Huizenga keeps that link active. They are both
games, and both worth your passion, as well as a bet every so often. They call the election a horse race, but that’s selling the damn thing short. Horse races don’t capture the American imagination the way Presidential elections and football games do. Among the films in theatres right now are W, Oliver Stone’s weird re-enactment of the current Presidency, and The Express, an inspirational tale of the first African-American Heisman Trophy winner, but you’d have to go pretty far back to find a hit movie about a fucking race horse.