WE SHALL OVERCOME OUR HANGOVERS:

It's Only a Football Game: Colts vs. Bears, who cares? (SKIP ROZIN, February 1, 2007, Opinion Journal)

Students of National Football League strategy insist that no matter who plays in the Super Bowl, the game will draw a huge and enthusiastic audience. We'll see.

The league has aimed to turn Super Bowl Sunday into an unofficial national holiday so big that millions of fans will gather around television sets, drink and eat themselves into happiness regardless of which teams play or even the outcome. The NFL Web site boasts of success: Last year, 141.4 million viewers tuned in--the second-largest Super Bowl audience ever.

What those numbers really convey is expectation. The league has so hyped the Super Bowl that millions tune in expecting an Event, and it rarely happens. How could it? Great games mostly happen by chance.

But there is another element: The odds for a great game improve with the right match-up, teams to which fans have an emotional connection. That happened in 1969, when the lowly New York Jets dared to challenge the mighty Baltimore Colts, and won, or 2002, when the young Patriots upset the St. Louis Rams, champions from 2000. Fans brought passion to those games; their passion drives Super Bowl mania.

We came close to tapping into that passion this year. Just two weeks before the big game, true believers envisioned a battle between the Patriots, no longer upstarts but now the gold standard for success with three Super Bowl wins in the past five years, and the New Orleans Saints.

What a game that would have been!

Supposedly, when Congress was stalled over the MLK holiday it was sold to several members by pointing out that for the past several years it had been the Monday after the Super Bowl so they were basically giving their constituents the day off after the big game. The NFL ought to honor that spirit by moving the game back a few weeks.

Posted by Orrin Judd at February 1, 2007 6:02 PM