By Eric Valentine
As noted before, the title of this ongoing column is in reference to Plato—he authored “The Republic” a gazillion years ago—who said what is glorified in a country is cultivated there. And we said we’d use these column inches to take a look at arts and entertainment to see from that lens what our society is honoring and therefore nurturing here.
Are you ready for some football?
As January bleeds into February, the sports world doesn’t get any more glorious than NFL football. And although the Super Bowl has become a defacto national holiday wherein Americans gluttonize on Doritos and Domino’s and debate which gazillion-dollar commercial was the best this year, it’s last Sunday and next that offer some of the best football you could ever see.
By the time the NFL is deep into its playoffs, fans are left with only the very best teams playing their very best. Last weekend’s matchups did not disappoint. How evenly matched was the competition in the so-called Divisional Round of the playoffs? With the exception of one game, the underdog came out victorious. And in that one game—Buffalo Bills versus Kansas City Chiefs—the game needed overtime to be played for a winner to be named.
Enter tragedy.
American football—at least as the rules are now in the NFL—doesn’t ensure that both teams will get a chance for their offense to score. In what is an actual improvement to the former rules, the team that wins a coin toss can select to be on offense or defense (it’d be stupid to pick defense in this case). If your offense scores a touchdown, you win. If your offense only manages to get a field goal, the other team gets a chance to score with its offense. I know, it’s stupid.
How stupid? Well, yesterday’s Bills/Chiefs matchup pitted two of the best young quarterbacks in football, Josh Allen (Bills) and Patrick Maholmes (Chiefs), against each other. It’s the Brady versus Manning of the 2020s. Toward the end of the game, both quarterbacks had their offenses firing on all pistons and it was pretty hard to imagine that the next time either offense would take the field, a touchdown would be the result. In other words, whichever team won the coin toss was going to vie for the Super Bowl this coming Sunday. The coin toss! It’s stupid.
So, the Chiefs win the coin toss and select to go on offense, because they’re not stupid. And of course, they score a touchdown and win the game. There were likely plenty of disappointed fans in Buffalo, but no known insurrections at the New York capitol.
What is sure to follow on ESPN and sports talk radio programs and podcasts the next little while is how those rules should be changed. Sports fans, from winning and losing teams and everything in between, will actually put forward some reasonable ideas. These ideas will reflect a certain sense of fairness to all teams and a guiding ethical principle of making sure the better team always wins, that merit not mercy will determine who is victorious. Politics won’t be at play.
These fans are the same ones (I’m talking about all of us now) who have picked a political team of sorts, whether it be registered establishment Republicans or Democrats or people who lean liberal left or conservative right. We will look at Build Back Better bills, filibuster rules, Supreme Court decisions and even criminal case verdicts through a mostly blue or mostly red lens. If you think you’re a true blend of the two, stop kidding yourself. Purple political lenses are more rare than a Minnesota Vikings entrance into the Super Bowl (it hasn’t happened since the early 1970s).
I offer no solution to this psychological glitch: how come we can—even when our beloved football team’s championship is at stake—see what’s best for all teams, what’s best for the sport; but when our political ideals are in jeopardy, compromise has lost in overtime to a zero-sum game.
An answer to the problem lies in whether both sides of any issue will ever wake up to the idea this glitch even exists for them. Like the NFL playoffs, we would be a lot better if we didn’t leave it up to a matter of chance.