Slippery Rock

February 4, 2008


So, the Patriots lost.


I’m actually more hurt than I thought I would be. It’s more the lack of symmetry to it-the game was laying out almost the way you thought it would be. You have to like your chances, with a lead, giving Eli Manning the ball in his own end and saying, “OK, son, beat us.” Play that game 50 times and I think the Pats win it 40. The win would have been so perfect, so elegant in an almost mathematical way. 19-0, perfect season from the new dynasty, the smartest kids on the block, the new school football mixing strategy and scouting and numbers in a sabermetric way.

Of course, Manning did beat us, plain and simple, lucky or not, he did. That Tyree pass was unearthly.

One of the worst things about this loss is that it will bring out the worst in sports fans, all the manure about “heart” and “desire” and “hard work” and all that crapola. Not that such things don’t exist, just that they aren’t nearly as important as people think. The Giants didn’t have more heart than Matt Light, Dan Koppen, and Steven Neal, they had more speed. More speed and more talent beats more heart.

And not that the Patriots weren’t trying or took New York lightly or cracked under the pressure or any of that stuff, either. To play football at that level requires enormous effort and desire and heart and will, no matter what team you are on. The Giants made some key plays, including one miraculous, immortal one, and the Patriots made a few mistakes. One game doesn’t mean they’re the best.

If you use that logic, anyone who beat the Giants during the season, including the Eagles, are even better. The old Slippery Rock fallacy lives again.

The Slippery Rock fallacy comes from a sports book I read once when I was very young, something about “Illustrated Sports Facts” or something. It had a series of “Ripley’s Believe It or Not” style factoids illustrated with some crudely drawn cartoons. One of the stories was a newspaper story that was supposedly written in the 1950s, arguing that, because Slippery Rock, a tiny NAIA school, beat Team A in football, who beat Team B, who beat Team C, who beat Team D, who beat Team E, and on, and on, and on, until you end the chain on someone who beat the National Champion. Therefore, the writer concluded, Slippery Rock should be the National Champion.

Now it’s baseball season, plus the Terminator show is on again tonight.

Summer Whateverhername is, the girl Terminator, is absolutely gorgeous.

More fighting with the wife last night. Oh goody. Does she ever stop to think that maybe being awake from 7am until 2am the next morning may impair one's alertness? Of course not.

I hate life.