Super Hype

Sometimes it's hard to know the players without a program. Eli Manning loves his "Seinfeld" almost as much as Tom Brady loves his Gisele. We are becoming ever more aware of the odds of a road team winning a Super Bowl played on a composite surface when the temperature is between ten and forty degrees Celsius. Will this be Michael Strahan's last game? Will Tom Petty rock the house? Will he keep his clothes on?
If you haven't started to fret about any of these questions, never fear, because you have another full week to contemplate all the possible permutations of the events that will unfold on Super Sunday. And when you've had just about enough of that, you can take what fraction of attention you have left and apply it to the events of Super Tuesday.
Yes, it's true. A scant forty-eight hours after the biggest event in sports takes place, we'll be eagerly anticipating the outcome of the biggest event in democracy. At least that's what our media would like us to believe. The same machine that cranks up our interest in the "World Championship" of American Football is getting us all worked up about the World Championship of Democratic and Republican Primaries. While most of us are chasing the people who owe us money for drunken Super Bowl bets, twenty-four states will hold caucuses or primaries to decide who they would like to be the nominee of their respective party to run for President of the United States.
Everyone wins, right? Not Dennis Kucinich or the people who have already voted for him on absentee or mail-in ballots. Or grumpy old Fred Thompson, who hopes that the writer's strike ends soon so he can pitch his pilot for "Law and Order: Special Elections Unit". And if you read or watched the news today, you'd be certain that Hillary might as well start to pull up her tent stakes in the wake of Obama's "rout" in South Carolina. Barack is certainly glad that he missed the news last week when the momentum was in Senator Clinton's corner. It's all just too exciting, and nobody knows who will win.
That's why we have elections. And conventions. And a process. All the polls in the world continue to show conclusively that polls are flawed, and that the best reports are the actual votes taken on the day of the contest. The rest is media frenzy. If you want to see the game, it starts at six o'clock eastern, three o'clock pacific, on Sunday. If you want to catch the results of the election, tune in on Tuesday night. That's why they play the game.