Winners and Losers

I watched two big bowl games this week, one by actually traveling to Phoenix to see the Fiesta Bowl and one by going to my aunt's house to watch the National Championship on HDTV.

I was cheering for TCU in the Fiesta Bowl, of course, because of my extensive family ties to the university. My aunt is a professor there, my brother an alum, and, well, we live in the Fort Worth metro area, so it seems fitting we should cheer for the Fort Worth team.

I guess it was just an off day for them. Boise State played a good game, don't get me wrong. They didn't make mistakes like TCU did. If TCU hadn't made those mistakes, though... I got the feeling it could have been different.

Maybe TCU was just disappointed not to be playing an SEC team. TCU vs. Florida would've been a fun game to watch. Whatever it was, you can't lose focus if you want to win a bowl game against another top ten team. It could have been different, but TCU lost.

It was a great finish for Boise State, for sure, completing a 14-0 season. And you have to respect that team, whose 2007 Fiesta Bowl victory against Oklahoma was legendary.

Still, it could've meant so much to TCU to win that game, and probably finish with a #2 national ranking (if there's any justice in the world, it'll be Boise State at #2). Not bad for a team that nobody's ever heard of.

Texas lost to Alabama, and of course we all know how Colt McCoy got injured in the first quarter, which knocked him out of the game. Did that affect the entire course of the game?

I don't know, but I thought it was remarkable to hear McCoy talk after the game. He said he never questions what happens, but trusts God to be in control of everything. Still, he would've given anything to be out there on that field. Wouldn't it have been a great story, McCoy leading the underdog team to victory?

But it's still a great story for Alabama to win, after all. The Heisman curse has been broken. In fact, since the underdog team won the past four years in a row, it's hard to even know what "underdog" means anymore. If it means "team you don't expect to win," then statistically the #1 team might have been the underdog (based on the previous four national championships).

I guess what I was thinking about in all of this is how these games bring together hundreds of different individual stories, divide them into two big teams, give one team the glory, and take it away from the other.

Even completely opposite teams can both make great stories out of victories, each in their own way. The team that no one has ever heard of can come out of nowhere to win a championship. That's a great story. Or the team that has a long tradition of excellence can win yet another championship. That's a great story, too. People love both.

Mostly I suppose people like it when their team wins. It's a pretty arbitrary system, but maybe that's what's so fun about it. There's nothing fans can really do to determine the outcome of a football season, so when it goes their way, it feels like the gods smiling on them.

Sure, we watch sports because they're fun to watch, but I think there has to be a little more to it than that. I think we all want to feel a little bit of the gods smiling on us. Maybe it's deeply engrained in us from an era when we were all warring tribes. (I've heard that football is just war without the killing.)

I wonder what that means for actual religion. It's not good enough for God to smile on all of us. That's boring. Or at least it sure isn't football. We all need our moments to feel we're special, as in distinguished, as in better.

Is this just a heathen desire that we ought to nullify? If it is, God forgive us--I don't see this desire going away any time soon. But if it isn't, I wonder...how does one find this desire fulfilled in the Kingdom of God?

Maybe I'll just leave it at a question for now.