Super Bowl Sunday and Toboggans

Tonight is the Big Game! (Thank goodness that phrase isn't trademarked) The Pats are on the verge of completing the perfect season. There's more than enough words on the internet written about the Super Bowl because everyone in sports feels its their duty to write about it. So I'll be quick with my predictions - Giants score first, Pats dominate but never pull away, and somebody not named Eli makes a bonehead mistake in the third quarter that makes Giants fans scream obscenities but follow it up with "that's okay, but there's still time left." (My guess is it'll be Amani Toomer - I want it to be Plexiglass Burress, but he's won a Super Bowl before and I'm not expecting mistakes out of him... of course, it could still be Eli. It could always be Eli. Hide your heart, girls.) The Pats will win but won't cover - and that's the stance I took in the bet with my Jersey roommate - he wins if the Giants win OR if the Pats blow them out... I need the Pats to win by 12 or less. I still think I got the best window.

My favorite soccer blog site threw up a post today with XI Reasons Football (with the feet) is Better Than Football (with the hands). A couple good zingers in there, but I love both sports. I love the strategy and specialized athleticism of gridiron football, and I love the action, the style, and the spirit of soccer. I don't expect the world's soccer fans to embrace the NFL - despite the shared name, the two games are fundamentally different from a spectator level. An NFL game is an event - a 3 hour chunk of your day, and often a lot longer if you include the pregame show and tailgating. And there isn't a whole lot of action - theres a lot of downtime which leads to more conversation, either about the game or just general discussion. A lot like going to a baseball game - and that's why the pigskin is the new American Pastime. Soccer, meanwhile, is non-stop action (the untrained American eye will say that nothing's going on, but nobody will deny that the clock is always running). In this way, soccer flows more like a basketball game, and that (as well as the smartest global marketing team in sports) is why the NBA is catching on overseas. The NHL could translate, too, but it needs to focus on keeping an audience here before grabbing fans in London.

But naturally, TheOffside's post lead to a debate in the comments over the word "soccer." Sammy wrote:

I think the term “soccer” should be eliminated from this website. When I think of “soccer” I think of kids doing laps around a park district and eating oranges. When I think of “football” I think of the beautiful game. We won’t offend any American Football fans here.

I want to share a little anecdote about this - I'm from Massachusetts, and the first winter that I was down here in North Carolina, as soon as it started getting cold one of my Southern friends started looking for his "toboggan". I said, "What on earth do you need a toboggan for? There's no snow on the ground, so we can't very well go sledding." He didn't know what on earth I was talking about, so as usual we let Wikipedia settle our dispute.

Up north, "toboggan" means a sled. In "Southern American English," it apparently means what I would call a ski cap (or, if I was making a joke about Canada or talking about hockey, what I would call a tuque). My gut reaction was that he must be wrong - that the South must be wrong! How can they take a word that doesn't belong to them and apply it to the wrong thing? Surely North Carolinians shouldn't get to decide names for wintery things! But when you settle down, you realize that it's just another part of southern culture that's different from the culture I come from - just like calling a rotary a "traffic circle," listening to country music or deep frying an Oreo.

And this toboggan incident led me to be a lot more neutral in the "football v. soccer" debate. What's in a name? Often the Americans who demand that we call the beautiful game "football" are the Eurosnob fans who don't give the MLS a chance in the first place. For starters, here's a quick history lesson on the term "soccer." We're not the only society who uses the word this way - and even if we were, would that be so wrong? Once you get to the World Cup, most of the time, the players aren't speaking the same language anyway! I think the community of American soccer fans would do well to drop this debate and accept the fact that, over here, we call it soccer. That's just our culture. It's no less right than football.

One last Super Bowl point - the media has been so focused on revamping the SpyGate investigation that nobody has highlighted the biggest surprise of the AFC Championship - Belichick didn't keep trying to score in the fourth quarter! Why stop now? What happened to playing 60 minutes of football? The only mention I saw of this was one little paragraph in Tuesday Morning Quarterback the week after the game, and Easterbrook left it at a "What's up with that?" (Probably because he hasn't acknowledged the Pat's relentless 4th quarter effort as a source of their wins in close games this year.)