An expert's dirty little secret
Posted: Thursday January 28, 1999 12:28 PM
This is a confession. I once had a job predicting NFL games for a newpaper. The job lasted about a dozen years and I picked every game every week for the entire season, attaching a little joke to each score. It was easy money, a few laughs. The truth was I knew nothing more about football than anyone else.
My son actually picked the games. He was four years old when we started, 16 when we finished. We would spread out the paper and he would pick the Browns because he liked the color brown and Green Bay because he liked the color green and the Los Angeles Rams because he liked their helmets. He liked nicknames like Mercury Morris and White Shoes Johnson and Hollywood Henderson. He liked the idea of the Giants because they were...well, giants.
I put his scores in the paper under my name, a little father-son bonding, and guess what? WE DID AS WELL AS ANYONE ELSE. SOMETIMES WE WERE MUCH BETTER. The point spread, created by those grand mathematicians in Las Vegas, made us equal to all of the experts with their many charts and statistics. The point spread made every game a flip of a coin. We could flip as well as anyone.
I say all this because the screen is filled in these last days and hours before Super Bowl XXXIII with expert talking heads, every one of them sounding like he or she knows everything there is to know about the Atlanta Falcons and the Denver Broncos. Here's the truth: none of them truly know anything. The game hasn't been played. It's a flip of the coin.
I know. I'm a former expert.
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