Pollsters, pundits and political experts were all wrong on Tuesday in New Hampshire as Hillary Clinton came from out of nowhere to nip Barrack Obama in the Democratic Primary Election. Why?
Let's sing: "A little bit of tear let me down. Spoiled my life as a clown." There's no crying in baseball. There's no crying in politics. This was an unknown factor to the pollsters. They ran their polls and the glamorous media hosts ate it up and jumped on the Obama bandwagon. Who can believe these guys?
The college football season was polled incorrectly every week and culminated with No. 1 rated Ohio State being dumped by Louisiana State University, the No. 2 team with two losses. Every week of the college football season was riddled with upsets and the folks who ran the polls could only shake their heads and sigh. We believe in them and for years they have been steering our approval ratings on almost every subject from the war in Iraq to the playoff season of professional football.
This weekend, the best teams of the National Football League meet to determine the four best teams. Those four will meet the following week to whittle it down to two division champions. In February, the two will meet in the Super Bowl. And we will listen to the polls, the experts and the odds-makers in Las Vegas and dumbly follow their lead.
I long for the good ole' days" when professional football teams thought for themselves, ignored the experts and never cried. I'm talking about guys like Joe Namath who led his AFC team, the New York Jets, to victory in the third Super Bowl over the powerful NFC Baltimore Colts in a dramatic upset. During the week before the game, one sportswriter asked Namath if he preferred Astro Turf to grass. Joe answered, "I don't know. I've never smoked Astro Turf."
And who can forget that whacko lineman who played for the Oakland Raiders, the bad boys of football in the early 1970s, Lyle Alzedo. Lyle once said, "If King Kong and I went into an alley, only one of us would come out and it wouldn't be the monkey." These are the elder statesmen that I hold in great esteem.
Therefore, I will be rooting for every person, team or group that is not favored in the polls from now on. I'm for the New York Giants winning the Super Bowl. I'm backing Law and Order's Fred Thompson for president of the United States. I'm going to go against the tide and support Roger Clemens' claim that he never took steroids. Why? Because I don't believe in polls.
Go Broncos. Nice talking to you.
