Super Bowl 202_
It is now generally referred to as The Game—infamous to some, heroic to others—but in fact, as football games go, it was pretty routine, and except for a couple of flashes of excitement—a fumble that became a field goal, a 40-yard punt return—mostly dull.
The excitement was more in the stands, where the hatred the two teams—technically The Team Formerly Known by a Demeaning Name, and The Team Between Names, but we’ll call them Team A and Team B—had for each other seethed like an overheating reactor. Down on the field, the defenses dominated, but each team managed to put together a couple of monotonous drives. Team A was trailing 21-17 toward the end of the fourth quarter, when they finally got in the red zone. Team B’s defense held them on third and goal, and Coach Dube Diflet on the sideline, who for most of the game had provided more entertainment than his team, seemed to be in the final stages of a meltdown—running up and down the sideline, screaming, throwing clipboards, headsets, and the like onto the field.
Fourth and goal. The quarterback dropped back and threw a bullet to his favorite receiver slanting across the end zone for what looked like a sure touchdown—except for the four penalty flags thrown simultaneously from four different directions of the field. Later, with the playback footage sealed from public viewing, many people remembered seeing Team A’s left guard envelop Team B’s hard-charging right tackle in a bear hug and wrestling him to the turf. The Team A fans had no such memory.
Coach Diflet stormed onto the field screaming, “That’s bullshit! I’m done with penalties!” so loudly the fans actually heard him, and taking what some spectators later recalled as a swing at the line judge.
Like dogs that get excited because their master does, the players were hopped up on the sideline, and the loyal part of the crowd was excreting a thundering low-pitched Boo! so mean resentful and threatening, the other part of the crowd started considering the exits. But somehow the referees assessed the holding penalty, and from the twenty-one yard line now, Team A took another shot. They slyly ran the same play, the quarterback threw a strike, but the db was right with the receiver, and with a perfectly timed leap tipped the ball away at the last second.
Coach Diflet went berserk, demanding a flag for the pass interference that half the spectators remembered as flagrant, the other half as non-existent. Coach Diflet made an awkward attempt to pull the flag from the ref’s pocket, but the terrified official managed to evade him. So he ran to the cheerleaders, wrested away the mic, and bellowed “This game is rigged! The officials were paid a hundred thousand dollars each—everybody knows it!” The crowd’s menacing roar turned uglier. Sporadic gunfire erupted in the stands, and only 124 people were killed—something of a bright spot as later most commentators agreed it could have been so much worse.
With still a minute to play, Coach Diflet ordered his team off the field. The players took off their helmets, plugged a finger in each ear, and ran to the lockers crying “We won! We won!”
An injunction issued after the game sealed all game footage from public viewing until an accusation of doctoring could be investigated. Not surprisingly, a few pirated clips circulated in the frenetic online culture, but were ignored by the angry fans who already knew what they thought and were immune to the bogus bullshit masquerading as “evidence.”
The game, of course, was recorded as a loss for Team A, but a growing mob didn’t accept that, and the next morning Coach Diflet was on all the radio and TV talk shows and all over the internet citing the obvious rigging of the game and the paying off of the corrupt officiating crew in his demand that the L be changed to a W.
By that time, the referees, all of whom had received death threats, were in hiding.
“Fake penalties,” Coach Diflet kept saying. “They cheated with penalties, they cheated with ball placement—the players all saw it, you can ask any of them—they cheated with the game clock—it’s an open-shut case. The referees were paid off—nobody knows where any of them are, they’re not answering their phones! I wonder why that is? The commissioner knows it too, but he’s too chicken shit to do anything about it. They’re all lemmings!”
When a reporter pointed out that there was only one critically close placement call in the game, which had resulted in Team A being awarded a first down, and that Team B had actually been penalized more than Team A, Coach Diflet just kept repeating “ball placement” and “fake penalties.” Eventually it was all he would answer to any question, so there was no point asking him what he had for breakfast.
“Hang the Commissioner!” began to echo from rallies around the country, and yard signs began sprouting in yards: “We won! We won!” in some places, “You lost! You lost!” in others—but with the matter now entangled in lawsuits, everybody knew a final judgment on the outcome could take years. If one ever came.
And Coach Diflet began eyeing a run for the Senate.
January 3, 2022