Many American sports fans — and many Americans in general — tend to think of themselves as underdogs, even when all available evidence points to the contrary.
We are a nation of favorites, of front-runners, of standing on third base and thinking we hit a triple. Of all the phrases other countries would use to describe us, “scrappy underdogs” is low on the list. But we tell ourselves the opposite, to the point of absurdity. Several members of the 1992 “Dream Team” — the U.S. Olympic basketball corps that featured Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson and Larry Bird, and is widely considered the most dominant sports team of all time — reportedly said when they won the gold medal, that no one believed in them.
And we still search for the underdogs, even at an event like the Super Bowl, a game that in many ways represents everything great and terrible about the United States in extremis.
By definition, if you’ve made it to the Super Bowl, you’ve done something terrific. But over the past few years, we’ve been able to cobble together “an underdog” simply by rooting for whoever is competing against the recently retired Tom Brady, who has played in four of the past five Super Bowls (and won three of them). This year, though, I think we’ve got the closest thing we’ve had to a legitimate, likable Super Bowl underdog since maybe the Atlanta Falcons in 2017 — or maybe even Arizona in 2009. It’s Joe Burrow and the Cincinnati Bengals.
If you want to feel good rooting for the underdog, this is your team. Get on the bandwagon.
To start with, the Los Angeles Rams are currently 4.5-point favorites to beat the Bengals, the largest spread at the Super Bowl since the Colts were 5-point favorites to beat the Saints in Super Bowl XLIV. (Those Colts lost, by the way.) The Bengals won the AFC North this season but were the fourth seed and had to go on the road to beat both Tennessee and Kansas City to reach this Super Bowl. Before the season, oddsmakers predicted the Bengals would win only six games. For those who follow these things, the betting win total over/under for the Bengals was 6.5, which is to say, most gambling prognosticators didn’t even think the team would have a winning record, let alone reach the Super Bowl. It has been many a moon since a team came out of nowhere like this to make it this far.
And by this far, we mean institutionally. There are 12 NFL teams that have never won a Super Bowl: the Titans, Bills, Browns, Texans, Jaguars, Chargers, Vikings, Lions, Panthers, Falcons, Cardinals and Bengals. If that seems like a lot of teams — 12 of 32 teams total — that’s because a few franchises have historically hogged most of the glory: The Steelers, Patriots, 49ers, Cowboys, Packers and Giants have won more than half the championships between them. Any self-respecting fan of an underdog wants to spread the wealth. The Rams won a Super Bowl, back when they were in St. Louis (the city they ruthlessly abandoned so they could have this $5.5 billion stadium in Los Angeles), but these Cincinnati Bengals never have.
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