Overrated – Updates

Ned Bitters

This week’s inductee into the “Overrated Hall of Fame” is … nothing new … just a few updates on previous columns.

Overrated – Athletes thanking God
My elation over the Pittsburgh Steelers’ seventh AFC Championsip game victory was dampened a bit when they handed the microphone to Ben Roethlisberger, the fifth-year Steelers quarterback who is not in any way overrated. If you want to argue this assertion by citing statistics, save your breath. (You’ll need it, as I hear the air is thin in Idiotville.) The man is a gamer, a leader and – indisputably – a winner.

I don’t really like the guy, but I’m glad he’s quarterbacking my team. I just wish the mic would have gone dead when he opened his piehole and started spouting off about how Jesus helped him and the Steelers win. His first words, if you recall, were, “The Lord is good.” What a dufus. And if you were touched by his giving credit to the lord instead of Dick LeBeau’s defensive schemes, then you’re as stupid as the Steelers quarterback who has suffered multiple concussions, one of which was suffered while riding a motorcycle while helmetless.

Consider his logic. The lord is good because he helped the Steelers win. That means the good lord plays favorites, which means he doesn’t like the Baltimore Ravens as much as he likes the Steelers, which means that he rewarded millions of one team’s fans while sticking it up the ol’ wazoo, or wazoos, as it were, of millions of the other team’s fans. He sounds like a game-playing prick, if I go along with Big Ben’s belief that the good lord was wearing black and gold on Sunday. I would hope the good lord has more important shit to tend to than making sure that the Steelers found their way to another Super Bowl.

If you buy into the goofy belief that some omnipotent being helps hook field goals, then you would not have been offended if Ray Lewis’ first words to the press would have been, “Well, we liked our chances coming in, but God fucked us royally. I mean, the Big Man really stuck one in our ass this time. Fuck him.” What’s that? That’s offensive? Not if you buy into Ben Cluelessberger’s belief that God took time out of dealing with the worldwide AIDS epidemic to make sure Troy Polamalu timed the snap count right on that big fourth and one. Any sports star that cites God’s favoritism is an idiot. (That all being said, c’mon Big Ben, bring another one home to the Burgh.)

Overrated – Thanksgiving
I forgot a very important item regarding the overratedness of Thanksgiving: the colors. How in the hell can brown and orange be the colors of a holiday? They stand for death and decay and rot and bleakness. Dead leaves are brown. Shit is brown. My eighth grade Algebra teacher’s teeth were brown.

No other holiday is marked by such dismal colors. Christmas has the life-affirming green and the vibrant red. Easter has beautiful pastels. The Fourth of July has the celebratory red, white and blue. But Thanksgiving? Brown and orange. You know what else brown and orange stand for? The Cleveland Browns. No one is thankful for them, even the poor saps who root for them in Cleveland.

Overrated – Athletes coming out of retirement
Nothing gave me greater sports pleasure this year than – I wish I could say “fucking one of those Olympic volleyballers,” but alas – watching Brett Favre shit the bed down the stretch and especially in the last game of the season. That egotistical prick fucked over the Packers, then signed on with a team he was certain was on the brink of a lengthy playoff run, hoping to pad his already overrated status.

Seeing the Jets not make the playoffs while the discarded Chad Pennington led his new team to the greatest single season turn-around in NFL history, which included a playoff game that a soon-to-be-weeping at a press conference Brett Favre was free to watch on TV, was as good as sports can get. This was more than poetic justice. It was more than cosmic come-uppance. I think it might have been divine intervention. To which I can only add: “The Lord is good.”

Ned Bitters is, in fact, overrated. You can contact him at teacherslounge@hobotrashcan.com.