What can a New Year's day college football game between one team that conjures up images of annual football supremacy and another which conjures up images of potatoes, tell us about us?
The Fiesta Bowl game between the University of Oklahoma and Boise State can tell us quite a bit actually.
Sport sand athletics have long been understood to be a direct reflection of a society and it's values. Examples abound everywhere from Jackie Robinson's breaking of baseball's color barrier, to the brash non-conformist American Football League- and it's radical 2 point conversion rule!- forcing a merger with the established stodgy NFL during the Viet Nam War protest years.
Which brings us to life in America today. The American working class family - the very foundation of our society and what was once known as the American way of life- is besieged upon and under attack like no other time in history.
Manufacturing jobs have been shipped overseas, bankruptcy protection laws re-written by the credit card and banking industries, immigration laws are grudgingly enforced... while people today are viewed merely as units of consumption, households are forced to hold down two incomes instead of one, and our nations borders looked upon as inconvenient obstacles in the flow of global trade.
In his book War On The Middle Class, author and CNN anchor Lou Dobbs writes "Whether the issue is...taxation , education,or jobs, big business and big government are unchecked in their attacks on the common good. Most of our elected officials, Democrat or Republican, have been bought and paid for by through campaign donations from corporate lobbyists and other special interest groups".
Somehow somewhere along the way, representation of the interests of the common man and woman- the vast majority of Americans- has been lost.
Which brings us to the point of sports reflecting society. College presidents at the nations largest universities have set up a system in which only the most established and traditionally most powerful football programs (think Notre Dame, Ohio State- sorry Hugh Hewitt-, and USC) can participate in a BCS bowl game. BCS bowl games pay the most lucrative financial windfall to the competing universities, of all the bowl games.
You see Boise State- despite going 12-0- was not supposed to be even invited. The Broncos were only invited to the Fiesta because the BCS, facing threats of federal legislation and lawsuits, eased access for "unaffiliated" conferences this year when it added the stand-alone title game. A year ago, Boise State would not have been guaranteed a BCS slot.
But through threat of lawsuits they did get invited and the unheralded football school from the land of potatoes...despite the protectionist rules of Big Football college presidents... stepped up and achieved one of the most thrilling and dramatic upset victories in college football history.
Score one for the common guy.