Something Amiss in Sportsnation

Whenever there’s something I need to know about sports, there’s only one place I go: ESPN Sportsnation. The online clearinghouse for sports polls, Sportsnation’s completely-scientific, never-biased, always-on-the-money sports surveys are to truth what Yao Ming is to tall.

Which player in the NHL (huh, what’s that?) will win the Hart Trophy (huh, what’s that?), you might ask? I sure don’t know, but Sportsnation does. A small plurality of voters say it’s the Penguin’s Sidney Crosby, so it must be true.

But there is a crack in Sportsnation’s foundation. A troubling crack. One of SN’s latest polls asks NFL fans to declare their favorite team and then, as a member of that particular fan-base, vote for who they want to win the Super Bowl. So you’d figure that 100 percent of New Englanders would root for the Pats and all Giants fans would, you know, be backing the Giants.

Nope.
At last count, 32.9 percent of Patriots fans said they were for the Giants and 19.9 percent of Giants fans said they wanted the Patriots. Oh, the complexity!

Seriously, though, what in the wide world of sports is going on here?

Well, it wouldn’t make sense that Sportsnation could be wrong. Right? Could it be that we’ve uncovered a disturbing level of masochism among the New England fandom? Could it be that these people want the Patriots to lose because they like being miserable?

More investigation is needed here — at least with respect to the Patriots traitors. As for the Giants fans pulling for the Pats, we assume it’s simply because they think Eli Manning’s face is stupid.

That just makes good sense to us.