As I watched the Super Bowl last Sunday with my friends, I couldn’t help but marvel at the improbable season of the Arizona Cardinals. I got to thinking, though––the Arizona Cardinals playing in a Super Bowl was only slightly more improbable than the Wesleyan Cardinals making it to the big game. Unlike Trinity College, who actually believes they were in the Super Bowl, we can only imagine how our lovely University would perform in the greatest game in sports.
First, the Theoretical Bowl between Wesleyan and the Pittsburgh Steelers would be delayed several months from its scheduled date. This would partially be due to EON demanding every light fixture in the Tampa Bay stadium be replaced with sustainable fluorescent bulbs, but mostly because the first Super Bowl to happen on 4/20 would be too good to pass up.
The Wesleyan squad would take the field, dressed in matching skinny jeans and V-neck cardigan jerseys, to the sound of French house music and the antics of their zany mascot, a multi-ethnic, multi-gender cardinal who specializes in Balinese dance. Each player would wear #44, in honor of Wes’s most beloved alumnus, Barack Obama (H’08). The team would seem dazed and disoriented, especially after finding the game will not played with a Frisbee. Several vegan players would quit after finding the football is made of leather.
During the coin toss, the Wesleyan captains would attempt to resolve the conflict with the Steelers through purely diplomatic means. An Economics major would offer proposals to bail out the troubled Pittsburgh steel industry. Another captain might offer the lessons of his senior thesis, a University Major dissertation on the effectiveness of play-actions in third and long situations. However, the overtures will likely be ignored and Wesleyan will be forced to kick off.
As the Steelers’ kick returner stiff-arms his way through the Wesleyan starting lineup, consisting entirely of frosh Beta pledges performing an initiation task, the stadium would emit a gasp of horror. To protest Bank of America’s mountaintop coal-mining investments and Super Bowl commercials Students for a Democratic Society would chalk and hijack the Goodyear Blimp. Due to poor navigational skills, they would miss their intended target, the stadium, and careen into the Florida Everglades.
After the first quarter, in which the Steelers would score a Super Bowl record 63 points, the Wesleyan team would stage an anarcho-collectivist coup against their head coach. From here on, the team would choose their plays by a majority vote, resulting in innumerable delay-of-game penalties and repeated uses of “the option.”
After the second quarter, where Wesleyan would trail by only 134 points, the Eclectic Society Halftime Show would begin. It would consist of three bands no member of the crowd has ever heard of playing short sets with poor sound quality and lighting. The fans would spend this portion of the evening smoking cigarettes in the gender-neutral bathrooms and hitting on drunk members of the opposite sex wearing too much eyeliner.
By the third quarter, most of the Wes fans would figure out Pittsburgh is an industrial city in western Pennsylvania, not a neighborhood of Brooklyn and begin to boo. When the Steelers take a bathroom break, the Cardinals would score their first touchdown and celebrate with an elaborately choreographed hip-hop dance routine. However, all the team’s progress would be voided when the Wesleyan fans riot upon realizing the Pittsburgh fans haven’t recycled their beer cups. The game would end a forfeit, 134-6.
I know Wesleyan is ineligible to play in the Super Bowl, and likely wouldn’t make it even if it was. But can’t a guy have a dream? While I don’t know if the big game would be better, it certainly would show America a different side of the greatest night in sports.