Epsilon Theory – Salient Partners | Now There’s Something You Don’t See Every Day, Chauncey.
Like every other male homo sapiens I know, I watch a lot of sports. There’s only one team that I watch as a fan – the University of Alabama football team (my grandfather and uncle played there, and I was raised in the Church of Bear Bryant) – by which I mean that these are the only games I watch where I could not care less about the quality of the gameplay, but only care about winning in as lopsided a fashion as possible. For example, while the rest of the world thought the 2011 Championship game where Alabama beat LSU 21-0 was a miserably boring affair, a Bama fan like myself thought it was a performance of absolute beauty. Roll Tide.
Fans and gamblers care about outcomes. For everyone else watching a game, we’re there for something else. One of those things – and for me the centerpiece of any non-Bama, non-Hunt-participant sporting event – is the chance that we might see something we’ve never seen before. For example, a few weeks back I was watching the Sunday night Giants-Cowboys game on television even though I don’t really care about the New York Giants and the last time I rooted for the Dallas Cowboys was when I was 6 years old and wearing footie pajamas with a big blue star on them. A year from now I will no longer remember (and don’t care today) who won that game. But I will never forget the greatest catch I have ever seen – Odell Beckham, Jr. throwing himself backwards, reaching out behind his head, and cleanly catching the long pass with 3 fingers of one hand for a touchdown. That’s why I watch the games – for moments like this where something happens that I’ve never seen before and almost certainly never will again.
