Posted by DAN SAVAGE on January 31 at 9:45 AM

More Super Bowl insight from my brother Bill.Dan Savage

At a certain point, you have to let the oddsmakers have their way, and consider various other methods to worry about the Super Bowl and your Seahawks’ chances. Getting away from reality is part of the appeal of sports, so how’s this for some unreal analysis, something that occurred to me while drinking some real ale and chatting with a barman regarding American sports:

The Seahawks are up against it because no bird-named team has ever won the Super Bowl. And don’t tell me about the Baltimore Ravens: despite their logo, they are NOT named for a bird: they’re named for a poem about a bird, which makes them about the gayest team in the NFL, hence all the macho posturing and murder charges their players get tangled up in as they try to salvage the tattered fragments of their masculine heterosexual self-image.

But back to nicknames: If you divide up the previous 39 Super Bowl winners by what sort of nickname they have, an ominous pattern appears: teams named after Industrial Workers (broadly defined to include ranch-hands) do very well. The Packers, Cowboys, Steelers, and 49ers have a combined 17-5 record in the Super Bowl, and 3 of those losses came at the hands of another Industrial Worker. The other Super Bowl winners can be sorted as follows: Thieves (Raiders, Bucanneers); Marine Mammals (Dolphins); Politically Incorrect Dehumanizing Racist Labels (Chiefs, Redskins); Hoofed Mammals (Colts, Rams, Broncos); Ursin Omnivores (Bears); and Abstracted Humanoids (Giants, Patriots).

Now, this isn’t a hard-and-fast analysis; some Thieves (Vikings) have done very badly in the Super Bowl, for instance. But note: no Super Bowl Champions have been named for birds. The Eagles have lost two, the Falcons one. So, the Seahawks should perhaps be 4 point underdogs, since they’re up against the Industrial Workers of the World, united as the Pittsburgh Steelers.