Due to my atypical schedule this week, I enjoyed the rare opportunity to listen to Frank Deford’s regular Wednesday morning sports commentary on NPR during my morning drive to work. He of course was talking about the Super Bowl, but true to his high standards of journalism, he never even mentioned  Tim Tebow once. Instead, he discussed the Super Bowl’s fixation on numbers, which by my estimation seems to be rivaled only by just about every single baseball game ever played. Although unmentioned by Deford, it struck me that this is Super bowl #44 (or “XLIV” in Super Bowl speak). This stuck in my subconscious simply because by sheer coincidence Barack Obama happens to be our 44th president. This is of course one of those inconsequential random intersections of data to which we immediately assign  an inordinate amount of importance because it is an “event” that will never happen again… unless of course we stop having Super Bowls (or presidents) for a while. It got me to thinking about which presidents aligned with which Super Bowls. A quick googling proved that not only does one rarely ever have a unique thought, most often someone else has had that same thought, and much better than you EVER could yourself. It took Google 0.36 seconds to locate an awesome series of posts at AmericaBowl.net in which Don Steinberg pits every US president against every Super Bowl game in history to determine which has been better: the Commander in Chief or the Big Game. Check it out – it is a great lesson in American history AND professional football. Most of the match ups have outcomes that are easily determined going in: usually there is a strong favorite from the get-go. However there are some surprise upsets. For instance, even though the Super Bowl IX match up between the Steelers and Vikings was one of the worst in history (Fran Tarkenton threw 3 interceptions and the score was a whopping 2-0 at halftime) “at least they played the whole thing,” points out Steinberg. Meanwhile our 9th president (William Henry Harrison) became ill and tragically passed away after just 32 days in office. By holding the “Purple People Eaters” to a miserable 17 yards of rushing, Terry Bradshaw and the “Steel Curtain” managed to eek one out over ‘ol Tippecanoe.

And what about one of the great games of Super Bowl history, number XVI? As Steinberg calls it, Superstar Quarterback Joe Montana led the 49ers to an impressive 26-21 win over the Bengals, passing for one TD and running for one himself. Although the Bengals gained 356 yards of total offense to the 49ers’ 275, San Francisco forced 5 turnovers and jumped to a 20-0 lead by halftime – the largest shutout lead at halftime in Super Bowl history. This also marked the first time in Super Bowl history that the team which compiled the most yards and touchdowns actually  lost the game.

But Joe Montana did not free the slaves. Nor did he hold a divided nation together through four years of a devastating Civil War.

President Abraham Lincoln wins the 16th head-to-head  battle going away in a cakewalk. Tough luck of the draw, Joe.

And leave it to The Gipper to tie up the score, halting a four game skid of presidential scandal and mediocrity. So how does it end – who wins? At the proverbial two minute warning it is indeed too close to call  – I cannot wait until Sunday evening to find out who wins. From the looks of it, this one might just go into overtime.

UPDATE: The Aints ain’t Aints no more.

Well, the game is over, and Obama lost out to Drew Brees and the New Oleans Saints. In all fairness to Obama, he still has  (at least) three more quarters to play his own version of the political super bowl. The Saints did not look so good in their first quarter, and neither has Obama. The real question is how long can the Republicans can keep up their strategy? I mean how many successful teams start playing their prevent defense in the first quarter of the game, anyway? It may be entertaining for the fans, but you don’t win simply by keeping the other team from scoring. At some point you have to get the ball and run your own plays. One thing is for sure however in Steinberg’s game-by-game analysis: Super Bowl games keep getting better and better (an onsides kick to start off halftime?!?) and politics seem to be tailing off in the other direction.