The Dolphins beat the Ravens this week, 22 to 10. Remarkable.

Likely as not, you are not a football fan. You may even despise the game with its capitalistic and historically, still significantly, misogynous trappings. Fair enough.

Nonetheless, stick with me here. This obsessional USofA sport, wrapped as it is in some of the finest cloth woven of our nationalistic fibers, will well serve our discussion. And I promise you do not need to know the difference between offsides and false starts to read on. For my fellow football fans, I will also be referencing gambling, grandstanding, and sex, so lots of bonuses ahead.

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Anyway, quite unexpectedly, Dolphins beat the Ravens this week. Or, in industry speak, Unbelievable defeat! “Miami stuns Baltimore in upset victory.” “Miami’s suffocating defense shuts down Lamar.” “A defensive performance for the ages as America watched dumbfounded.” Wow. Whatever your content embellisher of choice, I am guessing some serious money was lost on all those gambling apps populating all those smart phones owned by all those folks thinking they knew good from bad.

What’s curious about all these shock and awe headlines is that underdogs win fairly regularly. Last week, despite Von Miller’s departure, Denver beat Dallas. In fact last week hosted so many upsets in the NFL that some locker-room insiders pivoted to a we-should-have-seen-this-coming position, determined to make sense of things, determined to still believe that game outcomes are predictable.

Mike Tanier, writing for NYT’s Trend Watch, conjured nine likely explanations for “all the upsets” in the league, from increased taunting penalties to Tinder. That’s right, Tinder. Tanier suggests we may be witnessing a fundamental disruption in the forever sacred home field advantage because dating apps now allow players on the road to have their cake and eat it too: “romantic escape and a refreshing night’s sleep.” He goes on to say he’s less convinced of the probable influence of this variable, but included it anyway in service of “scientific rigor.”

Scientific rigor claims aside, I feel for the guy. Like all of us, his analysis is driven by a longing to predict things, to have a scoop on what might happen next, even if spied through the clouded lens of hindsight. And why wouldn’t we hold fast to this longing?

The desire for prediction and control is a fundamental human trait, our attempt at stress reduction, our attempt to secure our futures. And to exercise this habit we rely on the odds. Why would we bet on a game if we knew our gamble was doomed? Why would we invest in a stock we knew was about to plummet? Why would we storm a concert at the Astrodome if we knew we were destine to be participants in tragic death and incalculable injury. We wouldn’t. So we turn to the odds makers for everything from insuring our car to ensuring our life everlasting.

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Admittedly, certain concerns have verifiable, statistically significant, numbers in their predictions arsenal. Infectious disease experts schooling the lay public on COVID-19 pandemic trajectories and financial market quants parlaying pubic ignorance into massive profiteering schemes come to mind.

Ironically, the more reliable prediction models are often all the more disdained by our fear-of-change instincts. Again the world of sports offers up great examples. Malcolm Gladwell has addressed our resistance to the underhanded free throw because it looks funny or the ‘pull the goalie’ move because it’s unpopular. That infinite fount of truth, The Simpsons, takes easy swing at our refusal to embrace algorithms in its delightful parody on SABRmetrics. (For you trivia hounds, watch the MoneyBART episode in which Bill James plays himself. Home run material.)

Yep. In the face of the facts, the brightest among us frequently default right back to gut instinct anyhow, convinced that the stars or the cards or their news feed of choice can still serve up a better odds. Freedom can be blind.

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The collective impact of our overconfidence in the predictability of things is a distant second to the immeasurable damage wrought by its evil twin, our fierce convictions about the inherent good and bad of things. Righteousness fuels heinous acts. Even if we scroll back to less disturbing influences, our insistence on the dichotomy of good and bad is just plain silly.

Day in and day out each of us is confronted with hard evidence that ultimately good and bad fold into one another, that they constitute a continuum, not two finite and fixed points. We no more think that certain circumstances will usher in a period of goodness and light — our candidate sweeps the polls; our team’s first-round draft picks are solid; our job interview is a slam-dunk — than the future hastens the yin to our yang — our candidate’s positions shift, our draft picks fizzle, our would-be employer forfeits. We aren’t doing anything wrong here. This is simply the nature of life itself, the impermanence that plays out in life’s unending cycles.

Star Wars and Harry Potter enthusiasts notwithstanding, the good and evil polarity is itself is a delusion. Life, in all of its forms, is the stuff of continuums. Physics teaches us this. Faith teaches us this. Politics teaches us this over and over again. All positions, all actions, all crusades, all mergers and breakups and best-laid plans, will spawn unintended, unpredicted, consequences. Could be good. Could be bad. Could be we just don’t know.

Insisting otherwise only works if we remove nuance from our beliefs and stands, which not only makes our own lives a perpetual struggle and fight, but proves relatively frustrating for everyone else who has to deal with us on a daily basis. With a bit of wisdom and maturity, we move on from grandstanding. We accept that all things will carry pros and cons. We learn to lighten up.

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Back to football.

In his book Integrity, Stephen L. Carter tells the story of watching a game with his young son when this good versus bad business interrupted his Sunday leisure. Carter, who has tried his best to make the world a better place, was just looking for a day-off from pushing that ever heavier ethical rock up that ever steepening hill of unethical cultural forces. No such luck.

What happened was this: During a televised game, an intended receiver missed a catch, the football hitting the turf before it came to rest in the receiver’s arms. Incomplete pass. No doubts for viewers at home, including Carter and his son.

But the player faked (AKA cheated) his way out of the situation by masking his failure with confident (AKA conning) celebration as if the pass was complete. It worked. The refs were convinced, The play stood. (This has to have happened during that unfortunate we-won’t-use-video-replay-to-verify-calls period in the NFL… but I digress.)

Rather than taking a stand for truth, justice, and plain ‘ol fair play, one of the TV commentators reportedly praised the move, calling the successful deceit a ‘head’s up play.’ And because Carter was obviously not destine to get a break that day, his son turned to him and asked, “Daddy, what’s a head’s up play?”

If memory serves, I read the book years ago, Carter got up and turned off the game rather than contend with yet another of the morality lessons embedded in all the grey in-betweens of our lives. It was his day off after all.

What’s your take on the story? Was it a head’s up play? Is bending the rules our privilege or our failing? Before you rush to answer, consider how often you obey the speed limit. See what I mean? As another wise sage, Pogo, asserted: “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

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But let’s end here on an optimistic note. As in all arenas of life, the culture of football and its diverse membership also serve up moments of grace and humility.

It happened when one of the Fox Sports commentators, covering last week’s surprise Broncos win over the Cowboys, admitted the limits of their collective predictive powers. I’m paraphrasing here, but his basic message was this: ’It just goes to show we don't really know anything."

It happened when John Harbaugh, head coach for the Ravens, shouldered his team’s loss to the Dolphins. "Bottom line is, this falls squarely on me as the head coach. We were not prepared the way we needed to be prepared. Our schemes weren't up to snuff. And we weren't prepared to execute the way we needed to. So that's it. Not on one player. Our players played their hearts out. … We just weren't ready, and that's on me.”

It happens every week when opposing team members help one another up on the field, or stand in respectful wait when a rival player is seriously injured, or courageously wear helmets emblazoned with words which call on us all to examine our biases, to do our part to make the world a better place.

It’s why I still watch football. It’s why I’m still a fan. It’s why I’m hoping to post this blog before kick off...

Linda J. Rohan, ARNP