Sports and the Paranormal

You tell me: Is he in?

A lot of Fringe-ology revolves around problems associated with human perception. We do see what we want to see. And there is perhaps no finer ongoing example than the way this phenomenon plays out, seemingly every day, in sports.

Anyone who watches soccer, football or any major sports where wages are bet and the fans are emotionally invested knows the home crowd will boo any call that goes against them , even it was obviously right. For a long time, I figured this was almost some sort of ploy. Give the officials the business, all game long, in the hopes of wearing them down and winning some subjective calls for your team. But as I researched Fringe-ology and looked into some of these questions a bit more closely, it became grossly apparent: Fans really do believe obviously good calls went against their team unfairly. And here's a great case in point.

Check out these videos, and the message board comments beneath them. The topic is Super Bowl XLIII when the Pittsburgh Steelers won the game, with less than a minute left, after an incredible toe-tapping catch in the corner of the end zone.

Check it all out after the jump.

The Catch

It's pretty clear Holmes was in. But not in Arizona, where the Arizona Republic went all in for the Cardinals, gunning for controversy with headlines like "Was Holmes' Catch Too Unreal?" The cause never really took off, though, precisely because Holmes was in. But five days after the game the paper printed a series of freeze frames of Holmes' reception that really bury the lead (a cardinal sin, no pun intended, in newspaper reporting). Check frames 10 and 12 and it's obvious, again, this is a legal NFL catch. But the Republic clearly thought they were on to something, and judging from the comments section, so did Cardinals' fans.

What are they looking at?

Well, clearly not what they were seeing in Pittsburgh. Because pro-Steelers websites were writing their own stories, looking at the same catch, and calling it obviously all good.

One guy even put together a Zapruder-like defense of Holmes' catch, which I include here.

Steelers Fan With Time On His Hands

It should be noted this was apparently a response to:

A Cardinals Fan With Time On His Hands

The upshot of all this is that we need to understand: Sometimes we can't believe our own lying eyes. When our expectations or desires conflict with reality, well, sometimes reality can be very difficult to perceive.