What About This…? 1.26.2017

By Wayne William Cipriano

Surprisingly enough, Rosalie likes my football analogy regarding the recent prattling concerning the “illegitimacy” of Donald Trump’s election to the Presidency of the United States of America.

As any football fan knows well, and every football season widow has heard many times, there are several methods to evaluate the performance of a professional football team during and after a game.

Some are very esoteric, important to only a very few: the ratio of passing attempts to completed passes; offensive compared to defensive penalties by team; fumbles lost versus fumbles recovered; interception, etc.  But, there are other measures that make sense to anyone, even someone jilted for several months during each football season:  yards gained by the offense during a game (which also speaks to the defensive abilities of the opposition as well as the offensive prowess of a team); time of possession indicating what part of the hour of play each team controlled the football and thus denied in general scoring opportunity to the other team.

It is easy to understand how attending to these measures of gain and possession can tell us a great deal about how a football game was played, and perhaps by extension, which was the better team.

However, even Rosalie will agree (startling considering her antipathy to all thing football), the important metric or as Coach Lombardi can be paraphrased, the only metric is the final score.

If yards gained, time of possession, or any other measure decided the winner of a game, tactics and strategy would be different. But, they are not. It is the final score that is important, that determines the winner, not how far one team moved the ball, or how long they controlled it.

In our Constitutional structure the person receiving a majority of electoral votes becomes the President of the United States of America, not who received the most popular votes, not who won the most counties  nor states, and certainly not who was expected or announced by opinion polls to be the victor.

If we want to change this method of selection, our Constitution pro-vides an avenue by which a change can be accomplished any time we wish to expend the considerable effort required to do so.

If we just want to complain because we don’t like the way an election turned out but are not willing to do anything beyond complaining: TOO BAD!

It is the final score that’s impor-tant, and during that last game, as I recall, the final score was Trump Lions 304, Clinton Bears 227.