Sammie meets his match in the Pickin' Chicken
We’ve been having a lot of fun with animals.
I’m talking about the Pigskin Prognosticators, as several of us have been looking for excuses to explain our lack of football savvy.
Dogs, cats, llamas…
Heaven knows what other creatures will be drawn into The Press battle for supremacy in predicting pigskin outcomes.
And yes, I concede that I’m as guilty as anyone, having roped Sammie the World’s Greatest Cat into making my selections.
In fact, Sammie hauled us all the way into first place — until I decided that the issue was now really serious, and that I had to start making the selections myself.
Needless to say, my fortunes took an immediate nosedive.
Yes…
I’m trying to get Sammie back on the task, but she’s still upset that I ignored her for a couple of weeks. She stares at the ceiling when I beg for help.
Please, Sammie!
I need your skills…and soon.
WHILE WE wait to see if Sammie the World’s Greatest Cat will come to my rescue, I want to tell you a story.
And this one is absolutely, positively true.
You can sort through the files of the Merced Sun-Star newspaper in central California if you don’t believe me.
In fact, this tale is SO damn true that it’s almost scary.
The basic premise for football season there was quite a bit like our own Pigskin Prognosticators. We had five or six sports staff members picking games each week.
It was a combination of our Kootenai County characters stabbing at NFL results, along with the high school and college predictions done by Mark Nelke and Jason Elliott.
We had to select winners of all the local high school games (and there were quite a few), plus a few regional college battles and some NFL matchups to fill out the slate.
Sun-Star editor Joe Kieta wanted to liven up the picks, though, so he enlisted the help of staff member Carol Reiter — who happened to live on a nearby farm.
So each week, Carol would report on the game selections made by a creature who became known as the Pickin’ Chicken.
Carol would put the names of two teams in front of this creature, along with a little bit of corn.
Whichever pile of corn the chicken chose, that was his choice for the game in question.
And it’s worth noting that the chicken had no particular routine.
Right or left seemed all the same.
IT WAS really good fun.
Well, it was a few laughs until the Pickin’ Chicken started beating the hell out of the entire sports staff.
There was no possibility of cheating, either — Carol didn’t know anything about football and (needless to say) the chicken couldn’t read the names of the teams.
Not that he’d have cared.
Unlike our NFL picks here at The Press, there were quite a few prep games that were “gimme” picks — situations where an upset seemed totally implausible.
Those games gave actual reporters a HUGE advantage over the chicken, who — theoretically at least — had exactly the same chance at each game as someone flipping a coin.
We all chuckled when the Pickin’ Chicken started out with a couple of good weeks — but then it turned into a serious mystery when the beast just started blowing everyone away.
For instance, the chicken chose some upsets that were, well…
Almost unbelievable.
Eventually, it became more than a story about picking football games.
WITH THE Pickin’ Chicken’s success rate hovering between 65 and 70 percent after a few months, we took the issue to a local college math professor.
We had a national phenomenon going on in a nearby barnyard, and needed an explanation.
The prof took time out to watch the entire process one week — and was as dumbfounded as the rest of us.
He announced that the chicken’s chance of such long-term success — assuming about a 50-50 shot on each game — actually were one in a gazillion.
Or something like that.
It would be like flipping a coin over and over for a year, and having it come up heads 70 percent of the time.
Can’t happen, right?
To this day, no one has a clue how the Pickin’ Chicken managed to turn football picks into child’s play.
Personally, I wanted to take the bird to Las Vegas.
Sadly, however, the Pickin’ Chicken died of plain old age before the next football season.
But I’ll tell you this…
I’d have taken my chances as a Press Pigskin Prognosticator by hiding that chicken somewhere out back.
Sorry, Sammie, but that fowl arrived from another universe when it came to football guesswork.
I don’t suppose anyone has a magic chicken hanging around that I could borrow for a few weeks — do they?
*****
Email: scameron@cdapress.com
Steve Cameron’s “Cheap Seats” columns for The Press appear on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Steve also contributes the “Zags Tracker” package on Gonzaga basketball each Tuesday.