Lights, Camera, Conspiracy

The fact that Ray Lewis has said something Joe Flacco probably doesn’t understand is hardly news but hey, who doesn’t love a good conspiracy theory?

Ray Lewis finds it hard to believe the lights going out during Super Bowl XLVII was a coincidence. In Ray’s world, electricity is a simple thing. You pay your bills, the lights stay on. Since the NFL can pay its bills, the lights should’ve stayed on unless…

Unless someone wanted them to go out because the Ravens were blowing out the 49ers and the suits were afraid people at home would stop watching the game. Also because everyone hates the Ravens.

Setting aside for a moment the fact that the Ravens have collected more than a few utterly unlikable people over the years, how did the suits know the 49ers would respond positively to the unplanned downtime while the Ravens would sulk and stumble?

I love the pretzel logic here. Ray begins by saying, “I’m not gonna accuse nobody of nothing – because I don’t know facts.” He then immediately accuses somebody of something. “You cannot tell me somebody wasn’t sitting there and when they say ‘The Ravens about to blow them out. Man, we better do something.’ That’s a huge shift in any game, in all seriousness. And as you see how huge it was because it let them right back in the game.”

It let them right back in the game. It had nothing to do with how well the 49ers played or how poorly the Ravens played when the lights came on. It was bigger than that.

We all know that Ray Lewis is a man of faith so his belief in things unseen should come as no surprise; things like television network executives who know where the electrical panels for the Super Dome are, the Kung Fu necessary to disable the security guards and which switch to pull (let’s face it, unless that TV exec is played by Bruce Willis, I’m not buying that one), things like momentum and of course, the imps of Satan who conspire against the good men and true of Baltimore.

No, the real SMH moment here is the fact that so many of the commentariat are picking up what Ray is putting down. On the Bleacher Report site (linked above), there’s a reader poll, asking, “Do you believe the Super Bowl XLVII blackout was rigged?” With 32,227 votes counted, 54.9% favored “Yes, the timing was awfully suspicious.”

Okay, so maybe I shouldn’t be surprised by this.

Our egos demand the events surrounding us have more meaning than mere happenstance. The fuel injectors in our cars’ engines didn’t fail because of a combination of cheap gas and a failure to follow the owner’s manual’s recommended maintenance schedule; no, God hates us. If not God, then perhaps some worldwide cabal of OPEC sheiks and Japanese automakers is observing us from their cloud city executive suites, chuckling mirthlessly as we guide our sputtering Nissan Altimas onto the shoulder of the road.

Where we’ll discover our iPhones are low on battery.

I suppose you think Steve Jobs is actually dead...