After Sunday’s thrilling win over the Packers for a berth in the Super Bowl, an extremely emotional Russell Wilson thanked God for the victory.
“God is too good all the time, man,” Wilson told Erin Andrews of FOX Sports immediately after the win. “Every time.”
Plenty of God-fearing Packers fans probably disagreed with that assessment. It’s a question as old as sports. Does God have a rooting interest? Does He help one team (and in turn hurt another) through the micromanagement of His will?
As noted by Deadspin, Wilson elaborated on his belief that God made the win more interesting by deliberately creating the degree of difficulty in post-game comments to Peter King of TheMMQB.com.
“That’s God setting it up, to make it so dramatic, so rewarding, so special,” Wilson said regarding the sudden transformation from horrible performance to incredible performance. “I’ve been through a lot in life, and had some ups and downs. It’s what’s led me to this day.”
Apart from assuming that God cares about who wins a sporting event, Wilson’s theory assumes that God also wants to inflict extra misery on the team that mistakenly thought for more than 55 minutes of game time that God wanted that team, not the other one, to prevail.
Wilson is free to believe whatever he wants. And others are free to believe that God really isn’t the ultimate puppet master, influencing the flight of a ball, the questionable decisions made by coaches and players, and/or the sudden inability of a backup tight end to catch an onside kick heading straight for his face.
Whatever Wilson or anyone else believes, I respect that. I personally choose to believe that God exists, that He loves the members of both teams equally, and that He has far better things to do than fix NFL games.