Football

Nico Perrino

Former Hoosier CB Tracy Porter gets super for the Saints.

Indiana University won Super Bowl XLIV last night.
 

Okay, maybe not overtly. But it was a product of Indiana University who did, and at a school where football is second to nearly everything else you become relegated to obscure associations to boast of Hoosier football glory.
 
Coming out of a small town in southern Louisiana, just outside of Baton Rouge, Tracy Porter came to IU not heavily recruited. Unranked by Rivals.com, the football world didn’t have very high expectations for the 5-foot-11, 185lb DB coming out of high school. However, after starting his first game at IU as a true freshman against Central Michigan –a game in which he had two interceptions, one of which was returned for a TD- Tracy Porter as we know him today was conceived.
 
And IU faithful will be quick to remind you of the womb from which he was sprung and nurtured.
 
Mark Cuban, Jim Jones, and Jared Fogle: All famous IU alumni, but not the type of people Hoosier fans can be proud of.  Why? Well, Mark Cuban gets annoying with his constant bitching, not to mention his basketball team kind of sucks; Jim Jones was a cult leader who organized the mass suicide of 900 people – Not somebody the IU admissions department puts on their list of notable alumni. And Jared? Well Jared was the Subway spokesperson, but he’s kind of taken a back seat lately as he seems to have packed back on the pounds he lost during his time living above the restaurant on Atwater.
 
But Tracy Porter…! Well, Tracy is a man all of us IU fans can be proud of!
 
Stupid haircut aside, Tracy made us all very proud this postseason. He’s The NFL equivalent of Afghanistan. What Afghanistan is to empires, Tracy is to the NFL’s greatest quarterbacks: He’s the graveyard of postseason dreams.
 
Tracy, arguably, ruined the postseason aspirations of, once again –arguably, the two greatest quarterbacks to ever play the game of football. In the NFC Championship game he picked off Brett Favre allowing the Saints to send it to overtime and win, while all the while possibly ending Favre’s career in the process. And in Super Bowl XLIV, two weeks later, he picked off Payton Manning and ran it back for a touchdown putting the Saints up by 14 and essentially sealing the deal for Manning and the Colts.
 
So here’s to you Mr. Tracy, for giving us IU sports fans something to be proud of in these darkest of days: A Super Bowl win. Because without you –we will argue- The Saints would have never won the Super Bowl. And without Indiana University you would have never played for the Saints and been given the opportunity to win the Super Bowl. So…. through the implementation of The Transitive property, it is thus that Indiana, in effect, won this years Super Bowl.
 
Thank you very much.