Columnist Dean Juipe: Football history says Bush to win

Dean Juipe

Wednesday, Nov. 1, 2000 | 10:28 a.m.

Dean Juipe's column appears Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday. His boxing notebook appears Thursday. Reach him at juipe@lasvegassun.com or 259-4084.

The typical football game has its typical implications.

One team wins, one loses. One puts a stroke in the win column, one adds a mark to the loss side. One has reason for encouragement, one has motivation to regroup.

Only in rare instances will the implications extend beyond the playing field or beyond the participating teams' personnel or fan base.

But such a game was played Monday night in the National Football League when the Tennessee Titans defeated the Washington Redskins by a 27-21 count in our nation's capital. In fact, the result of this game affected history.

It assured that Republican presidential candidate George W. Bush would win next Tuesday's election.

Preposterous?

Well, history says otherwise.

Including this year, since 1940 there have been 16 presidential elections. In each of the previous 15 instances, how the Redskins fared in their game the week prior to the election served as a tip-off as to whether the incumbent party in office would retain the presidency.

The Redskins' games have become a precursor, if not an influencer or a determining factor, in presidential elections. If the Redskins win the week before the election, the incumbent party stays in office.

If they lose, the Oval Office is in for a make-over.

End result: Vice President Al Gore, a Democrat from Tennessee, may have been pleased to see or hear that the Titans defeated the Redskins, but if he was aware of the historical implications he would have been rooting for the other side.

He needed the Redskins to win to assure the Democrats would hang on to the presidency.

Given that they didn't win, Gore's career just went down the drain.

This larger-than-life tidbit was unearthed by the Elias Sports Bureau and was presented as gospel by ABC Sports during the Titans-Redskins game. A Tuesday call to the Redskins' public relations office confirmed the particulars.

If the presidential campaign has seemed frivolous to date, it's doubly so now that we know who's going to win the Nov. 7 election. All the effort, all the travel, all the millions and millions of dollars spent boosting the Bush and Gore campaigns have been reduced to the extraneously mundane.

If only we'd have known sooner.

Bush and Gore, as it turns out, could have received their parties' endorsements and sat quietly and awaited the outcome of a football game. They could have saved themselves and the country grief on countless fronts: the staggering campaign expenses; the redundancy of their messages; the endless column inches and air time their daily escapades are accorded in the media. Even the complexities of polling could have been eliminated had Elias stumbled on to the pertinent presidential factoid a little sooner.

So it's going to be Bush in the White House.

Beyond the obvious -- that the winner has been preordained and you now have even less of a reason to vote -- here's a suggestion for the incoming president: Have the Titans as guests of honor at the inaugural ball.

While he may think otherwise, Bush wasn't going to be there without them.