By Amanda Earp
I love football — specifically the NFL.
My team is the Indianapolis Colts. I have loved them since I watched my first Colts game in 2006 when they played the New York Giants.
It was Manning brother versus Manning brother and the first NFL game, beside different Super Bowls, I remember actually wanting to watch. I followed them the whole 2006 season and watched them win the Super Bowl; I was hooked on the Colts and the NFL in general.
Fast-forward to 2011 and I watch more football now than some of my guy friends. It is probably my favorite thing to watch on TV and anytime I can watch it, I will.
I was watching a Monday night game back in December when the New Orleans Saints played the Atlanta Falcons.
I’m going to digress before I get any further into this story and admit that, yes, I am still bitter about the Saints beating the Colts in the Super Bowl last year.
Extremely bitter.
For example, when I see someone wearing anything relating to the Saints I still get upset like the game happened last night.
As I was watching the Saints and Falcons game, the announcers kept calling the Saints the “world champion.”
This bothered me, not because I am an angry Colts fan — which, granted, I am —but because the Saints should not be considered the world champions.
They are champions, but they would be considered the national champions because the NFL is the National Football League. How can we consider a team to be the world champion if they only play teams in the United States?
The only team we should call the world champions in “football” would be Spain because they won the 2010 FIFA World Cup.
I could not figure out why an announcer would give them this title, so I texted a friend for his thoughts on the subject.
He replied that it was probably a marketing phrase used to make the game sound more important than it is and he, of course, followed with a joke about the Saints beating the Colts.
This got me thinking about other leagues in our country that have claim on world championships: baseball and the World Series to be particular.
The Giants would not be considered the world champion; South Korea would currently be the champion for winning the 2008 Summer Olympics.
I would be a little more lenient with this term being applied to baseball because of the Toronto Blue Jays, but I still do not think just including Canada is grounds to be called world champions.
My thoughts on this apply to basketball as well. The United States would be considered the basketball world champion for winning at the last summer Olympics, not the Los Angeles Lakers.
This title makes the United States sound arrogant by claiming when a team wins the national championship they are, in fact, world champions of the sport.
As someone who is going to make a career out of dealing with word choice, I find this extremely annoying.
Even when my beloved Colts win another Super Bowl, or so I hope they do, I will not refer to them as the “world champion.”
Amanda Earp is a graduate student from New Waverly and the copy desk chief for the Lariat.
