So-called ‘experts’ often seem clueless

The recent Super Bowl triumph of the underrated and overlooked New England Patriots is just one more reason why one should never put a whole lot of faith in the so-called “experts,” whether it involves sports or most anything else in life.

Throughout the regular season and on through the playoffs leading to the Super Bowl, the “experts” in the national media were consistent in their insistence that the Patriots could not possibly win the next game, never mind win the ultimate championship awaiting at the end of the line in New Orleans.

“They haven’t picked us to win all year,” one of the Patriots said of the experts in a post-game interview last Sunday. “And if we were to play tomorrow they still wouldn’t pick us to win…”

He got that right. Not only would they not pick the Pats to win, they’d most likely also take a page from the playbook of the television weather forecasting crowd, refusing to acknowledge their most recent bum prediction while confidently unleashing the next one on a gullible public.

An expert, the dictionary advises, is “one with the special skill or knowledge representing mastery of a particular subject.” Patriots fans, as well as followers of other sports teams that get no respect, might alter the definition to read, “one who mistakenly believes he has the special skill or knowledge representing mastery of a particular subject.”

University of Maine Black Bear hockey fans might buy that definition. Last weekend, the University of New Hampshire Wildcats came to Orono ranked second in the country in one poll of collegiate hockey “experts” in which Maine was ranked sixth. Maine defeated UNH on Friday night and finished in a tie on Saturday, no small back-to-back accomplishment. So, having dominated a team ahead of them in the rankings, the Black Bears moved up a notch, right? Or, at the very least, remained in sixth spot, yes?

Wrong on both counts, oh Naive One. Have you learned nothing from the Patriots’ experience? When the latest poll came out Tuesday it showed that the “experts” had rewarded Maine for defeating and tying the Number Two team in the nation by dropping the guys a spot, to seventh. Thank God the Black Bears didn’t win that second game outright and find themselves ranked tenth. (Yes, I understand how these things work, and also realize that they are pretty much meaningless in the overall scheme of things. But, still…)

But it’s not just in the sporting world that the alleged experts run amok. Sit in on most any major court trial and you can often enjoy the spectacle of seeing one side’s “experts” come up with conclusions that are the exact opposite of the other side’s “experts” in an effort to sway the jury. It has always seemed to me that a little of that goes a long way with juries, and you have to wonder how many experts it takes to spoil the broth for a lawyer’s case in the minds of the non-experts on the panel. Chances are it’s not many.

Elsewhere, Exhibit A in support of why one must never place a whole lot of faith in the experts, is, of course, the Enron debacle, which, before all of the chickens come home to roost figures to leave many Very Important Bodies scattered in its wake. It was, after all, the now-bankrupt energy corporation’s experts who, with the approval of their accounting firm’s experts, were allegedly cooking the books to a farethewell and wiping out the life savings of their employees, even as they were unloading their shares of company stock and reassuring the working stiffs that all was rosy. It was the experts who reportedly cut dubious business deals that falsely inflated earnings reports and diverted millions of dollars into their own pockets. And if there’s any justice, it will be the experts who wind up in Leavenworth, where, given sufficient time, they may become expert in how to survive life behind bars.

Meanwhile, the experts still running around loose simultaneously assure us that, a) the economy is in robust recovery; b), the economic apocalypse is upon us and we’d best hunder down for the imminent cosmic cataclysm; and, c) none of the above. It’s safe to fly, they say, and it’s not safe to fly. Bin Laden is dead; bin Laden is alive. And so forth.

The bottom line, I believe, is that we’d be a damn sight better off much of the time if we paid less attention to the experts and more to our own common sense. But of course that’s merely the opinion of an expert non-expert.

NEWS columnist Kent Ward lives in Winterport. His email address is olddawg@bangordailynews.net.