Well, that's settled: the best team in the AFC is the New England Patriots, and the best team in the NFC is the Dallas Cowboys, so they'll meet in the Super Bowl. It should be quite a game! Dallas hasn't been to a Super Bowl in about a decade, and with New England's undefeated season on the line…

Huh? What do you mean "Dallas lost?" So what? The outcome of one little game shouldn't matter when you consider the entire season! The statistics clearly show that New England scored more points (589) than any other AFC team, and Dallas scored more points (455) than any other NFC team, and in fact, more than any other NFL team except for the Patriots. It's just not fair to discard the entire results of that season for one isolated game in one small state. The overall results should be all that matters.

Of course, this probably sounds excessively stupid to you. It's not enough to score lots of points in blowout games; you also have to be able to win individual games to become a champion. A 34-3 blowout win does not more than offset a 27-37 loss.

It's not enough to be so much better than some teams that you blow them out more than you lose the close games. You have to play every game, winning many more than you lose, to become a champion. And once you do that, you have to prove that you can win up to four more individual games before the Lombardi Trophy can be yours.

But this is exactly the same mistake progressives and conservatives alike make when they want to throw out the Electoral College in favor of a national popular referendum—or rig the EC so that one state's votes go to the winner of the national popular vote.

It shouldn't be enough for one candidate to run up the score in either urban or rural areas. A candidate should have to win smaller elections everywhere in the United States, or at least a majority of them.

I bring this up every so often because, 12 years ago, Discover Magazine ran an article ran an article describing the mathematical proof that voting in districts increases every voter's power. The intuitive answer is the same one as for professional sports: a season that values games instead of points increases the power of each team. Every year in the NFL, when it comes to the final week of the regular season, one or two teams have the ability to get into the post-season just by winning one more game. Except in the case of obscure ties, they don't have to worry about scoring a fixed number of points, nor does some other team with 100-point season-long lead mean another team can't make the playoffs. "Win and you're in."

What the Electoral Collage needs is more granularity, not less. The balance gets thrown off by those two extra electoral votes for each state's senators, as I said four years ago:

It's not necessarily that the candidate who wins Oklahoma shouldn't get all seven of Oklahoma's electoral votes - it's that he [or maybe this year, "she!"] should get five votes, just like the candidate who wins California should get 52 votes instead of 54. The "senatorial" electoral voters give California 4% more votes than it would have by population, but they give Oklahoma 28% more electoral votes, and both Wyoming and DC get 66% more electoral votes than population would decree.

The way to increase individual voter power is to eliminate the senatorial "bonus" voutes, and then to allocate Electoral College votes by Congressional district, rather than by state. That way, a candidate has to win in 217 individual districts, rather than appealing to the urban voters in New York who overrule the upstate voters, or only to large numbers of "red states" that overrule big cities.

The corrolary to this, though, is that it only works if all Congressional districts, nationwide, are drawn without regard to political affiliation. They would have to be drawn as compactly as possible while including as much of a representative sample of the area's demographics as possible, while not defining "area" so broadly that, for example, a majority-African-American district was cut into seven parts so that seven districts would all have one-seventh African-American representation.

That's the part that's unlikely to happen. The Electoral College change would require a Constitutional amendment that's unlikely to pass, but right now, drawing Congressional districts is the sole province of each individual state. Imposing requirements on that, while probably overwhelmingly popular with voters, would never pass two-thirds of a Congress elected on gerrymandered lines, much less pass three-fourths of the state legislatures, as is required to ratify a Constitutional amendment. If all the changes were part of one amendment, it might work if it could get through Congress, using the same definition of might as in George W. Bush might go down in history as one of the greatest presidents ever.

We could see Electoral College changes that deliver more transparency and more individual voting power. Abolishing districts and going to a national vote is the strongest possible move in the other direction, one of reducing every voter's power and strengthening tyranny of the majority. It's not enough to score the most votes—you need to win the most contests.

Every professional sports fan, liberal and conservative alike, understands this. It's a mystery to me why they can't understand it for something far more important.