Robert Alford Should Be Proud of Having a Pick-Six in the Super Bowl

I am going to express a contrarian opinion on the internet. It’s only contrarian because we know that athletes aren’t the real world and things people should be happy about in their chosen professions don’t apply to athletes in this non-real world. Part of being a sports fan is to lack self-awareness when it comes to bellyaching and raining on the accomplishments of others, while sitting in a job where you pretend to work for half the time.

Yesterday, Robert Alford sent a tweet out about his pick-six of Tom Brady. Alford, of course, almost had another interception late in the game, but it hit off his hands as he turned his body, and ultimately somehow fell to Julian Edelman.

That spawned, of course, plenty of derision, which led to Alford deleting his tweet.

The worst tweet in history? Granted, Twitter history doesn’t quite extend to the written history of all mankind, but it is a pretty Easy D for me to say it’s not even the worst one sent this week.

Is there any other profession where you can be in the upper 1% of your field, do something that very few others have ever done, and then be mocked because of it? Yes, Atlanta blew a big lead. Yes, Robert Alford had a chance to seal the win.

He also made a great play in the biggest game of his life, something that everyone who begins playing way before the American Medical Association recommends dreams of doing. Edelman’s ridiculous catch wouldn’t be less ridiculous if Atlanta had won the coin toss in overtime and gone down the field for a touchdown. Julio Jones’ catch on the sideline was one of the best catches I’ve ever seen.

Robert Alford being proud of something he did in the game is not the reason Atlanta lost the Super Bowl. We’ve become pretty jaded as a society when we think that three-dimensional human beings can’t be both proud of things they accomplished and disappointed in other things.