Rooting for the Underdog

The underdog team is losing at halftime and you are invested in them winning even though you have no particular attachment to either program.

Something in the human soul responds to the underdog story in a way that is almost involuntary. The team that isn’t supposed to win, competing against the team that is, in a game where the outcome seems predetermined — and then something shifts. The instinct to root for the one who is counted out is nearly universal.

Read this passage slowly.

Let that sit for a second before you move.

God chose the weak things to shame the strong. Paul is describing a pattern that runs through the whole of Scripture: the younger son, the smaller army, the stuttering prophet, the fishermen chosen over the scholars, the cross chosen over the throne. The narrative of God’s work in the world is consistently told through the ones that the world’s evaluation system would not have chosen.

The underdog story moves people because it resonates with something deeper than sports preference. It is the story of the human being against the systems that have already decided the outcome. The fan who roots for the underdog is acting on an intuition that the game shouldn’t always go to the team with the most resources, the most talent, the most accumulated advantage. That intuition is spiritually correct.

The underdog story also offers something the heavily favored team’s story doesn’t: the demonstration that what seems determined is not. The upset is evidence that the evaluation system is not the final word. That is a message the human soul needs to hear more often than the sports calendar provides it, which is perhaps why the moments when it does arrive produce such disproportionate joy.

The specific story and the named need is the connection to what the underdog narrative is carrying.