Chucky-Gate: Jerry Rice Says Bill Callahan Threw Super Bowl XXXVII

The greatest receiver to ever played the game has just accused his former head coach of the greatest sports scandal since the 1919 Black Sox. Jerry Rice appeared on ESPN to publicly claim Bill Callahan fixed the 2002 Super Bowl, won by the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.

“For some reason — and I don’t know why — Bill Callahan did not like me,” Rice said. “In a way, maybe because he didn’t like the Raiders, he decided, ‘Maybe we should sabotage this a little bit and let Jon Gruden go out and win this one.’”

Rice backed Tim Brown’s claim that Callahan deliberatly changed the gameplan 48 hours before kickoff.

“Tim and I are both veterans and we know that’s not how you do things.” Rice said.

Not only did Rice say Callahan fixed the game by deciding to pass the ball “60 times” but he said the reason center Barrett Robbins missed the game, was because he was so distressed over learning about the fix that he skipped town.

Basically, this is Rice’s argument regarding throwing the Super Bowl: Bill Callahan liked Jon Gruden, so much so that he was going to sacrifice his chance to win a Super Bowl as to allow Gruden to win one. He’d accomplish this by throwing the ball instead of running it.

Here’s where Rice’s arguement stops looking credible (despite the fact it never seemed credible): the Raiders threw the ball 44 times that night, which is three more times than they threw it in the AFC Championship game. The Raiders running back in 2002 was Hall of Fame legend Charlie Garner, while the receivers that MVP Rich Gannon was throwing to were Tim Brown and Jerry Rice.

If you were running that team, what would you do to win the Super Bowl?

I had a lot of respect for Rice before this, as he was always a humble legend. He even welcomed the chance that Calvin Johnson would break his single season receiving record, saying he had plenty of them. But apparently he didn’t have enough Super Bowls and I’ve lost basically all my respect for Rice after this.

If he didn’t win the game it must have been fixed. Bill Callahan threw the Super Bowl folks, he honestly did. He also killed Kennedy, staged the moon landing, is actually Elvis Presley and is the reason the economy is in the toilet.

Bill Callahan is the anti-christ, mystery solved.

Maybe it’s because I’m a Bucs fan that I’m being so defensive about this, or maybe it’s because I’m not a backwoods nut-job who thinks the government is watching me through my cereal. However, we did learn something from all of this — at least I did — that we didn’t know beforehand.

There are sore losers, and then there’s Jerry Rice.