I recently found out the great groundhog\u00a0Punxsutawney Phil, the world’s most famous animal prognosticator, only has a 30% success rate when it comes to guessing whether Pennsylvanians are in for a long winter or early spring. With those kinds of odds, we don’t recommend Phil try his hand at roulette.<\/p>\n
Turns out, the critters at the Fort Worth Zoo don\u2019t fare much better when predicting Super Bowl winners. Over the past 11 years, a diverse cast of animals including elephants<\/a>, hippos<\/a>, gorillas<\/a>, rhinos<\/a>, and orangutans<\/a> have tried their hands at picking which football team will hoist the Vince Lombardi Trophy. The only correct prognosticator: Brazos the elephant, who correctly predicted<\/a> the Los Angeles Rams would beat the Cincinnati Bengals in 2022.<\/p>\n That\u2019s a 9% success rate. Ouch. You’d have better odds letting a coin do the thinking.<\/p>\n Mixing it up, and perhaps concluding past failures were due to animals\u2019 warm-bloodedness, the Fort Worth Zoo has handed the responsibility to a tiny toad named Benito. The selection is apt, as the toad is named after the Super Bowl halftime headliner and recent Grammy winner Bad Bunny, and at this point, what does the zoo have to lose?<\/p>\n While the choice in critter wasn\u2019t surprising, we are a little shocked by Benito\u2019s Super Bowl pick: the Seattle Seahawks. We\u2019re not sure how much pride Benito takes in his own species \u2014 he\u2019s specifically a Puerto Rican crested\u00a0toad, by the way \u2014 but selecting a mascot that\u2019s a massive predator to your own kind displays at least a little self-loathing. Also, it\u2019s the 250th anniversary of the U.S., and what could be more suitable than a win by the Patriots, who hail from the city where this great experiment kicked off.<\/p>\n Come on now, Benito.<\/p>\n That said, betting markets do have the Seahawks as 4.5-point favorites. Perhaps Benito’s safe pick can at least get the Fort Worth Zoo a notch in the W column.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I recently found out the great groundhog\u00a0Punxsutawney Phil, the world’s most famous animal prognosticator, only has a 30%…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":152595,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[15304,116,118,117,7227,27564,92],"class_list":{"0":"post-152594","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-fort-worth","8":"tag-brian-kendall","9":"tag-fort-worth","10":"tag-fort-worth-headlines","11":"tag-fort-worth-news","12":"tag-fort-worth-zoo","13":"tag-super-bowl","14":"tag-top-story"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/152594","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=152594"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/152594\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/152595"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=152594"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=152594"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=152594"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}