An historic meeting

As Pierre Garcon of the Colts and Pierre Thomas of the Saints prepare to meet each other in the Super Bowl (so to speak--they're both offensive players), I want to share with my many readers a little series of numbers.

There are roughly 25,000 people in America named Pierre. In a country with 300 million people, that makes the odds of being named Pierre 125,000 to one. And you know, come to think of it, I have never known anyone named Pierre. I've known a couple Federicos, two Galens, a guy named Trip, another named Trig. I knew a dog once named Puh. I'm no stranger to unlikely names. But I have never met a Pierre.

Now, there are currently about 1,600 players in the NFL. If you apply the already-scant odds of being named Pierre to that population, things start getting a little astronomical: the odds of an NFL player being named Pierre are 156,000,000 to one. I guess the lesson here is that we should cherish this two-Pierre Super Bowl.

Needless to say, you get dramatically different numbers on all this if you try it in France.