Princess, the star of New Jersey’s Popcorn Park Zoo, has correctly picked the winner of five of the last six Super Bowls. She went 14 and 6 predicting regular season and playoff games this year, and has a lifetime record of 88-51.

Her pick this year: The New York Giants.

The Bactrian camel’s prognostication skills flow from her love of graham crackers. Zoo general manager John Bergmann places a cracker and writes the name of the competing teams on each hand. Whichever hand Princess nibbles from is her pick. On Wednesday, she made her pick with no hesitation at all, predicting bad news for Bill Belichick, Tom Brady and the New England Patriots, even though the Las Vegas oddsmakers have New England favored by about 3 points.

– Wayne Parry, Associated Press.

Really? We’re still doing stuff like this? I figured it would die out with the World Cup octopus, but then I guess I frequently underestimate people’s capacity for general silliness. We are, after all, still using a groundhog to forecast the weather.

But no one actually takes Groundhog Day seriously, right? Am I to take it that anyone, when really pushed, believes Princess the Particularly Lucky Camel can successfully predict the outcome of football games better than, say, a coin toss could? I doubt it, and even if there are a few people who do I strongly doubt they read this website, but just in case:

Camels can not read. Since I have no means of communicating with camels I have no way to confirm this, but I doubt camels understand the rules of American football or even the concept of competitive sport. If you can get a camel to explain to me the distinction between roughing the kicker and running into the kicker, I might at least listen to what it had to say about the outcome of the Super Bowl. But I refuse to buy that camels can just magically, psychically see into the future, because if they could I suspect there’d be a lot more camels.

Every Jets fan has to resolve this conflict to his or her own satisfaction, but the way I see it, you should root for the Patriots. Maybe Bill Belichick would decide to step down if he secured another ring. Maybe Tom Brady works out with a little less fervor in the offseason if the Pats capture the title. The Giants are your rival, sure, but you won’t see them in the regular season again until 2015. Hope the Patriots get fat on satisfaction, and deny the Giants the opportunity to rule the city.

– David Ferris, SNY Why Guys.

No way. Just… no way.

I understand the dilemma, and since I deal with way more Giants fans than Patriots fans on a regular basis I can even see how from a pure exposure standpoint it might make sense to favor New England, but there’s just no way I could ever bring myself to root for a team coached by Bill Belichick and featuring Tom Brady.

But I don’t hate the Giants the way some Jets fans do. Not at all, really. They’ve got too many lovable players, and as a longtime Eli Manning apologist I’m enjoying the evidence this season is providing for future arguments with Giants fan/hater friends.

To me this isn’t nearly as much of a debate as it was with the Yankees-Phillies World Series in 2009, and even then it was pretty obvious to me the Yankees were the good guys.

Seriously, though — and excuse the woe-is-me-ness here — how can this keep happening? Why do my teams’ crosstown rivals and divisional rivals keep winding up playing for their sport’s championship?

I’m not going to bother with a poll because I know a lot of you are Giants fans. And congrats to you, if that’s the case. We’re in this together now. Let’s hold on to this:

The Giants won yesterday and are bound for the Super Bowl, which is a) very exciting for fans and members of that team and b) yet another reminder that we — and by we I mean me — should really never count professional sports teams out until they’re mathematically eliminated. Hindsight now says otherwise, but the Giants looked as good as dead at multiple points during the regular season.

Anyway, there was an old Dave Letterman gag where he’d take some photograph of a notable event and focus on some rando in the background and say, “But what about that guy?” (He might still do it, I just haven’t watched the show in years.) And anytime the FOX cameras showed Jim Harbaugh on the Niners’ sideline last night, they presented one of the greatest but-what-about-that-guy opportunities of all time. Somewhere behind Harbaugh, at most times, stood some dude in a 49ers shirt with long, curly blond hair that might have been a mullet and a strong, well-manicured mustache.

I asked Twitter for his identity last night and again this morning and got nothing, but it turns out I’m not the only one curious. Brandon Eddy passed along this from Bleacher Report:

No one (at least no one in my circle of sports friends) can seem to figure out who he is, how he got there or what grooming products he must use to make his jaw-dropping hair and handlebar-teaser combo kick so much righteous ass that it delivered a San Francisco 49ers team from 2010 despondency to 2011 postseason-storybook heroism.

And the screengrab:

An update to the Bleacher Report story reveals “The Bro” has a Facebook page, which claims he’s an “equipment manager with the San Francisco 49er’s.”

I kind of prefer my friend Dailey’s explanation: