You can book it: Bears, Irish sure read like winners

Any weekend when the Bears don't play is a good time to catch up on a stack of neglected reading material.

After finishing last month's Playboy and Cat Fancy it was time for the heavy stuff.

No, not "The Brothers Karamazov." My tastes reside more with Stan Lee comics than Fyodor Dostoyevsky classics.

All this matters why? Because my theory of sports says the team with more books written about it always should beat a team with fewer books written about it.

(Obviously the Cubs prove this doesn't apply to baseball.)

Books feed interest, interest generates revenue, revenue purchases resources, and resources win championships.

If the folks running the Bears and Notre Dame are smart, their football teams should play each other in both the Super Bowl and BCS title game every year.

Boy, is that "smart" part a big "if," or what?

A couple of books crossed my desk recently: "100 Things Notre Dame Fans Should Know & Do Before they Die" and "Bear With Me, A Family History of George Halas and the Chicago Bears."

The former was written by John Heisler, one of my all-time favorites among the millions of college sports information directors, and the latter by Pat McCaskey, one of my all-time favorites among the millions of McCaskeys.

To be honest, both books are interesting but probably won't wrestle the Pulitzer Prize from Chet Coppock's "Fat Guys Shouldn't Be Dancin' at Halftime."

There is literature, and there is literature, you know.

Of course, "Fat Guys" will have a tough time gaining Oprah's favor with competition like "The Great Book of Chicago Sports Lists" by Dan McNeil and Ed Sherman, "Settling the Score" by Mike North and "Then Ditka Said to Payton" by Dan Jiggetts.

Anyway, despite being about the trillionth book apiece on the Bears and Notre Dame, the authors of the latest do come up with interesting new tidbits. I'm not giving them away, so check them out their next bye weeks.

OK, enough about them. Now back to me and my theory that the volume of books determines winners.

The Bears and Notre Dame should contend for Super Bowl and national championships every season because there must be more written about them than any other pro and college football teams.

So far so good this season. The Bears have a 3-1 record and the Fighting Irish are 4-1. The question isn't how they managed to go 7-2. It's how they managed to lose twice.

Seriously, the rivalry factor notwithstanding, Notre Dame never should lose to Michigan and the Bears never should lose to Green Bay.

Books about the Wolverines and the Packers are leaflets compared to books about the Irish and the Bears.

This weekend Southern Cal shouldn't even show up against Notre Dame and the Falcons should have no chance to beat the Bears.

Maybe country songs are written about the Falcons and Hollywood screenplays about Southern Cal.

But not as many books are written about them even if you include the ones about the O.J. trial in USC's total.

So trust me and bet on the Bears and the Irish next weekend, assuming they're smart enough to spell "Karamazov" or even "Cat."