The Cold, Hard Football Facts love affair with Pennsylvania is well documented.

 

We love the Keystone State because it:

(For the record, Penn State is one of the greatest places in the world to immerse yourself in the rural American football experience. More importantly, the Cold, Hard Football Facts find it no small coincidence that a place filled with so much beaver is called Happy Valley.)

 

Fans in PA also know their football history, as evidenced by an e-mail we received the other day from Eric of Coal Township, Pennsylvania (cool location names like Intercourse, Blue Ball and Asslick are another reason to love PA ... O.K., we made up the last one). 

 

Eric's note alerted us to a poll being conducted right now on the Philadelphia Eagles Virtual Museum, a nifty off-shoot of the team's official web site. Eric thought, rightly enough, that we'd be impressed by the survey.

 

The results of the poll are interesting because short-sighted football fans in most parts of the country believe football was invented by John Elway at Stanford in the early 1980s.

 

Not true, friends of the facts.

 

And, fortunately, our Philly friends suffer no such illusion. The poll asks Eagles fans to name the best middle linebacker in team history: the choices are Chuck Bednarik, David Lloyd, Tim Rossovich, Bill Bergey (recently the subject of a great NFL Network feature about his vicious rivalry with Cardinals guard Conrad Dobler), Byron Evans and current Eagles MLB Jeremiah Trotter.

 

You know how it would work in most towns: Trotter, the contemporary player, would snap up all the votes from simpleton fans. Guys like Evans and Bergey, who a number of people today would remember watching, would finish high up on the list. Anyone who played before 1970 would be forgotten or – even worse – mocked as some useless old-timer who couldn’t handle the game the way it’s played today.

 

Yet in this poll the oldest player on the list, Bednarik, has garnered the vast majority of the votes, 65.5 percent at the time we put together this story Sunday morning.

 

It's good news. It reaffirms our faith in Pennsylvania's football tradition, and tells us that most Eagles fans have a proper respect for the history of the game, and for one of the greatest players ever to strap on a helmet.

 

It also tells us that 34.5 percent of Eagles fans still have their heads up their collective asses, especially the 19.5 percent who believe Trotter is worthy of sniffing Bednarik’s crusty old jock strap, let alone actually a better linebacker. (We're guessing the harelipped retards in the poll who picked Trotter over Bednarik are the same dirtbags who booed Santa ... but we digress.)

 

As the Cold, Hard Football Facts first noted back in 2004, Bednarik isn’t just the best middle linebacker in Eagles history, he’s the greatest Eagle ever.

 

He’s also one of the greatest football players, period, as evidenced by the single highest honor ever bestowed upon an individual football player: That's right, folks. Last October, Bednarik was named captain of the Cold, Hard Football Facts All-Time 11, the leader of the most awesome collection of gridiron talent ever assembled.

 

So, congrats to our friends in Philly. Take a bow. Pat yourself on the hairy back. Wash down your cheesesteak with an extra bottle of Yuengling for breakfast. Because more than 65 percent of you are the balls.

 

Of course, 19.5 percent of you are still ignorant, disrespectful, harelipped a-holes.