The point I'm trying to make is that, for instance, married winning teams pay less taxes than other teams.
That's not correct. While married couples can apply the lower bracket percentages on greater amounts of income than single filers, it's not twice the amount of income (except for the 10% and 15% brackets). Therefore, two single people, each with $500,000 of income will get the advantage of having more of their total income taxed in several of the the lower percentage brackets than a married couple with $1,000,000 of income.
For example, the 35% tax bracket kicks in at the exact same dollar level ($372,950) for single filers as it does for married filers. That means that two single people can have a combined income of $745,900 before they hit the 35% bracket, while two married people will hit the 35% bracket when their combined income is only $372,950.
Using the 2009 federal tax brackets and ignoring all other income and/or deductions, $500,000 of taxable income for one single filer would have a tax of $152,684 (for a total of $305,368 between the two single people), and $1,000,000 of taxable income between two married filers would have a tax of $320,362... almost 5% more than the total tax of the two single people with $500,000 income each.
The current tax bracket system only favors married couples when one of the two makes substantially more (or all) of the income between the two of them, but when both of the married couple have similar income levels (like when they both win $500,000 each on TAR) they end up paying more taxes because they are married.