With a Little Luck

Bad teams don’t win.  But lots of good ones lose. That’s a truth chiseled into the bedrock below the foundations of stadiums around the world, and yet competitors wish with all their might it wasn’t true. They get it, but they’d rather not. When you pour your heart and soul into a thing, you’d like to know the odds are high that you will get what you have paid for.  Unfortunately, in the world of sports, you can never be so sure. So much can go right and then one little flinch goes wrong and everything you thought you had falls out of the bottom of the bag. Maybe that’s why we love it so much, those of us who stay glued to it. The drama grows magnetic when nothing’s set in stone.

That’s an easy and entertaining way to look at sports when your stake is outside the lines. What you know when you’re inside them, though, is that the unpredictability terrorizes your soul. And you know what those who aren’t you can’t know—how really, really hard it is to win a game.

That’s one of the many reasons ball coaches are preparation freaks.  Football coaches, especially, can make the Boy Scouts look like slackers. BCS powerhouse programs these days hire a set of eyeballs for every detail you might imagine as well as some you never could.  Arrive early to almost any SEC game and you’ll see at least two dozen non-coaches at mid-field watching their opponent warm-up.  They’ll have notepads in hand and pens will be flying. Everybody everywhere is looking for an edge.

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 Rightly so. Information is power. Head coaches hire staffs to provide comprehensive intel on any and every thing their opponents might do…or think about doing…or trip and fall into doing. They abhor nothing more than being surprised. The detail mined for is so extreme that some staffs have a guy whose only job is to know what one team might run on third and short from the 20 or third and long from the 25.  Another guy is completely responsible for what might happen in the red zone if the game is on the line.  One guy, for one team, in one situation.   That’s “i” dotting and “t” crossing on steroids.  The fleet of diggers in matching polos and khakis who join their padded warriors on Saturdays at the field vow by the logo on their visors never to be caught off guard.

Except they are.  All the time. Because a couple of folks are always playing whether they are on the schedule or not.  Lady luck and human nature are a tandem tough to scout.

Humans play the games. (Fans forget this all the time.)  And ref the games. And coach the games. And human beings are fallible. Even the most ballyhooed ones.  Yet the masses offer up little grace when the game is on the line, forgetting all these imperfect humans factor in to the final result. Sometimes training escapes the best of us no matter how prepared we are. We take our eye off the ball, we move before we’re supposed to, we grab instead of wrap them up. We don’t call the time-out.  We miss the holding. We place a lousy spot. Remembering to do what you know how to do is harder than it looks.

Martina Navratilova was asked one time how she got so good at going in to play at the net.  She said she practiced it every day.  Over and over and over and over.  And she said that sometimes she still forgets. It was mind-boggling to her how she could do such a thing. (Who knew that she was human?) The relentless display of discipline seems relatively easy to those who have never tried to do it themselves.

In addition to that, sometimes the ball bounces weirdly, or the wind blows sideways, or a guy steps on another guy’s foot. Fluky stuff is real. Like the field goal attempt that hit the upright and gave the opposing team better field position than they would have had had they not held their opponents on third and long.  Or the guy that fell down around mid- field without a soul between him and the house.  Or the ball that squirted out of the runner’s hand because his own opponent’s helmet hit it in the may lay of a block. Goofy, unpredictable stuff can and often does swoop in to change a game.

Yet we can’t believe it when it happens. 

When the awkwardly tipped ball lands in the hands of an opponent who was not where he was supposed to be, giving sudden pristine field position to the other team, we shake our fists at the heavens. And when the game tying field goal hits the six-inch goal post from shut-your-eyes close range, we melt.  What are the odds, we wonder.

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Fairly high, it seems. A confluence of uncontrollables is always waiting in the wings.

Players get injured, coaches get sick, athletes face personal upheavals that have nothing to do with the game, and outcomes are affected. So much happens that is outside our control. And yet coaches beat themselves with a cat of nine tails when they can’t make it end like they want.

With a little luck star players stay healthy, guys don’t fall down, and kickers hit the space in between the six-inch poles. But lucky jumps around. And sometimes it gets caught in a pattern that’s really hard to break. Getting good is just the price of admission.  It’s how you get in the door.  What happens once you’re in there, though, is somewhat up for grabs. So it’s best to not bet on the outcome. It’s really hard to win a game.

P.S. For coaches everywhere who had the wind knocked out of their sails before the first quarter was even over, or took a left hook to the jaw in the final minutes, or fielded grenades that just kept coming from kick-off to close of game....hang in there. All you can do is the best you can... The Man in the Arena