The Choke

Tom Pennington/Getty Images

TEXAS A&M’S Alex Caruso missed a 3-point shot with 36 seconds remaining in the NCAA second round game between Northern Iowa and Texas A&M on Sunday in Oklahoma City. Northern Iowa was leading 69-57 at the time, and Caruso’s missed trey seemed to be their last faint gasp, as Northern Iowa’s win percentage was calculated to be 99.99% in that moment. A&M’s Admon Gilder rebounded the miss, however, and scored a put-back bucket with :34 on the clock, cutting the lead to 69-59, but the needle barely moved. UNI was still 99.96% to win at that moment.

And then this happened:

What the actual fuck?

Texas A&M wound up winning the game 92:88 in 2OT. Improbable? Impossible? A miracle? There really are no words to describe this. You have to see it to believe it. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the greatest choke we may ever see in our lifetimes.

To give you some idea of the magnitude of this collapse, let’s use another recent shocking late-game turn – Super Bowl XLIX between the Patriots and the Seahawks. When Seattle found themselves with 2nd down on the Patriots 1-yard line in the closing minute, the Seahawks possessed an 87.4% chance of winning the game. The Hawks’ chances plummeted to 0.4% when they didn’t run the damn ball, and Malcolm Butler picked off the pass at the goal line. (About the only way you could have a bigger swing in an NFL game would be a chip shot FG blocked and run back for a TD on the last play of the game.) Somewhat of an apples-to-oranges comparison, of course, given that we’re talking about different games with different variables, but the point is that, percentage wise, UNI’s collapse is even more unthinkable. 538.com suggests A&M was about a 3000-1 bet to win the game at that point, having not found a comeback of the sort anywhere in college basketball in at least the past four seasons. (If I put a $100 on A&M to rally last weekend, and another $100 on 5000-1 Leicester to win the EPL last summer, I’d be retired and living in Tahiti already.)

This game capped off four days of utter NCAA nuttiness the likes of which we’ve scarcely seen. I’d basically given up on college basketball after last season, since the on-court look of the game was so bad. The new rule changes shortening the shot clock and adjusting the geometry of the court to create more space have had a positive impact on the quality of play.

One of the comments I heard quite a bit about the new rules was that, come tournament time, you’d be less likely to see the sorts of big upsets you’ve seen in the past, the theory being that most of those upsets occur through smaller schools with lesser talent playing entirely half-court games consisting of holding the ball for longer and reducing the number of possessions in the game.

This year’s NCAA tourney showed that to be utter nonsense. Upsets were everywhere in the first two days. Friday saw a 15-seed, 14-seed, and 13-seed all win – the first time that’s ever occurred on a single day of the tourney – including the most humdinging, bracket-busting upset of all time: 15-seed Middle Tennessee State’s 90:81 win over Michigan State. There’ve been eight 15-over-2’s in the history of the tourney, but this one was different: Michigan State was, in essence, the fifth #1 seed in this tourney, and were shocked to find themselves slated as a #2 going in. The Spartans, at 11-2 odds, were second favorites in Vegas to win the whole thing behind Kansas. Sparty was a 17½-point favorite going into this game, and the Blue Raiders from Murfreesboro were getting as much as +$2200 straight up from the Vegas sports books.

And all it took was watching the Blue Raiders jump out to an apropos 15-2 lead at the outset of the game to make you realize that the NCAA Selection Committee had gotten it horribly wrong. Middle Tennessee was clearly underrated. Upsets of the 15-over-2 variety in the tourney tend to be the product of the committee bumbling the selections, either placing an overrated team at #2 or an underrated team at #15, or it’s the case where the #15 team has some great player on their team who goes off: I very much remember 1993, when 2-seed Arizona got ousted by Santa Clara, a game I had interest in since I knew one of the Santa Clara players, and Santa Clara had a freshman point guard by the name of Steve Nash who was kinda good. Another example of this is Lehigh’s C.J. McCollum, now of the Portland Trail Blazers, going off for 30 against Duke in 2012.

And this year’s rule changes may have, in fact, contributed to leveling the playing field more than first thought, simply because everyone is trying to adjust to new rules and trying to figure out how to play. You can play neither offense nor defense in the quite the same way as before. Indeed, the field was the losingest in the tournament’s history, with more combined losses among the 68 entrants than ever before, thus suggesting a far more level playing field. The committee took more heat than the norm for the field they selected for this year’s tourney, but given how parity appears to be reigning and everyone seems to be about equal, how in the hell are you supposed to differentiate? And though a fair number of blue bloods from power conferences wound up reaching the Sweet 16, teams like Kentucky and Michigan State did not, and many more of them had the bejeezus scared out of them. Across the first week of the NCAA tourney, the overall quality of play was generally better than what I’d seen a year ago, and more importantly, the drama was better than ever. And that’s what’s most important in the end. We love the drama and absurdist theatre of the NCAA tournament. The kids don’t always play well, but they play their hearts out. Inspired comebacks, clutch shots, overtimes, buzzer beaters (or, in the case of Cincinnati, beater buzzers), weird schools you’ve never heard us from places like Nacogdoches, Texas, seemingly doing the impossible, strange twists and turns and unpredictable results. It’s all great stuff. It’s why we watch the tournament, and why we watch sports at all. Sports are life’s original reality TV.

And then Northern Iowa had to go and make us basically forget all of what we’d just seen by pulling off the most incomprehensible of chokes. The Panthers from Cedar Falls had already had a pretty memorable couple of weeks. That they were in the tourney at all was due to this wild and bouncy buzzer beater in the MVC championship game in St. Louis against the Orange Purple Aces of Evansville (who were wearing orange, for some reason). UNI then pulled off the most miraculous of results against Texas in the first round, as the Panthers’ Paul Jesperson did some Steph things at the buzzer, sinking a 50-footer to give them an improbable 75:72 win. But UNI is known as a “mid-major” program in NCAA-speak: not one of the élite, but certainly not a nobody. The Missouri Valley Conference is a highly competitive and well-respected league, and Northern Iowa has made four trips to the NCAA tourney in the past six years, first coming into the collective sports consciousness six years ago when they went about torching and torturing #1 Kansas in the second round of the tournament. This is a team that knows what they’re doing – or should’ve known what they were doing, I should say. Indeed, as was pointed out in The Washington Post, had Northern Iowa done any of these 14 13 things instead of what they did on Sunday, they likely would’ve won the game. What you have instead is an absolute disaster.

 Oh, I’m sorry, I meant to say that what you have is an act of God.

“Glory be to God … they were blessed the other night, and we were blessed tonight.”
– Texas A&M coach Billy Kennedy, when asked right after the game the Aggies’ victory.

Oh, fuck right off.

Let me just get this off my chest here. I don’t give a shit what religion you are. I don’t. Believe whatever you want to believe, and permit me to do the same. But don’t give me this bullshit about how you won because you were ‘blessed.’ I hate it when athletes say that sort of stuff. Fuck that shit. Quite honestly, I wouldn’t know why God would give a damn about a basketball game. The outcome is not divinely determined. It’s determined by human beings making plays – and also making mistakes. Also, to say that UNI were ‘blessed’ the other night also implies that they were just lucky and is disrespectful. Sure, they were fortunate a 50-footer went in the basket, but they were good enough to be in a position to win that game. Saying stuff like this just makes me want to hate you for being completely ignorant. Here’s to hoping you have to go and pray over why it is Oklahoma thumps your ass this coming Thursday in Anaheim.

But I digress. In the 100 years or so that I’ve been watching college basketball, I cannot ever recall seeing a comeback like this. Certainly, the game has changed over that time – but a lot of those changes didn’t really come into play in this instance, save for the fact that the clock stops after a made bucket in the final 2:00 of the game, which wasn’t always the case. The 3-point shot aids your attempt at a comeback, of course – but Texas A&M only made one such shot in this rally. The advent of the double-bonus on college hoops took away one path to a rally, in that in the past, when every foul in the bonus was a 1-and-1, the strategy you employed during a rally was simply to force the other team to throw it to their worst foul shooter, at which point you fouled the hell out of him and hoped he’d miss the front end of the 1-and-1. But again, free throws didn’t matter here – UNI shot no free throws at all in the final :30 of this game, their only points coming on a breakaway dunk after a long in-bounds pass, which was about the only thing the Panthers did right. Otherwise, it was mistake after mistake after mistake:

And here, we also have to give some praise to Texas A&M for a bit of creative strategy and some out-of-the-box thinking, which is the sort of thing you need in times of desperation. If you remember back to Super Bowl XLIX (and how I can ever forget?), you may recall the endgame situation: Pats up four, Seahawks on the Pats 5-yard line, and both teams have one timeout left, final few moments of the game. The Seahawks carry the ball to the Pats 1-yard line on first down, and conventional wisdom dictates that New England should call timeout to save some seconds for their offense in case Seattle scores. Even so, this is a completely dire situation for New England. So what does Belichick do? He doesn’t call the timeout, because a stopped clock would be an ally of the Seahawks, who are still losing the game. So now what do the Seahawks do? By not calling the timeout, and putting the onus on the Seahawks to manage the clock, the Pats are then able to take an educated guess as to what will happen: the Seahawks will likely have to pass on 2nd down, since an incompletion would stop the clock and it would save the timeout. Sure enough, the Seahawks do exactly that, the Pats play pass defense and recognize the formation, Butler jumps the pass route and makes the interception. It’s still somewhat miraculous, but Belichick had at least positioned his team for the possibility of a miracle to occur.

OK, so let’s apply some game theory here to the final moments in Oklahoma City. Texas A&M is down 10 points after Gilder’s layup with :34 left, but the clock is now stopped. Conventional basketball wisdom here is that you deny like hell the inbounds pass and try to force a 5-second call or a bad inbounds pass (which did happen once in this sequence), and if that doesn’t work, then you immediately foul and concede two free throws in exchange for stopping the clock. But there is a second school of thought about this, which is that rather than immediately fouling whomever receives the first pass, you immediately trap him and then foul on the second pass. You want to try to steal the inbounds pass, of course, but failing that, the goal is to force them into a bad area of the floor – the corner, along the baseline – double-team the ball and use the boundary of the court as a third defender. Now, there is nothing all that unremarkable about this strategy in and of itself, and teams are well-drilled in learning how to break the press. And it doesn’t make much sense, in a predicament such as A&M found themselves in, to be letting the seconds tick away when time is of the essence.

Except that it really doesn’t make a difference whether the time is ticking away as you trap in the backcourt or if you’re bringing the ball up the floor after the free throws, the most likely result of which being that you’re even further behind. You’re fighting on multiple fronts here. You’re fighting the clock, but you’re also fighting the score. You have to score as quickly as possible when you get the ball, and in this instance, that time is better spent trying to get the ball back nearer to the opponent’s basket than it is taking it out of bounds 94 feet away.

But more importantly, in choosing not to immediately foul, you have the element of surprise on your side, because the other team’s players expect to be fouled. Not doing so increases volatility and can also increase the potential for unusual or unlikely to occur.

In fact, this very scenario unfolded in Oklahoma City two weeks previously during the NBA game between the Zombies and the Golden State Warriors, a 121:118 OT win for Golden State that was the best game of this season, and just about any other season for that matter. Golden State trails by four points with :14 remaining in regulation, Klay Thompson drives for a layup to cut it to two with :10 left, OKC then immediately inbounds to Kevin Durant like they want to do since he’s an 89% free throw shooter – but the Warriors don’t foul. They trap Durant along the baseline and catch the Zombies by surprise. Durant & Co. stop moving, stop trying to get open, and even forget they have a timeout left. Durant tries a crazy diagonal cross-court pass which the Warriors knock free and steal, and now it’s a scramble drill and the Zombies are in a mess. They’re all over the place and commit a foul, and two Warrior free throws force the OT. And this is Kevin Durant we’re talking about here, one of the best and smartest basketball players on the planet. An unexpected approach by the Warriors leads to a moment of madness, an unexpected rush of blood to the head.

And indeed, part of the problem for Northern Iowa in this instance is that when the expected foul doesn’t come, they forget what to do. Go back and watch this again. They stop moving, the guy with the ball panics, they’re trapped in terrible areas of the floor and twice they resort of trying to throw the ball off defender’s legs and out of bounds, but the alert Aggies step away from the trouble and make the steal. And with each successive turnover, the A&M belief grows, the UNI panic further settles in, the frenzy builds and then it snowballs into a full-blown avalanche.

Even so, this is all low-percentage stuff – but if you’re A&M, you’re looking at the no-percentage stuff of not playing any more games, so you may as well try everything. And even with all of this effort from A&M, it got them no better than being tied. They still had to play the overtime, but Northern Iowa messed that up as well, screwing up their final possession in the first OT with the game tied and settling for yet another Jesperson heave-ho from mid-court. Foul trouble attrition then settled in during the second extra session, as it often does in such extended games, and the Aggies were able to wear UNI out with their superior depth. But even though the outcome was still somewhat in doubt well into the second OT, you just sort of knew that the Panthers had blown it and they would eventually succumb. All the announcers could say during the 2nd OT, again and again, were words along the lines of, “I can’t believe what we witnessed at the end of regulation.”

It’s an appalling meltdown, and you feel bad for the kids involved, all of whom had played great to get their team in that position in the first place. We take life lessons from losing, of course, but losing in the NCAAs is particularly bitter in that the losses aren’t necessarily applied again to playing the game: graduating seniors move into other life phases, don’t necessary continue to play, and the vast majority of them certainly never play at this high of a level again.

The biggest takeaway from that, as it turns out, is that most of us are going to lose the last game we play. Winning championships is rare. Going out on top is almost nonexistent. And when you’re an underdog in the NCAA tournament, I think you’d almost rather be blown out by 30. Being blown out by 30 sucks in the immediate aftermath, of course, but you’re able to divorce yourself from it over time and look at the bigger picture: losing in the NCAA tourney was, in fact, a reward for doing so many other things right. And the humor of it all sets in at that point. You got blown out by 30 and you probably deserved it, but at least you had a helluva good time along the way.

But what do you pull from a loss like this one? Don’t choke? Well, yeah, no shit. But is there a lesson or a moral victory to be found in this anywhere? Anywhere? I don’t know what to say. I got nothin’ on this one. Words are completely failing me.

Fleet Foxes

Sweet!

THANKS to Shinji Okazaki’s brilliant overhead kick, Leicester City defeated Newcastle United 1:0 on Monday evening. The win brought the Foxes to 63 points with eight games remaining in the EPL season, five points clear of 2nd-place Tottenham Hotspur and 11 ahead of 3rd-place Arsenal and ESPN’s SPI now lists the Foxes as being 73% favorites to win the title.

To put that into some perspective, at this time a season ago, Leicester City were dead last in the EPL and staring at relegation. Only a seemingly miraculous late season run salvaged the club, as the Foxes won seven of their last nine matches to save themselves in 2015. Even so, the Foxes were assumed to be a relegation candidate this season. They were picked to finish dead last, or near to it, by virtually every single pundit and sports journalist in the U.K., and had the longest odds of any of the 20 league clubs at the start of the year, with the bookies offering 5000-1 on Leicester to win the title. (Even the Philadelphia 76ers had better odds on winning the NBA title.)

And it isn’t as if they had a whole lot of takers. The British press has now put in considerable effort beating the bushes in search of people who willingly tossed £5 or £10 down on Leicester back in the summer. It’s one of those dumb sorts of bets you might make just for the hell of it with the loose change jangling about in your pockets. Bookies love those sorts of bets. It’s easy money. If the Foxes can hang on for eight more games, and win the championship in the most popular sports league on earth, it will go down as probably the biggest upset in the history of sport.

Oh sure, there has been a one-off prizefight here and there where the underdog channeled their inner Rocky Balboa and sprung a big upset, but you’re talking about the EPL here, the longest and one of the most rigorous campaigns in sport. The EPL season is 10 months long, and unlike other European leagues, they take no winter break. Most countries have one domestic cup competition, but in England they have two, so if you’re progressing in the tourneys, the fixture backlog can get completely ridiculous. (Liverpool was playing two games a week for the better part of two months, as they juggled three different tournaments.) With injuries and depth issues and mid-season transfers, a squad can come to look and play, by the end of the season, absolutely nothing like they looked and played at the beginning. To win, therefore, takes sustained excellence, which makes a scrub club like Leicester’s achievements truly impressive.

And this is good for the game. It’s good for a sport which has become predictable to the point of being stale. This past weekend, Paris St.-Germain defeated Troyes 9:0 – yes, that’s 9:0 – to clinch the French Ligue 1 championship with eight games to go. Barcelona has a 30+ game unbeaten streak going, and are now well on their way to winning in Spain, while Bayern Munich and Juventus went on their inevitable long winning streaks to win their inevitable championships yet again in Germany and Italy, respectively. After a bit of early season upheaval, the old guard have reestablished themselves and the season is playing out like it usually does. Big money rules the roost in soccer, where great talent doesn’t come cheap. As the season has progressed, all of the big clubs, with their big wage bills and big financial backing, have taken their rightful and predictable places at the tops of the tables.

Except in England, where apparently everyone showed up drunk, and everything has gone mad.  Manchester City fielded the first £300 million side in history earlier this season, but you’d think that for £300 million you could afford more than one quality center back. The Citizens sleepwalked their way through a goalless draw with Norwich this past weekend that pretty much killed whatever chances remained of winning the title. Meanwhile, Manchester United salvaged a scrappy 1:1 draw in the FA Cup with West Ham United over the weekend, but since when does Man U have to be scrappy? Manchester United has a £200 million wage bill, and the club made £190 million in jersey sales alone in 2015. Two other big spenders were taking part in the FA cup over the weekend as well, with perpetually flaky Arsenal getting beat by Watford (who was trawling in Div. 2 a year ago), while Chelsea was busy getting whomped by Everton, which was newsworthy insofar as that it wasn’t really an upset at all. Everton aren’t a small club by any means, but they’re probably a better team than Chelsea at the moment and are constructed for about half of the cost, and they’re spearheaded by striker Romelu Lukaku, who Chelsea gave up on. EPL clubs spent over £1 billion this year acquiring players, and a whole lot of that is looking like it was money very badly spent.

But Leicester City just keeps on winning and it’s awesome. It’s totally awesome. And you should root for Leicester City. Everyone should root for Leicester City. The Foxes are, quite simply, turning the sport on its head. And as a purveyor of Lose, and a regular fan of a similar sort of club, I simply have no choice but to wholeheartedly back the Foxes for the remainder of the season. Not only is Leicester City’s potential triumph in the EPL a chance to stick it to the man, but there is a possibility that business as usual in the EPL may never be usual again.

There is essentially a caste system in the sport, one which has been established over 100+ years. There is a hierarchy and a pecking order. There are 92 clubs in the four professional leagues in England, with hundreds of more clubs in the levels below that, and every club comes to find some sort of a comfort zone for itself. As much as the local fans of some collection of Division 4 duffers would like to see their club somehow rise to greatness, it doesn’t wind up working that way. I recommend everyone read The Miracle of Castel di Sangro, Joe McGinniss’ wonderful book chronicling a backwater Italian club rising to the second division. The club is completely out of its depth once it reaches Serie B – and, in fact, no one involved in the operation of the club has any real interest in seeing them succeed at that level, since doing so would require a substantial financial investment. The ownership is perfectly content with Serie C mediocrity, and trying to compete at the Serie B level is a burden and also something of an annoyance. Being successful on the pitch gets in the way of being profitable off of it.

Leicester are one of the great yo-yo clubs of British football. They’ve won the second division seven times in their 130-year history, more than any other club – which means, of course, that they also get relegated a lot. They go up, they go down, they go up again. There is a whole group of clubs who do this sort of thing (with my beloved Norwich City being one of them) Some simply rise to the top level, cash the big EPL cheques, spend very little money and drop back down to The Championship (aka Div. 2), using a year or two of EPL windfall as a nice budget for the club. (The current Div. 2 leaders, Burnley, employed precisely that strategy a season ago.) Some clubs, meanwhile, go all gung-ho when they arrive in the EPL, rife with delusions of grandeur and glory, deciding that they need to pony up and spend like the big clubs – which can be disastrous if you do it wrong. Fairly regular EPL yo-yos Bolton Wanderers went all-in and got it all wrong: they are now saddled with £180 million in debt, verging on bankruptcy and sitting dead last in the second division, having been forced to sell players and having had no money to buy quality replacements. The yo-yo clubs like Leicester and Norwich, like Wolves and Hull City and the sort, have generally placed their emphasis on talent development over the years, and have maintained policies of zero sentimentality when it comes to selling off players. There have been quite a few great players over the years who’ve donned the Foxes’ blue jerseys, but usually they were simply passing through on their way to bigger and better things.

And with modest means and modest results come modest expectations. A 50-point EPL season and maybe a nice cup run constitutes a successful season. You temper your hopes and you redefine success. Winning seven second divisions at Leicester, while definitely a step down from the big time, has still contributed to a creation of culture and tradition at the club. Some of the game’s best and most ardent fan support lies within those loyal to the yo-yos, be it Leicester or Norwich or Crystal Palace or what have you. You learn to take the good with the bad, celebrate the successes and not let the defeats – of which there are many – get to you too much. It’s an unfair game, after all. In this day and age, the disparity in finances between the big clubs and the yo-yos is so vast that you cannot hope to win.

Or can you?

We all love the Moneyball idea, of course, but as has been pointed out on this blog countless times before, Billy Beane’s approach to building the Oakland A’s into a perennial MLB playoff contender, in spite of budget constraints, only went so far. Theo Epstein then took many of Beane’s ideas and instilled them in the Boston Red Sox, with the financial wherewithal of the Red Sox organization to back him up, and it was Boston who wound up pinning three World Series championship banners up on the clothesline and not the A’s. Perhaps the most successful “moneyball” devotee in the game of soccer was the French club Lyon, who parlayed savvy buying and selling into an incredible seven straight Ligue 1 titles – and Lyon also happens to be the only domestic club to defeat Paris St.-Germain this season, the Paris club having been purchased by a Qatari sovereign wealth fund several years ago and infused with so much money to spend on players that the scales have now been seemingly impossibly tipped. It seems simply unimaginable that anyone other than PSG could win the French league anymore. It’s unthinkable.

But Leicester winning the EPL seemed unthinkable as well, yet here they are on the cusp of doing just that. Leicester City are a triumph of scouting and player development, and of employing creative solutions. Not only are they winning the league, but they’re playing the game in ways like no other club does. For most of the season, Leicester have been near the bottom of the EPL in several statistical categories. They possess the ball less than almost every other club, and are near the bottom in terms of the number of passes completed. Indeed, for most of the season, they seemed perfectly content not to have the ball at all. Rather than play out from the back, the Foxes are perfectly happy to lump the ball forward into wide open spaces and chase down the opposition. They are a high-pressing, high-tempo team and they hunt the ball in swarms and in packs, counterattacking in numbers and at speed when they turn over the opposition.

This is a style of play built somewhat out of necessity. It’s been the time-tested strategy of lesser clubs to try and be well-organized against superior foes and then try and hit them on the counter. Yet this approach has been somewhat tailored and customized at Leicester to fit the particular skill sets of their players – an approach which has yielded a whole far greater than the sum of the parts. About the only name of note on the club at the season’s dawn was that of the goalkeeper, Kasper Schmeichel – not for anything he has done but because his goalkeeper father, Peter Schmeichel, was a Manchester United legend who also spearheaded Denmark’s unlikely European championship in 1992. Leicester City’s squad are a mix of journeymen and cast-offs, a lot of whom couldn’t have gotten a game at any other EPL side.

And they play as if they’re never going to have this chance again. The Foxes run like hell. They generally play at 100 miles an hour. They are tenacious and resilient. It doesn’t bother them if they concede a goal – they simply go about scoring another one. No team has more 1-goal wins than Leicester, and no team has more comeback wins.

But simply to speak of effort sells the Foxes’ tactics short. There is method to the madness. It’s a scheme built around the strengths of their players, and one which aims to hide their deficiencies. For example, the two center halves are both terrific at attacking the ball, but neither is a great man-marker and neither is all that fleet of foot. To compensate, the right back tends to hang back instead of overlapping on the offense, thus giving them a more solid three in the back. The front pairing of Okazaki and Jamie Vardy tend to stack one behind the other, with Okazaki clogging defensive space and freeing the speedy Vardy to serve as an upfront outlet – any sort of danger situation that arises can be solved simply by clearing the ball into vast open spaces and letting Vardy go chasing it down. The Foxes like to pinch the wings and force everything into the middle, where rangy defensive midfielder N’Golo Kanté breaks up the plays and springs the counterattack, at which point the Foxes pour forward at pace.

Kanté has been one of the breakthrough players in the EPL this year. The Foxes acquired him this past season from France’s SM Caen for £5.6 million. Defensive midfield is one of the most rugged and difficult positions on the pitch, and it didn’t seem to make a whole lot of sense to be employing the 5’6” Kanté in that position, yet here he is ranging touchline to touchline and box to box, breaking up all the opposing rushes and making all the plays. Kanté is the leading tackler in the EPL, and it’s hard to find another player in the world playing the position any better.

And this is precisely the sort of bargain buy and barn find that the Foxes have thrived upon. The striker Vardy is a classic late bloomer, 29 years of age and having been playing in England’s 5th Division four years ago. (Vardy was sitting on the Leicester bench, in fact, when this bit of madness occurred in the Division 2 playoffs in 2013. Ironically, he was sitting alongside Harry Kane, the two of them now likely to be spearheading the England attack at this summer’s Euros.) Algerian midfielder Riyad Mahrez, meanwhile, was found in the scrap heap that is the French Ligue 2, purchased from Le Havre for £400,000. Mahrez has 15 goals and 11 assists this season, and is one of the leading candidates for EPL Player of the Year. The entire roster is filled with guys who’ve bounced from club to club, some of whom toiled in Div. 2 obscurity or generally flew under the radar, and together they’ve bought into the system and played as a team, first and foremost.

The mastermind of the Foxes success this year, Claudio Ranieri, is a journeyman in his own right, having gone through about 8 managerial jobs in the past decade, the most recent being a disastrous spell in charge of the Greek national team, during which time they lost twice to the Faeroe Islands in European qualifying. Ranieri was the betting favorite, at the start of the season, to be the first EPL manager sacked. When faced with what appeared to be the worst job in all of the Premier League, Ranieri has responded with positivity, creativity, and clearly he’s tried to keep the game fun. The defense was so bad at the start of the season that Ranieri finally promised pizza for everyone if they could actually keep a clean sheet. And his mantra from the beginning of the season was “40 points” – that being the theoretical number Leicester would need to see them safe from relegation. In every post-match interview during the first half of the season, Ranieri and his players would say the same thing: Leicester’s goal was 40 points, and that’s all that mattered. Leicester had 40 points by Christmas – the first team ever in England to be in last place one Christmas and atop the table the next – and then the mantra changed: now that the Foxes had 40 points, everything else was gravy.

And that may sound trite, but think of the motivation at play here. Relegation is a professional humiliation, one which can affect the trajectory of your career – and also affect your wallet, as many players’ contracts contain clauses allowing for wage cuts if relegation occurs, and your value on the transfer market sinks like a stone. Part of what makes the last two months of a soccer season fascinating is that moribund clubs seemingly rise from the dead. They fight like hell to stay up, and weird results start happening all over the place. The last team you want to face towards the end of a season is a team that’s desperate to avoid relegation. The Foxes carried that mentality from last season over to this one, fighting for every point from the outset, oftentimes rallying from 2-goal deficits and leaving it late. Avoiding being put to the sword was their only team goal – and having done that, they’ve played with freedom and relief ever since. Pundits keep wondering at what point Leicester City will start to feel the pressure. But there is no pressure! The Foxes have been playing with house money for months, and that sense of joy and belief is palpable when you watch them play.

The irony of being so successful is that now everyone in the EPL is giving them respect. Teams sit in deep against Leicester now, attempting to prevent the furious counterattacks and trying to force the Foxes to unlock the defenses. Norwich basically published the blueprint on how to play against Leicester City a few weeks ago, fielding three center backs who collectivity rendered Vardy irrelevant while the rest of the team went about gumming up the works. Nonetheless, Leicester managed to sneak an 89th minute goal to win 1:0. The Foxes have taken 10 of 12 points from their last four games, all of them games which were rather ugly and methodical in nature. Strangely, this spate of ugly wins constitutes further progress for the Foxes. Having run and gunned their way to the top of the table, they’re now showing the guile and moxie necessary to stay there.

The Foxes’ rise to the top has been met constantly with skepticism from the British media, of course, all of whom feast upon the daily soap opera afforded by the divas from Manchester and Greater London. Even now, I’m still finding mildly idiotic predictions online of Leicester somehow winding up finishing third. Leicester is bad for the punditry business, of course, because Leicester are a modest club from a modest city who are drama-free and don’t do anything other than win all the time. Have they been lucky at times this season? Of course, particularly on the injury front, where they’ve skated by all season with a very thin bench (although you could also argue that a team which plays with that tempo and a thin bench is also a product of superior conditioning and preparation). And they took some points here and there which they probably didn’t deserve. They were dreadful in that Norwich game I mentioned before, and could’ve and probably should’ve lost. (Sigh.) But after 30 games of this, it’s no longer a fluke. Plucky little Leicester is no longer plucky. The British press have run out of condescending diminutives to describe this team by now.

And quite honestly, Leicester isn’t so small any more, either. No one in the EPL is. Of the 30 biggest clubs in the world in terms of revenue in 2015, 17 of them were in the EPL. As I’ve said before,  middle-class members of the EPL may not have as much money to spend as the Arsenals and the Man Uniteds and the Chelseas, but they now have more money than just about everyone else on the planet! And all of those non-glamourous clubs have been making up for their lack of resources over the years by being smart. Leicester and Stoke and West Ham and the like spend wisely, since they have less margin for error, but now the quality of player available to them is much greater than in the past. This is why what Leicester’s doing in the EPL this year shouldn’t be labeled as just a one-off or a fluke. And it’s also why it’s an outdated notion to assume that their players, now all of whom have enormous pricetags, are suddenly all going to want to jump ship and go elsewhere. Leicester can afford the players they have, and afford new players, and guess what? WINNING IS FUN! (Or so I’ve been told, anyway.) Ranieri was asked about this possibility in his press conference on Monday, and he shrugged and asked, “why would they want to leave?” You know, that’s a good question. Unless Real or Barca come around throwing £50 million at you, how does it get any better? You’re making good money, and you’re also making history.

And if you’re a fan of one of the bigger clubs in the EPL, you should be outraged by what you’re seeing. Arsenal is flaking their way to another failed season, Man City folds up like a house of cards, Man United has provided nothing but boring dross, and we’ve already been over the tire fire that is Chelsea. You have all the money on the planet, you can buy almost any player you want, and you’re getting beat to the finish line by Leicester? By LEICESTER? Really? Business as usual clearly isn’t cutting it any longer, not when you have smart teams like Leicester and, to a lesser extent, Spurs leading the way. Spurs have spent stupidly over the years themselves, but finally decided to put an end to that nonsense and actually trust in the development of young talent. That team has potential to be terrifying in the future if they keep the core together, and still just might overhaul the Foxes just yet.

“But lads, it’s Tottenham.”  
        
– Sir Alex Ferguson

OK, so maybe not.

And for us Norwich fans and Stoke fans and Crystal Palace fans and Newcastle fans and the like, Leicester up top is the greatest thing we’ve ever seen. The good guys can and do, in fact, win every now and then. Not that often, but it doesn’t have to happen that often to rekindle your faith. Money can’t buy you heart, it can’t buy you guts, it can’t buy you steel, and it can’t you buy you brains – and in the modern EPL, it clearly can’t always buy you a championship.

There have been cases in the past, most recently Nottingham Forest in the 1970s, where a club has been promoted to a higher division and then promptly won the title. But that was back before the big money of the EPL and the Champions League came into play, when the finances were less dissimilar and the gap between divisions wasn’t nearly as severe. Probably the closest thing you can find to this in America would be the worst-to-first Twins and the worst-to-first Braves playing in the 1991 World Series, or the case mentioned previously of San Francisco 49ers starting out the 1981 season at 200-1 odds on the Tahoe books and winding up winning the Super Bowl. But that doesn’t even come close to a 5000-1 shot. 5000-1!

And this is March, which means March Madness here in the U.S., a chance for the underdogs in college basketball to take their place center stage and take their shots at the blue bloods. But in the end, the underdogs never win out. They might pull a stunning upset, but rarely do they go further. The biggest longshots in the NCAAs to win out in my lifetime were, in fact, pretty well-established basketball schools – NC State in 1983, Villanova in 1986, Kansas in 1988 – who reached the role of underdogs by underachieving during the regular season. Butler was a true underdog, a team you knew nothing about but who were scrappy and who punched above their weight and who you could get behind and root for, but then they had to go and lose the final to Duke, who hate fun, and then lose the final to Connecticut in a game so bad that it set college basketball back about 20 years. This year’s NCAA bracket sucks precisely because it has far too few interesting fringe teams and far too many boring big conference schools laden with athletes who can’t shoot and do no particular phase of the game well, thus making a boring sport become even more boring. But I digress.

We need the romance and the excitement of the underdogs. We need the unexpected to happen from time to time to keep our interest. What Leicester is doing this year it wonderful and exciting, and we should all hope they ultimately win the title. Will they be able to defend it? Will they do well in European play next season? Who gives a shit? Live in the moment, and learn to love the Foxes. What they’re doing is unprecedented in sports, and deserving of admiration and support.

And since I referenced a band I really liked in the title of this blog post, the music maven in me feels compelled to throw in one of their songs. This video includes a great interchange between the band and a fan at a concert recorded in Essen, Germany. “We want rock!” Rock on Leicester City: