Clear as Mud

Saturday featured two of the wildest, craziest, and ultimately best football games that I have ever seen. They involved two of the sports most intense rivalries – Ohio State v. Michigan, and Alabama v. Auburn. Both games had ‘national championship’ implications and were witnessed by over 200,000 spectators. Both games came down to one play, and one decision almost certain to be second-guessed.

First, Ohio State v. Michigan in Ann Arbor. This was like a videogame, with huge plays throughout and both teams running up and down the field, with tempers flaring and the pot bubbling over. Ohio State, winners of 23 games in a row, held a 42-35 lead in the final minute when the Wolverines scored a TD to cut the lead to a single point. Michigan coach Brady Hoke had a choice at this point – be conservative and kick the extra point, a rubber stamp move which would send the game to OT, or go for the 2-point conversion and win the game in regulation.

So put yourself in Brady Hoke’s position for a moment and think through the variables at play.

First of all, your defense sucks. Ohio State has rushed for 395 yards. It is obvious that your defense simply cannot stop them. Going for the 2-pt. conversion would be an admission of a lack of belief in your team's ability – the longer the game goes, the more likely Michigan would be to lose. And sometimes, as a coach, you have to accept that your team is flawed. It’s a terrible thing to have to admit, of course, but your #1 job as a coach is to make decisions that give your team the best chance to win.

I’m reminded, after saying that, of an NFL game in 2004 where the Tennessee Titans were playing the Indianapolis Colts and the Titans onside kicked three times in the 1st Quarter. They also tried a fake punt later in the game for good measure. Tennessee’s coach, Jeff Fischer, said after the game that his defense had no chance to stop Peyton Manning and the high voltage Colts offense, and that their best shot to win was to try to prevent the Colts from ever having the ball at all, or give them a short field so they score quickly and give the ball back to the Titans. It was a rare admission from a coach that his team wasn’t good enough. The strategy didn’t work, of course, but playing the game straight up wasn’t going to work. You have to be inventive sometimes and try something different. And no sport has as much room for that as football.

So back to Ann Arbor here: Brady Hoke knows his defense stinks. They’re not going to win the game for him. Furthermore, his team’s kicking game also stinks. In OT, a possession-for-possession duel, the kicking game becomes huge, and the Wolverines are at a decided disadvantage. But on the other hand, it’s not like Ohio St. has exactly been stout on defense. Michigan has gained 600 yards in the game. Their stellar, stylish, #98 wearing QB Devin Gardner has thrown for 451 yards and done so while limping badly. The Buckeyes can’t stop a one-legged QB, for goodness sakes, and their DBs look hopelessly outmatched by the Michigan receivers. Sending the game to OT, therefore, would be a statement of trust in your offense to win the game for you.

But can the offense overcome a bad kicker and a bad defense? And while Ohio St. has won 23 in a row, Michigan has had a bad season. (A 7-4 record constitutes a bad season at the winningest school in the history of the sport.) Here’s the chance to salvage the season in one play. Your team is at home, in front of 113,000 fans, your team has overachieved just to get to this situation, and you have one play in which you can win the game outright.

Oh yeah, and think through all of that in about 30 seconds. What do you do?

Michigan went for two and the win. Unfortunately, the play they called sucked:

Hoke was praised by the pundits for the decision to go for two, although he cheapened it, in my opinion, by saying that he’d asked the seniors on Michigan’s squad what they wanted to do and that they’d wanted to go for two. This is a sly way of shifting blame from yourself, which most high-profile coaches are good at doing. Players always want to go for it, because they believe they can make it. Your job as a coach is to make rational decisions.

That being said, The LOSE applauds the boldness of the move. I would’ve done the same thing, and I wish that more coaches would have the cojones to do the same thing as well. Football is a series of set pieces, 150 or more of them, during which any number of things can go wrong. And better teams can find more ways to win. As I said earlier, the longer the game goes, the more the advantage tilts to the favourite – and Ohio St. was clearly the favourite. So take the risk and go for the win.

So the final score was Ohio State 42:41 Michigan in the best game of the year … or it was the best game of the year for about 3 hours, because then Alabama played Auburn at Jordan-Hare in Auburn.

The Crimson Tide of Alabama were undefeated coming into the game, and looking for a third straight ‘national championship,’ while 2010’s ‘champion’ Auburn has revived themselves after a miserable 3-9 season in 2012 to reach a record of 10-1. The War Eagles have also taken on that ‘team of destiny’ aura, of which I am extremely skeptical, but they’ve found improbable ways to win games, including these late game dramatics and then this miracle two weeks ago against Georgia which has already taken on a nickname, “the prayer at Jordan-Hare.”

So the narrative of the game from the get go was Team of Destiny vs. Team of Dynasty. Adding some spice to the affair is the fact that Alabama-Auburn is probably the single nastiest rivalry in all of American sports. It’s the closest we come in this country to some of the fierce, volatile derbies you see in European soccer. And 'the prayer at Jordan-Hare' looked pretty meek by comparison by the time this one was over. This game was so nuts that the play which put Alabama ahead was an afterthought by the end:

Just your run-of-the-mill 99 yd. TD pass. Whatevs.

In keeping with their tenacious and rescourceful nature, Auburn ties the score at 28 with this nifty bit of improv from their QB in the final minute. Three more plays by the Crimson Tide then bring the ball up to Auburn's 39 yd. line as time expires – except, upon review, there is :01 put back on the clock. And at this point, the onus is on Alabama coach Nick Saban to make a decision of what to do: he can run the clock out and go to OT; he can let his QB A.J. McCarron throw a 'Hail Mary' pass into the end zone; or he can try a very long 57-yd FG.

So let's pretend we're coaching Alabama at this point, shall we?

The defense has been pretty bad – Auburn has racked up 300 yds. on the ground, and Bama's defense offered almost no resistance as Auburn sliced them up during the tying TD drive. The running game takes a lot out of a defense due to the physicality, and Alabama's D seems out of gas.

Alabama's trademark, steely efficiency has been lacking in this game, as they've made all sorts of mistakes during the course of the action. The kicking game, meanwhile, has been an absolute disaster: Alabama's kicker missing three FGs, one of which was blocked. Alabama seems to be in the same boat as Michigan, at this point, where in two of the three phases of the game, they seem to be at a disadvantage. And as nonsensical as the whole 'team of destiny' idea is, success spawns belief. Momentum and Belief seemed to be dressed in blue and orange at the end of this game.

There are really no good options here. The best bad option seems to be to throw a Hail Mary and hope for the best. McCarron is your best player, and he's already produced a 99-yard TD pass, so why not give him a chance? At worst, you'll be going to OT, and maybe your defense will get it together. Hell, this group of players has won two 'national championships' in a row. They know a thing or two about winning close games by now. So the last-gasp, Hail Mary, unlikely as it is to work, seems like the best bet.

Which is precisely what Alabama didn't do.

Insetad, they went for the 57-yard FG, using their other kicker, the guy who didn't miss 3 FGs already in the game. The long FG is extremely low percentage, and carries some risks: it's more likely to be blocked, as it is a low kick that has to be driven hard. There is also the scenario that, if the kick is short of the backline of the endzone, it can be returned by the defense, but that's unlikely to amount to much. Extremely unlikely. You wouldn't really think of that as a possibility, would you?

Yes, that happened.

That's the first time in the history of the game that it has ended in that way. This game immediately vaults into Cal v. Stanford 1982 territory for greatest ending in the history of not only football, but of any sport. It's a seemingly impossible play.

Improbable, yes, but not impossible. There have only been four such occurrences in the history of college football. In the NFL, however, this has happened three times in the last 15 years or so. And remember Pasteur's adage, "chance favors the prepared mind." Auburn took a timeout before the FG attempt and placed Chris Davis, their punt return specialist, at the back of the end zone. On kickoffs and punt returns, teams usually have equal athletes on the field – linebackers, tight ends, and so-called "hands team" guys like DBs who are used to handling the football. On a FG, however, the kicking team forms a wall consisting mostly of offensive linemen to block, and if the play breaks down, the defense has the advantage. Once this became a transition play, the hands team – Auburn – had all the advantages. The Georgia win was all about luck. In this game, however, luck had nothing much to do with it.

Of course it's easy to second-guess, in light of what happened, but the FG attempt just didn't make a whole lot of sense. And had that happened to some team other than Alabama, people would be less inclined to revel in the schadenfreude of the moment. As it is, there are few figures as unsympathetic in sports as Nick Saban, who has the reputation of being the ultimate opportunist as he has jumped from one job to the next. That being said, he's won 3 'national championships' in his tenures at Alabama and LSU before that, so you have to begrudgingly acknowledge his genius as a coach. Even the best coaches make some bad decisions from time to time. It's tough to see an unbeaten season go up in smoke.

Alabama and Michigan both lost, but the game itself ultimately won. It's stuff like this that makes us play games, makes us watch, and keeps people coming back. Games are improvisational theatre at its best, unscripted and unpredictable. You never what you're going to see. Most of the time, they follow fairly predictable storylines: Team A is better than Team B and they win by a score of blah blah blah. But we don't care about those games, in the end. We care about it when it all goes mad.

And losing in those moments, of course, hurts far more is the norm. Raising the stakes simply raises the disappointment. Sometimes it's what you come to be known for as a player or a coach – that one spectacular afternoon which people remember for a lifetime. Tough ways to lose. The 'next game' can't come soon enough, but the next game won't really matter much, in the end. In the random world of college football, beating your rival is usually far more important than winning any other game. The 2013 senior class at Alabama will be reminded forever about Chris Davis' 109-yd return, likely far more than the two championship games in which they prevailed. (And Auburn folk will certainly do the crowing, of that you can be sure.) And no Michigan alum will care, 20 years from now, about how Michigan did/didn't beat some other team in some irrelevant bowl game in late December. They will ask, however, "why didn't Hoke kick the extra point against the Buckeyes?" Hindsight is always 20/20, and it's always as clear as mud.

Plenty of Space Under the Thinking Cap

Plenty of good seats available in Phoenix

You can always tell what a prospective class of rookies and free agents is going to be like in the NBA by the number of teams which are deliberately tanking the season before. Judging by this year, it must be a bumper crop. I would point the finger at three teams – the Philadelphia 76ers, Boston Celtics, and Phoenix Suns – who flat-out wrote off this season before it even began, and have chosen to engage the time-honoured NBA tradition of getting rid of every asset on the roster in the hopes of striking it rich in the 2014 offseason. I could also point the finger at the Utah Jazz as well, a once proud and savvy club who’ve disintegrated over time and now have the worst record in the NBA. I’m not sure what to make of Sacramento, Milwaukee, or the Washington Buzzards. The LOSE suspects they stink simply due to incompetence, which is another time-honoured NBA tradition.

There are more truly bad franchises in the NBA than in any other sport. The NHL has quite a few bad ideas for franchises, primary among them being the comical Phoenix Coyotes, but even some of the bad idea clubs are at least well-run given their seemingly hopeless positions. NBA clubs, meanwhile, are simply run in some of the stupidest ways imaginable. The main reason teams are terrible is due to their own incompetence. With a small number of players comes small room for error. Talent assessment is everything in the NBA, both in terms of drafting players and managing that talent when it comes time for reupping it, or not, to new contracts. And the latter issue seems to dominate the bulk of the business in the NBA. Our favourite players may be wearing numbers like 6 and 23 and 35 on their jerseys, but to the GM of an NBA franchise, those numbers may as well be $5 million and $10 million and $15 million, as the bulk of the league brass seems entirely fixated on the voodoo economics which surround the salary cap.

The NBA salary cap is the greatest example in sports of wanting to have your cake and eat it, too. It was put in place in the 1980s, at a time that the league was awash in red ink, in the efforts of controlling costs, since limiting the expenditure on player salaries to a certain percentage of gross revenues would, theoretically, prevent franchises from going broke. The players went along with it at the time, and continue to do so, and there is a very good reason for that – since the salary cap is tied to the players receiving a certain percentage of the gross, any growth is the league is fundamentally growth in their bi-weekly paycheques. Indeed, the average salary in the league has grown from $330,000 in 1984 to $5.2 million in 2008, as the league soared in popularity. This has been the base model for similar systems put in place in the NHL and NFL as well, which have ultimately seen similar growths in player salaries over time.

But the spinmeisters in the league offices have also tried to sell the salary cap as a way to foster competitive balance, which is complete rubbish and always has been. The argument goes that, were a cap not in place, the larger clubs with more access to revenues would just spend endlessly to acquire the top talent at the expense of smaller clubs, to which I say “so what?” The LOSE is a curious hybrid of economic philosophies when it comes to sports, in that I’m both simultaneously a Marxist in my belief that the players should get pretty much all the money – I don’t go to a game to watch an owner – and a free market capitalist in favour of letting the marketplace sort itself out. And with a salary cap comes minimal amounts which have to be spent and which apply to every team – but not every team generates the same revenue. It works out to a certain percentage across the board, but that still leaves some franchises with inherent economic advantages – the percentage cost of the salary cap for the Lakers is far less of a burden a small-market club like the Sacramento Kings. This is what leads to the predatory, extortive practices of clubs to demand municipalities pony up taxpayer money to finance new arenas, which has nothing to do with the ability to compete and everything to do with the ability to maximize profit margins.

It also leads to some ridiculous revenue sharing ideas with the league, like the so-called “luxury tax” which penalizes teams for going far over the salary cap in their spending. The absurdity of such rules is best illustrated by this year’s Brooklyn Nets, who have a wage bill totaling $100 million. The threshold for taxation is $71.75 million, and the tax is steep – in the Nets case, it’s $3.25 for every dollar they go over the threshold – which means they are on the hook for an additional $86 million in taxes. But again, so what? The Brooklyn Nets are owned by a bazillionaire and play in a hip new building smack in the middle of the nouveau riche capital of the free world. They can afford it. It’s a hypercompetitive, ego-driven business. If you want to win a championship, and you are making bank, what’s a few million extra on the top? (Of course, the former New Jersey Swamp Dragons are in last place at the moment. Having a larger chequebook hasn’t apparently made them any more competent when it comes to assembling a team.)

But in an effort to do more than just pay lip service to the idea that the salary cap fosters competitive balance, the NBA has created all sorts of exemptions over the years, beginning with the so-called Larry Bird exemption of the 1980s, which states that a team can go over the salary cap as much as necessary to resign their own free agents. And every time you create an exemption, of course, you also create a loophole which then has to be addressed down the line with another clause or another exemption, because the skillful NBA GM will invariably look to find all sorts of ways to game the system. The endless tweaking and rerigging of the salary cap system over 30 years has resulted in something more gerrymandered than a Texas congressional district. You need advance degrees in economics and accounting, and preferrably some work experience at Arthur Andersen, to figure out how the whole thing works. And having such a system in place also creates one of the most ideal of ready-made excuses to address your franchise’s own foibles. You can blame poor performance as being due to “salary cap constraints,” which prevent you from acquiring new talent – never mind that such constraints come from the fact that you’ve signed so many players to bad contracts in the first place.

Conversely, the argument is often made that a midseason trade is done to “free up cap space.” Acquiring top talent in the NBA is an expensive business, after all, with the top players making in excess of $20 million a year. And since basketball is such a small game, with only five players on the court at one time, the acquisition of one great player can make a huge difference. Since acquiring that top talent will eat up huge portions of your available wage bill under the salary cap, the best way to prepare for it is to clear out large amounts of space ahead of time. This has led to the lure of the expiring contract. The most sought-after players at the trade deadline every year are not guys who could actually help your team win a championship. No, in fact, usually they’re old guys with bad knees who can’t play anymore and are in the last year of whatever bad contract they signed years ago. If my team sucks, and I have three guys making $5 million, and you have a guy making $15 million in the last year of his deal, I’ll trade my three guys worth $15 million for your one worth $15 million and let the old guy with bad knees sit on the bench for the rest of the year. Then he’s gone and I’ve got $15 million a year to spend on a superstar come time for free agency, and then I’ll just sign a couple of rookies at the league minimum to sit on the bench and make up for the three players I had to trade. Sounds perfect! Everyone wins, right?

But why wait until the middle of the season, when it’s apparent that your team sucks, to throw in the towel? Why not just admit your team sucks from the very beginning? Throw in the towel, throw up your hands, suck for a year and hope it will get better next year. And if you’re a fringe team, on the cusp of making the playoffs perhaps but really not very good, is it worth it to qualify as the #8 seed and get blown out by the Miami Heat in the 1st round of the playoffs, or are you better off if you trade a bunch of dead weight you don’t want for some other dead weight you don’t want, and get rid of it at the end of the season so that you can sign someone better? And if you don’t make the playoffs, you’re in the lottery – the ‘random’ draw which establishing the order for the draft – where you might get lucky and get the #1 pick. Then your team will get a whole lot better in a hurry, right? And do so somewhat cheaply, at first, since rookies make far less than stiff vets with bad knees who sit on the bench and take up salary cap space.

Welcome to the idiocy of the NBA, where seemingly every decision most of the teams seem to make involve next year. Or the year beyond, for that matter – teams like the Knicks were making moves designed to clear out cap space two years in advance in the hope that the free agent ferries would come and sprinkle magic LeBron James dust on them somehow. And it’s all a gamble, of course, one which often doesn’t come true – seen any LeBron Knicks jerseys lately?

The draft is always somewhat of a crapshoot to begin with – for every Tim Duncan or LeBron or transcendent talent available with the top pick in the draft, there are far more Joe Smiths and Kwame Browns and Michael Olowokandis out there. And even seemingly sure things turn into draft busts sometimes. It doesn’t keep a bunch of teams from giving up entirely and hoping to hit the lottery every year – which, of course, runs antithetical to the original intent of the lottery in the first place, as it was designed in the 1980s to keep perennially woful and incompetent franchises like the Clippers and Cleveland Cavaliers from deliberately trying to get the worst record in the league so as to get the #1 pick. By including every non-playoff team in the lottery, all the league did was give more franchises incentive to try and suck.

Notice how I’ve said nothing about the actual game of basketball in this post? That’s because it doesn’t matter very much. It seems like the only thing many NBA GMs do is trade a bunch of guys they don’t want for other guys they don’t want. Making the argument that you’re trying to “clear cap space” is laughable to begin with – just because you have money to spend doesn’t mean anyone wants to buy. I’ve mentioned this phenomenon of Edmonton Disease in a previous post: if everyone clears out massive amounts of cap space so as to offer players big contracts, the actual amount clubs can offer in such a controlled system is basically about equal, which means that other factors will come into play, such as quality of life, or if the team is perceived to be a viable championship contender. The LOSE couldn’t help but giggle at a few naïve op-eds in the Sacramento Bee during the whole Kings mess which spoke of how new ownership and a new arena would have the finances to bring in some high-priced free agents to the Kings. Sorry, Sac, no player of any worth is EVER signing with that sorry organization. Ever. Why would you play in Sacramento when you could play in Chicago or L.A. or New York? Why would you sign with a perpetual vagabond fanchise that hasn't won a championship since three or four cities ago?

The 76ers this year have set themselves up for failure. They’re not only below the salary cap, having rid themselves of every big contract they had in the offseason, they’re actually under the salary floor. They’ve not even spent the minimum required by the league. Their roster of flawed and inexperienced players got off to an inspired 3-0 start – these guys are playing hard, of course, since a lot of them might not have jobs in a year – but are slowly sinking back to earth. They’re hoping to land one of the top picks in the draft, and also be able to spend big in free agency in the offseason, which is a nice idea, but here’s the thing: most teams get to be that bad in the first place because they are run badly. You may give up and decide to be terrible, but usually only after it's all gotten bad to begin with. Another prime tanker this year, the Phoenix Suns, are owned by Robert Sarver, regarded by many to be the worst owner in the league. (And anytime you can trump Donald Sterling on that front, it’s saying something.) Sarver has run the franchise into the ground since he bought it, so why would anyone expect Sarver to suddenly know what he’s doing come June?

And in the meantime, who wants to watch that crap? Does anyone, like, care about, you know, basketball or anything? If you’re a fan in PHX or Philly, why would you go to a game when it’s abundantly clear from the moves your team is making that they have ZERO interest in winning in the here and now. They have SUBZERO interest in fact – they’re actually trying to be terrible! At least in Boston, there’s a track record of not screwing up to give you some hope, but what’s gone well for the Buzzards or the Bucks anytime in recent memory, or for the Charlotte Bobcats, like, ever?

The LOSE inherently frowns upon tanking in principle. It’s easy enough to lose already without trying to do so. And being a former Sonics season ticket holder, I have a very good reason to hate the NBA. That being said, the LOSE loves the game and has been coaxed back to the league thanks to the Golden State Warriors, a group of terrific young talent which combines some of the game’s greatest shooters (Stephen Curry, Klay Thompson) and a collection of good passers at every position to create the league’s most interesting and most watchable team. They’re fun to watch and they possess enormous potential as they build off a solid season a year ago. But prior to last season, this was the Warriors. 30+ years of buffoonery. Whole seasons that were bad ideas to began with, others which were abandoned.

(And by the way, I have to credit that Bill Simmons piece on the Warriors as inspiration for this whole blog, because it’s the greatest single LOSE blog ever written by someone other than me.)

Once losing starts, it can be really hard to turn it around. You cannot simply flip a switch and write a big cheque. It usually doesn’t work that way. It could be argued that the NBA isn’t that dissimilar from the EPL, for example, in that there are teams at the start of the year which go in admitting straight up that they have no chance whatsoever. But unlike the EPL, where stinking gets you a ticket to Division Two, the NBA is a closed system. There are probably about 10 NBA franchises which deserve to be relegated to the D-League. If there was ever a league in need of a second tier, it’s this one. Perpetual awfulness doesn’t happen in the EPL. But in a league like the NBA, there are always ready-made excuses and justifications as to why your team is terrible – and why it just might continue to be terrible for a very long time. But hey, keep clearing out that cap space. Maybe it will come in handy. And try to fill some of that space under your thinking cap, while you’re at it.

Curses! Foiled Again!

The Tangerine Dream

Injuries on the offensive line may have stymied the Seattle Seahawks offense, yet they continue to win. Monday’s 14:9 win St. Louis over the Rams may have been one of the ugliest wins in history, but wins are a precious commodity worth cherishing in the NFL, and the Seahawks now stand 7-1 and atop the NFC standings. And now comes the most important game of the season. A win this coming Sunday is vital for the Seahawks and their Super Bowl aspirations. It’s the game they circled on the schedule and say amongst themselves “we simply cannot lose this game!”

Their opponent? The Tampa Bay Buccaneers. The 0-7 Buccaneers. Laugh at my hyperbolical opening paragraph at your own peril.

Unlike the Buccaneers of old, who wore the league’s most flamboyant jerseys and put the fun in dysfunctional, this lot of Bucs is deader than the skull on their pewter helmets. The Buccaneers actually won a Super Bowl on Jan. 27, 2003, a 48:21 over the Los Angeles Tijuana Oakland Raiders (some of whom apparently thought the game was in Tijuana and not San Diego), but have now sunk into the abyss. The biggest reason for their success was the hiring first of Tony Dungy and then Jon Gruden as Head Coaches, but the Bucs have now reverted to one of their more normal behaviour patterns from the Tangerine Dream days, which was hiring guys who have no idea what they are doing. They plucked Greg Schiano out of the cesspool that is the Rutgers athletics department, and Schiano brought along with him the typical hardass, domineering college coach attitude that goes over well with professional athletes for about 20 minutes. Schiano has hit every wrong note possible, and then simply invented new scales so as to hit even more wrong notes. If ownership in Tampa weren’t essentially absentee – The Glazer family has some bigger sports franchises to devote their attentions to – Schiano likely would’ve been fired already. As it is, the Bucs are collectively walking the plank.

Now, how is it possible, you ask, that the halpless Bucs could pose a threat to Seattle’s title hopes? The Bucs are so bad that, in saying Seattle cannot lose this game, it may actually be physically impossible for Seattle to do so. And yet the Seahawks must be careful, and must be mindful of those Floridian evildoers, because they aren’t just playing a bad football team this Sunday, but the Seahawks are tempting fate. Because every game vs. the Bucs is tempting fate, because being defeated by the Bucs will lead to the worst possible outcome.

Being laughed at.

No no no! Being laughed at is only the 2nd worst fate a loss to the Pewter Pirates inflicts! An even worse fate awaits those who succumb to the Buccaneers on any given Sunday: disappointment at season’s end! And it’s appropriate, on the eve of the day on the calendar reserved for witches and ghosts and ghouls, that we bring up one of the greatest curses in all of sports, which is the Tampa Bay Curse. Since the Buccaneers franchise began play in 1976, no team has EVER won the Super Bowl during a season in which they lost to Tampa Bay.

Superstition runs deep and rampant in sports, of course. The mental aspect of performance cannot be understated, and the margins between success and failure are so minute that any single thing which you think gives you some sort of edge will be exploited – even if they don’t make any sense. If you’re a .500 team that suddenly wins 5 in a row after your starting QB starts eating Cheerios with chocolate milk for breakfast, then by god, give him another bowl of Cheerios with chocolate milk! As was well stated in the film Bull Durham, “never fuck with a winning streak.”

The stupidest superstition in all of sports is the charade 16 NHL teams undertake every year when the players vow not to shave until they are eliminated from the Stanley Cup playoffs. 16 teams do this every year, and 15 of them lose, so it doesn’t seem to help much. This superstition dates to the New York Islanders of 1980, who won the first of four consecutive Stanley Cup titles while collectively going scruffy. The LOSE suspects the Isles winning four Stanley Cups had more to do with having Mike Bossy and Brian Trottier and Denis Potvin and Billy Smith on their team than how hirsute they’d become over the course of four rounds of playoff games. (The LOSE also hopes this ludicrous tradition doesn’t carry over to baseball in light of the Red Sox winning this year's World Series. Those are some damn ugly beards the Bostons have been sprouting. The Red Sox seem to have benefitted this year in the same way the Giants did last year, which was to face an opponent in the World Series who seems to have suddenly forgotten how to play baseball.)

There are lots of goofy little traditions in sports which you do so as not to bring bad luck or jinx it: in baseball, that includes axioms like “don’t talk to a pitcher throwing a no-hitter when he’s in the dugout,” and “never step on the foul lines when taking or leaving the field.” Every goalkeeper and goaltender alive makes sure to talk to his or her goalposts before the game, making sure the keeper's best friends know their help is appreciated come game time. And it’s all nonsense. What your QB eats for breakfast doesn’t have anything to do with his performance come Sunday … or does it? …

Hmm, well, the Seahawks franchise already feels somewhat cursed to begin with, so it’s best they not try to cheat the odds. Lots of team’s fan bases feel like their club is cursed, of course, when they fail to taste success. Cubs fans want to believe in the Billy Goat curse; across town, more than a few White Sox fans attributed 86 years of futility being the result of Bad Karma in the aftermath of the Black Sox scandal of 1919. The Red Sox had the Curse of the Bambino, supposedly invoked by Babe Ruth after he was traded to the Yankees. The cities of Cleveland and Buffalo have enough assorted sports curses attached to them to keep exorcists busy for decades. And I’ve even heard a few otherwise right-minded Tampans attribute their football teams woes to former star QB Doug Williams putting a voodoo curse on the franchise after he left.

The Bucs have always been a franchise with a case of the weirds. They lost the first 26 games in their existence. It took until the NFC Championship Game in Philadelphia in Jan. 2003 for the warm-weather Bucs to ever win a game when the temperature was below 32° F. It took 31 years for the Bucs to run a kickoff back for a TD. (For comparison’s sake, the New Orleans Saints – who have often been just as bad as the Bucs – ran the opening kickoff of their first game back for a TD. But after John Gilliam’s 94-yd return in 1967 vs. the Rams, the Saints proceeded to lose the game 27:13 and then continued to lose for about the next 25 years straight.)

Even when they succeed, the Bucs do it strangely:

“With four games left in the (1979) season, the Bucs needed to win only one of them to make the playoffs. In the first, STP was put all over the goal posts in Tampa to prevent the goalposts from being ripped down in the event of a celebration. Four blocked kicks later, the Bucs wasted the oily substance, falling to the Minnesota Vikings 23–22. STP was wasted again the following week as the Bucs were shut out 14–0 by the Chicago Bears, and in O. J. Simpson's final home game in San Francisco, Tampa Bay lost its third straight attempt to clinch a division title against a 49ers team which came in with a 1–13 record.”
– Wikipedia

In order to clinch a playoff spot that season, the Bucs beat the Chiefs 3:0 in the worst weather for a football game I have ever seen. The Bucs have always kept it zany, win or lose – and usually lose.

And then there is the Tampa Bay Curse, which is admittedly pretty bizarre. There is some logical explanation for the curse, of course. Given that the Buccaneers have generally been inept, so if the Bucs beat your team, it’s a good bet your team sucks. But as the Bucs’ fortunes improved, good and sometimes even great teams with visions of Super Bowl glory have seen the Curse rise up and destroy their fortunes. The 1998 Minnesota Vikings went 15-1. Guess who they lost to? And then what happened? Their kicker, Gary Anderson, who hadn’t missed a kick all season, flubbed his lines with the NFC Championship game hanging in the balance. He missed a 38 yd. FG that would’ve put the game out of reach, and the Atlanta Falcons rallied to win 30:27 in OT and go to the Super Bowl.

More recently, I recall this conversation which may or may not have happened back in Jan. 2002 between myself and Tim Williams – loyal Rams fan, Friend of the LOSE, and co-founder and senior partner of the law firm of Williams Morgan & Williams – on the eve of Super Bowl XXXVI in New Orleans:

Tim: I can’t believe our dumbass boss is going to the Super Bowl.
xp: Yeah, Barnes sucks. Screw him.
Tim: Rams are gonna win by 21 pts. Greatest Show on Turf, baby.
xp: Didn’t the Rams lose to Tampa Bay this season?
Tim: Uhh …
xp: You guys are screwed.
Tim: We’re so screwed.

The Patriots, of course, pulled the 20:17 upset in the Super bowl.

So listen up, Seahawks: you must not lose to Tampa Bay. YOU MUST NOT LOSE TO TAMPA BAY!! It is a DISASTER of EPIC PROPORTIONS if you lose to Tampa at-Bay …

Wait, hold on a second here. I'm being told by a member of my crack research team (emphasis on crack) here at IN PLAY LOSE World HQ that, in fact, the curse was broken four years ago. Hmm, let me check this for myself … Dec., 27, 2009, Tampa Bay 20:17 New Orleans in O.T. … Super Bowl XLIV, Feb. 7, 2010, New Orleans 31:17 Indianapolis … hmm …

Damn, this blog entry was going really well, too. Well screw it then. Tampa sucks. Just beat the hell out of them. Everyone else is doing it these days.

Quack Kills

Connor Halliday threw 89 passes on Saturday, while the starting pitcher
for the Red Sox threw 85 pitches. Hmm, it might be amusing if
 pitchers had to throw strikes while being blitzed by linebackers ...

“That’s total bullshit that he threw the ball at the end of the game like he did. And you can print that and you can send it to him, and he can comment, too. I think it’s low class and it’s bullshit to throw the ball when the game is completely over against our kids that are basically our scout team. Make sure he knows that, because I don’t really care.”

This sort of comment is not particularly unusual in the bizarro world of college football, where blowouts and running up the score is commonplace. As I’ve mentioned before, there is sort of a grey area as to what constitutes running up the score and humiliating opponents. College football is a strange entity in that the entire construct is that of being an exhibition – without any legit playoff system to determine who is the best – and so the game uses all sorts of apples-to-oranges ways of comparing teams in an attempt to decide it. Yes, style points matter in college football. And one of the ways to make yourself look good is to post lopsided wins. Hence the need to score 62 pts. and win by a massive score.

Which is precisely what happened in the game that quote refers to. The winning team in that game scored 62 pts. So clearly, that comment came from a frustrated coach whose team got crushed, right?

Actually, no.

Those were the words of Oregon defensive coordinator Nick Aliotti after the Ducks 62:38 win over Washington State in Eugene – a game in which W.S.U. QB Connor Halliday completed 58 passes (tying an NCAA record), attempted 89 (setting an NCAA record) and amassed 557 passing yards (a W.S.U. school record). It’s a pretty amazing performance, actually, one born from desperation, as the Cougars were down 14 pts. after about 5:00 of the game and were playing catchup throughout. Evidently, Oregon wasn’t really happy that W.S.U. coach Mike Leach left his starters in the game long after the outcome was decided. Such a sour graping statement would be understandable if you lost by 24 pts., but in the actual context of this game, it’s one of the more bizarre statements from a coach that I have ever heard.

The Good Guys are a young team which has shown considerable improvement after enduring a 5-year death march during which they compiled a 12-49 record. W.S.U. had no realistic chance to win this game, but their best chance involved letting their good young QB Halliday throw the ball all over the place.

Oregon, meanwhile, was a 39½ pt. favourite in the game, according to the oddsmakers in Las Vegas. The Ducks are one of the best teams in the country, if not the best. The Ducks average 57 pts. a game – as much as some NCAA basketball teams – and win by an average of around 40. They’ve became a national powerhouse in the past decade employing a cutting-edge offense that runs up numbers and stats you normally see in videogames. They’ve also become the 2nd-most loathed team in the Pac-12 in doing so, as the sentiment among the other schools is that their success has been bought.

Pac-12 foes deride Oregon as the University of Nike, since their athletic department has been bankrolled by sneaker king and billionaire benefactor Phil Knight. The Ducks now have a seemingly inexhaustible budget at their backs. Pretty much anything the school wants, rich Uncle Phil will get for them. (Including the endless array of groovy uniforms they trot out week after week, although the LOSE gives them props for the pink helmets as part of Breast Cancer Awareness Month, which will be auctioned to raise money). The Ducks success and their deep pockets have also created something of a sense of entitlement in Eugene – which apparently also means that they should get to dictate how their opponents play at the end of the game, if this statement is to believed.

Sure, Oregon had their scout teamers out there when W.S.U. scored 2 TDs in the last 3:00 of the game – but they also had their 1st team, Heisman-candidate QB throwing a TD pass with 12:00 left in the game, when the outcome wasn’t any less in doubt than it was the end. The Ducks generally roll up huge numbers in the first half and then sit a whole bunch of players on the bench in the 2nd half – but they also make a point of scheduling teams like Nicholls St. every year, who they beat 66:3 to start the season, which gives them ample opportunity to run up the score in the first half.

The Cougars, who were down 48:24 in the 4th Quarter, had no reason to stop throwing. They were getting beat, and they were trying to make plays. They’re also building for the future, and any accomplishments and achievements matter in that context. Their QB setting records is something to be proud of when the season is over. And as for Oregon having 3rd and 4th string defenders in the game, what better way to get experience than to play a top calibre Pac-12 QB? Good for The Good Guys. They didn’t necessarily play well – the Cougars committed 5 turnovers, while Oregon ran up 720 yards of offense in only 24:00 of possession time, which is absurd – but they played hard and competed and ultimately made a mockery of that 40-pt line in Vegas.

How this all comes off, in the end, is that Oregon was mad that the Cougars didn’t quit. And a 62:38 win looks less impressive as 62:24 when it comes down to polls and computer rankings – and, sure enough, Oregon is #3 in the BCS right now, the looney tunes system used to determine national champions in the sport. Then again, a pretty good way to win 62:24 would’ve been to, oh, play some defense! He should be more concerned about the fact that his defense gave up 557 yards, for goodness sake.

This was, in the end, one of the stupider things I’ve ever heard a coach say. Being addicted to Quack apparently can lead to delusions.

The funny thing about stuff like this is that players, coaches, and fans have LONG memories. Oregon is great right now, and W.S.U. is not. It was only a decade ago that the roles were reversed. It goes in cycles, and when you do something obnoxious, is almost always comes back around to get you later on. Given Mike Leach’s pedigree as a coach, and seeing the progress he’s already making, I suspect it won’t be that much longer before W.S.U. is competitive with the Ducks again. And I suspect that, should that happen, and should the Cougars get the lead, they’ll remember 2013 and throw the ball another 80 or 90 times and run up 62 on the Ducks just for old time sake, at which point some grumpy defensive coordinator will probably about the Cougars running up the score. Good. Let him quack all he wants, and let him eat some crow while he’s at it.

OK, Who Saw That Coming?

Tuesday was the final day of regular World Cup Qualifying, which always produces some stirring and stunning results, but they saved the best for last in the CONCACAF, where Mexico was on the verge of going home empty handed. El Tri have played absolutely terrible during this cycle. Nonetheless, the idea that they wouldn't be able so secure one of the 3½ CONCACAF spots seems unthinkable. (And the reason it's 3½ is that the team which finishes fourth has to play a home-and-home playoff with New Zealand.)

But there was El Tri clinging to 4th place in "The Hex," leading by 3 pts. over Panama after this miracle gave them a 2:1 win over Panama last Friday at Azteca. But a Mexican loss coupled with a Panamanian win would bounce El Tri out of the World Cup. The Mexicans had a game with Costa Rica in San José, and the Ticos were sure to play hard even though they'd already qualified for Brazil, simply because they cannot stand El Tri and would love to play their part in snuffing out the hopes of their fiercest rivals.

Panama, meanwhile, played the U.S. in Panama City. Now, the LOSE theorized not long ago that, given the chance to bounce their rivals from the competition by tanking one at the end of the cycle, the U.S. just might do so. The problem is that such shenanigans, while generally the norm in football, are decidedly un-American. And Jürgen Klinsmann has let it be known that he is still in search of a final XXIII for Brazil next summer. The Panama game, thus, was yet another audition. A chance for some players to make an impression. So no, the U.S. didn't dog it, even though they could have.

But nonetheless, Panama had so much more to play for. And while El Tri were making a mess of things in San José, on their way to getting beat 2:1 by the Ticos in the latest in a string of sluggish and unimaginative performances, Panama scored a goal at 83' to go ahead of the Americans 2:1. All of a sudden, the Mexicans were on the outside looking in.

And then this happens. This is Mexican television keeping tabs on the game in Panama City as the game goes into injury time, the Americans trailing by a goal and Mexico's World Cup hopes slipping away.

OK, so who saw that coming? Show of hands. Anybody? Anybody? Didn't think so. That's one of the zanier finishes I've seen.

Here is a rough translation of the Mexican commentary during the final minutes, as provided by César 'Señor Salad' del Solar, the South American correspondent for IN PLAY LOSE:

Announcer 1: long ball to Saborio, costa rica recedes, USA's ball, 3/4 of the way to the endline, attention to the US's center -- GOAL! GOAL! GOAAAAAAAAAL! USA's goal! We love you! We love you forever and ever! Aaah! God Bless America, doctor, the USA gets us back in the run for qualifying. The USA! Not you! You who are dressed in green don't! But they do! You don't! Let it remain clear all your lives, you do nothing for the uniform! You do not push the team forward! You don't put us in the World Cup! You don't keep us alive! It is the United States, not you! Not you and your arrogance! Not you and your infamy! Not you and your fireworks! 

Announcer 2: It's a failure, and besides it is undeserved, because you didn't even have the arguments to get us to at least the playoffs. The USA, with several substitutes, look, with many substitutes, went there, was dignified, shows us who is the United States, how they understand this sport - and the Mexican team is truly Dantesque, horrific, terrible, a failure of futbol ...

Announcer 1: GOAL!! GOAL!! USA! We are in the playoff USA! So we can keep criticizing ourselves eh, so we can say that USA already surpassed us! The USA is more than us in futbol, the USA today has the luxury of playing with substitutes and keeps us alive! Hopefully Vucetich puts on his pants, or tenders his resignation today! He is a failure as a coach! He is not functioning as the coach of the team! We need someone with pants who can play the Europeans (?). There exist no Europeans in this team (?) at this moment, doctor.  [César: I don't know what this refers to or if I'm hearing it right, someone help :)]

Announcer 2: No they don't exist. The game in Panama is over and Mexico will play against New Zealand dragging its legs, its dignity ...

Can you ever imagine an announcer saying that in the States? That mix of jubilation, gratitude and stunningly blunt admonishment of their own team that spews from the announcers is phenomenal.

And what a crushing loss for Panama. They've been building this team for about six years now, but that's twice this year that the U.S. has denied them – first in the Gold Cup final, and now this. They're not the most exciting team to watch, but they are resourceful and seem to find ways to get positive results. I wanted the best for them – and I suspect I'm not alone in that.

"This is just how football writes these crazy, emotional stories, and you're in the middle of it, because we all felt all of a sudden when Graham (Zusi) scored that header that it was all quiet, silence, and you feel for them. Maybe it's a little bit in my culture, in the German culture you never stop before the referee blows the whistle, because I have won many, many games in the last minute. And hopefully, we keep on winning more. But it was a very sad moment for all here in Panama. We understand that.''
– Jürgen Klinsmann

Considering that they just scored the tying and winning goals in stoppage time, those are about the two most subdued goal celebrations that I've ever seen. The Americans look downright apologetic after the game-winner. Even the American players seem to have realized what they had just done: they had aided and abetted the enemy! And yet both Zusi and Johannsson were simply making plays that were available to them. It was all in the moment and in the flow of the game. You cannot really blame them for scoring goals, especially when Panama's defense was so bad there at the end that it made it almost impossible for the U.S. not to score.

It's stuff like this which makes these games some of the greatest pieces of theatre in all of sports. In nations like Panama and Jordan, Burkina Faso and Iceland and Uzbekistan, these late-stage World Cup qualifiers are some of the biggest events – not just sporting events – in these countries' histories. (The Stade de 4 Aôut in Ouagadougou was packed so full on Saturday for the Burkinabé match with Algeria that fans were climbing the light stanchions just to get a better view.) The tension and the drama is unparalleled in sports, and some remarkable things happen. Stuff you'd never think you would see – nor hear, for that matter.

So the two injury time goals give the U.S. a 3:2 win over Panama and saves Mexico's bacon in the process. And the U.S. Soccer Federation couldn't resist the chance to troll their southern neighbours after this was over:

There was some begrudging acknowledgement from the head coach of El Tri after the fact:

"We have to praise ethical and professional behavior, in this case by the United States.”
– Victor Manuel Vucetich

And some of the Mexican fans have shown their gratitude in creative ways ...

... while also being rather skeptical of their own side, who now has a somewhat tricky playoff with New Zealand ahead of them:

Like I say, beating the Kiwis is no sure thing. The home advantage of Azteca will possibly be overwhelming, as it will be nothing like anything the Kiwis have ever faced, but the return trip to Wellington won't be a picnic. And the U.S. won't be around to rescue them from the dustbin a second time. The Mexicans have to play a helluva lot better than they have been, or all of that gratitude from earlier this evening may turn out to be for naught.

The Bucs Start Here

"It was like seeing a crystal vase fall out of someone's hands, and you're watching it in slow motion, and there's just no way you can stop it."
– Lanny Frattare, Pittsburgh Pirates play-by-play announcer

The best way to introduce you to this blog today is to have you watch the video first. This video is from Game 7 of the 1992 NLCS between the Pittsburgh Pirates and the Atlanta Braves. The Pirates are in their 3rd consecutive NLCS in 1992, and they've battled back from being down 3 games to 1 in the best-of-7 series in 1992 to even it at 3-3. They have a 2-0 lead going to the bottom of the 9th inning, with their ace Doug Drabek on the mound. So go ahead and fast forward to the 1:25:00 mark of the video – the Braves coming to bat in the bottom of the 9th – to see what unfolds:

I remember watching this game at the time and not believing what I saw. There are shock defeats in sports – 9th inning home runs, last-second shots, etc. But this game plays out like a sort of water torture in which victory drip, drip, drips away. Every confounding play leads then to another confounding play, culminating with a 3rd string catcher with 10 at bats all year driving in the winning run from 2nd base –  Sid Bream, a former Pirate and, quite possibly, the slowest player in MLB at the time:

"(Andy) Van Slyke told MLB Network that on the Francisco Cabrera game-winning hit, he motioned to Barry Bonds to move in. Bonds responded by giving him the finger, and the ball ended up landing exactly where Van Slyke said to play."
– Sports Illustrated

It could be argued that this game was the single most traumatic loss a North American professional sports franchise has ever suffered. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette did a terrific story about this game 20 years later, as the 2012 season was about to begin – to this day, some of the former Pirates still won't watch the game. They have nightmares about it. The Pirates franchise sank into a deep depression after this game was over, one which took two decades to dig themselves out of.

The Pirates were a homegrown collection of talent who ran up against the economics of the game at the time. After the 1991 season, when the Mets grossly overpaid signed Pirates 3B Bobby Bonilla in free agency, it was clear that the Pirates weren't going to be able to keep the two soon-to-be high priced free agents on their roster: Barry Bonds and Doug Drabek. They played in Three Rivers Stadium, a cookie-cutter, multipurpose 1970s stadium with zero revenue sources to tap into. The Pirates simply could no longer afford to compete.

Or so the narrative goes.

It's easy to look at the 1990s at the rise of so-called "big money" in baseball, since the New York Yankees won three consecutive World Series. This is, in fact, a bit of a fallacy – many of the greatest of the Yankees' players were, in fact, homegrown talents: Jeter, Rivera, Bernie Williams, Andy Pettite, etc. But having big money at their backs allowed the Yankees far more margin for error, and always at least gave the impression that the Yankees could simply go out and sign a free agent or acquire someone's soon-to-be free agent at the trade deadline. It was easy to make the argument that all it took to be successful was to have deep pockets, and that the franchises such as the Pittsburgh Pirates were doomed to be screwed over forever.

And you can thank the Oakland A's for doing a fine job of blowing that notion up. The impact of the so-called Moneyball ethos of the A's is something that cannot be overstated. Over the course of 15 years, the A's have proven that you can, in fact, do more with less. Billy Beane et. al have taken creative approaches to the acquisition and development of talent. They've done things differently, simply because they had to, not possessing the sorts of financial resources in their midst to spend their way to pennants.

As I say, the notion that big money = big success is really sort of a fallacy. Since the millennium turned, the big money Yankees and Red Sox have won World Series – but the economy model St. Louis Cardinals have also won two, as have the San Francisco Giants, who learned from their big-spending mistakes and adopted more creative approaches to roster building which served them extremely well. And there are plenty of big spenders who spend very badly and waste their resources: the Mets and the Cubs come to mind, as do the Dodgers and the California Los Angeles Angels of Yucaipa Anaheim. Talent development is still the greatest way to success. It always has been that way in baseball, and always will be. If nothing else, the A's constantly overachieving has eliminated the "small market" excuse for poor performance. If you're bad for decades on end, it's most likely due to incompetence and ineptitude on your own part.

And the Pirates have been incompetent and inept. After the 1992 loss, and the ensuing departures of Bonds and Drabek, the proud and storied franchise went off a cliff. 21 consecutive losing seasons. 21! I thought enduring 14 straight sub-.500 Mariner seasons in the Pacific Northwest was bad, but 21? And they've not really been close to being good, either – save for a 2nd place finish in their division in 1997, the Pirates have been anchoring the bottom of the standings for most of the past two decades. And the opening of PNC Park in 2001, a jewel of a facility and a centerpiece for the revitalized city, eliminated the excuse of not having any money to spend. The last two decades' worth of losing could be chalked up to needlessly stingy ownership, poor scouting and development, misused draft selections, and sloppy play on the field. Incompetence, plain and simple.

But now the Pirates are back in the playoffs, possessing some outstanding pitching and one of the game's bright young stars in Andrew McCutchen. After a late season collapse led to a 79-83 season in 2012, the Pirates have broken through this year with 94 wins. They finished 2nd in the NL Central and hosted the Wild Card playoff game against Cincinnati. The atmosphere in Pittsburgh was insane and jubilant – going 21 straight losing seasons will do that to you – and now the Pirates have a 2-1 lead in their NLDS series with the St. Louis Cardinals.

And you should root for the Pittsburgh Pirates, because they are enthusiastic and likable and have endured a generation of absolute misery. And maybe finding some joy in the game again in Pittsburgh will make some of those ghosts from 1992 start to finally fade away.

O Fortuna!

"Chance favors the prepared mind."
– Louis Pasteur

There are two lines of commentary in sports which piss me off. The first is the whole excuse of “we have to work harder.” This is usually bullshit. Everyone in sports works hard. The worst offenders along this front are in the game of hockey, but every sport goes has similar declarations of the need to work harder. There are occasionally exceptions, but for the most part, talent prevails. You don’t need to “work harder.” You usually need to play better, which often also means that you need to play smarter.

Now, I understand that there is some politics involved when you’re a coach and you’re answering questions from the media, particularly after a bad loss. You don’t want to just come out and say your team is dumb.

 
That didn't end so well for Coach Callahan, who was fired from the Raiders after a 4-12 season.

Winners tend to use lame explanations like "we worked harder than them" to explain their success, but particularly frequent winners start using the most annoying cliché in sports, which is talking about how they are a "team of destiny." The idea being that somehow fate or chance is on your side, and that you're being somehow spirited by Fortuna or Divine Providence or (pick any deistic system of choice) towards the promised land that is a championship. What utter rubbish. The outcome is not scripted ahead of time. Attempting to do so is, in fact, considered the biggest sin in sports.

That being said, winners do tend to get the breaks. In part, this is due to the fact that they are in position to capitalize when opportunities present themselves. Consider what happened last Sunday in Houston, for example. The Seahawks are one of the favourites to be in the Super Bowl this year. They look like one of the 2-3 best teams in the NFL. They had a tough road game against a good Texans team and were struggling on the road, trailing 20-13 late in the game. Now consider the quote at the top of this entry from Pasteur – "chance favours the prepared mind." Through film study, the Seahawks had come to suspect that a particular formation would result in a favourite play of the Texans – faking a run to their left, the QB keeping the ball on the fake and then throwing back to their right. When they saw that particular formation with 2:51 left in the game, the Seahawks defense knew exactly what to do – a safety sneaks up and blitzes from the left edge, with the left CB expecting the short pass and jumping the route. When you are prepared, good things can happen.

If you notice, Seahawks CB Richard Sherman runs 50 yards with only one shoe:

This is because Richard Sherman jumped out of his shoes when he saw this terrible pass from Texans QB Matt Schaub.

There is a difference between being lucky and your opponents being stupid. It was a terrible choice of plays to begin with – why would you call this play with a 7-point lead and 2:51 left in the game at all, but particularly against a team whose best players are their ball-hawking defensive backs who are looking to force turnovers? There hasn't been an interception returned to tie the score this late in a game in the history of the modern NFL, and with good reason – teams that are winning don't do stupid stuff like put the ball up for grabs!

The play call is horrible, but the execution is even worse. It's 3rd down for the Texans at this point. OK, so the play doesn't work. Take a sack or throw the ball into the stands, then punt the ball and let your defense finish off the game. You do basically anything other than what Schaub did. So no, that doesn't count as luck.

Now this, on the other hand, could probably be construed as luck:

WTF? I was at this game, up in Section 330 of Phone Co. Park. Game 7 of the NLCS between the Giants and the Cardinals. Giants RF/resident weirdo Hunter Pence's thrice hit ball had the weirdest spin I have ever seen and promptly did this:

That play made no sense, yet it scored 3 runs and the Giants went on to win 9-0 and go to the World Series.

Fast forward :45 in this video, which is probably the greatest case of luck in sports history. (For some reason I can't get the video to sit on this page right.) Boris Becker won the US Open that year, but he was dead to rights in this 2nd round match with Derek Rostagno. His shot isn't very good at all, but then it skips off the tape – probably the only way he could win the point. This was Match Point, mind you, and Becker then rallied from there.

But it's stuff like what I just showed above which gives rise to the whole 'team of destiny' idea. Weird stuff starts to happen. Unlikely heros step up. All the breaks and the bounces seem to go their way. And on the road to a championship, there is almost always a moment in time where the victors nearly fell from grace. If the Seahawks go on to win the Super Bowl this year, they will no doubt look back to the day when Matt Schaub lost his mind as a pivotal moment in their season: a moment when victory just sort of fell their way, and they won in spite of themselves.

The big European football leagues often seem like fait accompli from very early on, an inevitable procession to a coronation, but then something nuts like this will happen from time to time. You sometimes see a team in college football that is completely dominant and seems unstoppable, but the team I will begrudgingly admit is the best I have ever seen still almost lost at Cal. There is, almost always, a great escape along the way to a championship – a moment where luck seemed to go the winners' way.

And this is how we want it. What's the point of a good story without conflict? All endings have to be earned in literature and cinema – there is no happy ending without potential for sadness. (And, conversely, the most tragic endings in the arts are those in which hope and salvation are possible.) The winners always get the breaks. We're talking about minute differences here between winning and losing here. Some of the greatest teams in history didn't win championships (the 116-win Mariners and undefeated UNLV basketball team immediately come to mind). And since the winners are the one who end up writing history, they often like to gloss over the fact that they very nearly got beat. This is true in sports, in war, in just about everything. If you didn't nearly lose, you wouldn't appreciate winning quite as much.

Like I say, the key is to be in position to take advantage of luck when it happens – and there is no guarantee that it will, mind you. But it has nothing to do with destiny when luck goes your way. It just happens sometimes. God doesn't care if you cover the spread. God doesn't have a bet on the game.

This About Sums It Up

The LOSE tries to keep politics out of this blog, even though I generally view politics in the context of being part contact sport and part theatre piece. Here in this part of the world, we are in a government shutdown, having decided to undertake a quest to supplant Belgium's "World's Most Successful Failed State" status. We have only 586 more days to go.

I'm not interested in getting into the politics of it all, so don't ask me to go there. But this about sums up how I feel about the whole situation. Infer from it what you will:

Your Houston Astros Moment of Zen

There are 110 frames in that .gif file, which is appropriate, since this play by Houston Astros catcher Matt Pagnozzi allowed what turned out to be the winning run to score in the Astros' 110th loss of the year, a 2-1 defeat on Saturday night to the New York Yankees. The Astros then lost 5-1 on Sunday to the Yanks to close out the season at 51-111. They are the first team since the 1965 Mets to lose more than 106 games for the third consecutive season.

Seriously. Watch that gif again and again. The incompetence is absolutely mesmerizing.

I'm not sure I saw a worse play on a baseball field than this all season. The play got lost in the shuffle a bit during the game, as the focus of this game turned out to be on yet another 78-year-old Yankees pitcher making his last appearance of his career. This play isn't quite as terrible as this headscratcher from 2012, but it goes a long way toward summing up the Astros season. You don't lose 111 games by accident. It should come as no surprise that the Astros led the majors in errors. They also struck out more times than any team in major league history.

I'm sort of surprised they even won 51, to be honest. They can thank the Mariners for that, primarily – their 9-10 record against the M's constituting nearly a fifth of their wins. But after sweeping the Mariners in Seattle in mid-September (and seriously, how did everyone in Seattle NOT get fired after that?), the weary Astros faced a brutal stretch against good teams and hungry playoff contenders to close out the season – the Reds, Indians, Rangers and Yankees. The Astros thus closed out the season with a 15-game losing streak.

Speaking of a fifth, I think I would need to drink to watch this team. Fans aren't exactly tuning in or turning out in droves. The front office there has been pleading for patience, but there is only so much that fans are willing to put up with. Quite a few proud franchises have seen their fanbases dwindle through continued ineptitude – Toronto and Baltimore come to mind, the latter having done well to win some fans back with good play the past couple of years. In Seattle, the relationship between the Mariners organization and the fanbase is becoming almost adversarial – their misguided and pointless 71-91 season, combined with manager Eric Wedge resigning and essentially saying the front office were a bunch of passive-aggressive sissies without a clue, have only added to a decline which has turned what was once a 3,000,000 draw into a team drawing 9,000 for a September game in little more than a decade. You can win the fans back, of course, but winning is exactly what it takes to do so.

In the case of the Astros, I'm not sure where the hope is to be found. The thought was that the Astros would be OK with an ownership change and through establishing a Regional Sports Network on TV, as RSN's have proven to be quite a cash cow for other teams. Well, that hasn't worked out so well either (of course, if you're drawing 0.0 ratings for games, it's not exactly a good buy for an advertiser). Their new GM came from the talent-producing machine that is the St. Louis Cardinals, and one would think he's learned a thing or two about developing major league players while in St. Louis. Folks in Houston should hope so, because there weren't too many major leaguers out on the field this season.

Now that the beloved local nine have finished their terrible season at 76-86, are out of the playoffs and are no longer the Defending World Series Champions (even though technically that moniker holds true for another month), I am throwing my support behind the Cleveland Indians. This is purely for literary reasons – the main character in my novel is originally from Cleveland. He wears an Indians hat all the time: the retro red ones with the blue C that the club revived this year and not the ones with the terrible caricature on them.

That Bites

The Blue Sharks are now friends of The LOSE. These guys are awesome.

The Official Fiancée of IN PLAY LOSE rightly pointed out this morning that it would be the squandering of a great opportunity not to take the time to write about a football match between Equatorial Guinea and Cape Verde – a match which has come to take on some pretty major significance in qualifying for the World Cup, mind you, but also a match between two of the so-called “minnows” of the sport. The Equatoguineans are currently ranked 98th in the world, while the wonderfully named Blue Sharks of Cape Verde are actually ranked 44th. They have a dynamic and flamboyant coach named Lucio Antunes, a collection of pretty good young talent, and they were coming off a successful appearance at the Africa Cup of Nations earlier this year in which they reached the quarterfinals.

It all started badly for the Blue Sharks, however, in CAF Group B. Africa has five places in Brazil and the 40 qualifiers were divided into 10 four-team groups, with the group winners advancing to a final series of home-and-home playoffs to earn their spots in the World Cup. The Blue Sharks were beaten 2:1 at Sierra Leone and lost 2:1 on their home grounds, the Estádio da Várzea in Praia, to perpetual top-flight African side Tunisia. They then had a rather contentious third match on March 24 in Malabo, losing 4:3 away to the Equatoguineans, dropping them to 0-0-3. At 0 pts. and -3, they were pretty much eliminated from the competition.

During this key third match, Blue Sharks defender Fernando Varela was sent off for “unsporting conduct towards a match official.” There is a great scene in the movie Bull Durham where Crash Davis gets tossed for calling the umpire a cocksucker – the 100% guaranteed, surefire way to get run by an ump. The LOSE knows from his days of playing basketball that calling the referee a motherfucker is a guaranteed way to get T’d up. The LOSE is not sure what the magic words are which will get you red carded in football, and especially doesn’t know what they would be in Portuguese, the national tongue in Cape Verde, or in French, as the referee of this match in question was from Mali. Referees have, however, been known to study up on derogatory terms in foreign tongues prior to the game, so as not to let guys get away with talking shit. Or maybe Varela just called him a motherfucker straight out in English, that term having taken on some rather universal usage by now.

Whatever it was that he said/did, Varela got tossed and his behaviour earned him a four-game suspension as well. Not that it mattered, since the Blue Sharks were out of the competition at this point after a tough loss to the Equatoguineans, whose victory was primarily due to a hat trick scored by Emilio Nsue.

Who is, by the definition of FIFA, a Spaniard.

Welcome to the mess.

Recruiting foreign players is apparently nothing new in Equatorial Guinea. The rules seem straightforward enough, in principle – a player has to be a) born in a country, b) have a parent from that country, or c) have spent two years in that country. And yet rules for who is and who isn’t eligible to participate for a national team have not always been universally applied nor enforced by FIFA, due in part to the fact that it’s not always so simple to figure out. Football has always been a game of the masses – which, in the rest of the world, means the poor: migrants and immigrants and transitory populations whose movements aren't always that easy to document or track. And what further complicates things is that once you’ve started playing for a national team, you cannot switch. Even the most sophisticated national federations in the sport sometimes get flummoxed and come to discover a talented player actually technically isn’t a citizen. Figuring out who is and isn’t eligible can be tricky even if you’re organized and paying attention to these sorts of things.

And organization has always been rather lacking in African football, a wonderful game played by wonderfully talented players who seem to be undermined at nearly every turn by federations that are corrupt, disorganized, and dysfunctional. The LOSE is a big fan of the African game. I love me some Elephants and Super Eagles and Black Stars. But virtually every major African competition inevitably gets mired in some sort of squabble or bickering or infighting, often times involving paying the players (or some governing body or another refusing to do so). It all can be wildly entertaining, and yet it’s also quite sad. The game is administered by far too many would-be tycoons and grandstanding Ministers of Sport – big fish in small ponds caring far more about their own personal fortunes than anything else. The prevalence of said Ministers is particularly problematic, as matches take on even more of a governmental air than is the norm. FIFA strives to keep government politics out of the sport, but such set-ups make it almost impossible to do so.

So far this World Cup qualifying cycle, there have been SEVEN cases of African teams fielding ineligible players. The devil is in the details, and the recordkeeping doesn’t always match the bravado of the boss. The penalty for this is a 3:0 forfeit loss. FIFA doesn’t differentiate between those who don’t understand the rules and those who attempt to game the system, nor should they. Most of the time, I believe it’s the former. But in the case of Emilio Nsue, he was born in Mallorca and had made 51 appearances for Spanish age-level national teams. So it’s not like he is an unknown commodity.  The Equatoguineans have been trying to persuade him to play for them for years – he turned down a chance to play in the 2012 African Cup of Nations, which the Equatoguineans co-hosted with Gabon – and he seems to have come back around to the idea of playing for Nzalang Nacíonal only when the hopes of someday playing for Spain have completely dissipated. Suffice to say, this was not going to be a particularly difficult case for FIFA to figure out.

Nsue captained the squad and scored three goals in the 4:3 win over the Blue Sharks in March, and then was out on the pitch on June 8 for the rematch with the Blue Sharks in Praia, a 2:1 win for the hosts which was essentially meaningless for all involved. The suspended Fernando Varela was not on the pitch for the Blue Sharks. Nor was Fernando Varela on the pitch a week later, a 1:0 win for the Blue Sharks over Sierra Leone that also meant nothing because the Blue Sharks were on the outside looking in. They were stuck on 6 pts. and -1 goal difference and trailing Tunisia’s 11 pts. and +4 with only one match left to play. Mathematically eliminated.

Until July, when they weren’t mathematically eliminated any more, because Nsue was ruled ineligible.

The results of both matches between the Equatoguineans and Cape Verde were thus officially awarded as 3:0 victories for the Blue Sharks, so Cape Verde picked up 3 extra pts. and a whole lot of goal difference. Suddenly, Cape Verde were sitting at 9 pts. and +5, and they actually had a chance to still advance. Their one game left was at Tunisia, where a win was unlikely.

But given a choice between slim and none, slim is the better option. (Yes, I just linked to Tunisian television. This blog just gets better and better.)

The LOSE loves the minnows, of course (as evidenced by my fondness for the Ultimate Good Guys this past summer in Brazil). There are usually one or two who find their way into the World Cup somehow, often in implausible ways, and they add some unpredictability and joie de vivre to the affair. Among those minnows who still have a chance to swim with the big fishes in Brazil next summer are Iceland, who are somehow in second place in a completely strange European group, and Jordan, who are ranked 73rd in the world but get to play a home-and-home with a South American team TBD in November for a spot in Brazil. Winning the World Cup is not really the point for nations such as these. (Nor should it be the point for much of anyone, to be honest, since only eight nations have won the damn thing.) The point is to get there, to be on that big stage for three games and to leave a legacy.

Cape Verde is a small, island nation of 500,000 people, and their shock 2:0 win over Tunisia in Radès was a cause for national celebration and joy. It’s a cool little country. Reaching the World Cup would be a great achievement for the Blue Sharks and for the nation as a whole, and now they were merely two games away from it.

But there was one problem: Fernando Varela was in the lineup for Cape Verde in that game with Tunisia. You remember him. He’s the guy who is suspended.

Apparently, the thinking in Cape Verde was that since the matches with the Equatoguineans had been declared forfeits, which means all individual statistics from the matches don’t count, Varela’s suspension therefore didn’t count either. Which isn't an unreasonable assumption, I suppose, but you might want to, oh, READ THE RULES FIRST. From FIFA’s Clause 18.4: "an expulsion automatically incurs suspension … even if imposed in a match that is later abandoned, annulled and/or forfeited."

And so the game, of course, goes down as a 3:0 win for the Tunisians, since the Blue Sharks fielded a suspended player who was ineligible.

How do you say "facepalm" in Portuguese? Or, better yet, how do you say "clusterfuck?"

I feel bad for the players, who were essentially administered into losing a golden opportunity. There is no excuse for that sort of thing. It’s ultimately the responsibility of coaches and administrators and clerks to figure this stuff out. It’s bad enough to get beat on the pitch. It’s worse to get beat a week later in a conference room in Switzerland. The Blue Sharks are a whimsical and jovial lot who deserved a fate far less vexing and confounding than this. It’s a big disappointment for a small country, as they now must give up their playoff spot to Tunisia. Not that I have anything against Les Aigles de Carthage. Given the state of affairs in the country, Tunisians could use a little good news right now.

And, really, that fact makes it easy to root for all 10 African sides left in the competition – all of those nations could use an infusion of joy and national pride to make day-to-day existence there a bit more palatable. Of the 10, two of them – Burkina Faso and Ethiopia – survived having to forfeit matches for using ineligible players. The latter case is particularly noteworthy in that the Walia Antelopes thought they’d wrapped up their group with a game to play. Their raucous 2:1 win over South Africa in Addis Ababa (thanks to one of the greatest own goals in history) set off delirium, as Ethiopia’s footballing fortunes have generally been terrible of late. Only then did they discover a rather boneheaded error – Minyahile Beyene had accrued too many yellow cards and was to serve a suspension in a June 8 game vs. Botswana, yet no one involved with either the Ethiopians or CAF seemed to notice, so there he was out on the pitch in Botswana. Uh, whoops. With the 3:0 forfeit loss, Ethiopia had now unclinched. But they had a chance to redeem themselves in their final match, an away game at the Central African Republic – which was playing an away game themselves. Apparently, you lose your right to host matches when you’ve got coup d’états and civil insurrection going on. The Ethiopians won the game 2:1, which was played in a vast, nearly empty stadium in Brazzaville. It’s fair to say that the CAR supporters didn’t travel in great numbers.

And along with the pair of forfeit survivors you also have Senegal, which doesn’t get to host a match in their home-and-home playoff with African kingpins Côte d’Ivoire. This is because there was a riot in the stadium the last time the two teams met in Dakar.

In summary, everyone’s nuts. Sounds about normal.