I was literally born with a football in my hands.
My father was a football coach at Fairdale High School in Louisville, Kentucky during the first five years of my life and although it wasn’t like we ate, drank and breathed the sport it certainly took up an important part of our life as a family. After my father decided to concentrate on teaching at Western Kentucky University back in 1965, we still went to every football and basketball game on campus. So it was a very important part of our lives although back in those days the only football for kids was the sandlot variety and so formal football didn’t begin until we were in Junior High School.
Today there really is only one sports team I care anything about and that is Western Kentucky University’s teams. Fact is, I care too much about it. It sort of can take over my state of being.
I know that sounds ridiculous and it is, but when you have been brainwashed as a kid and it is very close to your spirit, then I think it is probably a natural thing. After all, especially at WKU back in those days, the atmosphere “On the Hill” was one of freshness, newness, excitement and really good teams.
The football stadium used to be on top of “The Hill” and they had just completed Diddle Arena which was one of the largest on campus stadiums in the country, and in those days WKU had a prolific Top Ten basketball team. So, the games were always sold out or very close to it.
The beautiful campus, all of the great students and energy of the place back then was fabulous for a kid like me. We even went to elementary school on campus. So, it was like I was a college student even at the age of 6. How cool was that? Very.
So, you can see that being a young Hilltopper I still carry with me all of those memories, the thrilling victories, the devastating defeats. Boy, did my brother and I hate losing…and we still do.
I know that we should rise above those experiences and not take sports so seriously especially since our lives don’t depend on it, but it is almost like you can’t help it. I’ll admit that my ego identifies with it as if it is me doing these sports myself.
So, try as I may to not let something that is supposed to be “just for fun” I find myself getting emotionally involved with the outcome. It is not like whenever we lose that I get torn up, but I do get sort of torn up when our teams aren’t good. The Topper tradition is a winning one. We expect to be good. We expect to contend for every championship out there. Since WKU joined Conference USA, it has dominated in terms of championships won across all sports it participates in. So, it is a source of pride for me and for the entire community.
Last year and now it looks like this year, the football team is struggling. (The basketball team could be phenomenal this year!)
WKU is not like the University of Kentucky or the University of Louisville, that have huge fan bases and lots of money. People go to those games win or lose because of the “Big Time” aspect of being members of the SEC and the ACC respectively. Probably the sickest fan base in the country is the UK Wildcat Basketball Fan Base for obvious reasons. Kentucky doesn’t have a professional sports team, so it is natural that it’s people identify with the “state school”. Louisville’s fan base is largely just Louisville, and I am sort of a fan because I was born there. But, I don’t identify with the Cards and honestly will never be a Kentucky fan in sports although it depends a lot on how they play the game and the attitude of the coach. I actually like John Calipari as a coach. I think he has his players best interest in mind and I don’t blame him for the “one and done” players he recruits. After all, if the point of going to college is to get a good job, it can’t hurt if you enter the work force at the age of 20 making millions of dollars a year. I’d say that qualifies as good job placement. The only problem with that is very few players can achieve that and all of them think they should and therefore neglect the classroom and don’t value the education they can receive for free because of playing a sport. So, they throw away a lot of good by doing so.
But that is not the point of this article.
This past weekend the Tops opened the 5 game home season against the University of Maine. Now, WKU is an FBS NCAA member, the top level, and while it isn’t in a Power 5 conference, it still has really good players, placing quite a few into the NFL in recent years. Maine is an FCS school, which has fewer scholarships and can’t get the quality of athlete that an FBS school can usually get. So, just by that criteria alone, the Tops should dominate and win rather handily.
It started out nice, It was 21-0 Tops after just 5 minutes of play. That is a lot. But, Tops fans had grown accustomed to such scores during the 3 years of the Brohm squad’s powerful offense when it was common to be up 50 – 0 by halftime and then coast.
One has to admit that those outstanding offenses of the Brohm era will hardly ever be forgotten because honestly, it was not just a football team, it was a work of art. Just fabulous in so many ways.
So, after scoring 21 points in 5 minutes, something Tops fans had become accustomed to, we go the rest of the game to score a big play TD in the 4th quarter and the rest of the time our offense does nothing.
Maine, however, scores 31 straight points on us and we couldn’t stop them. They didn’t have the quality of athlete of the Tops, but they were very well coached, focused and executed plays very well. They also had a good pass rush, mostly because their defensive line was so much quicker than our offensive line and their coach put a lot of pressure on the Topper Quarterback.
So, from the 6 minute mark until the end of the game, it was nothing but pure misery to watch the Tops just collapse.
The “coupe de gras” was the play call “to go for it” on 4th Down and 2 Yards to go for the 1st Down on the Topper 15 or so yard line. This means if you don’t get the first down, the other team gets the ball on the 15 or so, making it much easier for them to score and puts a lot of pressure on the defense to stop them. It is almost an impossible task in that situation.
Now, with the exception of it being the 4th quarter, of a championship game, and it is your last chance to win, nobody would ever even considering “going for it” on 4th down in that situation. The score was tied 21 – 21. In every coaches list of plays based on situations, you wouldn’t ever “go for it” under those circumstances.
It is a “Cardinal Sin” to do that as a coach. The stupidity of reasoning in that situation just blew my mind. It made me angry. I wanted to go down to the sidelines and cus the coach out for doing something so incredibly dumb. The entire stadium gasped. It was one of the epic moments in sports history if you ask me. To watch a coach completely submarine his team with a call like that is just horrible.
Of course, they may have been able to convert. But, the next cardinal sin was that he called a simple hand off up the middle as the play, which is the one thing any defense is not going to give up without a huge fight. Not to mention we had run for less than 60 yards up to that point in the game.
So, I felt sick. My father sitting next to me felt sick. I think the entire stadium felt sick when they scored on the next play from scrimmage, putting them up by a touchdown. In fact, it was one of the most brutal things I’ve ever seen on a football field. Epic fail and all because of the coach’s flawed reasoning.
Honestly, I’m still sick because of it. It is depressing. I know that sounds silly, but that is the effect it has on me. You can say, “Geez, get over it dude.” But, it isn’t really a choice. It is part of having an attachment to something since you can remember. It is visceral.
Now, if I watched a game with teams playing that I don’t care about I could enjoy it and say, “Well that was stupid.” and not think about it any more. It is part of why I would rather watch games with teams I don’t care about, because to me that is entertaining.
I guess writing this article helps me vent about it. But, I could have done without wasting a perfectly fine evening stressing about a football game, as stupid as that is. Some things you just can’t fix.
I will try to invest less in the games to come because honestly, with a coach who would make a decision like that, it doesn’t pay to put much investment into it. I don’t mind losing if we play well. But, losing that way is sickening, and it is possible this sort of decision making will continue with this coach, as much as I like the guy as a human being.
My suggestion is that the coach takes up chess and learn how to make decisions by seeing the ramifications of decisions.
Well, that is enough of that. Now it is time for me to get back to trying to build a life.