Between the ear holes

I am still getting over the near upset of my Dallas Cowboys Monday night. How can a team as sorry as the Buffalo Bills come that close to beating my undefeated Cowboys. Both teams are on the national stage of Monday night, so you know both wanted to play well. And yet, Buffalo did everything but win.
Saturday I was at Duke. You remember the Blue Devils, the team that ran their losing streak to 22 games earlier this year. Saturday they were getting thrashed by Wake Forest in the third quarter when suddenly a football game broke out. Duke gave the Demon Deacons all they could handle and could have easily won that one.
Aycock is having a tough season. My memory is long enough to remember long Falcon football losing steaks, and times when CBA had just 16 kids on the sidelines to play a game. Still, we’ve come to expect a lot more from Coach Pinkowski led teams.
In fairness, most of us don’t attend or even watch most football games. Our impressions of a team are often shaped by the final score. More than that, by wins and losses. Wins and losses are important, but often what really happens on the field, the good plays and the bad plays, the strong efforts and the weak efforts, are overridden by the ultimate distillation: w or l.
I can’t speak about every Aycock game, but Friday night I was at Beddingfield for most of the first half. I left to help cover another game for our Princeton paper, but when I left, I honestly thought Aycock would win. The offense was still struggling to establish consistency, though they had some good runs while I was there. What particularly impressed me was the defense was hitting and creating turnovers.
I would be the first to testify that football is a lot of hard work. My hat’s off to those who play.
The nature of the game is also such that the bigger, stronger, and faster athlete usually dominates. You can usually get kids in the weight room to improve strength, but there’s a certain amount of this stuff that is God given, and you either have or you don’t. You can’t coach speed, for example.
No offense to those who are on the Aycock team this year, but the talent level isn’t as high as it has been. I’m sure the coaching staff is working just as hard as they have been, and I suspect the kids are working as hard as they were last year. We just don’t have all the horses we had last year and in recent years.
The same could probably be said at Duke and Buffalo: they don’t have the horses to have a winning team, or at least not a consistently winning team. But at Beddingfield for a while Friday, at Duke Saturday, and at Buffalo Monday, each team looked like a winner.
One of my other teams, Princeton, broke a long losing streak two weeks ago. The team that had struggled to score, that had not been close to winning, suddenly became a winner. They not only won that game, but they won it by a convincing margin, and came back the next week and won again in a near blow-out.
I asked the coach about the turnaround. When the kids went out on the field two weeks ago, they knew they were the better team.
Last week, things went their way early, and the other team got discouraged and desperate. And I’m sure his team’s confidence went up.
As hard a game as it is, and as easy as it is to get discouraged, I am inspired by those who buck the trend, who make it happen, and who overcome the odds. I am also excited by those who can help us believe in ourselves enough to make it happen.
I enjoy watching Remember the Titans again and again. I enjoyed seeing Facing the Giants.
I have caught a time or two what I think is a new feature on ESPN. Former coach Lou Holtz (he’s coached at a lot of places, including NC State many years ago) is offering a pre-game pep talk for the underdog teams in big college battles. It’s entertaining, but I also think what I heard would inspire me to feel great about my chances to win before I took the field.
Believe and have confidence, and who knows, you might even beat the Cowboys, on Monday night.