A Buckeye loss and a lesson about fair play

So last night was the inevitable close to a crazy season for the Ohio State Buckeyes football team.  We knew we were going to lose.  Alabama's coach Nick Saban, already one of the most successful coaches in sporting history, had fielded one of his best teams ever.  Unlike so many other programs, his team made it through 2020 largely unscathed.

While other teams had games cancelled, practices cancelled, and a constant upheaval on their starting lineups, Alabama played together and stayed together and grew through the complete season.  Many teams had practices cut short, resulting in a lack of toning, conditioning and growing as a team.  Injuries were off the scale as the players weren't prepared for the rigors of football.  Teams had trouble hitting their stride since, on any given week, the same players might not be present to jell as a cohesive unit.  But Alabama made it through almost entirely intact.

This helped them even more since most teams Alabama played were already weakened due to faltering and floundering.  Typically with college football, there is a sort of bell curve in efficiency.  You start each season with a new lineup.  At first things are rocky as players learn to depend on each other and find the best way to be a well oiled machine.  By mid-season, they're hitting their peak and doing their best.  By the end, however, injuries, hits and players gone for the season begin to take a toll and it becomes almost a matter or attrition.  For Alabama this year, since so many opponents were struggling on one leg at best, its already crack team had all the benefits of a full season together, while not getting hit nearly as hard by opponents and therefore not suffering the same losses one might otherwise expect by end of season playoffs.  

OSU, on the other hand, was a dumpster fire from the beginning.  Since the Big 10 initially decided to cancel fall sports, OSU missed the crucial pre-season practices and conditioning that lays the groundwork for the season.  When the seasons was brought back, all Big 10 teams were already at a deficit.  Then because of strict Covid regulations, OSU (like so many others) had several games cancelled, including one it had to cancel.  This made it so a special dispensation had to be given by the NCAA just for OSU to get into the playoffs - something that was controversial.  After all, we were undefeated but didn't have enough victories to qualify for playoffs!  In the meantime, the lack of training and conditioning took its toll as OSU, again like most teams, suffered unusually high levels of injuries with each game.  Therefore, at no point was the same OSU team on the field more than once, with each game seeing different lineups forced to fumble about to find a stride. 

Add to this a relatively new (though surprising clever and effective) coach, and the controversies surrounding us just being in the playoffs, and it didn't look good.  Especially when we found out we first would be put against our old nemeses Clemson.  Clemson was that Achilles' Heel for us.  We had never beaten Clemson before. Clemson cost us our legendary coach Woody Hayes.  Clemson served us one of our most - one of the most - humiliating defeats in college football only a few years ago.   Clemson was definitely in our heads.  Though Clemson had also struggling due to 2020 issues, we were sure we were the underdogs going against them in the first round. 

But something happened last year that changed things.  Last year, we played Clemson in the same playoff round.  Fielding a powerhouse team along with a rookie coach that shocked all of football, we had mopped the floor with every team sent our way.  Despite that, we were still the underdogs against Clemson when we met them in early 2020.  

What happened next has become the stuff of infamy in Ohio.  We played Clemson that night as well as any game we had played.  We held them off, kept them from pulling ahead, and heading into late fourth quarter, it looked like we might just pull off a stunning upset victory.  And then - one of the worst calls in the history of any sport ever.  Even detractors of OSU later admitted it was horrible.

If you don't know football, I won't go into the history of replays and overturned calls.  Suffice it to say it stunned everyone.  Clemson fumbled the ball and OSU recovered the fumble and ran it down for what could have been a game winning touchdown.  But the play was challenged by the officials. Slow motion replay confirmed the Clemson player had complete control of the ball, had fumbled, and the OSU player had recovered.  And then, for reasons nobody understands, the officials reversed the play, removing OSU's touchdown with only moments left in the game.  It would be like standing on the edge of the Grand Canyon and saying, "Sure, but I don't see a hole in the ground."

Granted, the old rule is that if you lose because of one bad call, you deserve to lose.  That's typically the case.  But there have been some calls so awful that even skeptics have had to admit the game was lost because of that single call.  This was one of those cases.  Months later and few denied that had it not been for that clearly wrong call, OSU would have won.  

That went down hard, and was a motivating factor for us taking the field this year against Clemson, once again as the underdogs.  But we were driven this time. Why?  Because we felt cheated.  The whole program felt cheated.  That Clemson's coach decided to dig at us and mock us, rather than being contrite, only made it easier to want a pound of flesh.  And a pound is what we got.  In a shocking upset, we beat Clemson and beat them badly.   If nothing else happened this year, we got what we wanted and that was giving Clemson its comeuppance for having won through such dubious means the year earlier.  That, to most, made it a winning season if nothing else did. 

Of course that meant we were then up against the beast that is Alabama in the championship game.  Sporting one of the best defenses in college football, the best offense, one of the best receiving squads in college football, and a Heisman trophy winning wide receiver considered one of the best to have played in many a year, Alabama was a juggernaut.  We knew we had little hope.

Alabama arrived last night almost refreshed.  It had barely been touched all season.  Its team had been together from the beginning.  They were tight, efficient, like that proverbial well oiled machine.  Compared to them, OSU was a mess.  Half of our few remaining defensive starters were out from injury or Covid.  We had lost some of our best offensive players.  Our quarterback had received a massive hit to his ribs last week and was clearly not up to par.  And on the first play, we lost the running back who had emerged in the last weeks of the season and who had been the major reason for our previous two victories.  It went down from there.

Despite it all, we put up a decent fight.  In fact, our score - three touchdowns and a field goal - from such a broken and shattered team shows how pro-offense the game of football has become (hence the staggering stats attributed to players like Tom Brady).  That's the result of so many safeguards and limitations placed on defenders over the years.  But our attempts simply couldn't match Alabama's talent and near flawless execution.  It looked every bit the team with everything going for it, and we looked every bit the team with all cards stacked against us.

But you know what?  That's OK.  We lost.  Most fans this morning tipped a hat to Saban, who pulled his foot off the gas by the fourth quarter, not wanting to humiliate us or our coach.  People do that when they respect each other.  Alabama had at least three more touchdowns in its arsenal, but that wouldn't do.  Saban was as good as pulling his punches, and we all knew it.  And we admire Saban and Alabama all the more for it.

So you see, it's not that people can't lose, or are always pissed when they lose, or get outraged at losing or not getting what they want.  I'm sure there are a few crazies out there this morning in Buckeye land with the conspiracy theories.  But everyone I've seen, from news to online to friends and acquaintances, are content.  Sad of course.  Nobody likes to lose.  But it isn't the rage and blood boiling of last year when we felt we had been cheated.  People being cheated will eventually find a way to retaliate because nobody likes to be cheated.  We prefer to win of course, but if we lose fair and square, we'll take that, too.  

I just thought I'd throw that out there.  People don't always get mad just because they're not getting their way.  They may resolve to work harder, play harder and practice harder next time.  But people often can accept defeat and even admire those who defeat them for a job well done - when it's fair and square.  It's when they feel cheated, when they feel they were playing a rigged system, that sets them off.  Especially if they feel cheated all the time, and feel those who could do something to change the system and make it fairer are refusing to do so.