Voluntary Heartbreak, or Being a Sports Fan

I had resisted writing about sports this entire fall because I didn’t want to jinx the incredible run of my Kansas State Wildcats. Now I see it was unnecessary. What a heartbreaking loss. Sunday morning when I got up I was still depressed. I ate breakfast and went for a run and saw blue jays and cardinals and was still depressed. I came back and read the scene in Uncle Tom’s Cabin where Tom is sold to Haley by Mr. Shelby and I was still depressed about a freaking college football game. That is amazing (and probably not a good thing). Being a fan is sheer madness. It is volunteering for routine heartbreak, but we just keep deluding ourselves into believing that there is that chance this time it won’t end in disaster. This must be what Taylor Swift thinks at the start of a new relationship. Maybe this time.

I have been trying to put things in perspective. We started the year ranked 22^nd in the nation and projected to finish in the middle of the pack in our conference. And then we won 10 games in a row. And if we rebound and beat Texas in two weeks we will go to the Fiesta Bowl in Phoenix as the Big 12 champions. If you had told me at the beginning of the year that we would go to the Fiesta Bowl I would have been tickled pink. But such is the capriciousness of sports that for a time it seemed that we could have more. National champions more. A shot against Alabama or Oregon for it all. Now, sadly, the national title will likely come down to Alabama beating Notre Dame 35-3. Two “classic” programs squaring off in a terrible mismatch. And I will be disappointed with a BCS game. There was a time when I was running much better than I do today and I was trying to run a half marathon in under 90 minutes. My previous record was 105 minutes. I finished in 92 minutes and was depressed. This is the same thing. 92 minutes isn’t that good when you’re going for 90. The Fiesta Bowl isn’t Miami on the final day of the college football season. Two years ago we went to the freaking Pinstripe Bowl and now I am disappointed. I hate sports.

But, of course, I love them, too. And I will always be a fan. I will always watch my Wildcats. I thought a lot on my run the morning after about what it is to be a fan and how glad I am to be a fan of the team that I love. Sure, I could become an Alabama fan or a Notre Dame fan or a whoever has a shot every year to win it all fan. I could also root for the Lakers/Heat, Yankees/ Giants, Patriots/ Steelers. But I am a K-State fan because it is in my blood. This team represents my state and what I value. And I never let go of them even when living in Colorado and Texas for a decade and a half. When I was an undergraduate at Colorado State my drawers had one or two pieces of CSU apparel and half a dozen K-State shirts. I love that they are small town. That their recruiting class is always outside of the top half of Division 1 teams. That their players wear suits and don’t mouth off on Twitter. That they are scrappy and old school and led by a coach who would babysit an assistant coach’s children after their mother died so they could get by. That I don’t have to worry about a big scandal coming out of the program, like the vaunted Leaders Division of the Big 10. I love this team.

And I hate losing. But it comes with the territory. And, however little I feel it now, I do believe it is worth the tradeoff. It is difficult to believe in anything, whether a person or an institution or a religion. To believe exposes you and opens you up to being letdown by someone or something outside of your control. It is scary. And I don’t mean to oversell the importance of sports, but what is the value of life without faith?

About Basketball

I have been really busy lately with school so instead of trying to write a blog post full of critical thought, theology, or, really, anything written with any effort at all, I have decided to write about the remarkable resurgence of the Kansas State men’s basketball team in the past few weeks. Because it has been that awesome.

The text message I received from my dad on Saturday, February 12th said it all: “The year from hell.” I had to agree. K-State had just lost by two points to Colorado because Rodney McGruder’s final second miracle shot left his hand about a tenth of a second too late. You couldn’t argue with the call. The replay official froze the screen when the clock expired and the ball was still clearly on the fingertips of K-State’s sophomore guard. It was a rough moment, the seeming culmination of a rough year.

Though I disputed our pre-season ranking of #3 in the country and #1 in the Big 12--the pathway to the Big 12 championship always runs through Lawrence--I never imagined we would completely fall apart like we did. Our two senior leaders got suspended for taking “improper benefits”, our star recruit from last year left the team, even the 45 year-old Colombian on the team bailed. It was awful. Everything that could go wrong, seemed to go wrong, and then we invented stuff to go wrong and that went wrong too. And the ball on McGruder’s fingertips was just the ultimate example of all of that. We walked into a hostile Boulder crowd, played well, made a miraculous shot, but it left the hands a blink of an eye too late. That was the year. You couldn’t argue with anything. It wasn’t like our football team’s loss in the Pinstripe Bowl when the referee decided it was on him to decide the outcome with a superfluous excessive celebration call. There was no arguing this. We were playing bad basketball (trying to escape Boulder with a win?), our leaders were showing no leadership, Frank Martin seemed to be losing control. And then Kansas was coming to town. It was Valentine’s Day and we were hosting KU on Big Monday after losing to CU less than 48 hours before. Needless to say, I was not feeling a win coming.

But, of course, it did. We played extremely well. Kansas looked flat. We dominated them in every part of the game. Our 7’ center who I could beat in an arm-wrestling match owned the paint against the musclebound Morris Twins. Pullen was shooting like it was a video game. KU was turning the ball over blithely. It was an amazing night.

Then, of course, you are worried about the comedown. You beat number one in a shock the nation type game and then, naturally, you expect to lose to a struggling Oklahoma team. But we didn’t. Pullen didn’t play great and it took us awhile to pull away but McGruder continued to step up and has been our surest hand in this great run. Then there was the final date in Lincoln to take on a surging Nebraska who had just beat #2 Texas at home a few days before. Again, I was expecting it to all come apart. After the year we have had, what else could I expect? But we won that one, too. Despite anemic three point shooting.

Then we hosted #21 Missouri. Pullen had another big game. Nick Russell hit clutch free throws down the stretch and another victory. But perhaps the toast of them all was taking down Texas (#8 at the time) in Austin. It was the Wildcats first road victory against a top ten opponent in 17 years. And we played great. McGruder was unconscious and had ice in his veins as he stroked absolutely crucial shots. Pullen hurt his wrist and kept going. And we reeled it in. It should be noted as well, that I believe it is official that we now... OWN TEXAS!!! I can’t even remember the last time we lost to them in a major sport. Basketball or football, Austin or Manhattan--bring it on, Longhorns.

Now, I don’t know exactly where all of this is going. This could fizz out and we could lose in the first round of March Madness. But we are surging at the right time and it has come out of nowhere. While I was expecting to be disappointed to a certain degree this season, I was not anticipating how bad it did get. Likewise, I could never have foreseen this late surge. And this is one of the million reasons why sports are so much fun and why, despite my literary snobbishness and Indie-music enthusiasm, I will always watch them and love them and get excited and nervous and jump up and down and scream or think words that I shouldn’t scream or think.

On the Pinstripe Bowl

Often it is therapeutic to deal with grievances through writing. I trust that this is the case for the current situation. I intend no personal disparagement to any individual in what follows.

I didn’t get to watch Kansas State’s bowl game live because I was at a conference in Omaha while it was on. I got home the next morning, tuned into espn3.com’s replays of the game, and settled in for the game. I had maintained no interaction with anyone who knew the final score and had no idea what to expect.

For the most part it was a great football game. K-State’s defense was terrible, but we knew that would be the case, and our offense played exceptionally well. Syracuse boasted the sixth-ranked defense in the nation and we shredded them. Carson Coffman had an admirable game in his final appearance as a Wildcat and hopefully will silence the naysayers on his career. He was never flashy, but he was efficient. It was a back and forth, punch for punch type of game that is so very much fun to watch, as say compared to the 10-6 UCF vs. Georgia battle. And then, the officials decided the outcome.

Before I get into that specific call, let me say that I fully acknowledge that Bill Snyder was outside of his mind to call a fake field goal run on fourth and five with the punter running the ball. In that situation, either line up the offense and let them do their thing, throw the football which would have a far better chance of success, or kick the darned field goal. We lost by two, three points certainly would have helped. I hate those boneheaded type decisions. In the slippery field conditions it doesn’t pay to try and block a field goal so the defense by nature was going to hang back and there was no chance of Ryan Doerr running the ball for five yards. A similar thing happened in the Iowa State vs. Nebraska game this year. The Cyclones went for the win instead of the tie by going for a two-point conversion but instead of lining up their successful offense that had been embarrassing the Huskers all afternoon, they tried a fake field goal pass with their punter. Stupid. Let the offense decide the outcome or come up with something wildly tricky.

That being said, that penalty call for excessive celebration was one of the most egregious and inconsistent penalty calls I have ever seen. This youtube video shows other touchdowns from the game and the celebrations the players made when they got to the endzone. Daniel Thomas bumps his chest on one of his scores, on another he kneels in the endzone. On one of his touchdown scores Marcus Sales makes either the “O” for the Syracuse Orange or a diamond or some symbol to the crowd and gets no penalty. In a game on the same day, with another Big 10 officiating crew, Tennessee performed two salutes after touchdowns without drawing the yellow cloth. Why were none of these penalized and yet Adrian Hilburn’s rather innocuous salute draws 15 yards and gives the game to the Orange? There is no explanation for that, even if Hilburn’s move did break the letter of the ambiguous law.

There is something different about a game in the final few minutes than the rest of the game as well. If they make that call in the first half (and make it consistently for both sides), I am fine with that. I think it is a dumb rule, but if you want to show you will be enforcing it, show that from the beginning. Don’t let everything prior to that go and then call it in the final minute of the game for the first time. There is no excuse for that. In basketball, in a close game, you have to be tackled in the last few seconds for a penalty to be called. And this is right. In the last few seconds you do not want to the referees to step in as the stars of the game and decide which time will win the game.

The game should be decided by the players from both teams. Would K-State have made their two-point conversion try? I don’t know. Would they have held Syracuse in the final minute from marching to field goal territory? I don’t know. Would they have been able to slow them down in overtime and win the game? I don’t know. But we should have been given the chance to know. That penalty removed all chance from the game and effectively decided the outcome. Now Adrian Hilburn’s terrific catch and run will be remembered for a salute to a small crowd of K-State fans that had braved arctic conditions to come to the game that cost his team the chance of winning. That is not fair to him. We shouldn’t remember that salute at all, but now it is the defining play of that game. And that is a shame for both teams. Instead of an entertaining back and forth scoring battle, it will be remembered for the officials whistle and a piece of yellow cloth.

OK, I think I can move on now. National championship prediction: Oregon 35, Auburn 31, Go Ducks.