Revenge of the Jocks

It all came crashing down for Texas Tech tonight, and even though I've never been to Lubbock, don't know where it is, don't even know anyone who goes to school there, I still felt for that football team and especially for its head coach.

To understand why you have to understand how I felt when it came out that Bill Belichick had been cheating by stealing signs from opposing teams. For most of the sports media and a lot of fans, this was more vindication than revelation. Belichick built the New England Patriots into a dynasty by using deception and innovation, understanding probabilities and game theory, generally outthinking the competition. For a lot of sports commentators, even if he wasn't breaking any specific rules that they knew of, his MO already amounted to cheating - or at least not playing fair. He refused to let the teams go out and beat the hell out of each other like honest men. The news that Belichick broke the rules came as a coveted, tangible piece of evidence for what they knew all along: that thinking basically was cheating.

I felt differently. Whatever his personal flaws, I loved Bill Belichick, or at least the idea of him. I loved that a nerd in a cutoff sweatshirt could hold a league of 300-pound monsters in the palm of his hand. The fact that he cheated diminished that accomplishment in a real way.

I've played a lot of games in my life and often been desperately concerned with winning, but I've never cheated. Okay, maybe for a laugh I've outrageously stacked the deck in a card game with family. But I've never cheated when it counted. Winning was always about proving something, usually that I was smart, or right, or both. To win by cheating wouldn't prove anything.

So when I found out that Belichick cheated, it undercut the message I thought he was proving: that brains could triumph over brawn. Most sports fans celebrated the undoing of a conceited know-it-all. I mourned a champion's fall from grace.

All of this is a long way of saying, I dig brainy football coaches. With Belichick disqualified, Mike Leach became the heir apparent to my football idolatry. Trained as a lawyer, Leach is one of only six FBS head coaches who did not play college football. He spends each offseason researching a topic unrelated to football, which is why his office is filled with pirate paraphernalia. During every game he maintains the facial expression of someone working on a medium-difficulty Sudoku. Where other coaches have multiple, color-coded, laminated play sheets (a transparent crutch for weak minds), Leach uses a single page, crumpled and handwritten. He consistently engineers offenses that put up absurd numbers of points, despite having access to less talented players (for the most part) than the top programs.

And this season was to be his magnum opus. His Texas Tech Raiders had run up a 10-0 record, already vanquishing key rivals Texas and Oklahoma State. Only Oklahoma and the Big 12 Championship Game stood between them and playing for a National Champinoship.

Then it all went horribly wrong. Texas Tech went to Norman to play Oklahoma, a team they had traditionally struggled against. In its first series, not only did Tech not score, they looked confused and rattled by the crowd. Meanwhile, Oklahoma moved the ball with ease. They didn't seem to require any misdirection, they just ran right over the Tech defense. By the time Oklahoma nabbed a gratuitous interception and punched it in for a 42-7 first-half lead, it was clear to everyone what was going on. A good, old-fashioned nerd bashing was in progress.

When you put this game beside Belichick's epic miss of a perfect season in Superbowl XLII, it's hard not to see a kind of destiny at work. Rationality will only take you so far. You need grit, can-do, and the skin of your teeth to put you over the edge.

Can Sarah Palin have been right? Can you really not blink?

Blink.

The man most responsible for denying Belichick his perfect season was Eli Manning, a nerd in a jock's game if ever there was one. Reportedly a Wisconsin television station pulled Seinfeld off the air the night before a Division Championship game to deny Manning his pre-game ritual of watching the show, thereby giving the Packers the upper hand. Whether or not it's true it's a good story.

And the only man who has been able to consistently thwart Leach's offense is Oklahoma coach Bob Stoops, who actually employed Leach as his offensive coordinator for a year, and is no dummy himself. (In my version of the story Stoops becomes the villain, turning over the secrets of the mind to those who will use them for harm, like Oppenheimer with the bomb.)

No, if your goal is winning, rationality really does work. Probabilities work. The problem isn't winning.

The problem is what you get out of it. Is the edge you can get by crediting probability worth abandoning the right to attribute your victory to God, Destiny, or Wanting It More? If your first thought, like mine, is, well how much of an edge can I get?, you've already made up your mind.