Wednesday, March 11, 2009
At 11:30 a.m. today, Nebraska will face off against Baylor for the right to get drilled by Kansas. I know, making assumptions can be dangerous. Choose any cliché you like; they all make the same general point. Nothing is guaranteed in sports, much less in conference tournaments. But seriously, what could go wrong? What’s the worst that could happen? It’s not like Kansas could actually lose to either of those two teams.
Actually, hold up. I’m getting a sense of déjà vu. I seem to remember reading something similar to that recently...
Here it is. From The Kansan, March 4: “As stupid as it is for sportswriters to make assumptions — even apparently safe ones such as this — I’ll do it anyway. Kansas will defeat Texas Tech tonight, thus giving it at least a share of the Big 12 Championship for a fifth consecutive season.”
Man, what an idiot. Everyone knows that (insert favorite cliché having to do with the uncertainty inherent in sports here). The writer even acknowledges the faux pas while he’s making it. I bet he also thought that Matt Ryan would be a bust, that Emeka Okafor projected as a better NBA center than Dwight Howard, and that HD DVD would beat out Blu-ray.
I really ought to send whoever wrote that an e-mail. He needs to know he’s an idiot, after all. So let’s see what clown is responsible. Some guy named ... Alex Beecher.
Oh.
This is the part where I fess up to and (ideally) learn from my own mistakes. First of all, as I was so generously reminded of via an e-mail, one should never speak of championships (of the national variety, anyway) during March. To do so is to invite the kind of karma that allowed Alan Voskuil to invoke the spirit of Larry Bird for a night and drain nine-of-14 threes.
But even if you aren’t superstitious, the second lesson still applies. That is, as cliché as it might sound, no victory can be taken for granted in sports. Anyone really can beat anyone else on any given night. It might take the underdog catching fire from downtown while the superior team can’t hit anything, but that sort of thing can and does happen.
Reflect on the events of Kansas’ loss in Lubbock for proof. It may be easy to dismiss the game as a fluke. And it may very well have been just that. Texas Tech probably couldn’t play that well in its next hundred games, whereas Kansas might not play that poorly again for a similar stretch. But just because the Red Raiders may have been the recipients of some good luck does not mean the game should be tossed out. Quite the contrary — it should serve as a reminder to fans and overzealous sportswriters alike that clichés are as oft-repeated as they are for good reason. Which brings us back to today, and the apparently less-than-compelling Nebraska-Baylor matchup. Sure, it’s not sexy. And yes, Kansas ought to defeat whichever team it ends up facing on Thursday without any real drama.
That’s what ought to happen.
But just because something ought to happen doesn’t necessarily mean that it will. I learned my lesson; let’s hope that those who actually decide the games did, too.
— — Edited by Brandy Entsminger
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