Must There Be Only One? The Purpose of Championships I & II

The B.C.S. spectacles always generate a cacophony of voices demanding a college football playoff, a system that determines the one true best final ultimate champion (for that year at least). The Super Bowl stands as the mirror image of the BCS response to the lust for one final champion. I want to reflect a little on this thirst to have only one champion. What is the real purpose of championships?

In the underrated movie The Highlander, doomed immortals play out a grotesque game over the centuries where they must battle and kill each other until the end. For There Can Be Only One. In the movie the prize for the immortal left standing is to regain their mortality and live and love as a mortal human.

I always wonder about the drive in sports to demand a championship so that there can only be one. The demand for a championship requires that only one person  or team beats all the rest. This lust for a championship demands one who demonstrates dominance or superiority to all others in competition or combat.

The linguistic origins of champion hint at this dynamic. The concept has the same origins as camp and campus or field, specifically a field of combat. The Romans specialized the word to describe gladiators and the medieval French and English deployed champion to describe the victor on fields of combat especially the tests of military skill at tournaments. This approach  interprets athletics as an extension of  military combat where the stakes are death, and one person must kill or be killed, to vanquish is to live. The moral contest to be champion remains, like war,  zero sum,  and athletics prepares for and mimics this world of war.

American sport metaphors reek of sport's military origins. It banters around the word "warrior" to describe sports heroes; of course, athletes are not real warriors. The real warriors are in Iraq and Afghanistan. The metaphor of sport as combat and war, however,  drives the demand for one champion who vanquishes the rest and gains the victory or prize. "Victory" itself grows from the Latin root "to conquer,"  and this derives from deep Indo-European roots - to fight or subdue or to succeed in combat. The whole cluster of conflict and battle language around sport drives the ideal of champions.

And yet I wonder.        

The moral worth of sport and athletic endeavor can grow from another ethical root. In most cultures sport obviously grew from the cultivation of skills needed to survive and these involved hunting and fighting and cooperation, but the Greeks and other cultures also saw sport as a way to expand and perfect their humanity. They experience sport as practice in cooperation and growth where individuals pushed each other to grow through competition. Part II will examine how this opens a way of thinking about sport without an obsessive demand that there be only one champion.

Part II

Greek, Egyptian, Assyrian art all emphasized the beauty and line of sport and athletes. These cultures appreciated that mastery of athletics required training, discipline, practice and integrating mind, body and emotions. This is the ideal that lingers behind the affiliation of sports with universities in the United States.

For most of us this drive to perfect begins alone - trying to master a bicycle or skateboard, spending hours hitting a tennis ball off a backboard or shooting baskets or dribbling or feinting with a soccer ball. The sport does not matter but the drive first appears as solitary effort to master small skills and overcome endless mistakes and failures. A person learns  not to quit and to push harder and spend time and effort. This drive  begins not with the drive to subdue and dominate others, but to subdue and conquer oneself by mastering the minute skills and traits needed to improve and refine an athletic skill. Young athletes focus on what they can control themself; how many parents and coaches have recited that litany?

The athlete originally competes against baselines, against ideals of form and against themselves to stretch and extend their reach and competence. Athletes often work alone. This  path does not necessarily require the need or desire to dominate or vanquish others.

Now to the ideal of being a champion. The ideal of being a champion spawns championships, the tournaments or environments where individuals test those carefully developed athletics skills and stances.   In this moral vein, the justification for seeking to be a champion flows from testing oneself against others as a way to increase one's own development as a human and athlete. The outcome of these encounters can be not only personal growth but excellence in the form of the sport driven by encounters with other athletes who may be more proficient. This test forces the athlete to develop or stop. This is where the moral power of championships comes from. This is why the NCAA has made holding championships an integral part of its mission.

Winning marks growth and excellence not simply dominance. Competing against another person sets up a trial and motivates each person to work harder. In the competition which can be parallel as in swimming or interactive such as tennis or basketball, the athlete learns if she can swim as fast or kick as far or whether he can shoot while guarded or return a new serve. These trials may end in losing or failure; the other person may be superior. The question before the athlete and person becomes do they settle at the level they are and integrate that accomplished level into their life or do they quit the pursuit entirely, believing they have failed in developing that sport or, and this is the key moral challenge: do they focus harder, work harder, study harder, get training and mentoring? The next trial against people becomes a measuring stick. At some point the athlete or team may reach a skill level  that their growth stops. The athletes require higher level trials and challenges to push themselves new ways to get better at their chosen sport.

This dynamic of challenge and evolution happens in every field such as art, math, engineering, and sport is no different. You see it in little leagues, bronze, silver, gold or select soccer leagues or swimming or gymnastics meets that begin at the age of six.

These layers of testing can be important in two ways. First, some athletes discover their metier but also their ceiling or comfort level with the demands placed upon them. If they do not quit, but want to continue, they choose the correct level to play or migrate eventually to pickup or recreation leagues. Second, this tracking system invites athletes to expand and test and master one level before moving to another.

Each level will have its own championship and path leaders the way beyond the impasse that  there can  be only one. Of course not. There are hundreds of  CYO leagues and select soccer leagues that merge over time into fewer and fewer. Swimming, tennis, basketball and volleyball all swirl with multiple leagues segregated by age, experience, locality. Each team situated within them play against each other in tournaments or league play.

The dangers and challenge in this road lie in the obsession with being number one.A person can be motivated by the driving desire to be  better than the others. This requires beating them at the chosen field of competition. We call them tournaments or championships, both concepts arising from medieval jousts and fields of combat. The  tournament joust was not mortal combat but meant that the winner  could "turn" the rider in the joust. The winner stands triumphant for a day, but the moral excellence can be two very different things.

One intrinsic motivation path involves personal self respect and worth as well as the respect and celebration of one's peers. his  satisfaction and sense of self worth lies deep and grows from the inside where a champion knows he or she has performed their best. They have done their best and know it and from that has arisen their victory.

The other motivation path  involves the sense of worth that depends on the external validation, I beat them therefore I am. If I lose, I am worthless. The driver here lies in the external vulnerability of the motivation and the ultimately limited or even hollow satisfaction. On this path, one's worth and excellence is not internalized and worn with dignity, but it is brittle, anxious, often hidden by bravado, and goaded by the need to prove oneself again and again and again.One can never enjoy the victory because one's worth is only a shell depending upon the next contest.

It's interesting to understand the difference between tournament driven and league driven sports. The season of the league matters and games accumulate meaning as tests and victories or losses, successes or failures, growth or regression moments.  Seasons and league play value each game as both a meaningful encounter but also as contributing to a league championship. There are alot of winners and losers. The championship of the league can be the end of it or then become the launching pad to a berth in the city. county, state, regional tournament where all the league champions meet. League championships have their own moral worth and weight for players.  The bigger championships each acquire more weight or worth because they become more difficult tests against more trained and skilled opponents. In the end each victory beyond the league in championship play marks a growth and achievement or worth.

Of course the final championship brings together the top adversaries or contestants who con-test each other. One finally wins; a player, a team, stands alone at the top of the greasy pole as Disraeli might put it. Here we reach the Roman moment of vanquishing all and as the Roman emperor once said, "you are their god for a day."  For a day is the critical point. Being a champion is a precarious business that remains profoundly mortal. Any day you can be dethroned. Each year or each four years for the Olympics, the champion is challenged again and can lose or fail or not even make it to the championships again.

The point is that being a champion is a gossamer achievement, real, but delicate and fragile and doomed  to end at the end of the next cycle of contestation. The cycle of fighting for and winning championships takes on a liturgical cast since it defines and divides the year up into periods of league play, championship play, championships, rest and quiet and then rebirth of the new cycle.

Other sports like swimming, golf or tennis do not have leagues or strong season play. Their world revolves around tournaments and endless championships, some matter more than other by tradition or money, but no real clear closure occurs. Computers may rank players or in swimming the best times determine over the course of a year, but tournaments possess a fundamental incompleteness but also reveal a world of athletic competition where there are many, not just one. Over the course of a year a golf pro can win several tournaments and be ranked and carry glory, excellence and achievement.

The delusion  that there can be only one remains an ancient remnant, satisfying, blood curdling, and intensifying. But it remains an illusion that floats atop a world of many victors, many champions and seeks the champion of champions for a year or a day, until the next championship cycle or tournament.

In this moral thread of athletics, championships matter not because of the brittle proof of dominance, but because they cast a nimbus of aspiration around all the other athletes who test themselves at every level of the game and sport. The championship stands as a beacon that illuminates achievement, an exemplar of how to do it right.

There need not be only one.

Must There Be only One? The Purpose of Championships I

The B.C.S. spectacles always generate a cacophony of voices demanding a college football playoff, a system that determines the one true best final ultimate champion (for that year at least). The Super Bowl stands as the mirror image of the BCS response to the lust for one final champion. I want to reflect a little on this thirst to have only one champion. What is the real purpose of championships?

In the underrated movie The Highlander, doomed immortals play out a grotesque game over the centuries where they must battle and kill each other until the end. For There Can Be Only One. In the movie the prize for the immortal left standing is to regain their mortality and live and love as a mortal human.

I always wonder about the drive in sports to demand a championship so that there can only be one. The demand for a championship requires that only one person  or team beats all the rest. This lust for a championship demands one who demonstrates dominance or superiority to all others in competition or combat.

The linguistic origins of champion hint at this dynamic. The concept has the same origins as camp and campus or field, specifically a field of combat. The Romans specialized the word to describe gladiators and the medieval French and English deployed champion to describe the victor on fields of combat especially the tests of military skill at tournaments. This approach  interprets athletics as an extension of  military combat where the stakes are death, and one person must kill or be killed, to vanquish is to live. The moral contest to be champion remains, like war,  zero sum,  and athletics prepares for and mimics this world of war.

American sport metaphors reek of sport's military origins. It banters around the word "warrior" to describe sports heroes; of course, athletes are not real warriors. The real warriors are in Iraq and Afghanistan. The metaphor of sport as combat and war, however,  drives the demand for one champion who vanquishes the rest and gains the victory or prize. "Victory" itself grows from the Latin root "to conquer,"  and this derives from deep Indo-European roots - to fight or subdue or to succeed in combat. The whole cluster of conflict and battle language around sport drives the ideal of champions.

And yet I wonder.        

The moral worth of sport and athletic endeavor can grow from another ethical root. In most cultures sport obviously grew from the cultivation of skills needed to survive and these involved hunting and fighting and cooperation, but the Greeks and other cultures also saw sport as a way to expand and perfect their humanity. They experience sport as practice in cooperation and growth where individuals pushed each other to grow through competition. Part II will examine how this opens a way of thinking about sport without an obsessive demand that there be only one champion.

The Iowa Mess and the Role of Strength and Conditioning Coaches

The recent hospitalization of 13 Iowa college football players from a kidney disorder brought on by excessive workouts highlights the unique and under-appreciated role of modern strength and conditioning personnel. I don't want to get into the discussion about whether the Iowa trainer and football team made a mistake, but this incident highlights the vital role that the modern college strength and conditioning coach plays.

Their role has assumed such importance largely because of modern NCAA regulations. To protect student-athletes from excessive interference especially in the off season, NCAA coaches have very strict limits upon the amount of official contact they can have with student athletes both during and off season. Specifically they can have 8 hours of contact in off season and are constrained by how much can team coaching. This radically limits the official contact between student athletes and their team coaches.

Elite college sport, however, has developed into a year around activity. Much of the noncompetitive time is spent doing "voluntary" video study, but the most important time is spent in the weight and conditioning centers. These become mandatory social gatherings but above all this is the time when athletes build up the strength, endurance, flexibility and quickness made possible by modern training techniques. Every coach will tell you that off season conditioning determines in season performance. If you look at before and after pictures of freshmen and juniors, you can see the sheer physical and psychological difference this incessant work makes in the structure of being for the student athlete.

Even as the NCAA has tried to limit the coaching staffs of teams, the non-coach coaches have proliferated, and no where more so than in the strength and conditioning staff. One of the conflicts that bedevils NCAA enforcement that was revealed in the Michigan rulings is how seamless and important the strength/conditioning staff are, and they are now designated as "coaches." They often end up on the practice field looking a lot like coaches as distinctions around techniques of explosiveness or quickness seamlessly mesh with stances and play recognition.

The proliferation of strength/conditioning staff, their vital importance in developing strength and skill, the limits on coaching contact hours mean that during the long off seasons student athletes will spend hundreds of hours with strength and conditioning staff. Students often know and trust their conditioning staff more than their regular coaches.

This means modern strength and condition coaches assume a role of immense importance in student athlete lives.

The strength and conditioning coaches work with athletes to maximize their physical potential. Most trainers now specialize by teams and even position because of the different muscular, flexibility, endurance and power requirements of each sport. But the S/C coaches not only condition to maximize performance but they are critical to prevent injury. The modern training regime aims at strengthening ACLs in some sports or teach proper form or core strength to minimize injury. The strength and conditioning folks not only prevent but are vital bridges along with trainers to help athletes rehab from injuries.

All these activities place serous moral obligations upon the strength and conditioning coaches, and the obligations can be in conflict. They work with team coaches and feel coaches' pressure to maximize development and performance and bring athletes along as quick as possible. But the student athletes rely upon S/C coaches to keep them safe, help prevent injury and rehab at the correct rate and only release them ready. Here th S/C coaches work closely with athletic medical trainers and doctors.

The strength and conditioning coaches also serve as the early warning system for student athlete welfare. They see athletes every day. They learn athletes bodies and moods and can spot signs of emotional or physical distress long before coaches will see them. In fact many student athletes will hide their injuries from coaches for fear of being demoted.

The easy and demanding familiarity among student athletes and strength and conditioning staff engenders relations of trust. Students will often talk with S/C coaches about stuff they would never bring up with their team coaches. This places S/C coaches in a unique position to do great good and great harm to student athletes.

For instance as seems to be the case in the Iowa incident, strength and conditioning personnel set up challenges. They help students grow mentally and emotionally. Student athletes will tell you that they often end up performing at levels they did not believe possible because of the help of S/C coaches. Physical development demands great mental and emotional focus and discipline. It depends upon the ability of students to fail and try again and fail and try again and again until they master a performance level and then move to another. The process of conditioning development involves a fine edge of task of managing failure, growth, and challenge.

The S/C coaches need to be good psychologists as they demand, and set challenges and build performance, but they must also integrate safety into their programs and plans. This oversee a razor's edge for students where every challenge imposes the risk that the student will not be ready or could injure themselves, so strength and conditioning coaches must be masters of balancing that margin of preparation, challenge, risk and safety.

They must be tough, and some can be like the proverbial marine drill sergeant. But the great ones know how to be tough and demanding but also they listen and care. They teach student athletes to listen and care for the bodies and help athletes learn to cope with failure but self-discover the confidence and motivation to grow and learn and meet challenges.

In well designed athletic departments the S/C coaches work with trainers and coaches and student academic staff to monitor health and welfare of student athletes. They are a critical member of the student welfare team, and the athletes deeply rely upon them. This is what makes the Iowa incident so troubling because good S/C programs students for challenges and set challenges that stretch and grow athletes based upon prior preparation, not challenges that hurt them without proper preparation.

I don't know the full details of the incident, but I do know it reminds us that a good strength and conditioning coach should be the athletes' ally in becoming a better athlete and person, not a threat.

Quitting versus Leaving

I discussed how the first wave of uninformed anger at Jay Cutler for "quitting" the Bears/Packers game in the NFC championship expressed athletes’ indignation at quitting. But another way to see it involves the morally correct decision to leave at the right time.

For instance, if Cutler believed that his injury compromised his ability to play in a critical way, it meant that staying in the game actually would hurt the team. The silly mantra that I would rather have X at 80 percent than Y at 100 percent means nothing because what matters is the percent missing. If a quarterback can’t plant his foot, if a point guard can’t cut if a striker can’t accelerate, then this particular injury fundamentally damages their ability to play.

Being injured like that means not only that the player cannot execute, but it also means the opponent’s task is easier. The other team can run at a wounded player, lay off a wounded player and put more players on others, or design their schemes knowing that the wounded team has fewer options. In this case, leaving is not quitting but is doing the right thing to protect the team and integrity of performance.

But leaving can involve a deeper moral assessment of one-self. A player  can realize that he or she have lost the motivation or joy in playing. More than one good player retires because they realize that they can no longer bring the level of energy and commitment needed by them to play at the highest level they are capable of.  This involves their own private brutal assessment of who they are and what they could once achieve and what now can achieve.

Athletes may come to realize that  their body has slowed or betrayed them and even if they try, they cannot bring the level of excellence they demand of themselves or their team needs. They know that 80 percent of them is not the best they can do and that the team does suffer when they play at 80 percent even if the team wants them. They also know that as an athlete he or she will struggle with a nagging sense of failure.

This moral honesty deserves to be honored because it is very very hard for athletes to leave their sport. . Many players play on past their prime and endanger themselves and hurt their teams.

The decision here means the athlete chooses to leave the game at that level. They resign from play. This decision is very different from the claim they quit.

Recently Wayne Gretzky, one of the greatest hockey players of all time, turned fifty. Gretzky left hockey, he retired from the game, and he chose to leave while he was still playing incredibly well. He quit, but not in the ugly sense of quitting on himself and his team. He chose to quit the game with dignity and out of free choice. For reasons that made strong moral sense. We would be better off if most athletes heeded his approach.

When asked today about the decision he responds, Wayne Gretzky describes it this way, "I knew I was done. I spent the last month of that season pondering"... "Is this the right decision or should I go for one more year?' Once I made the decision, I knew it was right. I knew I could still compete, but not at the level I was comfortable."..."The older you get as an athlete, the more work you have to put in off the ice during the season and off the ice during the offseason. I knew, mentally, that I didn't want to be doing that anymore." 

Not only athletes face these decisions. We all face those moments when we are tempted to quit, many of us who have gone through rehab from surgery know that, but all of us face demands in life that stretch and push us and demand sacrifices form us. All of are  tempted to quit. But we all also face moments when it is time, time to examine the fit with our life and skills and aspirations. Time to decide if our life path needs to change. We should honor these moments in our life and honor the athletes as they play out this human moment.

The Athletic Morality of Quitting

“Quitter!”

Is one of the worst insults one athlete can fling at another. Quitting, giving up, strikes at the core of athletic ethics. To excel, to get better, to bring out the best in one’s team requires an athlete try his or her hardest at all times. An ethic of seeking excellence and competition calls for trying harder in face of setbacks and adversity. Setbacks involve learning from them and working to correct and get better.  Even when an athlete is losing, the ethic requires the individual keep trying to honor the game, their mates and the integrity of the sport. We always commend teams that keep “playing hard” even when far behind.

Giving up and quitting are so important that opponents may seek to break a competitor’s spirit and effort.  You can tell when a team loses heart and quits on itself and the game. A team fails when it loses the motivation and will to play to its highest level of energy. Once a team does not maintain its focused attention on excellence, its own talent and skill will not help it against a determined adversary, even one with lesser talent. It is pretty clear when a coach loses a team or when the team cohesion falls apart; we can see it on the field or in practice.

The excoriation heaped on Jay Cutler for leaving the NFC championship game with an injured knee reflects moral outrage from pro players at two levels. First, it refers back to the Achilles ideal, that I have discussed, that a player should risk health and life for glory. But second, at a deeper level, it expresses moral indignation at believing, justified or not, that Cutler quit.

Why is quitting such a damning ethical indictment in sports? The commitment an athlete makes to master a sport lies at the heart of a competitive ethic of excellence. Anyone who achieves success in sports of life knows that talent matters for little unless allied with a focused work ethic and character that leads an athlete to work and practice to get better and bring that relentless work to performance.

Trying your best is no guarantee of success or achievement. As Captain Picard said to Data “sometime you can do everything right and still lose.” But an athlete can control attitude and effort. This means the athlete decides and gives the time, energy and effort to learn, master and compete.

Trying your hardest means working not just in the game but also in working out in the off-season and preparation for competition. Trying grows from mental and emotional effort and manifests in physical and skill growth. When a coach says a player is mentally tough, the coach is referring to that constellation of emotional, cognitive and executive functions that make up character. Trying and giving maximum effort involves an act of decision and will. Athletes judge themselves and others by this because it is the one area totally under the control of the athlete.

This effort and attention reveal character. Attention is the most precious of human gifts because our attention organizes our energy and skill development. Not trying will mean that an athlete of immense talent will not develop it and become less of an athlete and competitor than they could be. They may still be good because of talent, but not as good as they could be. They fail in the moral endeavor of self-development and attainment of excellence. They also fail in the cooperative endeavor of the team pushing and helping each other become better athletes and better team. To quit on oneself means quitting on one’s team.

Regardless of the truth of what happened to Cutler, the anger players expressed has less to do with Cutler and more to a defense of a code. At the core of the code lies effort and commitment that condemns quitting as a cardinal sin in sports ethics.

NCAA Mocks its Values in Early Offer Decision Vote

In the cascade of NCAA legislation from the last meeting, one “minor” vote stands out. The NCAA Legislative Council voted to not  prohibit coaches from offering athletic scholarships until junior year of high school. So colleges and universities can continue to offer full scholarships to 13 year olds, eighth graders or high school freshmen.

This decision did not come from the media NCAA bogeyman like eligibility or enforcement bureaucracies.

No this decision came after due deliberation of the NCAA Legislative Council. The Council represents all NCAA conferences and makes the final judgment on legislative matters. This legislation was five years in gestating and had the strong support of the NCAA Recruiting and Academic Cabinets.

The issue seems minor to the media obsessed with enforcement or BCS issues, but it strikes at the core of the NCAA claim to be about STUDENT athletes. For the last decade college coaches have offered scholarships at younger and younger ages. I have written about the many problems for students, parents and coaches, but it continues. Right now most Olympic teams have long finished their junior recruiting and are already making offers to sophomores and often freshmen.

In basketball offers are routinely extended to eighth graders. Even football which had largely avoided this corruption of ideals, now moves towards offering scholarships to grade school behemoths or quarterback phenoms.

Why is this a problem? Simple.  We have no real ability to predict the character or academic potential of a 13 year or even 14 year old. Universities have no business offering full cost college scholarships to kids who have no high school grades or may have one year of high school grades.

The early offers ridicule the pretense to take the STUDENT in student-athlete seriously. With no real ability to predict academic performance and no great sense of athletic performance, the NCAA sanctions a shallow, competition driven practice.

Even though the academic and recruiting wings of the NCAA strongly supported this approach, the athletic directors and some powerful coaches killed it at the conference votes. Most don’t want change because the big schools benefit in the early recruiting game and the smaller ones see a chance to benefit from early mistakes and late blossoming or local product commits.

The pretend reason for the opposition from athletic directors and coaches is that it would be hard to enforce. The coaches and directors claim to worry about false reports made against them or about being held accountable to secret offers they do make. This is a sham.  After a year or two of transition the media and culture of coaching will adapt. There will be mistakes, but the AD and coaches don’t want change because they have now accommodated and are benefitting from the practice.

Five years ago most coaches hated making offers to children and would tell you. They knew it made no sense to extend offers to eighth graders and freshmen. They knew that this increases risk for athletic talent and growth, but also for academic talent. But now they have lived with the wrong of it, and they can rationalize it. “We help them earlier. We guide them for grades. We end the rat race sooner.” It goes on and on but it teaches us that good people will accommodate themselves to bad systems and then rationalize it away.

So at a formal vote of the Legislative Council worried more about enforcement liability and keeping their recruiting advantages than living up to their professed values. Congratulations NCAA on living up to your ideals.

Hanging at the BCS

More or less by plan, I spent the last four days in Phoenix at the BCS shebang; a national   championship football game, a real wallapalooza,  also took place. I ended up there with my sister as a member of the PAC-10 Council and found myself rooting for Oregon, of all things, in PAC-10 solidarity. My sister knows infinitely more about football then I do so it was a pleasure to understand what was going on rather than just watching the pretty patterns and missing ninety percent of the skill and chessplaying on the field.  We had a great time enjoying the game and spectacle.

The Game

A great college football game! The bigger, faster and more talented team won, but only in the last two seconds. Both teams played offenses that no professional football team would dare play. Half the receivers and all the quarterbacks would be carted of the field, and several the the big guys would have heart attacks from exertion in a pro game. Auburn turned all the tables when it opened for three quarters and played the high powered ultra-fast Oregon offense only with better personnel. Hats off to the team for morphing its crisp college offense into the ultra-max to match the Oregon game. The average play got off in 9 to 15 seconds. Auburn felt in control most of the game but could not break the undermanned Oregon defense. I mean Cam Newton outsized three of the four defensive linemen. Meanwhile Oregon dealt with the ultra-offense by shuttling in hockey line substitution patterns. We were all surprised at the end to see that Oregon had actually amassed 400 plus yards mainly in the air, but the vaunted Ducks left alot of points on the field with overthrown passes and horrendous penalties one leading to touchback and another pulling them beyond field goal range, others giving Auburn third and fourth chances.

But Oregon was Oregon and pulled out two, yes two, two point conversions. They added one fake punt pass to add to their touchback. The weird half time score of 16-11 must have driven the bookies crazy. Auburn defense manhandled the the Oregon offensive line, and the Oregon QB spent the whole day under pressure while Oregon's critical running game disappeared under a mass of large, fast and smart defenders. Auburn scored and seemed set to score again and again, but could never quite put it away with bad passes on fourth down in the end zone, interceptions, and very uneven offense. Both teams slipped and struggled with an unforgivable sodden field.

Somehow Oregon, clearly outmatched, hung in there and launched a last minute drive and scored on shovel pass and then topped it with a leaping dunk catch for a two point conversion. Game, set, but not match. Auburn had three minutes, plenty of time for either offense. A strange but very heady carry by their freshman running back lead to a freakish gain after it looked like he had been stopped, but neither his knees nor wrist  never touched the ground, and he sliced forward for 37  yards. Auburn blew forward again and kicked a field goal from the one foot mark as the clock expired. Everyone was exhausted from the game and there was no gloating, just a huge recognition, even from the  muted SEC chants, that people had witnessed one hell of a college football game. The tension never let up, ever, and it certainly felt better than the last four championships.

Spectacle

The game served as the main course after three days of party. I am painfully aware of the corporate superstructure of the event and the logos and Tostitos pervade the place, but the structure itself supports a remarkable celebration that I participated in. It's kind of like the holidays, you just eat, and hang and watch TV then eat some more. The plan seemed to be that we all end up stuffed with every kind of Tostitos possible including their new "artisanal" flavors. Every table had bags of myriad Tostitos  along with amazingly tasty and horrendously unhealthy Tostito dips.Notice that I am capitalizing the corporate name out of good grammar, not corporate sponsorship.

"Sightings" occupied the time between eating and hanging. The real stars at events like these are not the Conference Commissioners or the University Presidents and certainly not the Athletic Directors. Unless you were infamous like Cam Newton, it wasn't even the players. No people whispered about  "Lee sighting" or maybe  "Kirk sighting" or an "Saban Sighting." People prowled the banquets and parties makings lists of how many stars, I mean ESPN commentators" they saw.

You got a true sense of the real secret world government Sara Palin and others worry about when a cavalcade of very black and I presume armored ESPN Escalades purred up to the Phoenician hotel. Guys in black suits with sunglasses stood by their black Escalades gleaming in the Phoenix sun muttering to the black hook ups in  their ears. Through the opaque glass you might glimpse shadows of Erin Andrews, Jon Gruden or Brent Musburger.

The spectacle thrives on color and score several strong style points for tradition. Auburn's band marched crisp and accurate wehrmacht style.   13 xylophones and twirlers twirling white rifles augmented the flawless precision. Their blue and orange team uniforms glistened clean and classic. After ESPN nattered for two weeks about what Oregon might wear (think what that tells us about ESPN), the Ducks ran around in glow worm shoes and carbon or graphic or something pants while their band lumbered along with very large bright yellow bibs. Auburn looked great. For those who noticed, Auburn's cheerleaders wore demure orange dress while Oregon's wore newly designed day glow bikinis.

Outside the stadium looked vaguely  like an 1950's flying saucer, and most, but not all,  of us got the irony of two real universities playng in the non-university University of Phoenix stadium.  Inside, however, the stadium erupted with endless noise and cheers and divided into orange and yellow. Again pure college ball. Colors matter. Colors defined the tribes gathered for the battle, and the whole stadium reflected the  two dominate colors: orange and yellow.

I knew this but forgot and wore a really cool peach shirt that morning.  A PAC-10 colleague gently pointed out that "peach" faded into the orange color spectrum and I probably should not be wearing it. So I doused myself in purple to flaunt my UW affiliation and prove, since it is hard to deal with the  the nouveau riche Ducks, to support PAC-10 solidarity.  I admit the overweening SEC presence did make it easier to do. I sat in the Duck section and counted at least six different yellows; butter, daffodil, bright sun, day glow yellow, day glow yellow/green puke and some others. That sort of captured Oregon; the Auburn side, like their band, wore one official orange, just one.

Waltzing around the stadium with roof closed, you could feel the vibrations, although not like the Seattle Seahawks last week who registered about 2 on the Richter scale, really, the earthquake monitors around the Puget Sound picked it up! Everywhere you looked people walked around in blue and orange striped overalls, war eagle fringed painted faces, tiger tails spouting from orange pants. A pair of green/day glow painted guys wearing green and yellow harlequin outfits took each others pictures while WAR DUCK placards competed with WAR EAGLE cheers ( you have to remember Auburn is the Tigers but their call is the WAR EAGLE, it is a bit confusing but a marketing bonanza). Frat guys wearing yellow togas or blue Togas jeered at each other. Some fans wore "In Chip We Trust" shirts.

I realized again and again how much fun these spectacles engender. I also realized how much we use sports to   call forth communal and tribal loyalties. In some areas of the country parents have been known to refuse to pay tuition if their children defect to a rival school rather than the family heirloom school. Inherited blood loyalties as well as adopted loyalties  manifest themselves in the sports competition. The colors, perceptions, sense of unity (even the belief that a Husky could root for a Duck, I avoided several awkward bathroom confrontations from yellow and green clad folks insulted by my purpose by loudly proclaiming "PAC-10" and the bathroom took up the chant, "PAC-10, PAC-10," thankfully. Bathrooms do not make good confrontation grounds. Speaking of which I believe that University of Phoenix Stadium is the only sport venue I have ever attended where the men's bathroom lines were longer, I mean 2 to 3x longer than the women's lines? Beer, college or is there something in the air?

While I paced myself and sat at every TV timeout, we stood, hollered and watched for the entire game. My sister has promised to hide the photo of me wearing a day glow pom pom as a wig, but for just a moment, we could all enjoy the sport, the excellence and the loyalties that sport competition permits.