November 13, 1993.

The game ended about 15 minutes earlier. I was not happy. Some other guys were visibly upset. Some were cussing. Some were crying. Some appeared as if they wanted to get in a fist fight. Some looked like they were going to throw up.

I sat in the visitors locker room at Notre Dame Stadium in a state of disbelief as our team, the #1 team in the nation, lost to Notre Dame. We weren’t just a “good” team. We were the best. ESPN, Sports Illustrated and all the other college football media were debating if we were going to go down as the best team in college football history. We were quarterbacked by the sure-to-win Heisman Trophy winner. Our defense outscored our opponets offense all by themselves in 3 seperate games. We were unstoppable… that is, until 15 minutes earlier.

We lost on the last play of the game, to the #2 ranked team in the country, on their home field.

The entire Florida State team was distraught… but not Coach Bowden. He sat in that locker room, surrounded by 100 or so devastated young men, and explained that this wasn’t the end of the world. Coach Bowden smiled, laughed and explained we were going to go home, work hard and win again. He promised us that we weren’t out of the National Championship picture… and he was right… as he usually was.

This was a dark day for Florida State, but Coach Bowden rose above the pain, he rose above the anger, he rose above the sadness, he rose above everything and somehow got his team to believe we were still going to win the National Championship.

We won the National Championship that year, just as Coach Bowden told us we would.

Words don’t do my memory justice as I could write more and more, but that afternoon in South Bend, Indiana will always be my enduring Coach Bowden memory.

I don’t know if overpromotion is a word or not, but lets just say it is.

I have followed sports the majority of my life and I have noticed that great teams are normally led by great coaches.

Great coaches come in many different shapes and forms. Often you will see a team make a former player their coach. Sometimes this works, sometimes it doesn’t.

Logic might tell you that if a team takes a great player and makes him a coach, he will be a great coach. This coach, being a great player, knows what it takes to be great, so logically he should be able to coach his team to be great.

Logic would also tell you that if you take a marginal player and make him a coach, he will be a marginal coach. This coach, being a marginal player, doesn’t know what it is like to be great, so logically he shouldn’t be able to coach his team to be great.

Funny thing about logic in this case, it is wrong. Rarely does a great player become a great coach. However there are plenty of cases where a marginal player becomes a great coach.

Now slow down, I am not saying that all marginal players will make great coaches, or that great players will make horrible coaches, I am just saying that I recognize a trend.

I wonder if this trend exists outside of the sports world?

When I worked in retail jewelry, great salesmen were often rushed into management positions. I always wondered why this happened? If someone is great at sales, why take them away from the sales process and have them manage people who aren’t as gifted in the sales process? Unfortunately when the great salesman became manager, the store usually suffered. The sales went down and the manager was replaced.

When a marginal salesman was promoted to manager, the store normally benefited. Yes, a valuable member of  the sales team was removed, but the great salesmen were still selling. These marginal salesman usually became very good managers.

I wonder where else this trend might exist? The medical community? Industry? Politics? Churches?

For my sake, will you forget the politics of the phrase “redistribution of wealth” for a few minutes?

I am getting tired of hearing the phrase “redistribution of wealth“ repeated over and over and over and over…

Please understand me, I do not want my taxes to go up. When I was a kid growing up I always heard the news reporters talking about how taxes are “squeezing” the middle class. At 12 years old I didn’t know what that meant. At 37, I now painfully know what they meant.

The problem I have with the phrase “redistribution of wealth“ is that my tax dollars have always been used in “redistribution of wealth.” I pay my taxes and the dollars I give my local, state and federal government are redistributed to where my government sees fit. My tax dollars help pay government employees. Money I earn is taken away from me in the form of taxes and put into government  employees pay checks. Isn’t that “redistribution of wealth?” My tax dollars go to help build bridges in Wyoming. I have never been to Wyoming, but my hard earned money is going there to help pay for salaries, raw materials, engineers and things I don’t even know about to build bridges. Isn’t that “redistribution of wealth?”

So what gives? Why all of a sudden do we keep hearing about “redistribution of wealth?” I guess “higher taxes” just  doesn’t scare people enough anymore so some genius decided to pit “Rich America” against “Poor America” in some sort of marketing nightmare. Funny thing about this marketing campaign, if “Rich America” has its marketers backed by its dollars, where is the marketing dollars for “Poor America?”

The umpires in the MLB playoffs have been awful. I am not breaking a news story here, the officiating has been horrendous with virtually all of the poor calls shown over and over again on replay.

Last night in Game 2 of the World Series the umpires made two more obviously wrong calls.

If you listen to ESPN Radio’s Colin Cowherd (maybe the funniest and most honest sports radio personality) you have heard him consistently rip Major League Baseball for their refusal to upgrade their game with instant replay. Cowherd has repeatedly explained that he believes the reason MLB attendance and television ratings are going down is because the game of baseball is controlled by its traditionalists who refuse to allow the game to evolve.

I would be surprised if Colin Cowherd doesn’t point to MLB Commissioner Bud Selig’s comments about poor officiating  before last nights game. Selig is quoted by Jim Caple of ESPN.com:

The more baseball people I talk to, there is a lot of trepidation about it and I think their trepidation is fair. I’ve spent a lot of time [on this] over the past month and will spend a lot of time in the ensuing months as well. I don’t want to overreact. You can make light of that but when you start to think you’re going to have more intrusions — and even if their good intrusions — it’s something that you have to be very careful about. Affecting the game on the field is not something I really want to do.

and Selig continued:

Life is changing and I understand that. I do like the human element and I think the human element for the last 130 years has worked pretty well. There have been controversies but there are controversies in every sport.

What other sport, industry or business can say that “the last 130 years has worked pretty well” as a reason not to change when the business is trending down?

Baseball’s attendance is down, their television ratings are down, but hey, it has worked well for 130 years so we’re not going to change.

I’ll guess I’ll do what most of America is doing, turn on the NFL or college football and forget about baseball. That will probably work for the next 130 years.