| Subject: When A Rival Becomes "THE RIVAL" |
Author:
An Observer
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Date Posted: 22:42:28 12/01/24 Sun
In reply to:
An Observer
's message, "The Other The Game" on 22:08:19 11/30/24 Sat
Sports rivalries are fun. We define who we are sometimes by whom we choose to hate.
Sports rivalries are the cherries on the ice cream sundae of regular seasons.
But while some teams are motivated and rise to the occasion, some programs seem to be allergic to cherries.
Consider Ohio State on Saturday. The Buckeyes were clearly the better team. Michigan was missing two of its best players, arguably their two best. Add that the game was at Ohio Stadium and that's why the Buckeyes were a three-touchdown favorite.
But as I watched the interminable Fox Sports preview interview videos, it was clear how much the weight of "The Game" bore down on Ryan Day. How many times was it mentioned on Saturday that Day was 47-1 against all other opponents, but 1-3 against Michigan? During the preview video, the man looked beaten down.
During "The Game," I saw unimaginative play-calling from OC Chip Kelly and, in general, Ohio State looked like a different team than the one which had lost only to #1 Oregon and run the table since then. It was almost as if the pressure and the three-game losing streak were too much for the coaching staff to take.
We've got a "The Game" in our conference, too. And it might be my imagination, but it seems to produce more upsets than the other 7x7 match-ups. I don't think I'm going to get too much pushback from saying that, this year, Harvard was the better team in the sense that, if the Crimson and the Blue played 100 times, Harvard would win more than 50, maybe by a comfortable margin, certainly at home in Allston.
And more than any other sports rivalry in our conference, including "The Game" on the turf, Penn defines itself by its rivalry with Princeton on the hardwood.
Isn't Princeton currently running a win streak over Penn of something like 100 games? It might be closer to a dozen, but I recall that Penn has coughed up a fur ball on more than one occasion recently, blowing a 19-point lead with the championship on the line in 202x. (To be fair, an awful lot of 19-point leads have been blown in our conference over the last several years.)
Maybe I'm trying to fit a regression line to some random data points, but it seems that Ohio State, Harvard, Yale and Penn do themselves a disservice when they put so much emphasis on beating one particular rival. Putting that much weight on defeating a single opponent inspires some teams (New Canaan has beaten Darien on seven consecutive Thanksgivings now), but it seems to be an unbearable burden on others. Or at least an unproductive burden.
On more than one occasion, I've thought that both Harvard and Yale would benefit from dialing back their mental emphasis on beating each other. In my mind, first and foremost, the goal is to win championships. If left unchecked, rivalries can get in the way of that.
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