As the Super Bowl is played this weekend, one team will end the day basking in the glory of a championship, while another will walk away with football immortality having just slipped from its grasp.
That nearness of just missing destiny realized is a cruel fate, one that often becomes the shadow of a lifetime. Champions are remembered for their great plays on the biggest stage. But others are forever branded with the dropped pass or the missed field goal or landing one yard short of glory on the last play.
Everyone in football risks the fates cast like thunderbolt judgments from football’s Zeus at his heights on Mount Olympus.
Among the major American sports, football is notable for the small number of games that are played. The NBA & NHL play over 80 regular season games and baseball plays 162 games. Then they all head into a number of playoff rounds. NCAA basketball plays over 30 games before conference tournaments and a big national tournament.
But college football plays 12 games and the NFL plays 17 games before playoffs, where every contest is a “Game 7” with winner-take-all stakes. You can’t have a bad day. With so few games to play, in no other sport does anyone spend so much time preparing for comparatively so few moments of competition.
The football offseason is long. Tough hours of preparation are difficult, mundane and painful. It is a collision sport where men are taught either explicitly or implicitly that force equals mass times acceleration. They train to maximize force.
Injuries occur; aches and pains are part of the process. Athletes push their minds and bodies to the limits of human performance to be ready for those rare game days.
For the great ones, it is a season in which success is paid for with a year of sacrifice and commitment to one’s self and to one another. For coaches, it is a year of preparation, analysis, planning, thinking and rethinking everything you do. And no matter how hard you work, or how thorough your preparation, your foes too are lurking and working.
To be Tom Brady hoisting the Lombardi Trophy, you have to be Tom Brady the other 340+ days of the year when there is no game and no spotlight. You have to be Tom Brady early in the morning, running and throwing and sitting in an ice bath to overcome the aches and pains from exertion. And you have to be the Tom Brady who works each day knowing that everyone, many of them younger or with more natural talent, is stalking you and chasing you and working to pass you.
This week when asked what advice he’d give young players, Cincinnati Bengals’ Super Bowl quarterback Joe Burrow nailed the answer when he said, “Work in silence; don’t show everybody what you’re doing. Let your game on Friday nights and Saturday nights and Sunday nights show all the hard work you put in. Don’t worry about all that social media stuff.”
It is that “work in silence” that has always made the difference, has always overcome the thin margin of error that separates good teams from championship teams.
Football at its best is an art and all strive to write the poetry of a season’s epic tale of a summit reached. But the writing of that epic tale is what you do that no one sees.
But it can only be reached by one team. In the NFL or major college football, as surely as you and your team have paid the price, have striven to be that one team, every other team is pushing for that same goal. So, you convince yourself to do just a few more reps, make a few more hits.
You present your sacrifice to the altar of the football gods in the hopes your team will be found worthy. You risk it ALL every time you play. With each victory your winnings grow. You can’t walk away because next week’s game is another “let it ride” moment where you must bet it all.
And there are cruel winds that blow from the gods on football’s Olympus. Injuries, bad bounces of the ball, snow or rain or cold icy winds.
And yet there you stand, willing to risk it all not only in front of your teammates but also in front of millions around the nation and the world.
The struggle that is football was perhaps never more evident than this NFL playoff season. For every glorious moment of Robbie Gould, or Joe Burrow or Matthew Stafford or Patrick Mahomes there was the blank, far-away stare of men who gave all in battle only to be left empty at competition’s altar. Proud men in one round like Tom Brady, Aaron Rodgers, Josh Allen and even Patrick Mahomes eventually walked off the field battered and bruised.
Some walk off the field for the last time. For others, the fates point to next year.
But tomorrow is promised to no team. Rosters and coaches change. Players come and go and the season’s end falls into the deep slumber of winter. And for over 340 days of the year, there is no glory in the journey. There is no applause, there are no cameras and there is no instant gratification of victory. The football journey is the ultimate in deferred rewards.
And once a season is done, it all starts again back at base camp. The climb is long and challenging and the air gets thinner the closer you get to the summit. The workouts, the spring time, the summer and the long slog of preseason camp, and game after physical game with the hopes that the playoffs will come again and the cruel fates will turn differently…
