I guess I'm lucky

We like to moan about our misfortune. Whether it's our inability to win playing McDonald's Monopoly (I know, I know, Boardwalk doesn't exist, the fix is in!) or something as simple as not getting picked to participate at a school assembly, we make sure everybody knows how unlucky we are.

I'm one of those people. I "never win anything." I "have the worst luck."

Well, I'm done with that lifestyle. I'll take the luck I had Friday over winning a cool mill from McDonald's anytime.
(Yeah, sorry, this isn't a sports post. But it got me writing on here again, so take heart if that's what you were looking for)

On Friday I was driving to cover a football game for my job. It was a long drive, but I was going because the paper in that area had said they wouldn't be there. Football is one of our more important coverages during the fall, so my Editor said if I wanted to go, I could go. I decided to make the trip, because I thought it would win me brownie points and I would get to see another part of Colorado I hadn't yet.

Well, the drive was nothing short of spectacular. Once again, CO did not disappoint. Until it wasn't spectacular.

While rounding a curve, I hit a patch of gravel (I think) and lost control of my car. I slid across the road (brakes and steering giving no love) and off the other side. My car started to roll before coming to rest upside down. It happened very quickly.

I was hanging by my seatbelt, unbuckled it and crawled out of back window of my car, which had been shattered and was no longer there. This happened immediately, I was not unconscious for any amount of time. In fact, I was almost completely untouched.

Afterward, I had all sorts of people telling me they couldn't believe I was alive, or couldn't believe I was okay. I have no idea how accurate that is. It sounds melodramatic to me, because I was fine, and got out of the car with no problems. But this is what I know: The car flipped about 180 degrees before landing off the road about 15-20 feet down. It appears the driver's side of the cab landed first on a boulder. The roof caved in a pretty significant amount. I didn't notice it at the time, but that roof was probably not very far from the top of my head. So it's fair to say my seatbelt saved me from a head trauma of some degree.

What happened after is where I really feel lucky. I crashed in the middle of nowhere, about 5.5 hours from Craig, and had absolutely no idea what to do. But a couple guys were not far behind me, and they had been working on that road. They saw the crash and helped me out. They set me up with another nearby man they knew who was a volunteer with the local fire rescue. If Bradly Littlejohn and I had crossed paths under different circumstances, I doubt we would have exchanged more than a couple sentences. But here was Brad, chauffeurring me all over the place--taking me to get checked out by the EMTs, then to a hotel for the night, then to the car rental agency the next morning.

I've never been in a situation even close to that before. I have no clue what I would have done. I didn't have phone service where I crashed. But some complete strangers helped me out, and went way beyond their call. And I'm back home because of it.

I don't know what's gonna happen over the next couple weeks. I'm going to need to get a new car in all likelihood. It's going to be inconvenient. But I'm feeling as good as I always do, thanks to the kindness of some cats I've never met before, and a whole lot of luck. Yep, I'm lucky after all.

When we lost our way

When we thought replacements could do an impossible job.

Imagine sending a guy with four years of deep-sea fishing experience to go do the job done by those cats on "Deadliest Catch". "He's fished on the ocean before, so he'll be able to catch us a use-able amount of crabs while our normal guys are asking for better insurance benefits," goes the thinking. Right, but the new guy's never seen anything quite like this. He'll do fine for a couple weeks, with some miscues. But then he'll get caught in a serious storm, the likes of which he hasn't dealt with before. He honestly won't know what to do. It's not his fault; the crash-course in training he received can only get him so far. So in all likelihood something terrible will happen--equipment will be lost or broken, a significant portion of the past week's catch will be lost, the ship will capsize--something to the suits realize, "What were we thinking? Nobody can just step up and do this job."

It's not as serious with sports (because it's sports, not real-life), but in the case of the NFL replacement officials, it's just as egregious an error on the part of NFL brass. They have been officiating Division III college football for years, so it's fair to say they understand the rules of football. But it also should have been obvious to the NFL that they were (and are) woefully unprepared for what they would be (and are) seeing on the field.

About 2.5 percent of college football players make it into the NFL. That's the strongest, fastest, most athletic 2.5 percent of all college football players. Most of those guys come from the FBS, a stronger, faster, more athletic division of college football than Division III. Of all those college football players that make it to an NFL team, not all of them play. No, just the strongest, fastest, most athletic group of 30-35 players play for each team (before accounting for injuries).

See where this is going? These referees have vaulted into an entirely different world of football. Steve Young said it best after last night's game, that the NFL is so much faster in person than anything these guys have ever seen, they never stood a chance. Being an NFL official is already an extremely difficult job--it's why fans are constantly pissed off at the officials in years past. So why would anyone think a replacement is a good solution?

Don't blame the replacement referees for these early-season debacles. It is technically their fault, but they were put in an impossible situation. Blaming them would be tantamount to blaming me for ruining your softball team's chances at the intramurals or parks and rec championship. Yeah, I'm bad, so the team has no chance of winning, but I shouldn't be in this position if excellence was the initial goal.

Think these things through a little bit.

College Football's Big Game

This weekend (if you haven't been clued in by the endless talking about it on TV and ever-growing number of features on every angle possible) No.1 LSU will travel to Tuscaloosa to take on No.2 Alabama in college football's biggest game of the year.

That first paragraph is not meant to belittle the game. It is a huge game. The winner will be heavily favored to win the national championship. But this game has taken on more attention than I can ever remember a college football game getting. There have been plenty of No.1 vs. No.2 matchups in the regular season before, but this one somehow seems bigger. The last 1 vs. 2 was between Ohio State and Michigan, and received a great deal of attention mainly because of the fact that it was the biggest rivalry of the year for both teams, with a shot at the title game on the line. This game between Bama and LSU feels somehow different. Yes, a shot at the title game is still on the line (though not guaranteed, like it was in the OSU-Michigan game because that was the final game of the year). This game is receiving extra attention because it is coming at the perfect time. It is a matchup of two SEC schools in the height of the "SEC is the only football conference that matters" era of college football.

History tells us that we've got a good shot a good game between the two teams. I hope it will be a good game, but I will have the nagging thought in my head about how this game will spell the end of the season for one of the (supposedly) best two teams in college football.

The BCS is designed to have the best two teams in the nation play. It doesn't want a playoff, because that allows for upsets to happen, and then the system does not get its optimal national championship matchup. Believe it or not, in the BCS' 13 years, it has gotten the two contenders right more often than not. But this year, it is almost impossible for that to happen.

According to every unbiased source, the BCS' current Nos. 1 and 2 (LSU and Bama) are the best two teams in the country. The problem is, they are playing each other this weekend and are both in the same division of the SEC. That means only one of them (the winner of Saturday's game in all likelihood) can play in the SEC championship game. A team with one loss that doesn't even make it to its conference championship game cannot possibly be selected to play in the national championship, right? And despite how annoying it will be when all the SEC fans are pining for the loser of this game to be given another shot, this year, they'll be right.

Which brings us to the even bigger problem. According to the BCS, LSU is the best team, the most deserving of playing in a national championship game right now. But to do so, they have to beat Alabama in Alabama this week. Home-field advantage is approximately 70-times more important in college sports than pro sports. In a game between the nation's two best teams, which seem pretty evenly matched, how is it fair for the site of the game to help decide the winner (and then the likely eventual national champion)?

It's not fair at all to do this in college football, a sport where the great teams switch from year to year (look at Auburn and Oregon this year: not bad by any stretch, but nowhere near national champion caliber. That's just how it works). When LSU has its chance to win a national title (it probably will not be this good next year), the school is given a significant disadvantage to winning that title because of a road game on the schedule. It doesn't make any sense.

Unfortunately, there isn't a good solution to this problem. The only solution is to extend the season and have teams play home-and-aways with all the teams in their conference divisions. But I don't like that at all. Really, the best solution is the one just about everybody has wanted all along: a playoff. The loser of Saturday's game will almost certainly still finish in the top four or eight teams in the country by season's end, and in a world with an FBS playoff, they would be given another shot at the title. A shot they deserve, because the only mistake they made was deciding to be great in a year when a team from the same division decided to be great as well.

What is going on in New Orleans?

After five weeks, the New Orleans Saints looked like one of two dominant forces in the NFC. They were 4-1, with the one loss coming to the Green Bay Packers at Lambeau Field, in a 42-34 shootout. Basically, the Saints would have been 5-0 if they had played anyone other than the Packers in Week 1.

After winning four games in a row, though, the Saints went to Tampa Bay and lost a head-scratcher to the Bunccaneers (who had just been dismantled 48-3 the week before in San Francisco). "Chalk it up to just one of those bad days that you occasionally get in the NFL," I thought. Then the Saints went and put up the most points since the merger in embarrassing the Colts 62-7. "Right, last week was just a hiccup," I thought. Now in week seven, New Orleans produced the most eyebrow-raising result of all: a 31-21 loss to previously winless Saint Louis (and the Saints' final score came in garbage time, when the game was over). After looking like one of the teams to beat in the NFC through five weeks, the Saints look more like an also-ran after eight. They are still likely to make the playoffs, but with their inability to win on the road, they wouldn't figure to be contenders when January rolls around.

So what the hell is going on with those guys? Clearly there is a big difference between home and road games for New Orleans right now. The Saints' two road wins came against Jacksonville and Carolina, and they have enjoyed three excellent offensive performances at home, putting 30 points on Chicago, 40 on Houston and the aforementioned 62 on Indy.

Right now, the Saints have two major problems. The first is Drew Brees' play recently. Over the last 5 weeks, Brees has thrown an interception in four games (the exception being vs. Indy) and three of those were multi-interception games. The Saints are always going to be relying on their offense to win games for them, because it is so explosive. Their defense is by no means bad, but it is typically not going to be good enough to win them games, especially when Brees is providing the opponents with short fields due to turnovers. So long as Brees is turning it over, the Saints will continue to struggle.

The other problem is with the Saints run-defense. Over the same stretch of five games, the Saints have allowed three 100-yard rushers. The two exceptions: the Indy abomination (of course) and when they played at Jacksonville and Maurice Jones-Drew averaged almost eight yards per carry but only carried the ball 11 times for reasons that will probably never be known. What other teams were doing is unimportant, though. The fact remains that the Saints have had a lot of trouble stopping the run. This is bad for the obvious reason that not being able to stop the run is bad, and also because teams effectively running the ball is going to keep the New Orleans offense off the field for longer, giving them bigger problems.

Whatever is going on in New Orleans, they've got to put a stop to it soon. The Falcons appear to have hit their stride somewhat and are playing better football, and the Buccaneers already have a tiebreak advantage on the Saints. They'll have to play much better football if they plan on winning the NFC South this year.