So everyone who has served in the military knows the phrase, "the enemy gets a vote." It is shorthand for, things won't always go our way. In fact, things are pretty much guaranteed to be FUBAR (fouled up beyond all recognition) most of the time. It's gonna be a sh!t show. Murphy is gonna be in charge. It will be a soup sandwich. As wrong as two bo....well, you get the picture.
That's how football works, too. The enemy gets a vote. Plays are gonna go wrong. A lot of them will. It'll be a mess. Nothing's going to go our way, roughly half the time. Just hope they go our way often enough for us to win.
Right?
So why all the moaning and crying after the fact about how specific plays were bad, about how this player or that player had a bad night?
Okay, we should all know this. I mean every single one of us more mature than a 4th grader.
But just in case some don't get it, here's another analogy for football.
Say you're painting a house. Room by room. It has 12 or more rooms. You gotta paint each room. But this jerk beside you, who is supposed to be helping you, he has a completely different vision for the house. Specifically, you're using orange paint, and he's using blue. Or crimson. Or scarlet. Whatever.
Point is, you're gonna do your best to paint the first room orange. While the other fella is going his own direction. By the time the room's walls have been painted, it's a friggin mess. A total mash-up. But if most of the space on the walls is orange, good enough, you can live with it.
Only a douche canoe wants every wall of every room pristine under those conditions.
Sure, in the heat of the moment, we're gonna get excited about a player doing something extraordinary, or another player making a bone-headed move. That's natural. Watching a game is really jut a series of those moments, strung together.
But when the final whistle blows, it's time to take a few steps back, give up the details, and re-focus on the result. The outcome. Were we good enough?
Accept the wins. Enjoy the wins. Embrace the lads who bring them to us.
And stop worrying so friggin' much about how we got there.
Go Vols!
