The fact is that every team has luck every year, but it's only the team that wins it all that seems to have benefitted the most, and so people tend to think they were more lucky than anyone else. All the luck that a team like Baylor might have had doesn't get talked about because they weren't good enough to take advantage of it. Conversely, the best teams are also going to be the best at taking advantage of their luck, and so naturally they'll seem to be the most lucky.
What's more, I think there is a little confusion about what luck really is. When you design your punt coverage in such a way so as to allow your cover guys a clean break down the middle of the field, is it luck then when the punt returner fumbles it and you're right there to recover? When you design your KO coverage to go to one corner every time at a specific depth, and then one day it pays off by setting up the perfect hit that forces a fumble, is that luck? One thing I've learned over two years with coach Meyer is that he is obsessed with being the most invested team on the field and therefore puts a lot of work into all of the little things. Now if you don't see all the work he puts into these facets of the game, you may think it's just luck when the ball just seems to bounce our way, but I think coach Meyer knows it's not luck, and, in fact, he probably hopes that opponents will continue just thinking its luck so that he can maintain the advantage.
I'm thinking specifically back to the UT game in 2005 when the returner dropped the ball and we recovered. I can remember many times when a returned would muff the punt but fall right back on it because our gunners were coming from the outside and weren't really anywhere near the guy. With Meyer's punt scheme, however, we're in much better position. The snapper generally gets a clean break which not only allows us to be in position but can also cause the returner to take his eyes off the ball. When the player fumbled in the UT game, I probably thought it was pretty fortunate for us, but as things like this continued to happen throughout the season more than I could remember it happening in other seasons I realized that it had a lot to do with our unsusual scheme. It also set up well for fake punts, we had a huge one of those against Georgia that year. Now fast-forward to last year's SEC Championship game against Arkansas when we blocked a punt, faked a punt, and also recovered a fumble for a TD in much the same way.
It's no coincidence, and I think this is supported by other numbers. Our punt-return defense ranked 4th nationally last year, and 2nd nationally in 2005. We also set a school record for blocks last year with 8, including the three against USC that may have been the difference in that game. Speaking of which, were those three blocks luck against USC? If it was, the luck certainly continued when we blocked two more against Vanderbilt. Indeed, at Utah Meyer's team when from 2 blocks in his first year to 9 in his second, and at Bowling Green then went from 1 in his first year to 8.
So I think you have to be careful when you talk about luck. It's very easy to talk about how lucky the winner is without having any idea what's really going on behind the scenes. The saying that luck is what happens when perparation meets opportunity certainly seems consistent with Meyer's philosophy. Sure, if the player never fumbles we'd never have the opportunity to recover it, but under Meyer we've been prepared to take advantage of those opportunities when we get them more so than I ever remember. Luck is supposed to be inherently random, but if Meyer's been lucky for 6 straight years across three different programs, maybe it's time to recognize that there's something more there. Depending on your definition, there may or may not be luck, but there's no questioning that there's great coaching.
The bottom line ot me is that if you're going to simply say that we've been really, really lucky and just leave it at that hoping that our luck will run out, be prepared to keep losing.
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