Urban Meyer Is Complicated

My social media timeline has been overwhelmed by the breaking news of Urban Meyer’s impending retirement from the Head Coach position at Ohio State. As an OSU alum and a former Ohio resident for 25 years, I really can’t escape it, thanks to all of my friends and colleagues who care deeply about the football program. (Spoiler alert—I don’t care at all.) Meyer has had serious health issues during this past season, including the Indiana game (pictured above) when he did his best Hillary Clinton impersonation, falling to a knee on the sideline.

The numbers are impossible to ignore—three national championships (2 at Florida, 1 at OSU), seven conference championships, countless players drafted by the NFL. For Ohio State fans, the most important number was his spotless record against the University of Michigan—7-0, the only Buckeye coach to never lose in the Big Game.

Of course, that’s the just tip of the iceberg when it comes to Meyer and his story.

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The Rarity Of Getting This Parenting Thing Exactly Right

It is often said, by people who have endured the pain of making decisions on behalf of their offspring, that children don’t come with a manual. In my case, this wasn’t strictly true—my dear brother gave me a rather amusing “owner’s manual” for babies which read much like a Chilton’s for diaper changing when my son, Kevin, was born nearly 11 years ago. But the sentiment remains true. You never really know if you’re doing the right thing for your child.

You agonize over the simplest things, like wondering if he’s drinking too much juice or not enough juice. You watch with bated breath as he goes to preschool for the first time, hoping he’ll make friends. You wonder if he’ll be picked on for something as simple as his name, a lifelong curse that you put on him from birth. And then you watch as he finally puts himself in a situation where real failure is a possibility, like trying out for one of the top six soccer clubs in the state, and you wonder if you had just spent one more day helping him with his foot skills instead of taking that press trip to California, if that would have made the difference.

Luckily for me, my son made the team, and this past weekend they had their first tournament.

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LeBron James Is A Laker And It Makes All The Sense In The World

There comes a point in the life of a grown man where it’s no longer really appropriate to care deeply about professional sports. I’ve written about this before. I enjoy watching sports as much as anybody, but I realize that it’s entertainment. That’s it. My own personal self-esteem or self-worth is in no way affected by whether or not somebody puts a ball in a hoop or a goal, no more than it would be by Luke Skywalker disappearing at the end of The Last Jedi (spoiler alert). In both cases, I’m watching professional performers execute their craft.

I completely understand that, for many, the enjoyment of watching sports can be enhanced by rooting for a team or an individual to do well. I like rooting for Manchester City in the English Premier League, mostly because they play a beautiful style of football/soccer that is enjoyable to watch and produces a large amount of goals. If they lose a game (which they rarely do as of late), I simply turn off the television and go on with my day. I don’t give it another thought. Some would say that doesn’t make me a “true fan”—and they’d be right. I’m not. I just enjoy their style of play.

But there are a lot of “true fans” of the NBA today who are upset by the fact that LeBron James decided to leave the Cleveland Cavaliers and join the Los Angeles Lakers for the upcoming season, signing a rather large contract in the process. When James left the Cavaliers the first time, he departed to play in Miami with fellow stars Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh in pursuit of his first championship. After somewhat mixed results in South Florida, including two titles and two runner-up finishes, James returned to Cleveland and brought that city its first professional sports title in over fifty years. All’s well that ends well, right?

Except that the Cavs showed this year that they can’t compete with the best in the Western Conference, getting flat out smoked in the finals for the second consecutive year. So James, perhaps tired of playing in Cleveland, decided to leave yet again. But this time it’s a bit different, and nobody can or should really be all that mad at him. Because James has finally realized that his end game is not to win more basketball championships—it’s to build a lifelong brand.

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Soccer Saga Update

kevin commonwealth sc

I know you’re all dying to know how the soccer team situation with my son turned out. Or maybe you’re not, but it’s my blog and I’m going to tell you anyway.

After I sent my email, things did actually change a bit. The coach started the best seven kids for each of the two remaining games, and the team played pretty decently as a result—a team that beat our kids 11-0 in the first meeting eked out a 3-1 victory that was even closer than the score indicated, and the final game was another loss (2-1), but the game was marred by horrific officiating and should have gone the other way. If they had played that way all year, their final record would have been much more like 6-2 instead of 3-5.

In other words, I asked the coach for some hope, and I got some. So I figured that the best thing to do was to have my son tryout for both teams—his current squad and the one that we were considering switching to. Since the tryouts were a week apart, there would be plenty of time to decide which team was the better option. His current squad was holding their tryouts first, so worst case scenario was that it would be a good warmup for the team he wanted to be on.

As it turned out, we weren’t the only ones with that strategy.

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Today, I Am That Soccer Dad

I am always, always excited when I get parenting advice from people who don’t have children. You can’t really explain to these people how wrong they are about, well…everything. I know this because I used to be a person without children, and despite my brain’s post-TIA attempts to wash out my memory, I remember many of the wrong opinions that I used to hold.

“Children should never misbehave in public.”

“Why are parents always talking about their kids? So boring!”

“Why do people take kids’ sports so seriously? Who cares?”

The last one is the one we’re gonna talk about today. I think we’re all aware how much I care about my son’s soccer team and his personal growth (and with my daughter about to tryout for her first select team in a week and a half, it’s gonna get worse), and I think it’s fair to say that there’s a bit of vicarious living going on there, too. At the age of 40, I’m not likely to have any more of my own personal team sport success to celebrate.

However, I would like to think that I care so much because he cares so much. I haven’t forced anything on him. He plays soccer about 40 weeks a year, and that’s all he wants to do. He doesn’t play any other sports. He doesn’t play an instrument. He’s not particularly interested in school work—he gets all As and pegs every IQ test, but it’s not because he loves it, it just comes naturally to him.

But he loves soccer. And that’s why I sent an email to his coach this week about why we’ll likely not be on that same team again next year.

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College Basketball Is Dead, Long Live College Basketball

Those of you who’ve been around here for a while might remember that I normally do an NCAA bracket competition around this time of the year. This year, I took one look at the bracket and said, “Eff that.” Not only did I not feel confident in any one team, I couldn’t even feel confident in selecting the top four teams. Make that eight. Actually, make that sixteen.

In the bracket that I did do for my annual “friends and family” competition, I was only able to correctly pick six of the final sixteen squads—and that includes Loyola Chicago, whom I actually picked to make the Sweet 16 on a hunch. Without them, I’d be batting about 31 percent. Three of my Final Four are already out, including my two finalists and eventual champ, North Carolina. Two #1 seeds are out before the Sweet 16 for only the third time ever. The South region’s four survivors are the 5, 7, 9, and 11 seeds—1-4 are gonzo. The “people’s bracket” in ESPN’s Tournament Challenge had Virginia as the overall winner, which would be fine except for the fact that they lost in the very first round by twenty points to something called a “UMBC,” becoming the first #1 seed to ever lose to a #16 seed.

So it’s not just that I suck at picking college basketball games, it’s that everybody sucks this year—the overall leader in ESPN’s bracket only has 560 of a possible 640. To get into the top 50 (out of about 20 million entries) you only need 520 points. What the hell is going on?

What’s going on is that the college game is forever and irrevocably damaged at its core. Depending on whom you ask, that’s either terrible, or wonderful.

This isn’t the first time that we’ve seen lower seeds disrupt the tournament, (Wichita State in 2013, Butler in 2010 and 2011, VCU in 2010, George Mason in 2006, Loyola Marymount in 1990, even Villanova in 1985, etc.) but it’s the first time that the entire bracket appears to have gone haywire in this fashion. What’s causing it?

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Your Daily Reminder That Everybody Is Hurting

Yesterday morning, Tyler Hilinski, the projected starting quarterback for the Washington State Cougars football team, was found dead in his apartment, the victim of a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. He was just 21 years old.

This is a kid who was carried off the field on the shoulders of his peers just weeks ago, the hero of a triple-overtime comeback victory. On most college campuses, there is no bigger hero or star than the quarterback of a winning football team. No party is inaccessible, no club off limits. Every girl wants to date you, and every guy wants to be you.  To outsiders, it seems like the perfect life.

But for Tyler Hilinski, it was apparently anything but.

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Donald Trump Stared The NFL Directly In The Eye, And The NFL Blinked

One of the very best things about growing older (I turn 40 this month holy shit OMG OMG) is that one gains a bit of perspective.

When I was a child, the NFL was my obsession. I was a diehard Raiders fan, for no other reason than the Raiders were a particularly good team in the mid-80’s and Columbus, Ohio didn’t have an pro squad. I lived and died with each win and loss. I played John Madden and Joe Montana Football on the Sega Genesis with my best friend every day. I wore Raiders hats and Marcus Allen jerseys.

Of course, I then proceeded to grow up and stop worrying about the exploits of grown men who don’t know me, and I began to understand professional sports for what they are: entertainment. I still enjoy watching sports, but I view them the same way that many people view going to the movies—a nice way to kill a couple of hours with a healthy dose of escapism. It drives my friends and family crazy when they ask me who I’m rooting for and I say, “Nobody. I just like watching the games.”

It goes without saying that there are tens of millions of people who feel completely differently about professional sports, and, in particular, the National Football League. The NFL has dispatched all other pro sports with relative ease, thanks in no small part to fantasy games and betting, but also due to the physical nature of the game. Joe Sixpack feels a connection to NFL players—they work hard, just like he does. They go home dirty, bruised and bleeding, just like he does. And they love America, just like he does.

Whoops. Scratch that last bit.

When Colin Kaepernick, backup quarterback and the adopted son of two white parents, decided to protest police brutality against minorities by kneeling for the national anthem last season, I called him a troll. While statistics and data can always be cherry-picked to suit the needs of the editorialist, there is, at the very least, significant doubt about the validity of his point. Of course, the people who support #blacklivesmatter are nearly entirely the very same people who are saying that only police should have guns. I don’t get it either.

However, when a rather significant number of players began to join in the now-unemployed Kaepernick’s protest (which just proves that he’s unemployed because he’s a poor quarterback, and for no other reason), Donald Trump just couldn’t help himself—he had to comment.

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A Less-Than-Proud Moment And A Very Proud Moment, Courtesy of Youth Soccer

Soccer Saturday is, by far, my favorite day of the week. It’s not really even close.

My work schedule is such that I’m normally traveling out on Monday morning, working 16 hour days Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, and then flying home, dead tired, on Friday afternoon. Sunday is the day that I steel myself to do it all again. But Saturday? Saturday is the day where I either freeze in the cold, stand in the pouring rain, or endure third-degree sunburns to watch my son play soccer. Despite the always awful conditions, and the assault on my seasonal allergies, there’s nowhere I’d rather be than watching him play.

I’m a Soccer Dad, no doubt. I cheer loudly. I coach way too much from the sidelines. I pace and pace up and down the sideline during the games—I stopped bringing a chair years ago. I live and die with each play. My FitBit tells me that my heart rate more than doubles during the games. I know that my son cares immensely about winning and losing, and I know his day—no, his week is ruined if he doesn’t win.

This past weekend was almost like getting two-for-one, because we had a tournament! Over 150 top teams from Kentucky, Ohio, Indiana, West Virginia, and Tennessee all came together in Georgetown, Kentucky, for the Stride tournament on Saturday and Sunday, and my son’s FC Kentucky Boys U9 squad was among them.

U9 is a little bit of a mix between kids who have been playing since they were 3 or 4 years old and live and breathe soccer (ex., my son, Kevin), and some kids who are still figuring out if this is something they want to do. Each kid is required to play a certain amount in each game, regardless if he’s a top player or not. U10 is where it gets super-duper serious, with more kids getting cut than making the squad, more intense travel, and no rules about the amount of playing time required.

But that doesn’t mean that U9 isn’t serious.

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Step On Up And Identify Yourself, Tournament Challenge winner

It all came down to the UNC-UK Elite Eight game. If UK had won, I would be writing this post as the winner of the Riverside Green challenge, sipping my tea bragging about my superior basketball knowledge. Instead, I finished fourth as UNC ended up not only winning that game but the entire tournament, making espn97517000 our annual winner. So, um, let us know who you are so I can give you your prize of your very own editorial column at Riverside Green. (And Lizzie, if it’s you, you already owe me a column.)