When you teach a sports journalism course, and your school\u2019s football team ends up on national television for all the wrong reasons, the lecture almost writes itself.<\/p>\n
According to Las Vegas and the rest of the prediction markets, Western Michigan University should have never been in the game last Saturday against Michigan, much less be in a position to win. Sadly, since my alma mater Western fell 13-12 to the Wolverines, the story of their play has been overshadowed by how they lost. Michigan\u2019s game-winner came after officials added one second back on the clock \u2014 a second that was not apparent to viewers at home because the Big Ten conference used an internal replay-feed clock and not the one we all see on television.<\/p>\n
Western fans, and the Mid-American Conference (of which Western is a part), didn\u2019t buy the rationale. The MAC filed an appeal earlier this week, asking for the results to be overturned, and the NCAA said no. As for fans \u2026 I was most surprised that many students at Western were less hung up on losing the game and more disapproving of the enthusiasm with which Michigan fans greeted their predicted victory. The game should have been a blowout in the Wolverines\u2019 favor, Western students said; a contested one-point win is no cause for rushing the field in celebration.<\/p>\n
I reminded them that wins and losses mean nothing without feeling. And that\u2019s why, no matter who wins or how often, the life lessons that come from being around sports will always matter more.<\/p>\n
All of us are pressured, constantly, into revealing who we are. Most of that revealing happens in private, in rooms without cameras, in the small unwitnessed decisions that make up a life. Sports are different. It happens on television, in the Super Bowl, at the U.S. Open, in the exact moments when the calls go wrong and the world is unfair \u2014 and nowadays somebody\u2019s phone is already up and recording.<\/p>\n
What comes out of a person in that instant isn\u2019t scripted. It isn\u2019t a PR statement. It isn\u2019t something absorbed from ESPN. If there\u2019s hatred in a person\u2019s heart, it surfaces in sports. If there\u2019s love, you can tell the difference. Sports don\u2019t just help build character. They broadcast it.<\/p>\n
The drills, the reps, the thousands of hours in the gym \u2014 they\u2019re not just there to build strength and skills to hit the shot or strike the ball. They\u2019re building something else in a person too: muscle memory. The kind that means when the pressure arrives, the body doesn\u2019t consult the mind. It just moves.<\/p>\n
You don\u2019t acquire that in the moment when it\u2019s needed. You earn muscle memory beforehand, in practice, after years of turning that learned skill into something closer to a heartbeat. Involuntary.<\/p>\n
The companion to that is your moral memory, and it\u2019s built in the same way \u2014 not during the big and obvious moments but in the small and private ones. When nobody catches you on camera. You build your moral memory over the course of a thousand unremarkable moments in life. Those times when you know lashing out would be unproductive, even if doing so would be satisfying. How you handle those moments becomes structural. It becomes who you are. When the pressure comes, it\u2019s not a mission statement or what you learned in Bible study that directs your next step. <\/p>\n
It\u2019s the moral memory \u2014 a byproduct of the discipline that keeps you anchored to your own core while the endorphins of the moment are actively trying to drag you off course. It\u2019s the difference between being steered by whatever\u2019s loudest in the room and being steered by something you built in yourself, rep by rep, long before anyone was watching.<\/p>\n
When my students wanted to know my thoughts about what happened, I told them it never occurred to me that the Michigan students rushing the field were the ones who owed anyone an explanation. Releasing joy after an emotional finish is not unusual in sports.<\/p>\n
What I talked about was our coach, Lance Taylor, because for me, that\u2019s where the actual drama was. It was a close game, with an outcome that felt unfair, a finish that didn\u2019t go the way it was supposed to. A coach has plenty of cause in the moment to lash out at referees or make an offensive gesture, to say something defensive, maybe even destructive, that plays well for 90 seconds. But he didn\u2019t do that. <\/p>\n
Instead, when things didn\u2019t go his way, he showed his players how to keep cool when the pressure comes. In the end, that life lesson will have a greater impact than the Hail Mary that cost them the game.<\/p>\n