Business Trip: A Scandurro Story

BY TIM SCANDURRO

Trap Game (n):  “A trap game is a game played against an opponent generally deemed to be easy to defeat. As a result a person or a team may not prepare as thoroughly as they would for a formidable opponent.  Often this attitude and its attendant lack of preparation lead to a loss.”—Urban Dictionary.Com

“I was very pleased with the approach this week.  The team took the game very intentionally and didn’t coast through the week.  And it showed.”—Coach Jon Sumrall

“When I was coaching defense it was my job to keep the score down, not theirs.  When you’re playing defense it’s your job to stop them.  It’s not the offense’s job to not score.  It’s like I tell the offense, what the (bleep) do you think I send you guys out there for?  To punt?  We have a punt team for that.  Your job is to go out there and score points.”—Bill Belichick

One of my favorite quotes, usually attributed to the actor/director Woody Allen, is that “90 percent of life is just showing up.”  It sounds easy enough.  But we live in a world where we are constantly distracted and pulled in a thousand directions and don’t have enough time to accomplish everything we are supposed to get done.  So when we accomplish something important one day, we feel like we’ve worked hard enough for that week and we let things slide.  Maybe I can take tomorrow off, or get away for a few days.  Maybe I’ll sleep in, or go home early, and just move tomorrow’s tasks to next week.  We want to smell the roses, and why not?  Didn’t we earn that? We struggle to show up with the same effort every day in our work and personal and family lives, and we usually pay a price for that.  And then we do it all over again.  We’re human.  

They say that “life imitates art,” but I have always felt that the far greater truth is that life imitates football, and vice versa. 

Last week Tulane pounded South Florida, entering as a slim 4 point favorite at kickoff and emerging with a 45-10 blowout win. In a high pressure contest that we absolutely had to have, the entire team locked in for the first time all season and delivered a near flawless performance in every phase. Darian Mensah was the top rated quarterback in the country.  We led 31-0 in the second quarter.   

All last week the players heard about how impressive their performance was, and how as soon as we steamrolled struggling UAB in Birmingham we could get into the first bye week and rest up.  We opened as 14 point favorites and the line rose to 17.5.

You take a team coming off a big win who reads all week about how good they are, and next up is a weaker team they should handle easily, on paper…. and we all know how that story sometimes ends.  Every coach in America tries to warn his team about the exact situation Tulane was walking into Saturday in Birmingham.

“It’s like rat poison,” Nick Saban said.   “Don’t eat the cheese,” Bill Parcells said.  Put the work in.  Prepare the same way you always do.  Don’t listen to the noise.  This team can beat you if you don’t give your best effort.  Show up.

It doesn’t always work.  The coaching staff at top ranked Alabama put rat traps all over their locker room last week to emphasize the danger lurking in their game Saturday with Vanderbilt, and everybody said the right things, and Alabama still went into Nashville as three touchdown favorites and came out with a shocking loss.  Tennessee has been hearing a lot about how this is the best team they’ve had in a long time, and they went into Arkansas Saturday as a two touchdown favorite and got beat.  It happened to us in the Cotton Bowl year.  Talking about it and emphasizing it isn’t enough.  As we like to say, “these are 18 and 19 year old kids.”  They don’t always get it.

Coach Sumrall knew going in that he had another possible problem:  there wouldn’t be many people in the stands in Birmingham.  So he called it a “BYOJ” (bring your own juice) game, and made that expectation known all week and in the locker room. 

It worked.  It all worked.  We got ahead big again at halftime, and then really laid the wood to them in the second half.  71 points later, UAB’s coach apologized to his team afterwards “for not getting them ready for that type of physical football.”

The point total created some ambivalence in a certain segment of our fan base, consisting of people like my 82 year old mother.  She sat through a couple of 62-0 losses with my father and she sat through some other Tulane football experiences where we played the role of the baby seals, and the other team had the club.  When we hit 50 in these games she starts worrying that we are acting like some of our old enemies, one in particular.  Maybe it’s also her maternal instinct that makes her start feeling sorry for the opponent. 

On the other hand, I can guarantee you my dad is explaining to St. Peter this week that UAB in some forgotten game years ago ran a halfback pass against us while up three scores.  There was no margin of victory that he ever apologized for, because he always viewed it as righteous payback for some prior wrong inflicted on us.

However you feel about the score, the important thing is this:  We showed up.  We took care of business.  We built on last week’s performance.  We looked like an improving, jelling, dangerous  football team that is going to be a real handful for everyone left on our schedule and whatever lies beyond that.  It was a demonstration of leadership and discipline at the coach and player level, and it’s gotten us a lot more traction in the national conversation. 

We are still in this thing, y’all.  Every game left on our schedule is a playoff game with a small p, and if we keep the approach we’ve had the last two weeks, a playoff game with a capital  P is very much in play.

Keep that here though.  Don’t tell the team.  Looking that far ahead is rat poison.

-By Tim Scandurro