The 100 percent artificial, made-for-TV drama that is overtime in college football was invented for coaches who lack the guts to settle the score in 60 minutes of blood, sweat and tackling.
Air Force coach Fisher DeBerry is a real man.
Akron coach J.D. Brookhart has the courage to stare down defeat without blinking.
They don’t need no stinking overtime.
“I wanted to send a message to my team. We’re going to try to win this dadgum football game right now. We’re going to honor our team motto: Return to dominance. We don’t believe in moral victories,” DeBerry said Tuesday, explaining why the Falcons went for the glory of a two-point conversion and the win, rather than settling for a chip-shot extra point and overtime, when the visitors trailed heavily favored Tennessee 31-30 with 95 seconds remaining in the fourth quarter.
Air Force lost when halfback Chad Hall was tackled short of the goal line. The Falcons, however, won the respect of every one of 105,000 nervous witnesses in Tennessee.
“We’re down 17-14, we’re on the 1-yard line, we’re playing in an Atlantic Coast Conference stadium, with ACC officials, and we’re a school that’s never beaten a BCS team. I figured this was our best opportunity to win. One play. The last play,” said Brookhart, a 41-year-old rising star in his third season in charge of the emerging Akron football program, but better remembered in Colorado as a Denver kid who grew up to be a prolific receiver for the CSU Rams during the 1980s.
The North Carolina State defense dug in for its last stand. Rather than take the easy way out and kick a field goal, Brookhart sent in a running play: 25 Wham.
And – wham! – as the final three seconds of the fourth quarter ticked away, running back Dennis Kennedy squeezed into the end zone with a touchdown for a 20-17 Akron victory so improbable that N.C. State coach Chuck Amato is now whining the Zips admit dumb players to the Ohio school.
Big risk. Big reward. But not by Brookhart’s standards.
In 1995, Brookhart was pulling down a six-figure salary as a salesman. He quit the job.
And went to work as a volunteer for the Broncos. Fetching coffee. Being a grunt.
Walking in the shadow of coach Mike Shanahan. All to get back in the crazy business of winning and losing football games.
When the NCAA decreed 10 years ago that overtime would determine the outcome of regular-season games, so a meek coach could no longer arrive at his weekly booster-club meeting wearing the lipstick of his sister on his cheek, it was another sign that although education is fine, America would rather be entertained.
“I like overtime, because it does define a winner, and that’s why we play the games,” DeBerry said.
Maybe it was because I grew up under those leaden autumn skies of the Midwest, where drizzle mixed with a burning-leaf haze qualified as a good October day in Indiana. But there always seemed to me something raw and real in Notre Dame coach Ara Parseghian both hearing hosannas and taking heat for the 1966 national championship after settling for a tie with Michigan State. Often, half a loaf is as good as life gets.
Don’t get me wrong. Overtime can be awesome theater, full of sweat-soaked coaches prowling the sidelines and fraternity brothers drunk on drama in the stands. But the glorified red-zone drill employed by the college game to determine an overtime winner is a lame excuse for real football.
If it were up to me, the rules of overtime would not read like a gimmick. Overtime should begin, the same as any self-respecting football game, with a coin toss and a kickoff. Each team would be guaranteed one offensive possession. And then it’s sudden death. Unless the score remains knotted after 15 minutes, when everybody would have to deal with the regrets and ambiguities of a tie.
Sound fair enough?
Of course, what’s fair got to do with anything?
DeBerry and Brookhart both did the right thing. The coaches put the outcome and their trust on the shoulders of athletes, then let it all ride on a single play, rather than scheming and delaying and praying for luck to find them in overtime.
Just because you show a brave heart does not mean you earn a Hollywood ending. Akron won. Air Force lost.
“Right before the snap, I’m thinking: What if we don’t make it? For a team like us, trying to make a name for ourselves, maybe it’s not a no-lose situation. But it’s close to it,” Brookhart said. Despite catching more than 100 passes for CSU, he promptly was cut by the NFL, and went to work for Xerox.
“The ball on the 1-yard line with a chance to win or lose? Certainly your safe decision is to kick a field goal and play for OT. But I don’t think it really entered my mind. Situations like this? That’s why I got out of the selling software business.”
To teach players how to be winners, a coach cannot be afraid to lose.
Staff writer Mark Kiszla can be reached at 303-954-1053 or mkiszla@denverpost.com.
