Seems like everywhere you turn, there are people in sports who just need to settle down. Stop overthinking it. Just play and let the rest take care of itself.
Start with the Ryder Cup. You’d think with all the mental gymnastics that are going on that these guys are splitting the atom. Analytics to determine who is best suited to be paired with whom in the alternate shot. But will get they along? What if their chakras don’t match up that do?
But by all means, let’s make sure the ping-pong table is all set up so that proper team building can happen. And if the wives’ outfits aren’t color coordinated, it could lead to another European domination.
Here’s how to handle the Ryder Cup pairings:
“Hey guys, Scottie Scheffler’s going out first … anybody wanna play with him?”
There. That’s your first pairing. The rest of y’all just group up from there.
You can crunch all the numbers you want to make sure you’ve got the perfect lineup, but when somebody hooks a tee ball OB on the first hole, all that is out the window.
Just play.
It’s three days of golf with an interesting format that really doesn’t mean a whole lot in the grand scheme.
Noted philosopher Tiger Woods once asked the media at a Ryder Cup interview session anybody in the room knew what Jack Nicklaus’s record was in the Ryder Cup. Nobody did. (It’s 17-8-3, by the way.)
That’s because nobody measures golf greatness by Ryder Cups, where more than half the matches you play are tied to someone else’s success or failure.
Here’s another one –
Earlier this week, all over the Southeastern Conference, fans with little to do were breaking down the announcement of the three “permanent” football opponents for each school. Who are winners? Who are the losers? What rivalry might be lost that will cause the Earth to stop spinning on its axis?
Answers: Nobody, nobody and none.
OK, so LSU (which got Arkansas, Texas A&M and Ole Miss) won’t be playing Alabama on a yearly basis. Other than one less opportunity to go to Dreamland BBQ for ribs, LSU fans will still get the Crimson Tide every other year.
And in the meantime, how about a nice little roll call of Georgia, Texas and Tennessee to make up for it.
Stop worrying about it. Just play.
The SEC did it perfectly and as fairly as it could. Take a look at each school’s upcoming schedules for the next four years. It is everything you’d want it to be. All teams in the conference are regularly scheduled to play each other at least twice in any four-year period. LSU hasn’t been to Athens, Ga., since Garrett Nussmeier was in the fourth grade.
Georgia has played Texas A&M more times in Shreveport (one) than it has in College Station (zero).
Just play. Stop worrying about who is trying to pull a fast one.
It also filters down to the high school level. This will be a re-shuffling year for the football schedules (2025 is the second year of the two-year cycle) and coaches are already on the phone trying to find non-district games for the next two years against teams that can help their potential power point ratings. The Holy Grail is when you can find a team in a higher classification that is in a weak district but could still win a lot of games.
Better solution: Just pick up the phone and call a few of your coaching buddies and ask if any of them might want to play in Week 2. Your place, their place … figure it out later.
Instead, there’s all kind of gnashing of teeth to find an opponent that could make a difference in getting a No. 11 instead of a No. 14 seed. Nobody remembers the Nicklaus Ryder Cup record and nobody remembers what seed you were in the playoffs.
Stop complicating things. There’s a reason there’s a particular word involved in so many sports. The umpire says “Play Ball.” The post-season is called the PLAY-offs. Coaches spent their lives diagramming “plays.”
In its simplest form, that’s how this is supposed to go all go down.
So just play.
Contact JJ at johnjamesmarshall@yahoo.com