An Awesome Comeback

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Ordinarily, I am very hesitant to use the word awesome — it's overused, and inappropriately used, too, as I have written before.

But no other word seems to do justice to what happened in Cowboys Stadium yesterday afternoon.

If you missed it (and, for reasons I would prefer not to get into right now, I nearly did), my alma mater, the the 18th–ranked University of Arkansas Razorbacks, rallied from an 18–point halftime deficit against the 14th–ranked Texas A&M Aggies to win, 42–38.

Before the season began, there were a lot of whispers among Razorback fans. Would Tyler Wilson, the understudy at quarterback, be able to fill the considerable shoes left by Ryan Mallett, who left school a year early to try his luck in the NFL?

(Mallett is currently the understudy to Tom Brady in New England — which means that, barring a Drew Bledsoe–like injury, Mallett is likely to spend the next few years riding the bench.)

Well, judging from yesterday's game, Wilson is more than capable of filling Mallett's shoes. He set a school single–game record in the comeback win, passing for more than 500 yards and, in the process, obliterating the record Mallett set against Vanderbilt last year.

There were several dramatic moments yesterday. There were the buildups for the obvious contests — Nebraska–Wisconsin, Alabama–Florida, Clemson–Virginia Tech — and then there were the outcomes that qualified as shocking (or, at least, surprising) — Kansas State's win over Baylor, for example (which I predicted), and SMU's victory over TCU in Fort Worth (which I did not).

But there was nothing like the Razorbacks and the Aggies.

Coming into the game, Arkansas had allowed only one rushing touchdown in its first four games. Admittedly, those first three opponents were nothing special, but the one last week (Alabama) certainly was.

Texas A&M scored five rushing touchdown in the first half. The Aggies seemed to be unstoppable — or maybe the Razorbacks were still struggling with the hangover from their 38–14 loss to Alabama last week. Whichever it was, I seriously considered not watching the second half. That's how lopsided it was.

What happened in the second half reminded me of an Arkansas game I attended many years ago, back when the Hogs and the Aggies were members of the old Southwest Conference.

It was a cold, dreary day in Fayetteville, Ark., when Baylor came to visit. A conference doormat when I was growing up, Baylor was asserting itself in those days and came to Fayetteville ranked 17th in the nation. Arkansas had climbed all the way to fourth in the national rankings before falling to eventual SWC champion Houston, but the Hogs were still in the top 10 — at #9 — and the home fans were confident that Arkansas would win.

The first half of that game is a blur in my memory now. I don't remember if Arkansas scored in that first half, but Baylor certainly did — repeatedly — and I remember that the Bears seemed to be in control of that game when the intermission came.

I also remember how quiet the usually boisterous Razorback Stadium crowd was. I overheard some people near me talking about leaving, and I found the thought tempting. I was cold and wet, and the idea of sitting in front of a warm fire instead of on a cold bleacher watching my beloved Razorbacks take a beating was appealing.

But I stayed and so did most of the home crowd — and we were rewarded with a great comeback. The Razorbacks won, 29–20. I don't remember the details, but I remember the growing excitement in the crowd as Arkansas gradually overcame Baylor.

It must have been like that for Razorback fans in Cowboys Stadium yesterday — except that what happened yesterday must have been even more impressive. It had to have been because Baylor only scored 20 points in the entire game that I saw. Arkansas scored 25 points in the second half against the Aggies — and held A&M to a field goal in the process.

It was awesome.

The Promised Land?

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Here in Dallas, Texas, there is a sense of inevitability settling in after last night's astonishing come–from–behind triumph over Oklahoma City in the NBA Western Conference finals.

The Christian Science Monitor called it "one of the most jaw–dropping comebacks in NBA history."

That may be true. I've seen some pretty amazing comebacks in my life, but nothing to compare with what happened about 200 miles north of here last night.

I'm not an NBA fan, but I will admit that I have been watching more lately. However, I had given the game up for lost. I left my TV on and went about some other things in my apartment. I could monitor the game, but, having conceded defeat, I didn't feel I needed to sit and watch it.

I changed my mind a few minutes later.

Down by 15 points with about five minutes to play, the Mavericks doggedly chipped away at the upstarts from OKC, forced the game into overtime and, as Eddie Sefko writes in the Dallas Morning News, never trailed in overtime (after never leading during regulation).

When the Mavericks returned to Dallas early this morning, a couple hundred people were on hand to meet them.

Today the giddiness and disbelief from last night seems to be morphing into supreme confidence, even cockiness. Sure, I heard one man say, there have been teams that have come back from a 3–1 deficit but not many.

Not many, but some. To pull that one off, it seems to me that a team has to be loaded with playoff veterans with the discipline and the concentration to remain focused on the task at hand.

I have my doubts that Oklahoma City can do that.

But as my friend who used to cover horse racing during our mutual Arkansas Gazette days like to say, there is no such thing as a sure thing.

It could happen. It isn't likely, but it could happen.

However, I will assume that the Mavericks — who would have to lose at home not once but twice for the Thunder to leapfrog them into the NBA Finals — will face either Miami or Chicago for the NBA title.

That would mean that the Dallas area will have hosted

• the World Series


• the Super Bowl and


• the NBA Finals

within a single calendar year.

As far as I know, that would be a first.

Mind you, I'm not talking about cities that had teams that participated in three major professional sports championships within a calendar year.

(I think New York came close to that when the Jets played in the Super Bowl in January 1969, the Mets played in the World Series that autumn and the Knicks played in the NBA Finals in the spring of 1970. Technically, that exceeded a calendar year, but New York did win all three.)

The site of the Super Bowl is decided years ahead of time. It has been played annually for 45 years, and, while it is not the NFL's explicit policy to prohibit cities without NFL teams from hosting Super Bowls, no city without an NFL franchise has ever hosted one.

And no host city's team has ever played in one.

For awhile, folks around here figured the Cowboys would be the team to change that. It didn't happen. Instead, two of the Cowboys' old postseason rivals met in the Super Bowl in February.

But it was played here in Dallas. In October, the Texas Rangers brought the World Series here for the first time — and now it appears the NBA Finals will be played here, too.

I think that's a first.

Boston's Memorable Comeback

The year 1929 seems to be inescapable for Americans these days.

Of course, the financial crisis has had people thinking about the Great Depression (which began with the stock market crash in October of that year) for awhile now.

But last night the Boston Red Sox gave sports fans a chance to reflect on 1929 as well.

(Considering that the last comparable comeback in baseball occurred only a couple of weeks before the legendary Stock Market Crash of 1929, Americans outside the Boston area may not find much comfort in last night's rally by the Red Sox.)

With their 8-7 win over Tampa Bay, the Red Sox remained alive in the American League Championship Series. They trail, three games to two, as they return to Tampa for the final two games this weekend.

The comeback, as has been stated, was the greatest in baseball's postseason since 1929, which was 40 years before the American and National Leagues split into divisions. In 1929, the only postseason games were the World Series itself — which matched the Philadelphia Athletics and the Chicago Cubs that year.

The A's won the first two games in Chicago, then lost the third game when the series shifted to Philadelphia. Thus, when the teams met for Game 4 on Saturday, Oct. 12, 1929, in Philadelphia, the visiting team had won each of the first three games.

It looked like that trend would continue through the first six innings of the fourth game.

The Cubs led, 8-0, going into the bottom of the seventh. But left fielder Al Simmons led off the at-bat with a home run for the A's, and Philadelphia scored nine more runs on nine more hits — taking a 10-8 lead into the eighth. The score held up, giving the A's a 3-1 lead in the series.

The Athletics clinched the world championship with another come-from-behind victory two days later, on Monday, Oct. 14, 1929, at Philadelphia's Shibe Park. The Cubs took a 2-0 lead into the bottom of the ninth, but the Athletics rallied for three runs to finish off Chicago in five games.

Does last night's rally have any historical significance — for either the economy or baseball?

It's hard to say what, if any, relationship the two things have to each other — and, therefore, whether the occurrence of an historic comeback should serve as an omen of an impending economic collapse.

It seems to me that a few things can be said with some certainty:

• Although we often hear sports analogies used in economic conversations, the fact is that the advantage in an athletic contest is more permanent than the advantages most consumers realize with most investments.
  
  As we've seen in the recent wild fluctuations of the stock market, the value of stocks can change drastically on a daily basis — if not hourly or even by the minute.
  
  But, unless a rules violation is discovered long after a game is over, and a team is required to forfeit a game it won on the field, a win is a win is a win. Fans can "what-if" an outcome indefinitely, some fans may desert a team because of it, but the outcome itself doesn't change. Nor does the value of any championships that were won.


• Also — unless I missed something — I didn't get the sense that this was a deal breaker for Tampa Bay.
  
  In 2003, at Chicago's Wrigley Field, when the Cubs were a few outs away from winning the National League title in Game 6 and blew it when both a fan and a player failed to catch a fly ball, igniting a fateful (and nearly as improbable) eight-run rally by Florida, I clearly got the feeling that the air had gone out of the team and the fans, even though Florida did not clinch the league title that night.
  
  The difference between the 2003 Cubs and the 2008 Rays is that the Cubs were playing at home. The crowd for Game 7 at Wrigley Field seemed more subdued than one would expect, perhaps with the memory of the previous game fresh in the fans' minds.
  
  And the Cubs' long-suffering fans were eliminated as factors in the game when Florida rallied from a 5-3 deficit to take the lead for good in the fifth inning.
  
  Only time will tell if a similar fate awaits the Rays. But they lost Game 5 on the road, and now they have two opportunities to wrap up the American League title at home. I like their chances.

Here's a sampling of the media response to last night's game:

• If you pull for the Boston Red Sox, you've lived with a history of postseason futility that was nearly as paralyzing as the one the Cubs' fans have endured for a century.
  
  In the end, it may take something as dramatic as Boston's championship season of 2004 to snap them out of it.
  
  In 2004, as you may recall, the Red Sox came back from an 0-3 deficit against the rival New York Yankees to win the league title in seven games, then won the World Series with a four-game sweep of St. Louis that was capped by a total lunar eclipse on the night of Game 4 that colored the moon red over Busch Stadium.
  
  Anyway, the Red Sox's fans know what's it like to have their backs against the wall.
  
  "Pedigree matters," says Bob Ryan in the Boston Globe. "The Red Sox are the defending champions. They always come to play nine innings, and if it takes the greatest postseason comeback in 79 years to stay alive, then they will give you the greatest comeback in 79 years."


• The rally was "unbelievable," as Joe Posnanski writes in his blog.
  
  "This was like something out of a kid’s dream," he writes. "Do you remember being a kid and concocting these fantastic scenarios when your team was losing, these preposterous comebacks that boggled logic and the space-time continuum?"


• Gary Shelton concedes, in the St. Petersburg Times, that Boston put together a remarkable comeback.
  
  "The Rays lost a devastating game," Shelton writes. "They didn't lose anything else. They did not lose momentum, they did not lose their confidence, and they did not lose their grip on the ALCS. Saturday night, Sunday at the latest, they will close out this thing. Just you watch."


• But judging from the tone of his recap in today's Tampa Tribune, Martin Fennelly believes the tide has turned — and that, in spite of their 3-2 lead with the last two games to be played at home, the Rays are finished.
  
  "Seven runs up. Seven outs away," he writes. "It goes on. How will the Rays?"