Tide Clocks

Archive for December, 2006

The Wake Forest Demon Deacons football team is 9-1, has their best record since 1944, is ranked #14 in the nation, and is poised to play Georgia Tech in the first ever ACC Championship Game to decide who goes to the Orange Bowl. Even Wake’s one loss to Clemson is qualified with the phrase  ”and they should have won that one.” As I write this, Wake’s game with Virginia Tech has begun. By the time the article is complete, we will know the next chapter of Wake’s unlikely Cinderella season. Right now: Wake is losing 7-0, 8:25 left in the first quarter.Full disclosure. I did not attend Wake Forest and I bleed Tarheel blue. Here are my bandwagon credentials: I grew up in Winston-Salem, my wife is a Wake graduate, her parents are Wake Forest graduates, multiple generations of her family on both sides are Wake graduates, many of my friends are Wake graduates, and my father teaches at the medical school. After Wake beat Boston College, and swept away by my wife’s newfound love of college football and worn down by endless gloating emails from my father-in-law, I finally surrendered to my inner Demon Deacon and jumped on the bandwagon - and I did it against every single bit of good judgment I have. Here’s why. Wake Forest invented the agony of defeat. Think of the basketball team’s crushing double overtime loss to West Virginia in the second round of the NCAA Tournament a couple of years ago. And how about all those heartbreakers with Tim Duncan? Stanford! And forget about the football team. They’ve only been to three bowls in the last quarter century, and since 1953 have only had 11 winning seasons. Why jump on the bandwagon when I expect disappointment? Why get my hopes up when Wake will ingloriously fall just short of everybody’s hopes and dreams of an Orange Bowl victory?Game update: Sam Swank, Wake Forest’s star kicker, just hit a 47 yard field goal to make the score 7-3, four minutes to half time. Swank is one of the best kickers in college football. He has won games for this team.

Legendary Game Ended 10-10 as Parseghian Elected to Play for a TieForget about the recent Ohio State-Michigan showdown. November 19 marked the 40th anniversary of one of the most famous games in college football history, the legendary 1966 “Game of the Century” in East Lansing between top-ranked Notre Dame and No. 2  Michigan State that ended in a 10-10 tie.The game is best remembered for the conservative strategy employed by Notre Dame coach Ara Parseghian in the final minutes. Instead of playing for the win, Parseghian elected to run out the clock, settling for a tie (there was no overtime then). It was an anticlimactic conclusion to a bitterly fought battle that had been hyped for weeks and the Michigan State fans at Spartan Stadium lustily booed the Notre Dame coach. Parseghian came under intense criticism from the media and sports writer Dan Jenkins wrote in Sports Illustrated that Parseghian “tied one for the Gipper”. “Old Notre Dame will tie over all,” Jenkins opined. “Sing it out, guys. A No. 1 team will try something, won’t it, to stay that way? Notre Dame did not. It just let the air out of the ball.”Famed Los Angeles Times sports writer Jim Murray was less kind, writing, “The Four Horsemen, indeed! The Four Rabbits! The Four Mice! ‘Outlined against a blue-gray October sky, the Four Mice went into hiding again today.’ … May George Gipp never hear of it.”Since Notre Dame was No. 1, Parseghian figured that if the game ended in a tie, Michigan State could not jump over the Irish in the national rankings. He was right as the strategy helped the Irish win the first of their two national championships under Parseghian. Notre Dame, which finished the 1966 season with a 9-0-1 record, wrapped up the title the following week with a 51-0 drubbing at Southern California. Fair or not, the criticism haunted Parseghian, who is now 83, for years and he eventually stopped talking about his decision to play for a tie.