Flying 30,000 feet above the ground en route to Tempe, Ariz., I was expecting to attend a college football game that would be decided by one team’s offense manipulating the other’s defense.
Riding down the press elevator long after the game was over and my game recap had been written, I didn’t expect to hear the excuses.
An Arizona State assistant athletic director for media relations let it out.
“I saw this one coming,” he said.
Saw what coming? The team deflated after nearly upending top-ranked USC last week? Or overlooking an Oregon squad that had lost 35-0 in the second half to the same USC team one week earlier?
Nope. Injuries was the excuse.
He went on to list just about every player who had missed the game because of an injury, or who hadn’t played 100 percent of the game because of what might have been an injury. I guarantee you that if the guy who runs out to get the tee following kickoffs had a hangnail, I would have heard about it.
As I was riding back to my hotel, the radio was tuned to “Devil Talk.” I didn’t catch much of the show – seeing as it was nearly 12:30 a.m. by the time I exited Sun Devil Stadium – but what I did hear was complaining fans.
So it got me thinking: Why do the fans have to find blame, and why does the program have to find an excuse after a loss? Can another team ever just outplay your team?
Evidently not. I will be the first to admit that I recently found myself wondering how certain offensive coordinators who called the same series of plays every time Oregon had the ball could have a job in Division I football.
I will go even further. As a fan, I put a lot of blame on Andy Ludwig last season when the Oregon offense sputtered. But I am not alone.
I have had general admission season tickets at Autzen Stadium for the past 10 years. So I know what it is like to sit next to ignorant fans who find excuses to boo or blame their team whenever they feel more knowledgeable than the coaches. Too many times, I’ve sat near some drunk moron who boos when Oregon sits on the ball deep in its own territory while the clock winds down toward halftime.
Listening to the postgame show on the radio, callers always phone in to talk about how they thought a certain play should or shouldn’t have been called, or to say that a certain player didn’t do his job running the play.
This is a world filled with blame and excuses. There simply doesn’t seem to be the possibility that someone earned the win by outplaying and outperforming the opposition.
That isn’t more prevalent anywhere than in college football, where the number-one excuse for a loss is injury problem. Well, the thing is, a football player runs at full speed and smashes into another player running toward him at full speed. Injuries are going to happen and the programs that work through them are usually the teams standing atop the polls.
It is time for people to stop complaining if their team doesn’t perform perfectly and time for the excuses to end. There comes a time when fans and players need to own up to the fact that they just got beat.
In Saturday night’s case, one sportswriter made an astoundingly astute observation after hearing the Arizona State media relations member ramble on about the injuries.
“Sounds like football,” he said.

[email protected]