Calling Audibles Part XVII: Game Plan
For my thoughts are not your thoughts,
nor are your ways my ways, says the LORD
For as the heavens are higher than the earth,
so are my ways higher than your ways
and my thoughts than your thoughts
~Isaiah 55: 8-9
Lots of people ask me what football coaches do while they are working all those long hours. “What could they possibly be doing in there for all that time?” Early on in our marriage, I use to ask my husband, John, the exact same question periodically. During his years in the NFL the answer was mostly “watching film” and “game planning.” Those elements are there in college football, too, and “talking to recruits” is added to the mix.
If you are anything like me, those explanations still leave some room to wonder about what they could possibly be doing in there for all the hours they work. But several years into this curious profession of my husband’s I quit asking this question. I accepted the reality that football coaching seems to equal long hours, lots of time away from home, and husbands and fathers who are not actively involved in daily family life on any consistent basis.
Truth be told, that was not an easy reality for me to accept. I had always thought I would be in a marriage where we more equally shared the parenting and the household responsibilities. I have a career, too, so I always thought somehow that my career was equally important to John’s. That was my game plan, at least—as close to an equal partnership as possible.
While the last seventeen years of marriage have been a great gift and our marriage is strong by any standards, I realize how unrealistic my expectations were early on in my life as a football coach’s wife. During the twelve years John spent in the NFL he almost never was able to do things like take the kids to school, be at a school function, or be at home when I had an evening meeting or class to teach. During the season my kids could go sometimes weeks without seeing him. I realized once that my son didn’t even know his dad lived with us for a stretch through one season. John got home well after 11pm and left home before 5 am, sometimes more like 4:30 am so to my children’s awareness he never came home.
I remember going to a baby shower for a coach’s wife soon after John and I got married. Another wife was being kind and asking me questions about myself. “Do you have kids?” she asked. “No, not yet,” I said. “Just wait,” she said. “That’s when this life really gets interesting.” Then she proceeded to tell a story about her son when he was a little boy (maybe four), and the doorbell rang. It was her birthday or Valentine’s Day or some occasion for flowers. When the four year old raced to the door and saw the man delivering the flowers, the little boy asked him who sent these flowers. When the deliveryman said they were from “Joe” (which was the name of the boy’s father, the coach), the boy turned to his mom quizzically and said, “What ever happened to Joe?”
She told this story and, of course, the whole room of seasoned wives laughed and shook their heads knowingly. I remember another wife telling me afterward that NFL stands for “No Family Life.” Even with all this sage advice from women who knew the drill, I kept hoping we could find a better way.
Coming to UNC did give us a better way. Even with all of the hours John logged in the office and on the road, our family’s life flourished here. The kids and I could be a part of things. Coach Davis cared about the coaches’ families. We were welcome at the office. We came for family dinner nights. John took the kids to school every Friday morning. My son went and helped his dad at practice twice a week. The kids knew all the players. The life we were able to have here in Chapel Hill is probably as good as it gets when it comes to family life in big time football.
The game plan we had talked about in those times in the NFL when John wanted to be able to be a more involved parent was a reality during our time at UNC. We will always be thankful for our time here and everything Coach Davis and his wife, Tammy, did to make this an atmosphere for families to flourish.
Now we’re looking at the possibility of returning to the NFL. Not many people understand why I wouldn’t be totally excited about that prospect. From a purely football perspective, getting a job in the NFL is a great accomplishment. Lots of people didn’t ever understand why John left the NFL in the first place. While I am working to be open to ways that are not my own and while I want to trust God who works in mysterious ways, I can’t help but have concerns.
From my perspective, life feels a lot like football right now. Sometimes our game plans in life don’t play out like we’d hoped they would. And sometimes there are reversals, turnovers, and penalties that happen to you even when you did not do anything wrong. Sometimes teammates let you down even with their best efforts. And sometimes teammates just don’t do their part. And sometimes the officials stink and make terrible calls that change the outcome of the game. And even with all the preparation, all the good work, all the successful plays you run, you still end up having to drop back and punt.
The audible this time around might come from me, from my family. Maybe there is a more excellent way to inhabit this crazy business my husband loves. Maybe God will make a way where I don’t see one. Either way, I need to be ready. I want to do my part to make the play called one that gives us more gain than loss.
Calling Audibles Part XVI: American Idol(atry)
Strive at first to meditate
Upon the sameness of yourself and others,
In joy and sorrow all are equal
Thus be guardian of all, as of yourself
~Shantideva, The Way of the Bodhisattva
…the human mind is, so to speak, a perpetual forge of idols.
~John Calvin, The Institutes
An idol is anything we excessively adore. That something may well be worth our love and affection, but it becomes an idol when that affection gives way to a distorted adoration. Idols become everything—more than they could ever really be. They embody our fantasies, our hopes and dreams. And even more dangerously, idols embody our projections of what we want and need from God.
If the human mind is a forge of idols, big time football is one of the hottest furnaces around turning out new idols at a dizzying pace. This time of year the idol factory is working overtime. Between the coaching carousel, bowl games, and the NFL playoffs idols are turning out faster than we can fall in and out of love with them.
This human tendency to pour all our expectations and hopes into the “next best thing” isn’t confined to football. Politics and Hollywood embody the same dynamic—who is hot today? Who can solve all of our problems? Who can make everything better?
What makes the hyper-productive idol factory of college football a blog-worthy topic is not that it simply exists. The interesting question is why idol making is so robust in a sport that is perhaps the most intensively team oriented sport that there is.
Few sports have the deeply entrenched collective character that football does. The beauty of this game is that so many people work together in an organic and organized way and they can make something exciting happen. A well-orchestrated football play is magical—as if all involved are so deeply connected that they move in perfect harmony, prompted by a secret language that only they understand.
Football is the symphony of the sports world. Basketball is more like a cool jazz band—there’s room for some improv and we enjoy the over the top solos. But, football is nothing if not people coming together to play their part in creating something breathtaking, something that we can’t wait to see unfold.
Even my seven-year old daughter gets the symphonic quality of football. She watches every play of her dad’s football games. She told me one day, “Mom, I know I can probably never play football, but it’s my favorite sport because every play I just can’t wait to see what might happen next.”
So how has this magnificent symphony of team effort become such a factory of individual idols? Why has this symphony of team become the theme song for a seemingly endless string of cult of personality characters?
Football is an American sport, born and bred. It embodies the American mythology of the rugged individual and our “united we stand” mantra. That hybridized character of this game we love is not a bad thing—it’s who we are as Americans. The sharp edge comes in how much we seem to be getting away from the united we stand part of who we are.
Football shows us this trend in Technicolor. The Internet is a breeding ground for our idolatrous tendencies. Cults of personality are googled into existence whether the truth backs up the banter or not. Twitter flashes the names of potential dieties every few seconds and the rate of retweeting determines a person’s iconic traction. Fantasy football has put team loyalty on the back burner in favor of people rooting for individuals and statistics so their own little world can work the way they want it to.
The tragic part of this idol factory is that we will inevitably end up disappointed when our idols fail to deliver, when we discover that they, too, are limited. The destruction wrought by over-zealous egos who buy the hype about themselves unleashes another layer of harm. Lives, careers, families, institutions are all vulnerable to the destruction that idolatry can set into motion. When someone really believes they are the answer to all of our problems, they set themselves and us up for a hard fall. And real people and their real gifts and abilities get lost in the way idolatry blinds us to what is actually around us.
The truth is a head coach or a star player is only as good as the people around him. A great receiver without an accurate quarterback is not that great. An amazing running back without a stout offensive line will not consistently find running room. A head coach without an able staff of assistants will not have long-term success. And a coaching staff and players without the support of their university can be destroyed no matter how willing and able they are to excel.
This statement of our deep connectedness is not rocket science. It’s basic biology. We are systemic beings—we live and breathe the air around us and those who inhabit our lives—whether we like it or not. We are what we eat and who we meet and where we live. We might yearn for there to be that one person who can make everything right. Or we might yearn to have the power to make things the way we want them to be. But we were made for a more complicated way of life, with a different kind of power and possibility than idolatry tells us we have.
Our radical relationality means that no one person can do it all. It even means we can’t feign helplessness when it comes to our relationship with God. God needs us to do our part, too.
Football could be an excellent stage to teach these important lessons of simultaneous humility and responsibility. No one is the answer to all of our problems, and every one of us can be a part of solving those problems. Practicing what it means to live in the kind of world where we need each other and others need us is what we need football to do for us. What we don’t need is something else in the world that tells us lies about what life is all about.
What a horrible distortion that the symphonic nature of football is being drowned out by over-amplified egos. If we could quiet the noise, we may be able to hear how things could change for the better. The audible must come from all of us—those who are idolized and those who do the idolizing. What we need is a shift back to a basic formation—there is no “I” in team. And if we can turn the “me” into “we” then all of us just might end up making something happen that we could have never done alone.
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