This puzzles me. A coach calls 70 plays in a average game. Some of them, in retrospect at least, will be suboptimum and some will look bad. But fans everywhere insist that a coach never should make a mistaken call. They become apoplectic over even one mistaken call. Why? Excellent hitters fail around 60% of the time. Great quarterbacks fail to complete 30% of their passes. Wes Welker---Wes Welker--once lead the NFL in dropped passes. Ben Hogan once said that he never hit more than three shots in any round of golf exactly as he had planned. The nation’s best college basketball player cost his team a national championship by calling a timeout that his team did not have. In 2008, Kobe Bryant missed 75% of his potential game-winning shots. Chauncy Billups, his fellow players’ choice as the second-best end-game shooter in basketball, missed 84%. Peter Drucker once said that companies choose the best candidate for open job only 25 percent of the time. Professional bettors cannot beat Las Vegas and million dollar analysts cannot beat the Dow. On Monday night, the Minnesota Viking played the New York Giants in a ninth grade football game. Two nights later, the St. Louis Cardinals attempted to play a World Series game by reprising a performance from the opening scenes of The Bad News Bears. So maybe some play calls are really bad. But how could that not be? How could coaches be immune to what afflicts all of us, the affliction that led a wise man to conclude that the signal trait of human beings is that we err? It actually seems that are three certainties in life and not just two: Death, taxes, and human error. Why do we condemn these coach’s mistakes, made in a mere game, as if they are exceptions? And why are so many people so virulent in their condemnation of those errors?
Posted on: Fri, 25 Oct 2013 16:23:58 +0000
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