Personal essays
Lessons from a loss - no not that kind of loss
One more time
I was all set to write about my second word of the year and then I watched the Cleveland Browns lose on Saturday.
No - this isn’t a post about sports or American football. It’s an essay about three takeaways from the loss and one bonus.
Let’s start with the bonus.
I have some of the worst friends in the world.
I have friends that are watching a football game thousands of miles away and see your hometown team losing and think, “I know, I’ll send Daniel a text right now.”
And so friends I hadn’t heard from in a while started texting me uplifting messages like, “well that’s embarrassing”, “you must feel awful”, and “well, what did you expect?”
One friend even sent the old chestnut, “I hope the Browns are pallbearers at your funeral.”
That probably sounds worse than it was meant to. It was a reference to an obituary from years ago that requested that member of the Browns be pallbearers at his funeral - after all they’d been letting him down all his life so he wanted them to let him down one last time.
Actually, even knowing the context doesn’t help that much.
So here are the three lessons I drew from the loss.
Confidence
There’s been a lot of talk about how cold the game was in Kansas City this weekend.
My brother and I, along with two friends, went to one of the coldest playoff games on record. Years later I found out that Kim, who I wouldn’t meet and marry for another decade, was sitting just a few rows away at that game.
It was cold. I looked it up and it was number five on the coldest games of all time. At kickoff it was one degree above zero.
But that’s not how it’s known.
The game is known as “Red Right 88.”
The Browns were on the 13 yard line right in front of where we were sitting. The Browns had an amazing place kicker who had already scored twice from much further.
Red Right 88 was called and if quarterback Brian Sipe didn’t see an easy pass he was supposed to throw the ball out of reach of anyone and the team would try to kick a field goal for the win.
Sipe threw an interception and eighty thousand fans swore. The season was over.
Anyway, you may have heard that this year the Browns used a lot of replacement quarterbacks before signing Joe Flacco to come in as their fourth starting quarterback for the year.
It was a great story. He’d led a team to win the Super Bowl.
Actually, it wasn’t just any team. It was the team that had been the Cleveland Browns before they left town because they got a better offer in Baltimore. But I digress.
He’d been hanging out at home being a dad when the Browns called (the team that is now the Browns not the ones that used to be the - never mind).
In his first game he looked great. It was like he’d learned the lessons of Red Right 88. If he didn’t have a clear open pass, he would throw the ball into the dirt or out of bounds.
As he got more and more playing time, he began to make riskier throws. Sometimes they’d work out and the announcers would praise his arm strength and his daring - but often they wouldn’t work out and someone on the other team would end up with the ball.
And that’s what happened Saturday. At the start of the second half Flacco threw an interception that was run back for a Houston touchdown.
In football, when the other team scores, your team gets the ball back. And so a couple of minutes later Flacco comes running back onto the field. The announcers, who were getting on my last nerves by this point, talked about how this would be no problem for the veteran quarterback. He’ll shake off his mistake and get back to work.
And then Flacco threw another interception that was run back for a Houston touchdown.
That’s when friends started to text me.
Some remembered that I’d predicted Flacco would do what he’d done. To be fair, I thought he’d spread them out more and I thought he’d wait until the end to do it so we’d lose on a heartbreak.
But then again, I’d been there for Red Right 88. Though as an aside, there is still a picture of Brian Sipe on my refrigerator. Kim had a huge crush on him despite that play and had pinned a grainy newspaper photo of him on our refrigerator with a magnet.
The lesson I took away is that we need to be most careful when we get too comfortable.
Confidence is a tricky thing.
Not enough can be debilitating. Too much can lead to mistakes.
Past performance
Some time during any ad for an investment company, you will hear a disclaimer that says something like, “past performance may not be indicative of future results.”
It’s a bit odd.
They spend most of the time telling you how good their services have been in the past and then they take a minute to warn you that this doesn’t mean they’ll be good in the future.
Sure, all these people made all this money listening to them - but who knows what the future will bring.
And that’s my second lesson from this weekend’s game.
Even when past performance indicates what you are capable of, the conditions that made that possible in the past just might not be the conditions we’re facing today.
In sports, a key player on your team may be injured or a key player on their team may be back.
The Browns’ defense was one of the best in the league for the entire season.
Over 17 games their statistics were overwhelmingly good.
On paper, they looked to be dominant. And when they faced this same team just weeks ago both the offense and the defense were so much better than the opposition.
But, as the saying goes, that’s why we play the game.
Past performance will break your heart.
Shake it off
The third lesson is that you have to be able to shake things off and get your head back in the game.
I’m not talking about Flacco’s first interception. I honestly don’t think that that was in his head when he threw the second interception.
He should have learned lessons from the first but he was right not to be spooked by it.
No, there was a moment earlier in the game that I think he was not able to shake off and there was a cascading effect.
Flacco threw the ball to nine foot tall David Njoku. Before the ball got there, the defender slammed into Njoku and the receiver was unable to catch the ball.
Njoku threw up his hands and looked to the referee for the pass interference flag.
Flacco threw up his hands and looked for any official he could find to ask about pass interference.
You could see that it stayed in his head and he was unable to get the next play off on time and he had to call time out.
In some ways it was a small moment but the inability to shake it off made it a bigger moment. Given how the defense had been playing, I felt the game was lost right then and there.
But I had sat in sub-freezing weather for Red Right 88 so I didn’t turn the game off until after the second interception.
I still haven’t learned that lesson.
Essay from Dim Sum Thinking Newsletter 199. Read the rest of the Newsletter or subscribe