sd'sker
Banned
Thought this was something interesting to think about before the Mizzou game.
Maybe better posted under the '90s dominance thread, but I thought it deserved it's own.
For the last few years I've heard a lot of the talking-heads of college football talking about 'parity.' Parity is allegedly what makes Appalachian State beat Michigan, Houston rise to national prominence for beating Texas Tech and Oklahoma State (and subsequently disappear from national prominence after losing to UTEP), and parity makes Tim Tebow give impassioned speeches full of promises. I don't think parity is the correct word however. Parity is defined as the state or quality of being equal, i.e. as the media sees it, schools are becoming more equal. This is not how I see it.
23-odd centuries ago, Aristotle outlined three approaches an argument can take in convincing its audience. They were, in no particular order ethos (ethical), pathos (passion), and logos (logical). I think the reason for all of the 'parity' in college football has a lot to do with how teams frame their 'arguments' going into games.
Take, for instance, Miami. A team known for its 'swagger.' This is a team that can truly get fired up for a game. They seem to be driven by pathos. When passion is working in their favor, they have beat the ranked teams of Georgia Tech, Florida State, and Oklahoma, but they get a rainy day in Blacksburg and lay an egg against Virginia Tech.
Another example of a pathos-driven team could be USC. The fun-loving surfers blow out most of the teams they play with unmatched confidence, but every year, for whatever reason, they don't show up for one of their games and lose to one of Oregon State, Stanford, Washington, etc. (bad teams they 'pathetically' don't care about)
If I had to name Osborne's drive, it may have been ethos. We may have not had the best players, but we worked harder than any other team, and we had some decidedly Christian under-tones to our program. Also, you can't tell me Matt Davison's heroics, a la 'the Catch,' didn't have anything to do with Providence...Just kidding?
I see Coach Pelini doing something very different from all of these programs. When asked what he thought might have gone wrong last year against Missouri he thought our players might have been too fired up, and when they had a bad break or two early in the game, their drive disappeared. This year there is a decidedly different rhetoric to our football team. Pelini's new philosophy is to leave the pathos to the fans (which we do a mighty fine job of I might add). When asked questions about why Thursday's game may be setting up for a grudge match against Missouri, the team has roundly dismissed the questions, saying they will just focus on fundamentals and execution. I ask you, what does that sound like if not logos?
If Nebraska is going to again rise to the status of powerhouse, I think it is exactly this logical drive that we will have to maintain. If we have seen one thing thus far of the Huskers' performances this year, I think it is probably consistency. We haven't laid an egg yet. When the Huskers lost to Virginia Tech, they didn't blame a lack of passion, they blamed a breakdown in fundamentals. With a logos-driven team, this is easy to fix. They went back to practice that Monday and said, "let's get to work," and we saw it pay off with their best game of x's and o's against Lou-La.
Chase Daniel came at Nebraska with pathos. Two years in a row after games against Nebraska he tried to create himself a rivalry by saying things like we have a high school defense or alleging that we are the dirtiest team he has ever played or one of our players spit in his face. Luckily, Chase Daniel's mouth and arm have left Columbia, and now the Huskers can easily return to focusing on taking down the Tigers with the part of their game they can control. Their heads. We'll see if our logos can out-match the pathos-driven crowd at Columbia this Thursday.
Aristotle made it very clear that none of these three modes of argument were necessarily more or less affective. They were simply different, but for what Pelini is trying to accomplish at Nebraska, I think he has chosen the right one. He doesn't want a mediocre football team that every now and then will beat a team it shouldn't. He wants a team that will consistently play well no matter the occasion, no matter the competition; something more teams should think about in the era of 'parity' in which we live.
Maybe better posted under the '90s dominance thread, but I thought it deserved it's own.
For the last few years I've heard a lot of the talking-heads of college football talking about 'parity.' Parity is allegedly what makes Appalachian State beat Michigan, Houston rise to national prominence for beating Texas Tech and Oklahoma State (and subsequently disappear from national prominence after losing to UTEP), and parity makes Tim Tebow give impassioned speeches full of promises. I don't think parity is the correct word however. Parity is defined as the state or quality of being equal, i.e. as the media sees it, schools are becoming more equal. This is not how I see it.
23-odd centuries ago, Aristotle outlined three approaches an argument can take in convincing its audience. They were, in no particular order ethos (ethical), pathos (passion), and logos (logical). I think the reason for all of the 'parity' in college football has a lot to do with how teams frame their 'arguments' going into games.
Take, for instance, Miami. A team known for its 'swagger.' This is a team that can truly get fired up for a game. They seem to be driven by pathos. When passion is working in their favor, they have beat the ranked teams of Georgia Tech, Florida State, and Oklahoma, but they get a rainy day in Blacksburg and lay an egg against Virginia Tech.
Another example of a pathos-driven team could be USC. The fun-loving surfers blow out most of the teams they play with unmatched confidence, but every year, for whatever reason, they don't show up for one of their games and lose to one of Oregon State, Stanford, Washington, etc. (bad teams they 'pathetically' don't care about)
If I had to name Osborne's drive, it may have been ethos. We may have not had the best players, but we worked harder than any other team, and we had some decidedly Christian under-tones to our program. Also, you can't tell me Matt Davison's heroics, a la 'the Catch,' didn't have anything to do with Providence...Just kidding?
I see Coach Pelini doing something very different from all of these programs. When asked what he thought might have gone wrong last year against Missouri he thought our players might have been too fired up, and when they had a bad break or two early in the game, their drive disappeared. This year there is a decidedly different rhetoric to our football team. Pelini's new philosophy is to leave the pathos to the fans (which we do a mighty fine job of I might add). When asked questions about why Thursday's game may be setting up for a grudge match against Missouri, the team has roundly dismissed the questions, saying they will just focus on fundamentals and execution. I ask you, what does that sound like if not logos?
If Nebraska is going to again rise to the status of powerhouse, I think it is exactly this logical drive that we will have to maintain. If we have seen one thing thus far of the Huskers' performances this year, I think it is probably consistency. We haven't laid an egg yet. When the Huskers lost to Virginia Tech, they didn't blame a lack of passion, they blamed a breakdown in fundamentals. With a logos-driven team, this is easy to fix. They went back to practice that Monday and said, "let's get to work," and we saw it pay off with their best game of x's and o's against Lou-La.
Chase Daniel came at Nebraska with pathos. Two years in a row after games against Nebraska he tried to create himself a rivalry by saying things like we have a high school defense or alleging that we are the dirtiest team he has ever played or one of our players spit in his face. Luckily, Chase Daniel's mouth and arm have left Columbia, and now the Huskers can easily return to focusing on taking down the Tigers with the part of their game they can control. Their heads. We'll see if our logos can out-match the pathos-driven crowd at Columbia this Thursday.
Aristotle made it very clear that none of these three modes of argument were necessarily more or less affective. They were simply different, but for what Pelini is trying to accomplish at Nebraska, I think he has chosen the right one. He doesn't want a mediocre football team that every now and then will beat a team it shouldn't. He wants a team that will consistently play well no matter the occasion, no matter the competition; something more teams should think about in the era of 'parity' in which we live.
ulsating brain emoticon:
