Saturday night in Atlanta, the Florida State Seminoles became the victims of a play called the “Block Six,” the cousin of Auburn’s “Kick Six” against Alabama two years earlier.
The plays are eerily similar in more ways than one.
Not only did each sequence of events involve a long run — at least three-fourths of the field — they both featured a run down the left sideline…
… in front of the home team’s coaches and players…
… with the opponent failing to establish effective lines of pursuit…
… after a field goal attempt of at least 55 yards…
… from a team widely acknowledged as the foremost dynastic power in its respective Power 5 conference…
… coached by either Nick Saban or the man who worked for him at LSU, Jimbo Fisher…
… in a game the Saban- or Fisher-coached team had led by multiple scores at an earlier point in time.
Yes, you could identify and rattle off several obvious differences between the two situations. The chief difference is that whereas Auburn’s Gus Malzahn purposefully planned to have Chris Davis as a (missed) kick returner, Georgia Tech’s Paul Johnson was worried that his team would pull a “Leon Lett” in the Dolphins-Cowboys Thanksgiving snow game in 1993. He didn’t want his players to touch the ball.
Yes, this game salvaged what will be an otherwise brutal season for Georgia Tech. Auburn didn’t salvage its season; the Tigers made their season on the back of the Kick Six, winning the SEC West and putting themselves in position to snare both an SEC title and a spot in the final BCS National Championship Game against… Florida State, a team which used a kick return and Auburn’s miss of a short field goal to win that thriller in Pasadena.
Yet, for all the ways in which the Block Six was different from the Kick Six, the similarities are sharper, and the biggest one — which deserves a little more examination — is that the heavyweight team favored to win should have put the puppy away when it had the chance(s).
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If you recall, Alabama missed two field goals — one of them especially late in the fourth quarter (blocked, as opposed to a “classic” miss) — which would have given the Crimson Tide a two-score lead over Auburn and provided Nick Saban’s team with a sufficient cushion. Alabama had numerous chances to — in political parlance — “lead in the polls beyond the margin of error.”
In sports, the expression can be best presented in this fashion: “Don’t put yourself in position to lose on one screwy play or one really bad call.”
Had the Toronto Blue Jays, for instance, been able to get even one hit or one sacrifice fly with runners at third base and fewer than two outs in the American League Championship Series against the Kansas City Royals, they wouldn’t have had to worry about bad ball-strike umpiring. It’s really hard to say that the umpires decided Game 6 on Friday night when Toronto went 0 for 12 with runners in scoring position, and 0-fer with runners at third and under two outs. The umpires shaped the outcome, but they didn’t decide it. There’s a difference. If you put yourself in position to lose thanks to a nasty break, you have only yourself to blame for being “within the margin of error,” for being within a threshold of vulnerability when you could have found higher and safer ground.
This is Florida State’s story against Georgia Tech.
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The Florida State SB Nation site Tomahawk Nation provided a thoughtful analysis of the Seminoles’ offensive limitations, which recalled a difficult first month of the season and stood in marked contrast to the previous week’s effective performance (especially in the second half) against Louisville:
https://twitter.com/TomahawkNation/status/658149117772853248
You can say that Florida State was bitterly unlucky to fall victim to such a wacky and improbable play, in much the same way that Michigan and Texas (against both California and Oklahoma State) lost games thanks to spectacular kicking-game errors. Yet, Michigan and Texas must also be subjected to the reality that they could have done a million different things to be in a better, more commanding position before an endgame disaster. It is the timeless lesson of gut-punch losses on highly improbable sequences: Sh** happens, and there’s no lesson to be found when it does — not in the immediate moment. The lesson is that you could have done several things to not lose WHEN sh** happens.
This leads into a larger and timeless point about football, which serves as a good way to close today’s piece.
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You will often hear fans and commentators say about a given team, “It’s just a few plays from being undefeated (or 10-1 or 12-0).” Conversely, you might hear fans use the opposite line of thought: “[Team X] is just a few different bounces of the ball from being an 8-4 club instead of 11-1,” with Auburn 2013 — the beneficiary of the Kick Six — serving as a classic example.
The value of this kind of thought is long-term, beyond the context of the given season. Auburn, and just about every team in general, can’t make its way through every season by receiving luck on a large scale and in conspicuously copious quantities. Gus Malzahn has dug himself a big ol’ ditch on the Alabama Plains, now that he’s not getting absurdly lucky anymore. Arizona needed a Hail Mary and a Joe Pisarcik moment to win the Pac-12 South last year, and the ball isn’t bouncing in a friendly way this season. Rich Rodriguez is learning a thing or three about how the scales even out over time. You do have to be better from year to year in order to maintain success, because the ball is not going to bounce in your favor every season.
However, in the short term — basically, within the confines of single seasons and the lives they acquire — the “They are just a few plays away from being [insert record here, good or bad]” line is useless.
This is cutthroat competition, drenched in pressure and bathed in tension, contested by 19- and 20-year-old male members of the human species. There will be chaos. There will be volatility. Games are going to be close. Maybe — think of Oklahoma-Oregon 2006 — officials really will decide the outcome of a game, and not merely shape the outcome of a game. It happens, but not all the time.
Generally, teams possess the ability to shape their fate, chiefly by putting themselves up by two scores in the final minutes… so that a “Block Six” merely leads to a three-point win instead of a six-point loss. If you’re a play away from winning a game, well, why didn’t you make that play?
The kicker (pun not intended) here is that Florida State is all too aware of this reality. The Seminoles lived on the edge throughout the 2014 regular season. They demonstrated ample perseverance and resilience on the road to a 13-0 regular season, but they also benefited from opponents failing to make the plays which could have carried them to the finish line.
“Florida State was a few plays from being 9-3 in 2014.”
“Florida State is currently one or two plays from remaining unbeaten this season.”
Both statements, however understandable and well-intentioned they might be, possess this much value right now: