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One of the difficult things about sports is also the best thing about it.
That “thing” is this: “You get one chance in sports, and when that chance is gone, it’s gone.”
Oh sure, sometimes a team gets a rematch within a season, but you get my point.
That leads to the questions that start with “what if?”
It’s been a while since we wandered down this road, but it feels like the right time to use our imaginations to think about “what could have been” in several different scenarios in the sporting world.
If you’re not sure what we’re doing here, read the first one and I think it’ll make more sense.
What if it wouldn’t have snowed in Denver for the Broncos game with the Seahawks?
Remember that game? It looked like it was being played inside a snowy globe.
What if it had been a sunny, calm day instead?
Being at home, I think the Broncos would have won that game and won the AFC Championship the next week. But I also think the Super Bowl would have looked exactly the same as it played out in Santa Clara—with Seattle’s defense dominating their opponent and winning.
What if the Cubs had not won the World Series in 2016?
The follow-up question is, “How would the seasons that followed 2016 have been different if the Cubs had lost Game 7?”
Traditionally, the loser of the NBA Finals, Super Bowl, World Series and the Stanley Cup Final struggles to get back to that place again the following year.
If the Indians had rallied to win the series, the dark cloud that had been hanging over the Cubs and their fans for 108 years would have been insufferable.
The players who were the core of that team would have had to bear the weight of rallying from down 3-1 to lead big in Game 7 and being unable to lift the curse, and many of them would never have been the same. Heck, most of them weren’t great after they won in ’16 and then got worse after they were traded from the Cubs to other teams.
What if the Colts would have won their final game of the 2023 season?
Remember, the Texans scored at the very end of the game, giving the 3-14 Bears the top pick in the draft that followed.
The Bears traded that pick to Carolina, who sent DJ Moore back to the Bears. The Bears would get a haul of picks in return, which ended up putting them in line to draft Caleb Williams the following April.
The Bears are a lot closer to being in the Super Bowl than the Colts, the Texans or the Panthers.
What if Indiana had not switched to class sports?
Let’s say, for example, the proposal to create classes based on school size had come before the IHSAA in 1995 and they voted against it.
I remember a respected, small school administrator in our area telling me, before the IHSAA voted to pass the class sports proposal, that if it didn’t go through, it wouldn’t be the end of the discussion.
I couldn’t get them to say it then, but it seemed clear to me that the smaller schools in the state were prepared to break away from the IHSAA and create their own governing body.
We all know what went down.
The big schools still look down on the smaller schools, but the thing that has changed is that the small schools couldn’t care less. In the single-class sport model, the little schools just wanted the opportunity to show the bigger schools that they were good and that they could compete.
Now, they don’t have to prove that anymore.
What if Lou Holtz hadn’t stepped down from Notre Dame after the 1996 season?
I think this question has popped back up in the last two weeks because of his passing, and it’s a fascinating discussion.
The whispers about Holtz’s time in South Bend running out really started after the 1994 season, when the Irish went to the Fiesta Bowl despite a 6-5-1 record.
They followed that up with final records of 9-3 and 8-3 and trips to the Orange Bowl in 1995 and the Independence Bowl after the 1996 season.
The math says they lost 11 games in his last three seasons, when they’d lost a total of 13 games in the previous seven seasons.
Notre Dame football fans got spoiled in those early seasons, and the five-loss season of 1994 lit the torches that would soon be carried by those seeking his ouster.
But, as often happens, what followed was a much bigger mess than what they had.
- Bob Davie — five seasons … 35-25.
- Ty Willingham — three seasons … 21-16.
- Charlie Weis — five seasons … 35-27.
They did the same thing with men’s basketball coach “Digger” Phelps in 1991, and they have posted only 16 20-win seasons in the 35 seasons since and only made three trips to the NCAA Sweet 16.
When playing the “What if” game, remember, it could always have been worse.
