Watching USC come from behind to beat Penn State with a last second field goal in the Rose Bowl made for an incredibly exciting football game. But the game was also a reminder of what happens when you get too conservative, when you take your foot off the gas after you have built up a significant lead.
Some baseball fans my age or older might remember the manager of the 1964 Philadelphia Phillies, Gene Mauch. He managed his Phillies’ team to a 6 1/2 game lead with just 12 games left to play. But then his decision-making and managing strategies began to become unhinged. He started his two aces, Jim Bunning and Chris Short, in seven of the last ten games. Four of those starts came after only two days rest.
What appeared to be a near certain National League pennant for the 1964 Phillies ended up becoming one of the most spectacular collapses in baseball history. Mauch’s team lost ten in a row before winning their last two, ending the season tied for second, handing the National League pennant to the St. Louis Cardinals.
Gene Mauch went on to manage the California Angels later in his career, but he never was able to free himself from the reputation as a manager who couldn’t seem to win the big one, couldn’t close out a year or postseason series with a victory.
Watching Penn State dissipate their two touchdown lead in the Rose Bowl during the fourth quarter on Monday night, I couldn’t help but recall Gene Mauch and his snake-bitten 1964 Philadelphia Phillies.
For the first three quarters of the game, Penn State was scoring on nearly every possession. They were an offensive juggernaut, appearing to run on all cylinders against a rattled USC defence. Their quarterback Trace McSorley was having the game of his career.
But in the fourth quarter, with Penn State holding a two touchdown lead, the coaching staff decided to pull the plug from the offensive machine and put it back into storage, hoping they could secure victory by running out the clock with predictable draw plays up the middle.
Running the same draw play again and again in the fourth quarter, while melting the clock down with each possession, deflated their momentum, shut down their rhythm, and allowed USC to get back into the game.
Does this failed strategy sound familiar? Gene Mauch certainly comes to mind, but for those who think that case study of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory goes back a bit too far, there’s a more contemporary example.
Polls conducted throughout last year’s presidential campaign showed Hillary Clinton having a commanding lead over Donald Trump, which led some to believe that Hillary’s victory was all but inevitable. All she had to do was to avoid a major gaffee and the White House was all hers.
But while Hillary played it safe by avoiding interviews in the waning weeks of the campaign, Trump contined to campaign aggressively, as though he was running a two minute, hurry up offense, desperate to score one last touchdown before time ran out.
Hillary, like Penn State, worked hard for the first three quarters of the campaign, built up a signficant lead, and then decided to sit on the ball and try to run the clock out. It didn’t work for Hillary and it certainly didn’t work for Penn State at the Rose Bowl.
The lesson here, of course, is to never sit on a lead. Keep firing away, keep playing aggressively, whether you have the lead or not. If Hillary or Penn State had adopted that mindset in their respective contests, both their outcomes may have been quite different.
