The long drive home from Indianapolis Saturday night after the Tiger football game afforded me the opportunity to do some deep thinking.
Ok, don’t overreact—I was focused on the road and driving home safely.
But clicking off mile after mile, at night with no view of the Northern Indiana plains to help pass the time lends itself to massive introspection.
And at the heart of just about everything is the question “why?”
I love that word, “why.”
“Why” is where you find out what’s really going on. It’s where you start to understand how things, and people, really work.
I first discovered this concept of this in teaching a class at church. I was asked why I believe what I believe about a certain Biblical topic. I realized that I didn’t have an answer for it, and I set out to change that.
Over the course of every day since then, I have been on a quest to make sure that I can have an answer to “why” in every aspect of my life.
Why do I do my football homework on Thursday?
Why am I such a terrible eater?
Why do I prefer to shower before I go to bed instead of in the morning like everyone else?
Why do I like audio books over regular books?
You get the point.
I am so into this that I set aside two days a year to focus on it—around Christmas time and in the summer while I have a line in the water.
What was I thinking about driving home Saturday night?
I was thinking about Tiger football and I asked the question, “why does what Bart Curtis teach work?”
The answer is repetition.
I am blessed to be allowed to watch them practice, and what I see them do on a Monday afternoon in early August is the same thing that they did at practice the Monday before the state championship game.
And it’s not just that they do the same things over and over again, their standard is to do it right every time in practice so that they will do it right every time on Friday nights.
Why have the Bears been so consistently frustrating to their fans?
Because Bears fans don’t trust anyone anymore, and for good reason.
The Bears always seem to have coaches with one foot out the door and GMs with their every move questioned. And as much as it hurts to say this, it’s true: the only thing consistent about the Bears is that they are always in a state of flux.
Two weeks ago, they canned their offensive coordinator. Last weekend, it was their head coach.
Now the guy who was a position coach three weeks ago is in charge of the entire football team and the GM of the team through all of it will get a shot to hire the new coach and decide what the next steps are.
There is a sizable debate on whether Ryan Poles deserves that chance, or whether or not he’s as much to blame for the spot the Bears are in as anyone.
Truth is, there is only one thread that runs through the entirety of the Bears mediocrity—the McCaskey family. They know less about football than even Jerry Jones does.
But they own the Bears, and that trumps everything else—and explains the last 40 years.
Why do we pay so much attention to March Madness?
It’s because people who don’t watch a single college basketball game for 11 months will get into office pools and online “you-pick-‘em” websites and fully engross themselves in the NCAA tournament. Why? Because time has proven that you don’t have to know anything about college basketball to win and win big in your office contest.
And the recent changes in the rules on paying players and NIL money aren’t likely to change that, because the potential to make money on college basketball is just as appealing to us as it is to college-aged kids.
And finally, for today anyway, why do we need sports at all?
Because the collective of sports still teaches our young people lessons like discipline, teamwork, resilience and sacrifice.
And on top of that, sports unite people like very few things can.
Look what Tiger football did over the last month. People of all ages, political stances, worldviews and demographics sat shoulder-to-shoulder in the cold and rain—their only concern being their wish to be part of history.
Why sports? What better to bring people together?