Careful What You Wish For: A Digest Sports Commentary

When I see our boys go out there and play every Saturday, it never crosses my mind that there’s ever a lack of effort. And when I look and the coaches and the passion that they engage the team within practices and on the sideline, it’s never crossed my mind that they didn’t care enough.
What has happened to the Jaguars this past season isn’t the result of us not having enough passion or caring enough, but instead us not appreciating where we were in the heat of the moment.
In seasons passed, there have always been ongoing gripes about what could’ve been done better and what’s not being accomplished. For the football team specifically, however, this narrative grew stale fast. This narrative isn’t because football is exempt from criticism, but for the better part of a decade, they’ve just been THAT good.
Bayou Classic appearances, SWAC West titles, and SWAC Championship trophies, and yet still, there was chatter of expectations unmet. ‘When will they win the SWAC again?’ ‘When will we get the next great quarterback?’ ‘We know they’re good, but can they beat Alcorn?’
All of these questions, especially the last one, could be heard in seeming perpetuity throughout the Jaguar Nation’s monolith. Yet, despite how many games we won and how many accolades were achieved, it looks like, as fans, we could never live in the moment and appreciate the greatness that we saw every year.
Low and behold, we got our victory over Alcorn that so many voices claimed to be the chink of the former regime’s armor, but we lost almost everything else that matters. But, for all the vanity and high standards that we rightfully expect as members of the Jaguar faithful, I can’t help but see the irony.
This commentary isn’t slander or vitriol aimed against anyone in our building today. Still, there are certain things that I’ve witnessed with my own eyes happen that I can say with some certainty wouldn’t have happened under different circumstances with different personnel in our building.
For future reference, the losses that have taken place over the past season are on every man and woman in that locker room who has donned the blue and gold. Homecoming, Jackson State, and especially in the Classic, I can’t help but feel as though we lost something that we had last year; we lost a spark.
Specifically speaking, I couldn’t say what it was from a practical or fundamental standpoint because from what my eyes tell me, we have the talent to bang with the best of them. So we have experience on our coaching staff to outthink the greatest, even Coach Prime over Jackson State.
So the question I’ll have to ask myself and the department will likely have to ask itself is; how can we still win? We have all the pieces as mentioned above, we have the system, and we have the fans. So the only question is now that we know what hasn’t worked, is what can?