A Need for Originality

If I somehow ever decide to switch out of mechanical engineering and decide to become a 2nd or 3rd grade teacher, my school year will consist of lessons centered around kids learning to think for themselves and form their opinions.

Since there is a better chance I come to the conclusion that I can walk on the Cal basketball team, I will just have to post about it.

Sports, and public perception in general, has gone too much towards numbers and statistics, something that not only is annoying because there are many factors that are not taken into play, but is something that holds us back as a people (sounds weird, but I think that's the correct grammatical use . . .)

Many articles I have read by so-called experts on Yahoo and ESPN have told me nothing of real substance; they rehash information, pull up statistics as if they are everything (read: John Hollinger), and come to conclusions without looking at other factors such as personal situations, motivation, momentum, things that can truly sway teams.

Because of this, I feel that this generation, and in turn, the younger generation, no longer understands sports.

I am not going to go around and act like I understand sports, because I don't understand every facet; I don't understand all the plays, nickel and dime packages (which one is which . . .?), I don't keep up with fantasy production as much as I'd like to (1-2 in my league so far, I'll make a comeback). I do feel, however, that because my youth was filled with more playing sports than analyzing and looking up stats, that I look at teams and players differently, and analyze them based on what I used to feel going into different games with injuries to our best player, playing multiple times in a weekend, or coming off a big win as an underrated team.

I am not touting my method as the way to understand sports. I am saying that sports is to be enjoyed, and when analyzed, analyzed with an open mind and an individual opinion, something that definitely does not require numbers and statistics at all.

Everyone is listening and reading, which is fine, but most are quick to adopt the ideas of the authors of magazines and websites, and continue to tout them without much thought and questioning. A prime example of this, which continues to annoy me, is the knee injury that occurred to Paul Pierce during Game 1. For those of you who don't know, Pierce went down with what seemed like a severe knee injury in the middle of Game 1 of the NBA Finals, was even carted off in a wheel chair, but somehow came back to win the game for the Celtics.

Many fans were annoyed and thought Paul Pierce was faking, and continued to make a big fuss about it. I understood their initial anger, because, as I know myself, losing sucks, and people tend to become irrational after a loss. But after time passes, opinions can still be formed, and it was disappointing to find that this didn't happen readily for the Pierce situation. Let me ask those fans this: do they know Paul Pierce's history of injuries/returns? Have they ever had a knee injury? Do they understand Paul Pierce, where he came from, and the type of player he is? If they look that up, and dig deeper than what is at the surface, they will come to another conclusion.

I want to stress that there is no wrong way to look at sports; as long as you enjoy it, then sports has done its job from an entertainment standpoint. But if all you look at is the obvious, and what can be calculated, you're missing out on the greatest part of sports: the fact that its unpredictable.