Winning without playing

I've seen overconfidence many times in my days as a sporting fan.

I've overheard, from many sports shows, the fact that the underdog is going to lose, so why should they even show up?

Oklahoma's dominant football season came under scrutiny this season, when they showed up against a Kansas State team, under-prepared and overmatched.

Their football team had heard from the media, many times I am sure, that they were one of the best teams to ever play the game.

Their football team had already counted their season as an undefeated one, yet their are two football teams who can argue with those fact: Kansas State and LSU.

Even the University of KentuckyÂ's basketball team fell under the spell of this overconfidence earlier this season, when they matched wits with the University of Louisville.

It seems that a typo in their basketball program had already made them 8-0, before they played the Louisville basketball team, when in fact, going into the game they were only 7-0.

When the basketball game was over, Kentucky's record stood at 7-1, not the 8-0 their basketball program had proclaimed them to be.

It seems that for some teams to break through these spells of overconfidence, there needs to be changes in the way they are thinking about their opponents, and this starts with the coaching, the practicing, and a complete reevaluation on what these teams want to accomplish come the end of the season.

To be a champion, a team not only has to play like a champion, they must also treat their opponents with enough respect to prepare for them as though there are no easy games, no automatic wins, or the Goliaths truly become vulnerable to the Davids out there.

Which brings me to the lackluster, emotionless, heartless, unprepared, blowout loss by the Philadelphia Eagles on Sunday.

Did the Eagles even practice this past week?

I ask this question to all of America who witnessed this game, because it sure looked like to me that the quarterback, the running back, and the wide-receivers were all on different pages of the playbook.

Many too many people on the Eagles staff were celebrating the fact that they had completed a 4th and 26 play the week before and that because of that play they thought they were destined to go to the Super Bowl this year.

Destiny surely can mess with a players psyche.

Destiny creates in a players brain the fact that their is a higher power above who just will not let a team lose no matter what.

Well, maybe while the Eagles were praising their Destiny, they should have taken a look at their opponents and seen the Destiny on their side, in the form of a former player and coach battling cancer.

The Destiny of the underdog is always stronger than the Destiny of the favorite.

A team can never be too prepared, a team can never anticipate too much, and it just seemed like the more dominant team that took the field on Sunday, the team that had nothing to lose, the team playing with an immediacy, a heart equivalent to a giant, was not the Eagles, but the underdog, and under-appreciated, Carolina Panthers.

I think it is rather sad when a team cannot win the big game.

I cried four years in a row for Jim Kelly, Thurman Thomas, and the Buffalo Bills.

I thought it was a travesty that the Chicago Cubs let their jinx get in the way of making it, finally, to the World Series this year.

However, I am just a fan, one cog in the big machine of sports, and I cannot make my teams practice harder, I cannot make my teams fight until the final whistle, and as a Philadelphia Eagles fan, I certainly cannot make a wide receiver catch a pass that hits him in the hands, and I surely cannot make a receiver run the proper route that is called.

As an Eagles fan, and as a Buffalo Bills fan before, all I can do is wait for next year, and hope that the Eagles will finally take their opponent seriously, instead of listening to what the media says, about how there is no way they can lose that next big game.