Root for the Other Team.

Last weekend the Nebraska Cornhuskers played the Bethune Cookman Wildcats in football. The game was in Lincoln NE. Nebraska's first game against Akron was cancelled because of weather. I don't really know much about Bethune Cookman, but it seems they are a small college and they took the game because it offered a nice paycheck and a chance to play in front of big crowd. They weren't expected to win. They didn't. They played hard, and never gave up.

I read in interview with Wildcats running back Alfred Adams, a young man that played as hard as anybody on the field. Someone asked him about the crowd and the way they cheered for Bethune Cookman. 

"I was confused. I didn't understand why at first, I didn't know if they were fake or us or what. But, soon I realized they were just encouraging us and it was love because we didn't have any fans here so it was love the whole game."  Adams said. 

I thought about that for quite a while, and it is true Cornhusker fans, after losing the first 6 games of the season and ten in a row, were hungry for something to cheer about. But, I remembered a story that Mac Brown had told on television.

He was coaching the Texas Longhorns and they had beaten Nebraska, in Lincoln to snap a home winning streak that went back several seasons. It was around fifty games in length. Ricky Williams, the Longhorns running back was unstoppable that day. If he couldn't run around someone he ran over the top of them. It seemed like he carried the ball on every play and had about a thousand yards. He left defenders laying all over the field looking as if they needed triage.

ABC interviewed Brown and Williams on the field, asking all the usual questions and getting all the normal answers. "Thank God, my linemen, the coaches..."  I thought, you should thank the defense, they just boosted your Heisman hopes.

"I told Ricky to put on his helmet, people would be throwing things at us when we ran to the tunnel." Brown said. But, something amazing, to him, anyway happened. The crowd gave Ricky Williams a standing ovation. He had played well, and deserved respect.

I thought about those incidents this weekend. Rooting for the other team once in a while is a good practice. We have more in common than we realize. You can learn a lot about life from a football game.