Darrell Laurant: Great games not based on statistics

Why do so many of us like sports so much? Maybe it’s because they’re so unpredictable.

We’re starved for that. Our movies and TV shows hardly ever surprise us. Neither do our political races, especially with the pollsters yammering in our ears for six months before the voting booths even open.

The talking heads have tried to de-mystify college sports, as well, stuffing statistics into their hard drives and telling us what is supposed to happen when one group of overgrown 20-somethings faces another on the football field or basketball court. When Alabama meets LSU for the national championship tonight, those of us watching on TV will get a headful of numbers.

Ultimately, it means nothing.

Consider this. Syracuse, one of perhaps 10 teams in the country (or so it seemed) that didn’t qualify for a bowl somewhere, beat West Virginia 49-23 back in October. West Virginia just finished destroying Clemson 70-33 in the Orange Bowl. Clemson beat Virginia Tech twice in 2011 by a total score of 51-13.

So does that mean Syracuse is 101 points better than Virginia Tech? Of course not. Syracuse had no business beating West Virginia, and West Virginia shouldn’t have beaten Clemson — at least not according to the pundits.

Thank God they don’t play football on the basis of computer software. No yet, anyway. That’s why I enjoyed last Tuesday night’s Sugar Bowl between Virginia Tech and Michigan so much.

OK, so Tech lost. But it was a great game, with all its imperfections. In fact, it could be argued that it was the imperfections that made it a great game.

David Wilson, who just declared for the NFL draft and is one of the best running backs in Tech history, made his second-longest run of the night in reverse, moving his team from the Michigan four-yard-line back to the 26. Later, Danny Coale tried a fake punt, for no apparent reason, that failed miserably. Quarterback Logan Thomas, a Brookville High School product who played brilliantly most of the night, threw an interception that was more like a handoff. Tech blundered into Michigan’s punter at one point, giving the Wolverines the ball back, and the Hokies’ Tony Gregory fumbled at the end of a strong kickoff return to set up a Michigan field goal.

Enough of the play-by-play – if you cared, you probably saw the game. And you knew that first string Tech kicker Cody Journell had been jailed for breaking and entering after a Blacksburg fracas, and that backup Tyler Weiss had been sent home from New Orleans for missing curfew (an easy thing to do in the Big Easy).

So Tech was in big trouble with a third-string kicker, right? Wrong. Justin Myer hit his first four field goals, the last one passing across the crossbar with two seconds left to send the game into overtime.

And the Hokies should have scored on their first possession when Coale made a spectacular one-handed grab of a Thomas pass, slid through the end zone and out of bounds, the football still firmly in his grasp. Or so it appeared, but the officials waved off the catch and left it up to Justin Myer.

By now, the supersub had risen in stature from unknown to a given. Except that this time, he missed wide right. Michigan kicked its own field goal, and the game was over.

None of this made any real sense, and that’s what held our interest until the final play.

It was unpredictable. Like real life. And, whether we like it or not, like college football.