"Saved by the bell." "We're out of cookies." "Roll with the punches." "Matthew, we need to talk." These are all phrases I don't like to hear. But there's another saying I hate hearing even more than all of those - "moral victory." It's one of those things that you hear about all the time, but what does it really mean? And does it really exist?
A moral victory is generally something that occurs when your team loses a hard-fought game, but there are still a lot of positives to take away from the contest. Maybe the winning team was favored by a large margin, yet your squad gave the opponent all it could handle. Perhaps your team was leading almost the entire game only to see the bad guys snatch away the victory during the waning moments. Or you could have outplayed the other team completely and lost because of some freak occurrence such as wide open shots not falling or a tornado appearing out of nowhere to throw your starting quarterback into the next county. Any and all of these could potentially qualify as a moral victory for those who are so inclined to believe in them.
Unfortunately, I'm not one of those believers. I think moral victories are the dumbest thing since the decision to shut down large sections of both Cabell and Newcomb halls simultaneously. The reason I'm even killing precious trees to write about them here is because something happened this weekend that's got the whole sports world talking about moral victories again.
This past Sunday the Dallas Cowboys - a significant underdog - wound up just short of upsetting the New England Patriots, in Foxborough no less. The Patriots came into the game riding two tremendous streaks: they had scored more than 30 points in 13 straight games - one game away from tying an NFL record - and hadn't lost a regular season game at home in three years. The Cowboys managed to snap one of those streaks, but they couldn't finish the job to stop the other from continuing. Up by three with a little more than two minutes remaining, the Cowboys allowed Tom Brady to be Tom Brady and lead the Pats to a game-winning touchdown to give New England the victory, 20-16.
Now, this in and of itself is usually enough to send me into fits of uncontrollable screaming, but having to read all the postgame coverage talking about moral victories made me just want to bang my head against the wall. Yes, I know. The Cowboys very easily could have won that game, and a lot of individual players performed well. But they still lost. That means for whatever reason, they failed to do enough right to win the game. And, as Herm Edwards reminds us, we always play to win the game. When you don't accomplish that goal, you've obviously done something wrong.
So why can't we just call a duck a duck and say what a moral victory really is - a loss? Why do we need to sugarcoat it by calling it something other than it is? In this age of inflating grades and touchy-feely compliment sandwiches, it's as though we're unable to tell anybody anything negative without somehow trying to put a positive spin on it. That may be necessary for grade-schoolers, but these are professional athletes we're talking about. If they can't take criticism when they deserve it, then they should become chiropractors or something.
When's the last time you saw a defeat really significantly change a season, anyway? The closest thing I can think of in recent years is when the New York Giants lost against the Patriots during the final game of the 2007 regular season but then went on a roll that eventually took them to a Super Bowl victory parade down Broadway. But that playoff run wasn't really about the momentum built from a loss. That run was the byproduct of a damn good defense, a fortunate, Brett Favre gaffe during the NFC Championship Game and an Ellis Hobbs slip which allowed Plaxico Burress to be wide open to catch the game-winning touchdown during the Super Bowl. None of those things happened as a result of the Giants' Week 17 loss.
When it comes down to it, unless you're trying for a better draft pick, very few good things come out of losses. I'm not denying that individual players could play well in losing efforts, or that teams who lost couldn't make perfectly valid arguments that they should have won the games. I'm just saying that in the end, the team that lost almost always lost for a reason. When you come into games with the object of victory and you emerge defeated, that's a loss - plain and simple. There's no way around it - no half-victory column in the standings for games you almost, should have, could have won. So can we all please develop some backbone and stop sugarcoating these losses by calling them moral victories? The bruises on my head will thank you.
Walking into Scott Stadium Saturday, I heard more than a few people say that if the Cavaliers managed to lose by less than double digits, that would be a victory. To finish, let me just ask one thing to those people and to everyone who still defends moral victories: If the Cavaliers had indeed only lost by nine points and gone home with a moral victory alone, would you still have rushed the field?
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