Fifth Down...Twenty Years Later

Twenty years ago today, I was a freshman at the University of Missouri. It was Parents' Weekend and my father and I were at the Mizzou-Colorado football game. The Tigers had been pretty down for a number of years and Colorado was a team that would go on to win a share of the national championship that year. What happened on that day was one of the most stunning, disappointing, unfathomable games I've ever seen. In Tiger lore it lives on in infamy as "The Fifth Down Game."

If you don't know the details, you can read about them at length here. The long and short of it is that Mizzou was about to pull off an improbable upset, when a series of (ahem) questionable moves by the officials turned the thrill of victory into the agony of defeat. The winning touchdown scored (kind of) when Colorado's Charles Johnson (almost) made it into the end zone on fourth (well, actually it was fifth) down.

Colorado's coach back then was Mizzou alum Bill McCartney. At the time he was a high-profile figure, not just as a coach, but as the founder of Promise Keepers, a Christian ministry emphasizing the need for character among men. Unfortunately, after the game, he tried to turn attention away from the whole five downs thing, and place the focus on the field conditions that day.  Admittedly, the field was terrible. For some reason, the Faurot Field omniturf had played as if it were an ice rink.  But given McCartney's status as a supposed Christian leader, it was...well...let's say "unfortunate."

Not surprisingly, McCartney came under great criticism for his response. Here was a man who had talked so much about character, and yet he refused to admit that Mizzou got robbed and that his team was the beneficiary. He was called a hypocrite and worse, and to this day is largely villified by his fellow Mizzou alumni.

I was glad though to see the video below from McCartney today.  In it he says what he should have said twenty years ago.  I'm not sure if most Mizzou fans are willing to forgive him.  And frankly, that loss will go on stinging for as long as we cheer for Ol' Mizzou.  But I do take the following lesson away from the whole escapade:  Be humble.

Even when it doesn't seem easy, it is the right thing to do; sometimes we need to forgo our "rights."  Our failure to do so will, more often than not, cause us more pain in the long run.  But this is not the only reason we should do this.  We should be humble most of all because we follow one "who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross," (Philippians 2:6-8, ESV).

May we all emulate Christ in humility, and find our glory in him.