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.

Be True To Your School

The Beach Boys once sang, in all of their brilliant harmonies, "Be True to Your School."  It can not be debated; I have heeded this command.

I still follow my high school's football and basketball teams as closely as I can from 568 miles away.  I have read about them in the online edition of my hometown's newspaper, exchanged text messages with friends and family members while they were at games, watched games streamed live on the internet and even once upgraded my TV package so that I would have the station that was carrying a game in which my high school was playing.  As a matter of fact, the color scheme of this blog is inspired by the orange and black of the Webster Groves Statesmen.

I still show the same type of support for my college as well.  Each Saturday during football season, you're sure to find me decked out in my Mizzou black and gold, watching the game if the Tigers happen to be on TV, or listening to the radio broadcast online if that's the best I can do. More Saturdays than I'd like to admit have been made or ruined on the basis of a Tiger football game.

As much as I am committed to my high school and college though, I am perhaps even more enthusiastic in my support of my other alma mater.  I have often told others that my three years at Covenant Theological Seminary provided me with a foretaste of heaven.  Thanks to both the teaching in the classrooms and the atmosphere that is cultivated, an ethos of grace pervades the campus.

Dane Ortlund captured my thoughts perfectly when he recently wrote about Covenant:

Every institution is filled with nothing but sinners. We are fallen, and our schools reflect that. And when I left three years ago, the school's overall sin-meter dropped considerably. But the norm is for institutions, even seminaries, to contain islands of grace amidst an ocean of self. Covenant is the only school I've ever set foot on that contains, in the mercy of God, islands of self amid an ocean of grace.

I shake my head with wonder at God's kindness to this institution.

Covenant recently released a number of faculty videos on YouTube that help communicate what makes Covenant so special.  I've included four below from some of the professors who had a particular impact on me.