Mike Finger: When risk is weighed against reward, some miscalculate - Houston Chronicle

Mike McCarthy says “you won’t get anywhere thinking about the negative all the time,” and he has a point. Coaching scared is no way to lead, just as living scared is no way to exist.

But the thing is, you also won’t get anywhere thinking about the negative none of the time, because that’s just delusion, and leading that way doesn’t work, either. Decisions have consequences, and some of them are bad.

Planning for everything to go right isn’t really planning at all.

In the grand scheme of things, McCarthy calling a catastrophically timed fake punt in the Dallas Cowboys’ Thanksgiving afternoon loss to Washington was not the most egregious risk-reward miscalculation of 2020. Heaven knows this year has seen plenty of them.

And although other football coaches in the state tried to match him this weekend — Texas’ Tom Herman also called a doomed fake punt before passing on a chance to at least guarantee overtime with a field goal, and Texas Tech’s Matt Wells somehow gave up a touchdown on an onside kick with his team leading — McCarthy’s gaffe was almost perfect in its wrongheadedness.

First of all, it offered precious little to gain. Trailing by four points and facing a fourth-and-10 from their own 24 early in the fourth quarter, the Cowboys still would have been 66 yards from the end zone even if they had converted. In what had been a defensive struggle until then, chances are they would have wound up punting anyway.

Second, the gamble appeared to be based on bad information. When the Cowboys ran their reverse to a wide receiver, they were counting on Washington to either give him room to run or leave the punter wide open for a pass. Neither came even close to happening.

But the third thing that made this particular debacle so fitting for our time was that the authority who ignored all of the odds in the first place continued to tout his plan even after it ended in utter disaster.

As most could have predicted, the fake didn’t work. As most could have predicted, it led to an easy Washington touchdown. As most could have predicted, that blew a close game wide open.

And afterward?

“It was a solid play call,” McCarthy told reporters.

This is called being dug in, and it’s not exactly unusual these days. It’s also probably not the best mentality to have when measuring risk against reward, especially when those variables tend to change over time.

UT decision-makers soon will have to weigh the ugly optics of shelling out about $15 million to rid itself of an unpopular coach against the chances of hiring a miracle worker who can help the Longhorns recoup all of that and then some by leading them to their first conference championship since 2009.

The Houston Rockets soon will have to weigh all of the rewards an All-NBA performer can offer them at his best against the risk of taking an unhappy superstar into a season in which he wants to be elsewhere. The Spurs know a little bit about that quandary.

Those who run all kinds of sports leagues — but most notably those who run college football and basketball — are doing their own arithmetic. The reward of conducting a mess of a season in which dozens of games are postponed every week?

Well, that’s obvious. It’s hundreds of millions of dollars in TV contracts.

The risks? So far, they’ve been deemed acceptable.

But maybe this is getting too cynical. Maybe McCarthy was right about not focusing so much on what can go wrong. And maybe some risk-reward calculations can be inspiring.

A Vanderbilt student named Sarah Fuller made one this week. See, she’s a soccer player, and a successful one, known for launching balls as far as 60 yards from her position as goalkeeper. Last week she helped lead the Commodores to a Southeast Conference championship.

Then she was asked to take a risk. Vanderbilt’s football team was 0-7, needed a kicker, and asked Fuller to come to practice.

There was a risk she could have wound up looking ridiculous. There was a risk she would be criticized by mouth-breathing knuckle-draggers for making a mockery of a game that does just fine in bringing mockery upon itself. There was a risk she’d don a helmet and shoulder pads and get pummeled by an opposing linebacker.

But to Fuller, none of those risks seemed so terrible. And after she kicked off against Missouri on Saturday, becoming the first woman to play in a Power Five college football game?

“I just want to tell all of the little girls out there, you can do anything you set your mind to,” Fuller told the SEC Network. “You really can.”

And that?

That was a reward worth chasing.

mfinger@express-news.net

Twitter: @mikefinger

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Mike Finger: When risk is weighed against reward, some miscalculate - Houston Chronicle
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