The "I want to vent regardless of reason" crowd

You've read it before and you'll read it again. That being a sports message board poster or a commenter typing "Enough with the youth (or inexperienced) excuse from the coach. This team just needs to win, period."

Encouraged by such an enchanting flight of fantasy, the dogpile begins and the string become the longest one on the board. It's as if all have become Nike catchphrase acolytes and the mantra is "just do it" with no room at the inn for facts and reason.

Well, we're sorry to say we don't offer any guaranteed-to-work-or-your-money-back de-programming product for the low price of just $19.95 but we do adamantly believe that the members of this particular cult have either been self-brainwashed or gulped down some hallucinatory kool-aid.

That's because there is no one timetable that fits all for experience.

Was there one for each of your kids as they surely must have developed in lockstep? Did every one of your newer co-workers evolve at the same pace? Did you immediate take to your new jobs and the multitude of tasks sans any errors? And this without a 'defender' whose purpose is to make your achieving success as difficult as possible?

So why the simplistic and false expectation with sports?

We've read just such at times this season, primarily on on New Mexico State and Nevada message boards.

Let's try this. Think back when your were 17 or 18 (yes, for some of us that takes a heavy duty withdrawal from the memory bank). Possibly your confidence level wasn't then what it is now. Your worldly experience surely wasn't. All of a sudden, you're on your own. It's living with you having the sole responsibility for getting to class, taking care of homework assignments, laundry, you name it. Did I mention the hallelujah-like but extreme proximity of the opposite sex in your dorm? Or the same sex, whichever direction you roll.

So along with the above, add mastering heretofore unknown basketball intricacies. Then there's role shifts (sometimes within the same season), a being asked to perform in different capacities. There's also better than ever before competition, those bigger and stronger with having been through the wars a season or two already on their resume.

Talk about being in Adjustment Central.

So in what fantasyland is it accurate that the expectation be that underclassmen should play as well as or sometimes even better upperclassmen and with equal or better consistency than elders?

Or better yet, offer the exact location of the fool's paradise where the nauseatingly offered admonition that "(he or they) have played half the schedule already so they are no longer neophytes" is appropriate?

Planet Earth to the fanciers of such beliefs: stuff it unless you are living, breathing examples of the dogma you express. If you claim that you indeed are, then come to the head of the class and explain how you did it, lay out just how to take such a path and offer why others doing so will be as successful as you claim for yourself.

The line forms on the left.

We're waiting...

And waiting.