October baseball, college football remains gold standard in sports television

There's no need for a poetic introduction: This was the greatest sports weekend of the 21st century.

The college football pundits told us all eyes needed to be on the pair of ranked match-ups in the southeast, and both SEC bouts ended with the underdog on top: Texas A&M fell to Mississippi State, and Ole Miss knocked out Alabama.

Credit must go where credit is due, of course, for initializing this firestorm: UA stormed into Eugene, Oregon, and once again crushed the Ducks' national championship dreams.

Like last year, the Wildcats entered the week unranked, but this time, came out Sunday as the No. 10 team in the country, the first time this has happened since the poll was first used in 1989.

But in the earthquake that was the shakedown of the AP poll, the games in Oxford and Starkville, Mississippi, while riveting, ultimately were just tremors along a fault line.

Fittingly, the new media capital of the world – Los Angeles – was the epicenter of it all. The backdrop of the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, with the famous Hollywood sign visible atop Mount Lee was a perfectly subtle element of foreshadowing for the "Jael-Mary" play that was an epic exclamation point on a tremendous day of parity across the Top 25.

That had to be it, right? What else was left that could possibly beat the unanimous SportsCenter top play, or Fox Sports' "The 1"?

I exchanged surprised glances with colleagues from other publications the moment redshirt junior wide receiver Jaelen Strong took off his invisibility cloak and emerged in the end zone with the ball in his hands — everyone realized that the stories they were about to publish were practically rendered meaningless by a single stroke of luck and genius, and it was as if, based on our collective facial expressions, we all telepathically asked each other, "What the hell just happened?"

After a game that ended around 8:30 p.m. Pacific Time, dozens of writers, (including myself) had to scramble to edit headlines and ledes that would have read something like "No. 16 USC survives late push by ASU" or "ASU comes up short in final seconds," just waiting until the clock had zeros across the board to hit publish. Long after ASU had boarded its team bus to the airport where a charter flight awaited to whisk them back to Phoenix, no one in the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum press box wanted to go home.

Twitter was ablaze with hate for coach Todd Graham late in the fourth quarter. He left ASU without timeouts or the ability to draw up one final strike toward the end zone. Thankfully, a Hail-Mary leaves fans susceptible to short-term memory loss.

The rest of our coverage team had gone down to the field to prepare for a press conference that would undoubtedly beckon questions much like the ones that were asked about last week's performance: Why did ASU's defense make Trojan redshirt junior quarterback Cody Kessler look like Marcus Mariota? What happened to the running game? Where was DJ Foster? What happened with the tackling on defense and special teams coverage units?

All perfectly fair and valid inquiries, reduced to an irrelevant stream of consciousness on the merits of a single, superhuman effort.

Most were captivated by the NLDS game between the San Francisco Giants and Washington Nationals that ended up lasting 18 innings and went until 2:30 a.m. on the East Coast, and by the way, some excitement took place at Dodger Stadium, too: The Dodgers and Cardinals split back-to-back one run games, including a walk-off home run by Matt Kemp to avoid a 2-0 deficit heading back to St. Louis for Game three.

As if that wasn't enough, across town in Pasadena, No. 8 UCLA was on the verge of collapsing against Utah. I was sitting with our State Press coverage crew, some of them still furiously typing and transcribing quotes in an effort to complete our chronicling of redshirt junior quarterback Mike Bercovici's epic conquest, as was a reporter from the Daily Trojan on my right.

But suddenly, everyone's eyes were glued to the television, including USC athletic department staff, with an obvious stake in the result and general disdain for their rivals in Westwood, as junior kicker Ka'imi Fairbairn missed two consecutive field-goal attempts that would have clinched a Bruin victory, first from 55 yards and then again when a roughing-the-kicker penalty gave him a chance at redemption from 50, officially thrusting the Pac-12 South into chaos.

Before a single NFL down had been played Sunday, sports fans in every time zone in America (it might be a stretch to include Alaska and Hawaii, but I'm sure they were excited about something) had something with which to be thoroughly enthralled.

Eight playoff baseball games have been decided by a run. Four went to extra innings, including the marathon in D.C., in which Brandon Belt homered to give the Giants the 2-1 win and a commanding 2-0 series lead.

This year's American League Championship Series won't have Mike Trout or Miguel Cabrera, and yet, I'm compelled as I have ever been to watch the Kansas City Royals try to keep their improbable postseason run alive, against the Baltimore Orioles, a team whose odds of making in this far in March were about the same as Kansas City's — I'd offer "slim to none," and that might even be considered generous to Las Vegas folks.

If you've had the time to catch a game, you've probably seen managers and players wearing hoodies with the slogan "Always October."

On behalf of sports fans everywhere, I ask, why can't it be?

 

Reach the assistant sports editor at smodrich@asu.edu or follow him on Twitter @StefanJModrich

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