Frazz by Jef Mallett for March 24, 2024

I love this comic but does anyone else get thrown off with the gradients he uses when colored ?

Technically, the only teams would be the rare case of teams with a no-loss season AND winning the championship.

I watched my son earn nine national championships in karate, and in every tournament where he was not grand champion (male) he was disappointed, but gracious to whomever defeated him.

Some people (most of ’em?) really love to WIN. Some to the exclusion of any other goal. The folks I most like being around, though, also like to DISCOVER things and SHARE good things and CREATE stuff (whether useful or artistic… or an attempt).

Expand it to “at least one loss” and suddenly it’s right and true.

Now Frazz starts us off with a bad assumption. In what world did colleges use sports to teach kids to win (and what does that even mean)? College sports are all about money.

You may end with a win as you end with lots of losses.

Learning how to lose well is a very important life skill. Winning is much easier.

The entire win-lose mentality is unhealthy.

Today’s strip is more of that “Everyone’s a winner” mentality, that helps breed mediocracy.

The idea of school sports goes back to the Romans: Mens sana in corpore sano, a sound mind in a sound body. Winning and losing is a byproduct of athletics, not the goal of athletics.

Well, the life story is that not everybody is a winner and that it takes practice and perseverance to win, Also cooperation with others.

Technically college sports is about learning how to be exploited and to pour money into the college.

The college “money” sports only teach students one thing – ask Coach Saban.

Meh

And high school sports aren’t?? They also have tournaments, but, in basketball, for example, EVERY team qualifies for the postseason.

Sports are about channeling young men’s natural aggressiveness into nondestructive activities. Teaching them to play fair, be good sports, always do your best, and accept both victory and defeat gracefully are helpful in turning boys into men.

basketball is boring as IMHO. The players are too tall, the scores are too high. It seems like the last few minutes are the only ones that count.

We teach kids to win so that we can vicariously feel like winners through them, and superior to others who supported those who didn’t win.

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If we were smart, we would teach kids that cooperation is more important than winning. But we are not smart.

The regular season is about being the biggest fish in a small pond. The post-season is about being the biggest fish in the BIG pond. You have to be “a winner” among the first even to qualify as “a loser” among the second. For some teams, anything less than the championship is a letdown, and missing the post-season entirely is a humiliation. For others, simply finishing the season with a winning record is noteworthy, and at any level winning more games this season than you did last season builds enthusiasm for next season. And of course, if you lose every regular season gave except the very last one, you’re going to party heavily after that win.

It’s commonly referenced in this strip that Frazz doesn’t win a lot of his races (running, swimming, or cycling), or even be particularly competitive in them. But he prefers to compete among (and against) the elites. He’d win more if he only competed against lesser athletes, but would that satisfy him?

My Alma Mater (Illinois) regularly qualifies for the NCAA tournament, sometimes as a fairly high seed, but it’s been nearly 20 years since they’ve made it past the second round. Yesterday’s win over Duquesne, however, means they’re headed to the Sweet Sixteen, so whether or not they reach the Elite Eight (let alone the Final Four), they’ll probably consider it a very good season.

In contrast, my high school went four calendar years without winning a basketball game; we didn’t set the national record for consecutive losses, but we held the state record (for all I know we still do). I was there when we won the game to end the streak, any we all lost our heads for joy.

One factual error: In the NCAA tournament (as in World Cup), the four teams who reach the final round each play two more games. The winners of the first game play each other for the crown, but the two losing teams play each other as well. Both the 1st place finisher and the 3rd place finisher end their seasons with a win.

Someone once commented that the message to the silver medalist is, “Congratulations. Of all the losers, you’re the best.”

1. In context, ‘ending the season with a loss’ means losing the last game of the season.

2. Now that there are post season tournaments for all conferences — the winner qualifies for MM — it is very rare for a team to NOT end their season losing their final game.

Most teams end their season in a conference tournament that sends its champion to the NCAAs. To end their season on a win without making the NCAAs (or NIT) a team would need to be an independent or in a conference that either doesn’t have a tournament or doesn’t get an automatic bid for its champion. Not up to date enough on college athletics to know how many teams, if any, would qualify.

A man is not great because he hasn’t failed; a man is great because failure hasn’t stopped him. – Confucius

School is not to give away cheap victories but more about overcoming adversities.

Maybe that’s why I never watch sports. Meaningless.

Sports is not about teaching kids to win. It’s about teaching kids to strive, to overcome challenges, teamwork, and physical fitness.

What if they were all ties?

Colleges today don’t teach. They indoctrinate.

As I have said before: One of my heroes is Robert Maynard Hutchinson; when he was President of University of Chicago he not only developed the Great Books system of education (with Mortimer Adler), but spoke the truest words of any college president ever – especially one whose school was a major football powerhouse; to wit, “Interscholastic athletics is entirely incompatible with education.” And with that, he shut their program down. U of C has not had a football team since 1939 – but they have had more Nobel Prize winners than any other university in the world……..

And those teams like University of Michigan, that entered with a long string of losses. smh