What a difference two weeks makes.
After the Southern Miss debacle most of us were writing off the team and slitting our collective football throats. Now we ride high after the team pulls itself together for two huge victories.
And we should be worried sick about the Wake Forest game this weekend.
We’ve been here before, you see. The Pack gets a huge victory – or victories- as the underdog (in fact, we’re the only team in the country to knock off two ranked teams while unranked). Then it falls flat against an opponent supposedly far inferior to the Goliath it whipped like a pizened dog the previous week.
I know, I know. There are cases where this hasn’t happened. But the trend is too obvious to ignore. It’s doubly worrisome when the upcoming game involves the Florists.
Yeah, the Florists haven’t won in Carter-Finley since, well, forever. But in 2004 they nearly did. And as for away games, as if last year’s debacle wasn’t enough, recall the 2003 Winston-Salem horror: shocked Pack fans filled that high school stadium at Wake and watched the Florists dismantle our nationally ranked team. Trust me: suffering the lisp-ridden taunts (“Go Wake THAWEST! State THHHUCKS!”) of Florist fans after that game was absolutely no fun.
No, no. The Florist fan base may have large numbers of those Southern small-town rich kids who take piano lessons and are said to have “tendencies.� The Florist football team, though, is for real. And for State to have any pretensions of success this season, the Florists are one of the teams Chuck Amato’s boys simply must thrash and thrash soundly.
Now on paper, they should do so. The odds-makers are already spouting their nonsense and making us six point favorites. But – cliché alert – the games aren’t played on paper. That’s particularly the case with the Florists; paper football games don’t factor in the absolutely greatest danger facing State, fan and player, as I write this: Da Big Head.
We went to Weak in 2003 with Da Big Head and were beaten senseless. We invited the Florists to Carter-Finely in 2004 with Da Big Head, and had to take it to overtime after being down by 14 points. Even last year, with the Jay Davis saga winding to its agonizing end, Da Big Head chirped subconsciously: good God, I know we stink, but these are the Florists. Come on.
Haven’t you, like me, seen signs that post-FSU-win “Da Big Head” – the feeling that we “shouldn’t lose” to a team like Wake – begins to return? And that, my friends, is a recipe for disaster. We as fans and the players themselves must regard this game with utter seriousness. Win and we are on track to have a special season as well as breaking the Letdown Curse that dogs Wolfpack football like Inspector Javert. Lose and it’s another year of “Go Wake FOWEST! State THUUCKS!â€? Then, they’ll make tractor noises.
Look at is this way: When a guy whose whole contribution (and what a kilderkin it is) to this site is making jokes tells you it’s time to be serious, it probably is. It’s like a leprechaun putting down his beer, staring you in the eye, and saying it’s time to stop all that assing around and pay attention.
Lose Da Big Head. Take this seriously. And let’s give those presumptuous SOB Florists such a beating that they walk from the field knowing that their pretensions of gridiron glory are just that.
