John Wooden Predicts BCS Semi-Final Losses By Georgia and/or Michigan

Of course not really, since John Wooden passed away in 2010.  However this blog has posted predictions several times based on the principles of John Wooden which have in fact come to pass.  John Wooden has articulated a truism of sports which strangely has never been acknowledged by the sporting public, yet keeps proving itself over and over again.  That truism is that a long winning streak can turn into a heavy and potentially insurmountable burden.  Time and time again there have been stunning upsets in sports, with the only common denominator being the fact that the losing team was undefeated.  In this regard, Wooden stated that a loss at the right time can be a good thing that actually insures a team's success because it serves like a reset button.  There are many examples of this at work, from last year's BCS championship game where one-loss Georgia avenged it's previous loss to unbeaten Alabama, as he predicted on this blog a year ago, the stunning loss by the 2015 Kentucky basketball superteam on its way to an expected 40-0 season, to the unbeaten UNLV basketball team that fell to Duke, to the unbeaten New England Patriots team that lost to the New York Giants in the Super Bowl, among many other examples.  And don't forget undefeated TCU's loss to Kansas State last week.

Of course Wooden's own UCLA basketball team seemed to defy this rule with a number of long winning streaks, which shows this is a subjective rule.  How long does a winning streak have to be for it to become a burden?  If a team is so much superior to everybody else (like some of Wooden's teams), even if a winning streak might be adversely affecting your performance, you still might be good enough to keep on going. But the fact is that a disproportionate amount of major upsets occur where the losing team had been undefeated, and that there are so few teams in major American sports that have an undefeated championship season.  So while everyone expects undefeated Georgia and Michigan to meet next month in the BCS championship game, don't be surprised if that doesn't happen.