John Wooden Predicts Ohio State over Notre Dame in BCS Championship

 

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, with the burden increasing as the winning streak continues on. Time and time again there have been stunning upsets in sports, with the only common denominator being the fact that the losing team was a long winning streak.  In this regard, Wooden stated that a loss at the right time can be a good thing that actually insures a team's success as it acts like a reset button.  

 

Playoff history is replete with examples of this, perhaps the best example being Kentucky’s unbeaten basketball super team a decade ago.  This has often been the case in the BCS championship, with undefeated Alabama, Georgia, LSU, and recently Oregon teams not prevailing. In all of these cases, the postgame analyses were strictly limited to the discussion of the X's and O's, without a hint that maybe the losing team was burdened by a losing streak.  Consequqently, with its 13 game winning streak, and Ohio State's regular season ending loss to Michigan, Notre Dame's streak appears to be in jeopardy.

 

It also seems strange to see this idea from Wooden, whose basketball teams had some epic winning streaks. Those streaks can be explained by the fact that those Bruin teams were so superior to their opposition that even a lessened performance was enough to keep winning.  But in the context of a single elimination tournament like the BCS championship, the chances of running into a clearly inferior opponent is not very great.