Luck never gets the credit it deserves. Whenever we experience success, we like to say it’s because we worked harder than everybody else, we were smarter or any number of reasons we can find to make ourselves look better. Only when we fail or somebody else succeeds do we invoke luck.
Luck plays a huge role in every part of our lives. Hell, had a meteor not randomly found the Earth in its path 66 million years ago, we wouldn’t be here in the first place. Should another one find its way here, whatever species replaces us will probably feel the same about themselves as we do now.
It plays an enormous role in a football season, too. Yes, every season, there are truly elite teams that don’t need as much luck to be successful, but they’ll damn sure take any they can get because sometimes, those great teams’ seasons are destroyed by bad luck. On the other side, some teams are far luckier than they realize and enjoy fantastic seasons. Then, they are shocked when they don’t enjoy the same amount of luck the next season and come crashing back down to Earth.
Remember TCU in 2022?
The Horned Frogs went 6-1 in one-score games that season and reached the College Football Playoff Championship Game. Winning that many one-score contests takes more than luck — good coaching and game management help, too — but when you’re involved in a lot of close games, any play can change the outcome, including the bounce of an oblong ball. So, for the Horned Frogs to go 6-1 in those games despite a turnover margin of only +1 suggests that they made timely plays when it mattered and were on the right side of plenty of coinflips.
The fact they followed it up with a 5-7 mark and didn’t reach a bowl game in 2023 suggests the luck ran out.
TCU is an extreme case of what can go right and wrong for any team. It’s also an example of why we should be a bit more skeptical of some teams who may have benefitted from more than their fair share of luck last year, and why we should be more bullish on those routinely dealt a bad hand.
Here are a few teams that could see the scales balance out this season.
Teams due for some better luck
Kansas State: The Wildcats finished 9-4 last year (6-3 in the Big 12), but went 1-4 in one-score games. Those four losses were 30-27 at Missouri, 29-21 at Oklahoma State, 33-30 at Texas and 42-35 at home to Iowa State. Only in the Oklahoma State loss did Kansas State make stupid mistakes, as…
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