The Great Credit Card Swindle: Manipulation or Self-Infliction?

January 12, 2015May 18, 2022 RilalyLeave a comment

Although it’s never explicitly stated in Jon Ronson’s Who Killed Richard Cullen? report for the Guardian, this reader can’t help but think that the central character of this report, a British citizen named Richard Cullen, was ultimately a victim of his own hand. Author, Jon Ronson, does state that Richard Cullen made some decisions in the process that led to his demise, but for the most part Ronson characterizes the events that led Mr. Cullen to take his own life as that which nobody forced Mr. Cullen to do, but everyone did.

Mr. Richard Cullen decided to play what Mr. Ronson characterizes as a “peculiarly modern British” game of paying off debt via a credit card. This game involves using one “unbelievable good deal” offered by a credit card company to pay off a debt, followed by another decision to roll that credit card’s debt over to another “unbelievable good deal” from another credit card company, until the victim of this game, in this case Mr. Cullen, ends up accumulating twenty-two credit cards, with twenty-two different compounding interest rates.

If anyone reads through the list of Richard Cullen’s actions with the belief that the man attempted to enrich himself by playing this game, they are mistaken. Mr. Richard Cullen was a good and honest man who wanted to pay off a debt that arose as a result of a health crisis his wife experienced. Mr. Richard Cullen believed he figured out a loophole in the system that would help the Cullens remain debt free. The Cullens, it appears, were not so desperate that this was a last resort. It appears as though Mr. Cullen thought he could beat the credit card by rolling debt through the “unbelievable good deals” that credit cards offer was a more advantageous way of cancelling debt. We’ve all received mailings that suggest we will pay 0% interest for the first six months if we sign up now. Mr. Cullen thought he could use those offers, and subsequent offers, to eventually pay it all off. It would prove to be a series of fateful decisions that eventually led to Richard Cullen conceding defeat in this game, by taking his own life.

Was Mr. Cullen a victim of targeted marketing? Mr. Ronson’s meticulous research makes the case that Richard Cullen most likely was. Ronson’s research shows that that targeting involved deregulation of the industry, reported to allow members of the lower class greater access to credit, thus allowing credit card companies to give more loans to a greater number of people. This eventuated in a series of unintended consequences through government action that led to a group called list-brokers –aided by a complicated, computer algorithm called Mosaic– to provide lists of people considered “prime targets” to credit card companies for eventual lending. Mr. Ronson’s report does touch on the actions of government officials attempting to be wonderful without gauging the consequences, but Mr. Ronson focuses most of his piece’s content on the credit card institutions that took advantage of the lack of foresight by the government officials, and he backs up his thesis with an admirable amount of research into the process. The glaring omission in the piece is the amount of blame that we, the readers, should direct at the victim of this convoluted game: Richard Cullen. If, for no other reason, than to learn a lesson from it.

This approach might be viewed as a cold-hearted approach by the reporter, and it may have angered the Cullen family, that Ronson might have endeared himself to in the process of reporting on this story, but the greater lesson of what Richard Cullen tried to do, needs to be taught. How many of us are susceptible to “no interest (for a specified amount of time)” marketing campaigns, and how many of us are susceptible to their “one time only” campaigns? The lesson of Richard Cullen needs exposure, so that it makes a mark on those that learn the details of it.

Mr. Ronson describes Richard Cullen’s plight as beginning with a health crisis, his wife’s.

“There had been no splurging,” Richard Cullen said. “No secret vices.” Richard Cullen just tied himself up in knots, using each card to pay off the interest and the charges on the others. The fog of late payment fees crept up and eventually engulfed him.

One curious line in Mr. Ronson’s report states that, “Right now, nobody knows how Richard Cullen’s strategy fell apart.” At various points in the report, we learn that Mr. Cullen presumably went to a credit card company to help his wife pay off the $4,000 dollar health care bill, at 0% interest, and he proposed to her that he would “switch (her debt) to another one after six months.” He then took six weeks off work, during this period, to care for his wife, and he began “signing up for credit cards” to “cleverly roll the debts over from account to account.” This reader would suggest, having never attempted to play this game with credit cards, that the strategy fell apart right there, at the beginning.

Right there, at the very beginning, someone wiser than Richard Cullen should’ve stepped in and said something along the lines of: “Have you ever viewed the annualized corporate profits of these credit card companies? They don’t produce an actual product, yet their profits dwarf most of the blue chip companies that do. How do you think they accomplish this? How does the beautiful city of Las Vegas manage to build a big, brand new building almost annually? Have you ever heard the line: ‘There’s a sucker born every minute?’ Did you laugh at that line? Did you think of all those poor saps who don’t have the wherewithal to spot the scheme, and did you ever consider the idea that they might talking about people like you, and the “perfect” and “brilliant” strategies you have to beat the system?”

The point of the statement “Right now, nobody knows how Richard Cullen’s strategy fell apart” also has something to do with the idea that no one knows the specifics of what Richard was attempting to do, because as his wife, Wendy states, “He wasn’t a man who talked a great deal, and he never, ever discussed finances with me.” To answer the question of specifics, this reader would suggest that Mr. Ronson might want to troll through the man’s receipts and financial records to find the point where Mr. Cullen’s strategy fell apart. Mr. Ronson does appear to answer this question by prefacing it with the words “Right now.” Critical analysis leads this reader to wonder if these words permit Mr. Ronson a work around that allows him to avoid the discussion of Richard Cullen’s role in his own undoing. The implicit follow up, this skeptical reader reads, is that “In the future, we may know, but “Right now” we don’t, so let’s get to the point of this article.” The answer, the reader would assume, is in the accounting. Mr. Ronson decides, instead, to move to the question of marketing arms of the credit card companies providing alluring tag lines to the unsuspecting, a question Ronson appears to believe is answered by the following line from Richard’s wife:

“He (Richard) said he didn’t seek out all of the 22 credit cards he had somehow ended up acquiring between 1998 and 2004. On many occasions they just arrived through the letterbox.”

The question this quote prompts is how many people receive credit card offers in the mail, and how many respond? It’s entirely possible that the demographics of the Cullen home led them to being targets of the credit card industry, but how many in that area, my area, and your area are targets? How many of those same people respond? As they say of internet fraud and phishing schemes, those that swindle only need a success rate of one in one-hundred to be successful.

The Credit Card Addiction

As Tommy Lasorda once said of drug addicts, and I’m paraphrasing, “It seems to me that they make a decision to continue doing what they do every single time they do it. I don’t see them as victims.”

Without knowing the specifics of what happened to Richard Cullen, it would seem to me that he had many opportunities to correct the course at various points along the way. The decisions he made along the way led to him falling prey to the very human conceit of mental prowess, regarding a belief in his ability to master an otherwise unmanageable game. When future mailings arrived in the letterbox, in other words, Richard Cullen should’ve not only thrown these away, but he should’ve stomped on them and burned them in a ceremonial manner. He decided, instead to sign up for another one without asking the vital question: “What’s the catch?”

Those three words “What’s the catch?” seemed fatally absent from Mr. Cullen’s vocabulary throughout the chain of events that led to his demise, and those three words are not the province of highly educated, upper class types. These words seem, more often, to be the province of the lower class, and uneducated types who attempt to mentally out-duel one another with “gotcha” games. It seems indigenous to those who attempt to display their street smarts by engaging in the “What’s the catch?” line before the other has entirely finished their presentation. At the same time, however, some of us fall prey to the conceit that we know how to play the game so well that it might prove to be our undoing when we encounter the organizers of said game, because we have a strategy, or we fall prey to the belief that we have spotted the loophole nobody else has.

One victim can feel for the plight of another victim, amassing a debt $4,000 dollars (Mr. Ronson uses the British Pound), some could even see that as such a manageable debt that they go beyond that, and most would also admit that it’s entirely feasible that that debt could compound greatly with interest. Most would admit that at some point, before amassing a $130,000 debt that Mr. Cullen was eventually left with, that they would humble themselves, at some point in the process, and sit down with someone who “really knows what they were talking about” to discover how truly complicated the business of credit cards is. For most, this humbling part of the process occurs quite early on, and in this part of the process, I am quite sure that most readers would have nothing but empathy for the dire straits that Mr. Richard Cullen found himself in.

There have to be very few who wouldn’t empathize with the crushing realization that Richard Cullen must have realized when he couldn’t afford to pay one, simple health care bill at the age of sixty-five (the age of Richard Cullen on the day of his death). The crushing realization probably had something to do with the idea that life hadn’t worked out the way Mr. Cullen thought it would. Most of us figure that we’ll have a pretty decent hold on what our parents did right, and what they did wrong, and all of the twists and turns life offers us to a point where when we’re sixty-five we should be living fairly comfortably. Some might feed into the notion that we’ll be rich beyond our wildest dreams, but few of us considered that we’d still be living the 9-to-5, paycheck to paycheck, type of lifestyle that forced us to cut back and called upon us to sacrifice. We don’t know Mr. Cullen’s financial status, but we can assume that Richard didn’t want his wife to feel guilty about forcing the family to cut back further and sacrifice more. We can also assume that Richard Cullen was frustrated that he was unable to flip a switch and make it right. We can assume that this had something to do with the idea that his life had not turned out the way he thought it would. He might have thought that he found a loophole in the credit card game, and that his creative ingenuity would prove that he wasn’t a poor provider for his family.

The ultimate moment of vulnerability arrived, for Richard Cullen, when the envelopes with red boxes and “Date Due” letters were on his left and the promises of other 0% lending letters were on his right. Most people can find themselves amassing debt at this point. Almost all of us fall for these marketing campaigns to one degree or another. We may not even employ the “What’s the catch?” mentality initially, but there is a point where this mentality does eventually kick in. There is a point where everything our parents should’ve taught us should’ve wedged itself in the scenario. There should’ve been some sort of rationale that told us we’ve reached a point where enough is enough.

Jon Ronson informs us that the Cullen family’s attempt to reconcile the chain of events that led to Richard Cullen’s suicide, recalled for Mr. Ronson a song from Bob Dylan:

“I remember an old Bob Dylan song Who Killed Davy Moore? in which a boxer dies in the ring. In the song, the crowd says it wasn’t their fault (“It’s too bad he died that night, but we just like to see a fight”). The gambler says it wasn’t his fault (“I didn’t commit no ugly sin, anyway, I put money on him to win”). The opponent says it wasn’t his fault (“I hit him, yes, it’s true, but that’s what I am paid to do”). In the song, nobody killed Davy Moore and everybody did.”

Mr. Ronson’s Who Killed Richard Cullen piece is a well-researched, in depth, and well-written condemnation of the credit card industry, and I highly encourage anyone who has thoughts of signing up for a credit card –for whatever reason– to read it. His final, and most thorough condemnation arrives when he finds that the Cullens were conspicuously targeted because they lived in an area that the computer program Mosaic found contained individuals that would need money. The computer program targeted people who own their home (an important aspect in the program should the need to seize property arise), coupled with the idea that the people in this area probably might not be smart enough to read the small print and spot the pitfalls. Mr. Ronson also finds the man most responsible for the deregulation that freed up the credit card industry to allow lower class individuals the same access to credit that the other classes had. A Lord Griffiths of Fforestfach –the vice chair-man of Goldman Sachs International, a former director of the Bank of England, and once the head of Margaret Thatcher’s Domestic Policy Unit– admitted that he was in favor of breaking up the “classic cartel” that was the banking industry of December 1970. At that time, he says, credit was “very much a middle-class preserve and I believed that the democratization of credit had to be a good thing. Everyone in principle should have access to credit.

“The only way in which to make banking a competitive industry is to remove all obstacles to potential new entrants into the industry,” he says. It was, by all accounts, a key factor in the subsequent deregulation of UK banking.

He concludes by saying, “I don’t think anyone would have foreseen how innovative and aggressive and competitive the financial services would become in their techniques,” he says. “The whole lot of them are to blame.” He pauses. “I’m not advocating a return to the status quo. But the pendulum has swung much too far.”

The result, he states, was:

“The pendulum has swung much too far” in the other direction to a point where (a report Ronson found that Griffiths later wrote stated). “The sheer scale of consumer debt [1 trillion pounds] has made millions of households extremely vulnerable to shocks to the economy … such as oil price rises, acts of terrorism and wars … Debt is a time-bomb for the 15 million people who struggle with repayments.”

When an argument, such as the one Mr. Ronson presents in this report, is such a thorough, and convincing, condemnation of one side, I can’t help but think pink. There’s an old joke that involves an instructor telling a student to avoid thinking pink, because the instructor knows that will be the first thing the student thinks of when instructed to do otherwise. Mr. Ronson concentrates on the data that he believes relieves Mr. Cullen of blame in this situation. It makes for a compelling, compassionate story, and it bolsters Mr. Ronson’s apparent desire to “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.” His expose calls for structural changes to the integrity of the system, and this reader doesn’t doubt Mr. Ronson’s sincerity. This reader was, however, unable to avoid thinking pink.

We’re not supposed to think about Mr. Cullen’s role in this unfortunate debacle that Ronson characterizes as “no one is to blame and everyone is.” We’re not supposed to think about all the decisions consumers make along the way, when they fall prey to predatory lending. We’re not supposed to think about the recipient of nefarious marketing campaigns. We’re not supposed to think Mr. Cullen, and all of the unfortunate victims who fall prey these ploys, could’ve stopped at some point. We’re supposed to look at these matters in terms of bad guy versus good guy.

The “There but for the grace of God go I” line pops into my head throughout this story, for I know that my ego is probably as substantial as Mr. Cullen’s probably was. I also know what a blow it would be to my ego to realize that I cannot play this game as well as the average joe on the street, then to have to admit that my attempt to master this game has put my family in a position where my kids might not be able to satisfy this debt throughout their lives. I cannot imagine what a crushing blow that must have been to Mr. Cullen. As smart as I think I am, I’ve learned that it doesn’t matter when you begin playing on another’s home field. When I enter the turf of the used car salesmen, for example, I know I enter the underdog. As such, when I receive “no interest (for a specified amount of time)”, “once in a lifetime” deal, I don’t even open it. I place it in the trash can, rubbish bin, or whatever you call it. When I receive the phone call that offers “once in a lifetime” deal, I hangup. I’m not smarter than Mr. Cullen, the author, or anyone else for that matter. I will say that I am more aware of my limitations than Mr. Cullen was, for I would never flirt with the notion that I can beat a person, or a corporation, at a game that they created.

A quick read of this article might lead the reader to think the author lacks sympathy for Richard Cullen and his family. You might be surprised to hear, I think the opposite. I don’t care how much legislation various governing bodies pass, there will always be those who prey upon others. I don’t think it does us any good to call for more legislation, as the author appears to be doing in this story, or at least a reversal of a misguided bill. What does a legislation do, they pass laws, and most of those who prey upon victims are not impeded by laws. The best measure I think we can use to prevent more Richard Cullens is to tell his story, in a constructively critical manner that can seem harsh at times, to prevent future Richard Cullens.

Artistic Images vs. Artistic Creations

December 31, 2014January 1, 2015 RilalyLeave a comment

Imagine that someone tells you that an artist’s self-portrait is now on sale. “Who is it?” would probably be the first question you ask, and if it turns out to be the work of a relative unknown, “What’s his story?” would probably be your next. If the answers to these questions aren’t very satisfying, all of your follow up questions would probably involve the story behind the particular self-portrait painting in question. If these questions yield no satisfactory answers, your final question might be, “Why should I be interested in this piece?” The quality of any artistic piece is subjective, but most art enthusiasts generate enthusiasm based on a number of factors, most of which have little to do with the actual quality of the piece.

It may be a little unfair to criticize the desire some art enthusiasts have for “a story”, or more information, of a self-portrait of a relatively unknown author before vesting any interest in a piece, but in the case of artist Bryan Lewis Saunders such interest has been generated. This event leads to the question, how does a relatively unknown artist generate interest in his work?

That’s easy: paint a masterpiece. Most works of art are not masterpieces, however, and they fall into the subjective, relative arena of appealing to the patron on some level. Very few pieces of literature, musical productions, or sculptures are so great that they can attract an audience without a great accompanying story. Most art falls into the middle ground of subjectivity, and it’s that subjectivity that requires a great story we can identify with, or that which tantalizes us in some fashion.

The self-portraits of Bryan Lewis Saunders appear to be –to the non-enthusiast crowd– marginal works of art at the very least. For those that are interested in making their own determinations on his art, these works can be viewed here and here. In the second link, and in Jon Ronson’s piece on Mr. Saunders for the Guardian, you can learn of the story behind these self-portraits, and how they involve Mr. Saunders doing roughly fifty different self-portraits on fifty different drugs, be they of the prescription or controlled substance variety. This story has generated a tremendous amount of interest in Mr. Saunders, and his work, and it appears to have added tremendous value to his pieces among the chichi crowd that wants to have his story hanging on their wall.

Let’s say, for a moment, that I’m right about the artistic merit of Mr. Saunders’ work, and the greater value exists in the narrative. Are you one that would love to give that narrative to visitors of your home? Are you one that would love to have a Saunders hanging above your shabby chic armoire, so that you could say, “Mr. Saunders did that while wrecked on the prescription drug Klonopin, otherwise known as Clonazepam. And let me take you down the hall here,” you say with excitement. “This is Mr. Saunders interpretation of himself after experimenting with butane honey oil, and in our master bedroom is my personal favorite that Mr. Saunders created after taking 250mg of Cephalexin. He actually mixed some of the cephalexin into the painting with water and a watercolor pencil. It’s the prized piece of my Saunders collection,” you say with pride.

If your audience isn’t necessarily impressed with the paintings, they would probably find the narratives so exotic, that they probably wouldn’t want to discuss the actual artistic merits of the piece. They also probably wouldn’t want to enter into a moral discussion of recreational drug use, and how your piece seems to glorify it in some way. Most people do everything they can to avoid appearing puritanical, and they want others to perceive them as hip and cutting edge. That having been said, if the pieces are as marginal as I believe them to be, most of your friends will silently wonder if your interest in the narrative may have clouded your judgment. They would probably not call you out on it, however, with something along the lines of: “So, if it came out that Mr. Saunders was actually completely sober when he did these pieces, would you feel like you were robbed?”

What if you spoke to the author of the painting, at a gallery that presented his work, and you found out that he was actually a loving father of four that had a full time job as a UPS truck driver, and he did the particular piece you love on a caffeine buzz, as a result of putting down an extra cup of Folger’s, and the only reason he came up with the whole “drug thing” was to build some sort of mythology that his artistic career lacked. Would you give that narrative to prospective admirers? What if it turned out that this author had a sensible haircut, wore Levi’s jeans, and spoke in a manner that never wavered from the Queen’s English? How would you enhance your admirer’s enjoyment? What if your friend didn’t enjoy the piece you purchased, what kind of defense would you have? What would it say about you that you even purchased such a piece?

Too often, the definition of art is conflated the image of art, and we like those images to be festooned with notions of troubled, reclusive individuals that suck in a potent drug at high volume; and we prefer them unhappy, inconsistent, singularly focused, and driven by the vagaries of the heart as opposed to a concrete, rational mind. We want to hear that our artists are so singularly focused that don’t understand how toasters work; that they didn’t know how to tie a tie, until they were forty; and they don’t understand the intangible merits of kissing. The only images we want in artistic profiles are those of quirky individuals that never learned how to fit in with society properly. The normal person that happens to have a creative flair about them are just not very interesting, so we choose to believe that all artists, true artists, fit an image we’ve constructed in our head.

If you’ve ever watched a docu-drama about an artist, you know these images well. By the time these movies are over, you’re left with the impression that it’s far more virtuous to be labeled a creative genius than it is to create art. The constraints of these entertainment vehicles being what they are, the director cannot have a 90-minute movie about a guy painting. That wouldn’t be very entertaining. It might also be just as boring to have the characters sitting around discussing interpretations of the pieces, but when the directors of these movies portray the polar opposite, and focus on nothing but the narrative behind the artist, and the subsequent image of the artist, the notion of the narrative of art being more important than art is fostered, until it’s possible that some truly brilliant, yet unnaturally normal artists could remain obscure.

Those of us that have heard about the near divine inspiration that informed the masterpieces we all know, occurred within an elegant hotel room that overlooks the streets of Pamplona, Spain –where the running of the bulls occurs– begin to question these narratives after hearing them for the thousandth time. Is it a marketing campaign that they use to influence the perception of the final product, or do some people really go to “different places” and receive a degree of insight into the human condition that overwhelms them to such a degree that a seemingly inhuman masterpiece is born? It’s possible, and it’s likely that it has occurred on occasion, but for the most part, most art is created in boring places, on the backside of all of the mundane routines, and the dogged determination that has persevered through all of the trials and errors that eventually led to a product that an enthusiasts might find so pleasing that they litter their walls and book shelves with them.

Artistic brilliance can be defined as an individual perspective of the world, and the presentation of said material. It can come from the most unusual places, but it can also come from such usual places that it doesn’t fit the mold of artistic brilliance. Does this presentation of material require a narrative, does a well-crafted, somewhat spruced up narrative make a final product more beautiful or more interesting? Maybe, maybe not, but I’m sure that every mid-level artist that has made their way into the chichi art world would tell you, it doesn’t hurt.

Mr. Saunders work can be used as the idyllic form of the mold, but it shouldn’t suggest that there is any less merit to the artistic creations Mr. Saunders decided to produce. That’s his art, his niche, and it’s what he does, and how he perceives the world through a purposely unfocused lens. What should bother anyone attempting to create art is the manner in which the world views the artistic world. If you create an excellent piece of do you have to indulge in mind-altering substances to tantalize the imagination of the chichi contingent, or should you just lie and tell them that’s what you’re doing? My advice would be to do the latter, and simply give them a narrative to sell to their friends. Your art may be better received for it, and you may be invited to live the artistic life, for the chichi crowd is vehemently against drug-testing, even if it means that they’re being duped into believing in it.

The Fanatical Fallacies of Football Fans

December 22, 2014September 21, 2024 RilalyLeave a comment

After a lifetime spent watching college football, the only thing I find more disturbing than the disillusioned fan is the idea that I may have been disillusioned for most of my life. Watching college football now, I realize how little I actually know about the game. I may know the history of the game as well as most fans that I encounter; I may know the terminology of the game as well as most of these fans; and I may even surprise some fans by the obscure knowledge I have of some obscure players on some relatively obscure teams. For all of us fans that “know” the game, however, it can feel like a revelation to learn –because most of us have never been involved in the game in any organized capacity— how little we actually know about what goes into the determinations and decisions, made in football meetings, involving those “in the know” coaches of even our favorite teams.

A revelation, by my definition, is a different way of looking at something you’ve been looking at for a long time. Some revelations, such as “Coaches game plan according to the talent they have on the field” can be perceived as so obvious that it may elicit laughter from many quarters, because that’s as obvious as the nose on your face. And I’ve always known that coaches coach according to talent, but when I realized that it answered just about every complaint I’ve ever had about “my team”, I began to complain less and less. When you say that to someone that has been complaining about their coach’s game plan for longer than you’ve been alive, however, they may look at you like that’s as obvious as the nose on your face.

“We have the talent,” is something a fanatical might say, because they know you don’t know “their team” as well as they do. “Trust me, we have the talent.” At this point, you may detect that they think you’re insulting their team, so you clarify:

“I’m not saying you shouldn’t complain, and I’m not saying you have nothing to complain about. I’m saying that most of what you’re complaining about is based on all of the decisions and determinations your coaches, offensive coordinators, and position coaches have made based on what they learn in the spring, and throughout the season, regarding how to game plan according to their team’s strengths, and weaknesses.”

“We have the talent,” he repeated.

When you have a revelation of this sort, you may want to share it, because you may believe that your friend is in an earnest search for truth in the same manner you were, you may think that they’ll chew on your revelation, and reconsider it the next time they think of complaining. When I presented my revelation to my friend, I didn’t bother to consider that I was treading upon the precarious line that exists between emotion and rational thinking. I didn’t consider that I was doing an injustice to the time-honored past-time of all fans: The art of the complaining. I basically told him that once you come to grips with the fact that the talent you believe you see on the field is probably not a very good indication of the actual talent those “in the know” know, you’ll begin to understand why the game plan of “your team” is what it is.

The gist of this complaint, as I see it, is that all fans live with the notion that their team’s quarterback (QB) is an as-of-yet, undiscovered John Elway –a player I use as a high water mark of the greatest individual talent the game has ever seen at the position of quarterback, as opposed to the other talented QB’s that happened to fit into their team’s brilliant system perfectly— and the complaint stems from the idea that the only thing holding “our team’s” QB back from recognizing that kind of potential, is the conservative game plan that the coaches decide to implement. The question I had for my friend, and all football fans, is how well do you know the strengths and weaknesses of your team’s QB? How well do you know, really know, your team’s strengths and weaknesses? He, like most fans, suggested he knew. He watched them on TV, and he went to their games, and he probably read editorials, and listened to sports radio.

When an offensive coordinator (OC) is first introduced to the potential of a newly recruited QB, he may be led to believe that the sky’s the limit with this kid, and he may develop an explosive game plan that seeks to explore the extent of that QB’s talent on the field. The OC may be as excited as the young QB to employ this explosive game plan, as it will make the OC look as brilliant as the young kid if that kid is capable of executing it. At some point in the spring workouts, and/or throughout the season, the OC begins learn to game plan around the extent of this young man’s ability. It is the OC’s job to not only explore this young man’s talent, and put him in a situation in which he can succeed, but also —and perhaps most importantly— avoid placing him in situations in which he fails too often. At this point, the OC, together with the head coach, and the team’s position coach, may deem it necessary to thin the playbook, or develop a more run-heavy, more conservative game plan. The latter fact drives most fans crazy, because no head coach, no OC, and no QB coach is going to say, “We had to make that change, because the golden boy that we worked so hard to recruit is not as good as we thought he’d be, or as good as you fans think.”

When my friend’s team’s QB first took the field last year, in 2013, the young man came out of the gate as a highly touted gunslinger. The initial game plan ended up resulting in a shockingly poor interception to touchdown ratio for the young kid. The resultant talk that sprang from that ratio –among fans, and sports radio personalities— involved replacing that QB with the as-of-yet undiscovered abilities of the backup QB.

There’s an old joke that every fan’s favorite player on the field is the backup QB, and the reason for this is that, to some extent, analysts and fans learn the actuality of the starting QB’s abilities, while the extent of the backup’s are still a source of exciting speculation. The fans and analysts know that the backup, much like the starter, was a highly recruited young man that their school happened to land, but they haven’t seen him in practice, they have never attended QB meetings, and they don’t know that young backup QB’s demeanor in the manner the coaches do. When those meetings between the coach, the OC, and the position coaches conclude, and they decide that their best chances at success involve that starting QB, coupled with a new, more conservative game plan, the fans revolt in their little echo chamber, and they come to the conclusion that the coach doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Why did they recruit the backup if they aren’t going to use him? Didn’t they watch the games where the starter threw interceptions all over the place? The head coach, they decide, is just stubborn. He decided to start the starter, and he can’t get out of his way long enough to understand that he needs to do go in a different direction.

Regardless the emotions involved in this situation, I would think that most fans would recognize that every coach, on every level, will do whatever they have to to succeed. “No, he’s a stubborn, old rooster that always believes he’s right,” they say to this. Fair enough, I say, but if he were wrong, don’t you think that the OC, and the position coach, would tell him he’s wrong. “They probably do,” the complainer would suggest. “And I’m sure the stubborn, old rooster tells them to go to hell.” You think that this head coach is willing to lose games to prove he’s right? “I sure do. I think he’s willing to go down with the ship. We need a new coach even more than we need a new QB, and that AD (GM if it’s pro) needs to go, and if the owner (pro) doesn’t know that, then we might need a new owner too!”

After listening to my friend gripe about his team’s underutilized golden boy, with a golden arm, he switched the discussion to the manner in which the team audibles at the line. “Everyone in the stadium knows that they’re going to see an off tackle right when the QB audibles out of the called play.” To further my “Coaches game plan according to the talent on the field” belief, I offered my friend a response that I believed to be a helpful, if not humble, insight:

“At one point, in one season, (my team) decided to switch up the snap count, to slow, and presumably throw off the timing, of defensive ends, and blitzing defenders. The only thing they ended up doing, unfortunately, was throwing off their own offensive lineman. The result was an embarrassing amount of false start penalties. The coaches decided that their 18-22 year-old offensive lineman could not keep the switched up snap counts in their 18-22 year-old minds properly, and the coaches were forced to adjust to that by having the QB use more consistent snap counts, silent snaps, and the “slow clap snap” that has been en vogue in college football of late.” My point in introducing that humble analogy to my friend was to prove the point that a game plan has to adjust to the player personnel you have on the field. Rather than acknowledge that larger point, my friend chose to focus on those deficits that I had mentioned with regard to my team.

It’s important to note here that prior to this discussion with my friend, I held his overall intellect in high regard. I wasn’t trying to belittle a person I considered beneath me, in other words, as much as I was trying to move an otherwise silly discussion to a higher level, a level I believed was more true than I knew for most of my life, and a level that I fantasized might place me in a higher level of esteem by my friend. What I found, instead, was that my friend had an unshakable belief, a wall that that he had presumably erected for the purpose of shutting out contrary opinion, and that this wall of was based almost solely on emotion. I’m quite sure that when I repeat this story to another disillusioned fan that they will laugh, and nod, and say they’ve had such a discussion, until that discussion moves to “their team” at which point the cycle will start all over again. When it does, however, I will be armed and ready with Kenny Rogers’ prescient rules of life: “You gotta know when to fold ’em, know when to walk away, and know when to run.”

We don’t know what we’re talking about when it comes to the finer points of football, be it college or pro. You don’t know why the coaches made the decisions they made, and I don’t know why. We all think “our guys” are supremely talented individuals who can throw every throw, block every defensive player, and run like the wind. We think this guy should be the starter based on what we’ve seen. We don’t know. We don’t know their weaknesses as well as the coaches, and we don’t know why they’ve coached the players how to compensate for their weaknesses in the manner they do. No coach is going to tell you that, however, as doing so would insult his player. No sports announcer is going to tell you this, because they do not want to insult their audience. Only someone with nothing to gain and nothing to lose would tell you that you don’t know what you’re talking about, because if they’re truly paying attention to the finer points of the game, they’re finding out how little they know on a weekly basis. You’ll probably agree with us, because you think you know far more than we do, but by doing so you might be exposing your own ignorance.