ST. PAUL, Minn. -- Some days, you need a game you can reach out and touch. You need a game where there are people standing patiently outside the gates of a small stadium, blankets folded over their arms, waiting for someone to open a ticket booth the size of a upright footlocker on which a sign hangs that says, "Children Under Five Admitted Free." Some days, you need a game where they're selling hot dogs, and hamburgers, and bratwurst, and you have to pay for them under the stands and then come back because, as another sign says, "Your bun is your ticket." Some days, you need a game where the women's basketball team is selling soda and cookies to support itself. Some days, you need ragged pep bands, seemingly formed by like-minded strangers on the sidewalk outside who just happened to bring drums and a tuba to the game. Some days, you need a little, low-ceilinged press box where everyone is jammed in, including the coaches from the visiting team, so you can hear them agonizing over their headsets, calling an assistant down on the sidelines an idiot, and calling one of their linebackers a "lazy f---," and nobody in the press box turns a head. Some days, you need a game you can reach out and touch, and a place in the game where the corporate gigantism afflicting the sports-industrial complex isn't quite so stifling, a place in the game where it's still easy to breathe. Somewhere beyond O'Shaughnessy Stadium, beyond the neat little campus and the grain elevators and the big river, they were playing important football games in the Big Ten, in the SEC, and in the ACC. There were shiny, happy people in shiny, happy luxury boxes. There were millionaire boosters and even more corporate executives. There were bands and they all wore uniforms, and they were huge, and they were so far down below the press box that they might as well have been playing on the radio somewhere. There was bombast and pageantry, and there was some terrific American football being played, and every one of those games was worth watching, on television, because they were basically television shows themselves. So when St. Thomas whacked Wabash 38-7 at O'Shaughnessy Stadium to advance to the semifinals of the NCAA Division III football tournament, the game didn't shake a leaf outside Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis, or Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta, or Bank Of America Stadium in Charlotte. But I am willing to bet that, in none of those places on Saturday, did anyone see a tight end score on a fake field goal. I am also willing to bet that, in none of those places on Saturday, did anyone see a tight end score on a fake field goal, which his team then followed up with a successful onside kick, which was followed by another touchdown. And I am willing to bet your house that nobody at any of those games was waving a papal flag in the stands because the star running back on the home team is studying to be a Catholic priest. All of that was what you could see on Saturday at O'Shaughnessy Stadium, where some people played American football and played it very hard. "As a coach," said St. Thomas coach Glenn Caruso, whose career record improved to 85-13 with the win, "you make those calls that people might call risky calls, but you do it because, if they don't connect, you have supreme confidence in the unit, offense or defense, that you're sending out afterwards will go out on the field and mitigate that mistake. Frankly, that's one reason why I don't think those plays are as risky as other people might think they are." It is beyond refreshing to hear a football coach talk like this. There's a lot of the riverboat in the way Caruso coaches his team. It goes beyond gimmick plays like the fake field goal -- tight end Charlie Dowdle was the holder, and he ran the ball down the right sideline and into the end zone -- and the ensuing onside kickoff. Caruso's team almost never punts, and not just because it almost always scores. On Saturday, the Tommies converted 5 of 6 fourth downs, including Dowdle's touchdown on the fake field goal. And on that play, it was Dowdle who had the option of putting the ball down for the kick, or taking it on his own. "That one was a little bit of a read," said Dowdle. "We practice that year-round, and it worked out for us." It's enough to make you wonder whether there's a direct correlation between the number of people in the stands -- and the amount of money on the line, and the size of the television audience -- and the level of risk-aversion on the part of head coaches. For example, the increasing sophistication of football analytics has demonstrated that coaches are better off running a play on fourth down and short yardage than they are punting the ball away. (There's even something called the Bellman equation, developed by an economics professor, that purportedly is definitive on the subject. To name only one coach who is open to the possibility, Bill Belichick is at least halfway to being a believer in the theorem.) Of course, in a year in which Mark Richt got fired at Georgia for not winning enough games, and Les Miles was nearly run out of Baton Rouge for having a bad last half of the season, and in a context in which every phone line to every talk-radio station in the South is set aflame if Coach Yokel doesn't land that fanged madman linebacker from Bear Bryant Memorial High School, there are variables, albeit many of them insane, that the good professor likely did not include in his calculations. But for someone like Glenn Caruso, the percentages have become a kind of instinct. His gut is a delicate calculating machine. "Look," said Caruso, "I know a lot of people say they're risky. But I think good football is good football. I believe there's trick plays, and if there's leverage points and opportunities that we can take advantage of, we do that. That's why we are who we are -- players as players and coaches as coaches. So I really did feel the play of the game was the fake field goal. And it was fourth-and-10, so it wasn't like a fourth-and-2, so you really had to trust it. "But when a team overreacts to something, what we see on film, based on something we saw last week, you can't, in my opinion, allow that to happen. And then the onside kick was one that we absolutely didn't expect to execute, based on what we saw on film, but both of those plays, they completely changed alignments from what we saw, and I'm really happy that you have a menu and that it's accessible within your players' teaching, and both of those were executed perfectly." Not that St. Thomas didn't dominate the basics, as well. It ran 83 plays to Wabash's 59, and it had the ball for nearly 20 minutes longer than did the Little Giants. (And no, they did not run the Annexation of Puerto Rico.) St. Thomas held Wabash's star running back, Mason Zurek, to 80 yards, most of them long after the game was beyond his team's control. The Tommies controlled the line of scrimmage on both sides of the ball, even though their star running back, Jordan Roberts (he's the seminarian), was held down as securely as Zurek was. But they built their lead with superior special-teams play. Their opening score was a 48-yard punt return by wideout Nick Waldvogel, who broke loose up the middle, dropped a Wabash defender with a perfect straight-arm, and scored easily. "It was just a plan we drew up," Waldvogel said. "I just trust my coaches and my teammates to do what's best, and the call was great. As a punt returner, you're kind of just hanging out there, so you have to trust your teammates because you're just hanging out there in space, trying to make a play. So a hole opened up in front of me and I just took it, trusted my own abilities and made the play." The decisive drive came shortly before halftime, when St. Thomas got the ball back on its own 45-yard line with only 25 seconds to the break. The Tommies ran off three first downs in a row and got the ball close enough for Paul Graupner to hit a 24-yard field goal to push their lead to 17-0 as the clock ran out. "The most important drive of the game was the one right before halftime," Caruso said. "The most important play was that fake field goal." It was the first loss this season for Wabash. For its part, St. Thomas is undefeated in 13 games and it will play Linfield next week for a chance to go to the Amos Alonzo Stagg Bowl in Virginia, which decides the Division III national championship. Not many people left the stadium, even after the game got completely out of hand, but since it seemed every third person in the stands was a relative of one of the players, this probably isn't surprising. The game was something for which it was worth staying around. You never were really sure what you would see next until the final gun went off, and people walked back through the gates and out into the clouded, darkening evening. Somewhere, beyond the little stadium and beyond the grain elevators and beyond the big river, Michigan State and Clemson and Alabama were punching their tickets for the upcoming multiweek television spectacular. Here along Summit Avenue, children cheered and ran pell-mell in all directions. And if they were under 5, they'd seen the game for free.
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