Losing

When the No. 1 seed Alabama men’s basketball team suffered an upset loss in the Sweet 16 in 2023, coach Nate Oats sought out advice from one of the greatest coaches of all time—Alabama’s football coach, Nick Saban.

It will come as no surprise to learn that Nick Saban, the seven-time title-winning football coach, had some wisdom to offer his colleague. Saban emphasized the importance of not dwelling on the opportunity the team had just lost, but focusing on the next opportunity to come.

Saban’s approach paid off. Despite losing more games and earning a lower March Madness seed than it did the year before, the 2024 Alabama basketball team reached the first Final Four in the program’s 111-year history.

“It’s a great philosophy in life,” Oats said this week. “There’s a lot of adversity you hit … You live in the past; you’re not going to be very good in the present.”

That’s where Saban came in. One of the greatest winners in the history of college sports, Saban also happens to know plenty about losing. As Oats pointed out, most of Saban’s championships came during seasons marred by at least one crushing regular-season defeat.

It may be surprising that Saban was so willing to let Oats pick his brain. But as it turns out, it’s something the pair have been doing for years. After he was hired from Buffalo, Oats asked Saban if he could embed himself into Bama’s practice facilities to see how the best college football coach of all-time ran his program.

Oats said, “I went and watched practices. I sat in on staff meetings. I shadowed him for a day. I went on road trips with him to see how they operated. I tried to learn as much as I could.”

Most of us regularly lose things: keys, wallets, TV remotes, glasses, and phones. Some of us are more prone to misplacing things than others. It’s not surprising that men are twice as likely to lose their phones than women. One study concluded that the average person misplaces nine things a day and spends an average of fifteen minutes looking for lost items.

Why does this happen? What is the psychology and science behind it? It comes down to a breakdown of attention and memory. When we misplace our belongings, "we fail to activate the part of our brain responsible for encoding what we're doing." The hippocampus part of our brain is responsible for taking a snapshot and preserving the memory in a set of neurons that can be activated later. We lose things when we do not have a clear reference point of when or where we put down objects like our keys or glasses.

One of the ways we can improve our memory is through practicing mindfulness. We do this by stepping back and calming our thoughts, focusing on being present in the moment.

Possible Preaching Angle:

We can lose more than our physical possession! We can misplace our hope, peace, joy, and love. Advent is a season where we can refocus and become mindful of what we have received in Christ's coming.

In his New York Times bestselling book When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing, Daniel Pink explains the value of being a little behind. In the world of sports, a team that's ahead at halftime—in any sport—is more likely than its opponent to win the game. This has little to do with the limits of personal motivation and everything to do with the heartlessness of probability. But researchers have noted one peculiar exception.

Jonah Berger of the University of Pennsylvania and Devin Pope of the University of Chicago analyzed more than 18,000 National Basketball Association games over fifteen years, paying special attention to the games' scores at halftime. It's not surprising that teams ahead at halftime won more games than teams that were behind … However, Berger and Pope detected an exception to the rule: Teams that were behind by just one point were more likely to win. Indeed, being down by one at halftime was more advantageous than being up by one. Home teams with a one-point deficit at halftime won more than 58 percent of the time. Indeed, trailing by one point at halftime, weirdly, was equivalent to being ahead by two points.

Berger and Pope then looked at ten years' worth of NCAA college basketball games, nearly 46,000 games in all, and found the same effect. "Being slightly behind [at halftime] significantly increases a team's chance of winning," they write. And when they examined the scoring patterns in greater detail, they found that the trailing teams scored a disproportionate number of their points immediately after the halftime break. They came out strong at the start of the second half.

Possible Preaching Angles: Discipline; Endurance; Focus; Perseverance —Sometimes, the pressure of being a little behind is exactly what we need to propel us to greater discipline and higher devotion.

Kris Lackey thought he had hurricane-proofed his manuscripts. An English professor at the University of New Orleans, he had saved his fiction and papers (including the novel he had half-finished) via hard drive, flash drive, and hard copy. But as the murky waters continued to rise and he was forced to evacuate his home, he left his papers and computer equipment behind. Even so, he left them in high places—tables and bookshelves well out of harm's way. He was, by no means, expecting the 11 feet of water that completely besieged his house during Hurricane Katrina.

Returning more than a month later, Lackey found pages floating in mud, completely indecipherable, as well as what was left of his flash and hard drives. Nothing was retrievable. Nothing.

When asked by GQ magazine about the best advice he has to offer, actor Nick Nolte said,

This is going to sound strange, but my best advice is to accept losing. It's the grandest thing you can do. We as a culture think it's a terrible thing to lose, but it's only through losing that we grow. We don't grow by winning. … But our culture glorifies winning, so to accept losing is the opposite of everything we're taught.

Sometimes our greatest losses can become our most profound teachers. … I'm not saying you should strive to lose or that you have to lose all the time. It's great to win. But a fair amount of losing is what makes us progress as people. You learn acceptance and humility. You learn how to find happiness.

Most athletes believe that god/fate is on their side …. Indeed, when they win a championship, talk of "destiny" fills the postgame locker room. What must be confusing to these highly trained, well-paid professionals is when they lose the game. Does it mean that God doesn't like them, that he wasn't for them, that they weren't as special as they thought? Indeed, would any of them have the guts to admit they were destined to lose?

I'm sure many have noticed that we never hear athletes during the postgame interviews thank God for their loss. It seems the god of athletics only shows up when players win. But … [the apostle] Paul believed that the God of Israel delights in showing up in the midst of loss—the resurrection of Christ proves it. God turns losing into gain, death into life, sorrow into joy, weakness into strength, futility into glory ….

So I can imagine Paul throwing his arm around the athlete who's just lost the World Series [or the Super Bowl] and saying … "Son of Adam, life is a game and we're all destined to lose. Let's go celebrate the good news."

The film Chariots of Fire is a true story about two British runners competing in the 1924 Olympics. Eric Liddell, a devout Christian, was encouraged by his missionary dad to "run in God's Name, and let the world stand back and wonder." Contrarily, Harold Abrahams, Liddell's teammate, ran for personal glory.

On the boat to the Paris Olympics, Liddell learned that to compete in the 100-meter dash, his best distance and the race he was favored to win, he had to run the qualifying heats on Sunday. He resolved not to run on the Sabbath. During a reception in Paris, Liddell was pressured by Scotland's aristocracy to run.

Lord Birkenhead began: "We decided to invite you for a little chat to see if there is any way we can help resolve this situation."

Lord Cadogan said, "There's only one way to resolve this situation. That's for this man [Liddell] to change his mind."

Unruffled by the pressure, Liddell responded, "I'm afraid there are no ways, sir. I won't run on the Sabbath, and that's final. God made countries, and God makes the kings and the rules by which they govern. And those rules say that the Sabbath is his, and I, for one, intend to keep it that way."

The Sunday Liddell could have been running, he worshiped in a Paris church and preached from Isaiah 40, which states: "But they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; and they shall walk, and not faint."

Abrahams, however, prepared for the race and confessed to Liddell, "I used to be afraid to lose. But now I am afraid to win. I have ten seconds in which to prove the reason for my existence, and even then, I'm not sure I will." Abrahams did win the gold medal in the 100-meter, while Liddell applauded him on the sidelines. But his gold medal gave him only fleeting satisfaction.

Later in the Olympics, Liddell competed in the 400-meter, an event he had not trained for and was not favored to win. Surprisingly, Liddell not only won but also broke the world record.

In 1925, Liddell went to China to serve as a teacher and missionary. When life in China became so dangerous that the British government advised British nationals to leave, Liddell stayed behind and was interned in a prison camp, where he died of a brain tumor in 1945. His last words were, "It's complete surrender."

Elapsed time: Measured from the beginning of the opening credit, the scene with the Scottish aristocracy begins at 1:25:35 and last approximately seven minutes.

Content: Chariots of Fire is rated PG because of mild profanity.

Hall of Fame baseball coach Sparky Anderson is the only manager in history to win World Series titles in both the National and American Leagues. He led the Cincinnati Reds to the top in '75 and '76, and the Detroit Tigers in '84.

But even Sparky can't win 'em all. In 1989, the Tigers finished a miserable 59-103. Sparky writes, "I never dreamed I could be part of a team that couldn't at least play .500 ball. I was embarrassed and ashamed." Sparky, in fact, suffered mental and physical exhaustion early in the season and had to leave the team for 17 days.

Looking back on it now, he writes, "If you think you're destined never to fail, you better keep one eye open when you fall asleep at night…. For my first 19 years as a manager I was blessed by so much good fortune I thought maybe the devil had forgotten where I lived. In 1989, I found out that Sparky Anderson has to pay his dues, too…. I never got over the point of bleeding a little bit after every loss, but I finally learned to let go. I can't say I'm happy with the pain I went through in 1989. But I'm grateful for what it taught me."

After winning the gold medal for the long jump in the 1996 Olympic games, Carl Lewis was asked by Bryant Gumbel on The Today Show: "You have competed for almost 20 years. To what do you attribute your longevity?"

Lewis, perhaps the greatest track and field athlete of all time, did not hesitate with his answer: "Remembering that you have both wins and losses along the way. Don't take either one too seriously."