Being Under-appreciated

A little less than two weeks ago, the BYU Cougars took on the Golden Hurricane of the University of Tulsa in the 2011 Armed Forces Bowl.  The game was a hard-fought slugfest between two equally-matched opponents.  Near the end of the game, BYU drove down the field and scored a touchdown on a fake spike, Dan Marino style to win the game.

The official MVP as well as the Player of the Game awarded by ESPN went to wide receiver Cody Hoffman, who caught all 3 touchdown passes for BYU in the game.  Though Hoffman's performance was impressive, I wouldn't have given him the MVP.  The commentators for the game suggested that they might vote for Matt Reynolds for MVP after an impressive block that he made late in the first half to set up Hoffman's first touchdown pass.  While I think that offensive lineman are among the most underrated and under-appreciated players on the gridiron, I still would have given the MVP to another player for his outstanding performance.

That man's name is Riley Stephenson.  He wears number 99 and punts for BYU.  Yes, I would have given the game MVP to the punter. (As a side note, that's a sharp-looking suit.)

Punting is probably the most underrated and under-appreciated position in football (with the possible exception of long-snapping, though it's pretty much the same idea).  No one likes to punt.  Teams would much rather keep their offense on the field and continue trying to score.  In leagues with less maturity and less defense, punting is rare and teams almost always elect to go for it on 4th down.  However, punting is also key to the game of gridiron football.  Especially when a team is in its own territory, punting puts more distance between the opposing team and their end zone.  If a coach has any faith in his defense, he will usually elect to punt the ball away when his team is on its own side of the 50.  If he doesn't have any faith in his defense, it's going to be a long game, either way.  Coaches will tell you that field position is important in any football game.  It is universally better to start at your own 45 than at your own 5 yard line.  The closer a team is backed up to its own goal line, the more conservative play calling usually is.  On complicated plays, it's too easy to get tackled for a loss and give up a safety or cough up the ball for an easy touchdown.  Winning the field position battle helps a team win the game.

In the 2011 Armed Forces Bowl, Riley Stephenson had an exceptional game punting the football.  BYU sent him out onto the field to punt 8 times throughout the game.  Of those 8 kicks, none were brought out to the 20 on a touchback, 7 of them landed inside the Tulsa 20 yard line, and 3 made their way inside their 10 yard line.  Riley only had one non-amazing kick all game: a 36-yarder that went out of bounds at the Tulsa 42 yard line.  Even that kick didn't look all that bad.

The biggest risk in punting is that the punt returner will be able to make a play and carry the ball for a large gain or even a touchdown.  However, a punt is not really returnable if it hangs up in the air long enough for the coverage team to get down the field and get in the face of the returner or if it goes out of bounds before it can be fielded.  This is the part of Riley Stephenson's punting game that impressed me the most in the Armed Forces Bowl.  Of his 8 punts, 7 were not returned and either went out of bounds or were downed by the BYU punt coverage team.  The one that was returned was a poor decision by the return man inasmuch as he only made it 1 yard before being hit by a BYU defender and fumbling the ball.  This fumble was recovered by BYU and led to the Cougars' only touchdown in the first half.

I relate to Riley Stephenson and punters in general because I'm a civil engineer.  If you live in something that's not a naturally-occurring cave, you're the beneficiary of the work of multiple civil engineers all at once and you probably never recognized it.  Civil engineers design structures like buildings and bridges so that they don't fall down and kill you.  They design the drinking water and sewer systems that keep you from contracting dysentery.  They design roads and traffic signals to be as stupid-proof as possible to try to keep idiots from running into and killing you on the roadways.  They (hopefully) even analyze the dirt underneath a structure so that it doesn't get reclaimed by its mother Earth.  And you know who gets credit for all of it?  The architect (and maybe a little bit the construction crew... maybe).  Yes, the nancy with an art degree who does nothing but make the building look pretty gets all the credit.

So, thank you Riley Stephenson, for your MVP-worthy punting performance and helping the BYU Cougars to a 3rd consecutive bowl victory.  Few others seem to appreciate it, but I know I do, because I'm in the same boat.

I Demand a Manual Recount of Your Blessings

You know those corny things where people make a list of their blessings on their blag?  Yeah, this is one of those things.  I took the title from my recollection of a Jay Leno joke from the 2000 US Presidential Election:

"George W. Bush sits down with his family to Thanksgiving dinner.  They sit around the table and start counting their blessings.  Then, all of the sudden, Al Gore breaks down the door with his lawyers at his back, pounds his fist down on the table and says..."

...wait for it...

"'I demand a manual recount of your blessings!'"

I thought it was pretty clever.

So, today I was thinking about how I've seemed to be so much luckier than my dad in most things in my life so far.  Then I started thinking about how I'm a pretty lucky guy in general.  That led me to think that, as a man who esteems himself to be a Christian, I shouldn't consider myself lucky as much as I should consider myself blessed (though you can't totally discount pure happenstance).  So, here we go:

• I left my car unattended for three weeks and the only difference in it compared to when I left was a spider web that had been spun on the passenger-side mirror.
• I have a car that's paid for in its entirety and is warrantied bumper-to-bumper for the next 4 years.
• Today, I traveled over 1300 miles in under 12 hours for less than $250.
• Oregon State University pays me $1700 a month (before taxes) to get a master's degree and occasionally grade a few assignments.
• Speaking of Al Gore, I have a blazing-fast internet connection that gives me access to endless concourses of information, both of a factual and social nature.
• Though it may appear to be in decline, I live in a point on the time-space continuum that's among the most prosperous in human history.
• I have a bachelor's degree from a highly-respected institution of higher education.
• My parents cared enough about me to teach me many of the important skills to a prosperous life in this world.
• I'm a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and I have a testimony of the Gospel of Christ.
• I'm pretty smart, but sufficiently humble that I can recognize when people are smarter and/or more knowledgeable than me. (barely)
• Today, I wore a pair of 95-dollar shoes that were made by small children in a sweatshop in China.
• There are still single women who flirt with me every now and then.
• Duct tape.
• Knowledge that God did not abandon us to find our own way and let nature take its course, but continues to reveal the right way through prophets.
• BYU football just wrapped up another 10-win season.
• Despite its flaws and the raging viral infection currently wrecking havoc on my upper respiratory system, my body works pretty well, for the most part.
• I have really good hand-eye coordination.  That's why they call me The Hands.
• There are pills you can take that mostly negate the effects of a lack of vegetables in your diet.
• Antiseptic mouthwash does wonders.
• I've had the opportunity to learn another language (mostly) and have been able to keep it bouncing around in my head with relatively little outside practice.
• I can read and write in both languages that I speak.
• There's a postal system that will take some crap that you wrote and, for 42 cents, send it to some random dude in Wyoming within 3 days.  (Thank you Jon Stewart)
• People who have come before me have refined the body of knowledge on clay and stone and steel so that I could understand what I do now.
• Someone thought up glasses for vision correction and someone else thought up sunglasses for light dimming.
• I have a telephone that fits in my pocket.
• I have a calculator that also fits in my pocket (kind of) that does calculus and matrix algebra, graphs functions in 2- and 3-space, and adds.
• Drafting erasers for when I royally screw up engineering calculations.
• An outright unhealthy abundance of food.
• Clean drinking water that's piped to a tap in your house, essentially for free.
• A Savior who lived a life that was beyond reproach from God, suffered incomprehensible pain, and died so that I and 15 billion of my closest friends and family can by happy for the rest of eternity.
• And, undoubtedly, many more.

The Problem

Based on whatever knowledge you have of my life, you might have already formulated some ideas on why it lacks romance and/or spousage.  Based solely on what you read in this blag, you can justifiably come to the conclusion that I have a few emotional issues.  However, the more distance I put between myself and my mother, both temporally and spatially, the less of a problem this really is.  You might also come to the conclusion that I'm somewhat passive around women.  This is also much less true than it used to be.  At age 16, I wanted nothing to do with girls and they pretty much reciprocated that desire.  However, at 23, I'm much more comfortable around women than I've been before.  I've also come to the conclusion that I'm less approachable to women because of my size (~6'2" and 250 lbs) and the Native American blood that gives me something of a disapproving scowl on my face even when I'm not unhappy.  You could also think that I might have trouble finding a woman who's as smart as me, who gets my sense of humor, etc.  The list goes on and on.

I do not consider any of these 'typical' issues to be the biggest problem between me and women.  This biggest problem is that both they and I move.  In the last five years, between Denver, Provo, and Corvallis, I've probably moved 7 times.  Some of those were very temporary, but there has been large uncertainty about exactly where I would be in the not-so-distant future.

For the sake of completeness, let's first discuss long-distance relationships: they don't work.

Now moving on, from about February of '10 to September of '10, I met 3 women that I could have definitely seen myself marrying.  Two of these were in Provo before I graduated and one was in Denver after I moved back in with parents.  In all three cases, I had no idea where I was going to be living a year from the date I met them.

In the case of both the women in Provo, I was getting ready to close out my time as an undergrad student and didn't really know what I was going to do afterward.  During this time, I just wasn't concerned with women because I had more pressing issues like how I was going to eat in 6 months' time.  I still held the delusion that I was going to find a job somewhere in industry, which wasn't the case.  In addition, asking a women whom you only met 3 months ago to move with you is asking a lot, even when you're 100% certain about the location.  When you have no idea where you're planning on moving, it's just downright socially unacceptable. 

In the case of the third woman, I was still totally uncertain about where I was going to be in a year's time.  I had not yet started applying for grad schools, though it was apparent that that would at least be a backup plan.  I was still not particularly concerned with women until about April of '11 for the same reasons as before I graduated from college.  By the time my future became secure enough to feel comfortable dating again, I knew that I was going to be moving to Oregon in the fall and didn't really feel the need to ask any woman to move with me.

A component of these conundra is the fact that, in 2012, women can easily lead their own lives.  In 1952, it was likely that many women were basically just waiting around for a husband.  In 1972, there was still a statistically significant chance that a woman (especially a Mormon) would not be doing much in preparation for marriage.  In 2012, more women go to college than men.  (This is largely a racial issue, but that's a post for another day.)  Women have plans for their lives like work, school, or a mission that they don't necessarily want to drop just to follow a potential spouse around.  This is another reason that it's harder to get married now than when your bishop got married.

As I move forward, I have the better part of a year and a half in Oregon before my future will, again, become uncertain.  If I find a woman who I want to marry, I have enough time to court her an build a relationship.  The prospects don't necessarily look all that bright at the moment, though I hold out hope.