A loss is always a gain

The Oklahoma Sooners had their first lost against Missouri this past weekend in Colombia. The game, in my opinion was a fantastic event and experience. Watching a sea of Yellow and Black storm a field after a game showed me a different side to sports.

I have witnessed a lot of losses, but nothing had more impact than our loss.

Reason: Both teams were undefeated going in, both highly ranked, ESPN College Game Day was there, and Missouri fans are notorious for being horrible (in many ways).

The town itself was full of hype. Everyone I talked to said they had never seen Colombia this crowded and excited.

When we lost, there were no taunts like "overrated!" like Texas. Rather, everyone was just SO excited they had won! This is a team that has been crushed countless times by us and is in now way a powerhouse like OU or Texas.

Teams learn more when they lose. When you take a step back, you have to take two steps forward to keep-on-truckin'.

As usual, the team started practice that Monday as if nothing had happend because we know that dwelling in the past leads to nothing good in the future.

1love

Logging and Tagging

I read in the New York Times today that the MLB has a department solely based around (get it?) logging every part of televised baseball. The group "tags" every pitch, hit catch, and much more. They log every event by date, game, player, etc. in order to categorize everything in clean groups. For instance, if you wanted to look up Alex Rodriguez foul balls, every one will pop up. Not only do they get the game, but everything around it as well. If a squirrel were to be in the shot, they would tag that play with "animal."

The job these people are doing is very similar to what we do. Every play we shoot has a down, distance, hash, formation, etc. They do this in order to categorize the game efficiently.

Knowing that MLB has began to trace (literally) everything that goes on, it is only a matter of time before it reaches other sports. This might eventually lead to things like the NFL recording every play and detail on a televised game, including the crowd cheering (which might be tagged as "drunk fans" "crazy fans") and other b-roll.

If this becomes a bigger department in video, I think I got my foot in the door pretty early!

POST TEXAS

Our win against Texas really showed me the amount of time and energy the coaches put in into each day of practice and preparing for games.

This will be my third season at OU and my first win at Texas . When we won the Big XII championship in 2008, the players were thrilled, but not as much as our victory in the cotton bowl Saturday.

I think its the intense environment of the Red River shootout that pumps up the players and coaches over anything.

Because this is our bye week, the players and coaches are a bit laid back and relaxed more than average.

I plan on working for coaches after I graduate so its always good to get to know them. Each coaching staff is unique in their own way with their own humor, dialect, and so on.

I had to ride home with the coaches on the way home from Texas and watching them celebrate made me enjoy football a lot more this season.