Mike Norvelle – Memphis Flyer

• For the third straight season, the Memphis Tigers will play on college football’s biggest, most exclusive weekend. Seventy-eight teams will play in bowl games over the next five weeks. But only 20 get to play for a conference championship on the first Saturday in December. Aside from the New Year’s Six, you can have “bowl season.” I’ll take the weekend all 10 FBS leagues decide a champion on the field. And for the first time, one of these games will be played here in Memphis, at the Liberty Bowl.
Larry Kuzniewski

Bryce Huff

The Tigers celebrated their division title last Friday, clinched with the victory over Cincinnati. But it’s the American Athletic Conference championship — to be decided on the field, against those same Bearcats — that would take the Memphis program a place it’s never been before. Coach Mike Norvell made that clear in describing the minimalist approach to last week’s celebration. “There have not been a ton of trophies lifted around here,” said Norvell after his team’s 11th win of the season (a program first). “Winning the West Division is pretty special. To represent where this program has grown, the foundation former players built . . . we want to celebrate it. But we’re not done. We did what we’re supposed to do. I want us to continue to grow. I want to see that hunger. We can talk about the ‘three-peat’ of winning the division, but we want to finish the journey.”

• Championships are won, yes, with line play. When the Tigers score their first touchdown (or field goal) Saturday, they’ll surpass 500 points for the fifth straight season. It’s a scoring total the program never reached before the 2015 campaign. You could say Memphis has established not so much an offensive scheme, but an offensive system, the kind that rolls over, one generation of players to the next. But when I consider the strength of this year’s Tiger offense, the record-breaking numbers of Brady White, Kenneth Gainwell, Antonio Gibson, and Damonte Coxie are merely the dressing. The meat of this juggernaut has been an offensive line as strong and stable as any the U of M has ever suited up. From left to right, they are Obinna Eze, Dylan Parham, Dustin Woodard (the senior center made his 50th start last Friday), Manuel Orona-Lopez, and Scottie Dill. Remarkably, this group has started all 12 games for Memphis, well-nigh impossible for a position tasked with creating collisions on every snap of every game. The unit will lose only Woodard at season’s end, meaning the Tiger offense — the Tiger offensive system — is in a good place for 2020 and beyond.

• Back-to-back Bearcats . . . big deal. In each of the Tigers’ previous two appearances in the AAC championship, they faced a team they’d played in the regular season (UCF). I don’t see the proximity between the Tigers’ regular-season game against Cincinnati with Saturday’s championship to be all that significant. Sure, familiarity breeds contempt and all that, but this is football. One play from scrimmage is usually enough to breed contempt. After Friday’s win, Coxie talked about talking, and the blocking he and his fellow Tiger receivers enjoy, and how much defenders don’t enjoy it. “I like to get in [defensive backs’] heads,” said Coxie, on the verge of his second-straight 1,000-yard season. “They don’t like to be touched.” He didn’t sound like someone concerned about what this week’s opponent heard — or felt — in last week’s game.

The Tigers beat Cincinnati without playing their best football. They failed to capitalize (and score) on a pair of Bearcat turnovers. The Memphis defense allowed the Cincinnati offense to stay on the field too much (eight third-down conversions and one on fourth-down). Saturday’s game will likely come down to which team plays better in the second half. And the cliche holds: Mistakes lose games (and championships). A team celebrated all season for its ability to execute a game plan — and minimize mistakes — will need to hold form in one more home game, with the prize likely a berth in the Cotton Bowl. Memphis football going places it’s never been before. Again.

It will be easy to say goodbye to 2016. From the political (Brexit) to the unspeakable (mass murder in Orlando), it has been a year in which our differences — our divisions — have been displayed in dramatic, all too often violent conflicts around the globe. Bloodshed continues in Iraq and Syria, North Korea seems ready to burst with its maniacal leadership (and nuclear weaponry), and here stateside, we Americans elected a president half the population considers unfit to run a reputable business, let alone lead the free world. Perhaps most threatening of all, 2016 is the year fake news — Oxymoron of the Century — became a thing. Trust has become the most valuable human commodity this side of love.

But the year in sports. My goodness, the year we’ve had in sports.

Had the Cleveland Cavaliers merely won their first NBA championship, 2016 would have had a star on the timeline of American sports history. But what is waiting 46 years for an NBA crown when the Chicago Cubs had to wait 108 years to reach the top of the baseball mountain? Had either of these teams erased a 3-1 deficit in their best-of-seven championship series, the event would have further cemented this year as significant. Both did.

The Cavs and Cubs somehow made footnotes of sports moments that otherwise would be leading annual reviews like this one. Villanova beat North Carolina for college basketball’s national championship on a buzzer-beating three-pointer, the kind of shot taken — and usually missed — on thousands of playgrounds and driveways . . . but in real life, with the cameras on and millions watching?

The Rio Olympics gave us Usain Bolt (again) and Michael Phelps (again). But the Games also introduced the world to Simone Biles and Katie Ledecky, proving (again) that on the sports world’s biggest stage, gender is merely a classification of greatness. In a world of more-apparent divisions, we could use an annual dose of Olympic togetherness. Deep breaths, everyone, as we await the 2018 Winter Games in South Korea.

No city has needed the distraction of sports more than Memphis. More Memphis lives have been taken violently this year than in any other year on record. We’re left to hope we’ve reached rock bottom in the bloody statistical category of homicide. And we turn to men in helmets and shorts to help us through.

This was the year Memphis became home to the highest paid player in the NBA. (Read that sentence again for emphasis, and know it’s quite temporary.) And when Mike Conley went down with broken bones in his back, the Memphis Grizzlies reeled off six straight wins — the sixth over mighty Golden State at FedExForum — to redefine the term “backbreaker” for good.

This was the year both flagship programs at the University of Memphis welcomed new coaches (a transition year unlike any since 1986). Mike Norvell has kept the pedal down for the football program, his team averaging a shade under 40 points per game despite Paxton Lynch now wearing a Denver Broncos uniform. And Tubby Smith has brought an almost regal feel to the Tiger basketball program, his lengthy record of success a welcome salve to a fan-base grown frustrated by, yes, divisions in the program.

We shed some tears as sports fans in 2016. Said goodbye to Muhammad Ali, then Gordie Howe, then Arnold Palmer. (Had but one of these legends died, the year would merit a black arm band.) The losses seemed to parallel those in the world of music: David Bowie, Prince, Leonard Cohen. It’s as though the year thirsted on pain.

Sunnier days are surely ahead. The Tiger football team will play its bowl game next week in Boca Raton, for crying out loud. Come December 31st, I’ll raise a drink to the year just passed, as I always do. But it will be a hard one. And I’ll chase it with an extra dose of firewater. I’ll then thank the heavens for, at the very least, giving us games to play.