Following Clemson’s last-second victory over Alabama in Monday’s championship game, coach Dabo Swinney was overcome with emotion.
“It’s indescribable,” he told an ESPN reporter after the game. “I mean, you can’t make it up… only God can do this.”
Quarterback Deshaun Watson was similarly overwhelmed and gave a similar response in his post-game interview.
“It’s what God wanted,” Watson said. “He picked us for a reason.”
This is hardly uncommon in sports. It’s become almost cliche for athletes to, before taking any questions or giving statements about any game, thank God for their on-field triumphs.
And every time it happens, I’m reminded of my seventh-grade religion teacher.
Back then, he would have us say a prayer at the beginning of every class. Before the prayer began, he would ask us for our “intentions,” or things we specifically wanted to pray for.
Someone would usually say an ailing grandmother or other relative. Someone else would bring up a student who was home sick. And inevitably, someone would bring up whatever school sports team was playing that day.
However, they would never say, “I’d like to pray for the football team to win this afternoon.” The teacher had established early on in the semester that, in his view, God does not give a damn about the outcome of football games.
So instead, people would pray for nobody to get injured in the game.
Of course one teacher saying that God doesn’t care about athletic success doesn’t prove anything. Clearly, other people believe that he does. But I thought he made an appropriate point.
Up until then, I had never considered the undeniable religious links between sports and athletes — the signs of the cross in baseball, the pregame prayers in the end zone before football games and, of course, the post-game press conferences where players thank God over and over and over again.
And after the class, I really didn’t think about those links much either.
That is except for when players and coaches thank God after games, like Swinney and Watson did on Monday night. Because it’s hard to say what exactly the duo and others are thanking God for.
Maybe they believe it’s part of his predetermined plan for them. Maybe they just thank him generally for giving them life. Or maybe they’re thankful to have avoided injury.
None of that is problematic.
What is problematic, though, is thinking that God intervened directly in the game to let Clemson win. Which, again, might not be what Watson and Swinney were thinking when they said what they said.
But surely some athletes who make similar claims do believe that God helped their team win.
One example is Seattle Seahawks quarterback Russell Wilson.
“That’s God setting it up,” he once told TheMMQB.com’s Peter King of his team’s Super Bowl berth, “to make it so dramatic, so rewarding, so special.”
By this line of thinking, God also set up the opposing team to be “so disappointed, so infuriated, so let down.” Which would seem to be downright cruel, unnecessary and unlikely to be correct of any God who reasonable people would consider just.
But maybe I’m wrong. Maybe an almighty, loving, caring, omnipotent God really does want Clemson, the Seahawks and other teams to win and pulls the strings to make it happen.
But with a civil war raging in Syria, consistent terrorist attacks across the western world and people of all ages suffering from debilitating, uncontrollable diseases, it seems that any God with the will to meddle in the world would feel obligated to intervene in those issues in addition to helping his favorite football teams.
Yet those issues — and continually random football outcomes, regardless of which team prays harder — persist.
Ethan Bauer is the sports editor at the Alligator. His column appears on Wednesdays. Contact him at ebauer@alligator.org or follow him on Twitter @ebaueri.
Clemson's Deshaun Watson holds up the championship trophy after the NCAA college football playoff championship game against Alabama Tuesday, Jan. 10, 2017, in Tampa, Fla. Clemson won 35-31. (AP Photo/David J. Phillip)
