Blake Dowling
As the glow of opening college football weekend wears off, and the tornado of Andrew Gillum versus Ron DeSantis begins, I read a very refreshing column this week from Skip Foster about non-biased reporting. Bottom line: If both sides of the coin are giving you heat, you must be playing it fair.
However, I did notice he did not mention Gillum’s opponent by name. Check it out, and thank you Skip for your insight.
Speaking of Gillum, there is a massive amount of “noise” (as they say in college football) surrounding his run for the Florida’s highest office. If you know Andrew personally, he is a nice guy. However, his incredible win could be overshadowed by the “noise” surrounding him if he is not careful.
There was more noise this week.
Speaking of “noise,” if you haven’t seen pics (or met) the FBI agents associated with most of this “noise,” who were rolling around North Florida, Vegas, and New York for over two years, hats off to Agent Whitesnake. This dude was way, way undercover.
In fact, we are still patiently waiting to see what exactly they uncovered.
One thing is for sure regardless of the FBI and Agent Whitesnake, there will be more college football this Saturday. The analogies and parallels between football, politics and business are always a spectacular topic. We need to “huddle up,” take a “timeout,” “coach up” the team, are just a sliver of the sports terms that we use in our professional lives.
Of course, there is also friendly banter among rivals when talk of football is afoot.
I saw a great tweet from Jimmy Patronis hazing Chris Dorworth over the epic Steve Spurrier Dos Equis ad that ran during the Nole collapse.
I had to weigh in with an old school Bobby Bowden Hardee’s clip comeback. Classic.
Nothing like friendly digital sparring with civilized sports fans. Jimmy must have enjoyed the Hardee’s clip as he liked the tweet.
Does Hardee’s still even make the Big Deluxe? They lost me with their advertising somewhere in the past decade.
It’s Chick-fil-A fast foodies’ world, and they just let you live in it.
Anyway, opening football weekend in Florida held lots of surprises.
For all the Gators out there, calm down. You beat Charleston Southern. For Noles, start over … and Coach, you have to keep your head up in the postgame presser. That was sad.
And for THE U, it’s a long season, get back after it.
As for the parallels of football, it is certainly not limited to business and elections. Football can provide you with plenty of analogies for guidance in life. How to sacrifice. The importance of practice. Team work really does make the dream work. I love this quote from the Bear on that subject.
“If anything goes bad, I did it. If anything goes semi-good, we did it. If anything goes really good, then you did it. That’s all it takes to get people to win football games for you.” — Paul “Bear” Bryant.
Elections this November (and the games this fall) will both have winners and losers, highs and lows. Just as in our careers and lives. I think the most important lesson we can take from football is when you have a setback, make sure to get back up and keep fighting. Vince said it best …
“It’s not whether you get knocked down, it’s whether you get back up.” — Vince Lombardi.
That is all for today, if you made it this far, thank you for reading. Now go watch some football, your Saturday demands it.
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Blake Dowling is CEO of Aegis Business Technologies and (slightly) enjoys college football and all things associated. He can be reached at [email protected].
