Second Thoughts

Coach kiss good start for Coogs

Houston football Coach Tom Herman isn’t shy about how he feels about his players, whom he greets on game day with a kiss on the cheek.
Houston football Coach Tom Herman isn’t shy about how he feels about his players, whom he greets on game day with a kiss on the cheek.

When the University of Houston's football players arrive for a game, they know what to expect as a prelude to the coming hours of brutality as they file into the stadium: a kiss on the cheek from their head coach, Tom Herman.

It is an unusual ritual in a sport that embodies America's most rigid ideals of manhood.

"A kiss on the cheek is when he shows his love for us," Houston safety Garrett Davis said, adding, "No one here is thinking, 'Oh, I shouldn't let him kiss me.' "

Physical expressions of affection certainly exist in big-time sports. Nothing says "Good job!" in baseball like a firm pat on the behind from a coach, and in international soccer it is not uncommon to see teammates peck each other on the cheek after a big play.

But kisses in football's gladiatorial culture seem as incongruous as a Gatorade shower at the ballet.

For Herman, 41, there is no better way to demand the painful sacrifices of the game than to forthrightly convey his affection for his players.

"How do you motivate a human being to do things against his own nature?" Herman said in an interview. "There's two things: love and fear. And to me, love wins every time."

Time keepers

The Washington Nationals could be excused if they did not want to go home. Facing elimination Thursday in Game 5 of their National League division series with the Los Angeles Dodgers, they did everything they could to stay alive, and ended up stretching a nine-inning game out to 4 hours, 32 minutes.

The marathon affair -- which the Dodgers won 4-3 to advance to the NL Championship Series -- was the longest nine-inning postseason game ever, and the longest nine-inning NL game of any kind.

"It was probably the craziest, if not the craziest, game I've ever been a part of in my career, in my life," Washington pitcher Max Scherzer said. "This is a tough one to be on the wrong side of."

Scherzer was correct that a game of 41/2 hours was crazy, but it was not all that surprising since the two teams had played a nine-inning game that went 4:12 just three days before. None of the contests in the five-game series went to extra innings, but their average length was 4:01.

Even in a postseason landscape, in which the average game has stretched to 3:30, Game 5 between the Nationals and Dodgers was special. The seventh inning alone took 66 minutes, with Washington burning through six pitchers in the inning.

For an idea of just how absurd a 66-minute inning is, the New York Giants and the Philadelphia Phillies once played an entire nine-inning game in 51 minutes. Even in 1919, that was a notable feat.

MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred acknowledged that things were going in the wrong direction, citing among other things that players were not focusing on keeping the games moving and that some longer replays were certainly interfering. He said in the interview that baseball would look for ways to get things back on track.

"We're going to put a package of issues on the table with the union," he said. "Speculating about which ones I like and don't like is counterproductive to that process at this point. I think the best I can do for you at this point is to say I'm prepared to think about additional rule changes that are relevant to the issue of pace of play."

Sports on 10/16/2016

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