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Grass Is Always Greener
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- Grass Is Always Greener
Dear Friends,
On Monday, Notre Dame plays Ohio State (my home state) for the College National Championship. I’ve been passionate about Notre Dame Football my whole life. My dad graduated from Notre Dame with Paul Hornung. My uncle played for ND and won a shared National Championship, plus centered to the Heisman Trophy winner John Huarte in 1964. I had cousins and dear friends go to college there, including Bryan Flannery, a friend from high school who was actually on their last National Championship team in 1989.
Me – I was too short, too slow, too small, and not smart enough to go there. I did co-create someone smart enough to attend. Our daughter Rachel. Yes, they were definitely willing to let me pay for an education there.😉
Notre Dame’s current coach, Marcus Freeman, is a young man who actually played for Ohio State, went pro, and was later brought on as a defensive coordinator for Notre Dame under the last Irish coach, Brian Kelly. After 12 years, Kelly left to coach LSU. His reason? Notre Dame’s academic requirements limited HIS ability to win a national championship. According to Brian Kelly, you can’t read, write, and play football well together.
I don’t begrudge Coach Kelly, for he made Notre Dame’s program a constant winner again after 3 poor coaching regimes since the legendary Lou Holtz. But the irony is that Coach Kelly’s hire for his defensive coordinator is now on the precipice of winning the title. With the new playoff format, Notre Dame actually had to beat three top 10 ranked teams to get into the final. 2 were top 5 ranked teams. That is more than Coach Kelly beat in all his 12 years. Here is the great part – Coach Freeman is doing it with many student athletes who were recruited by Kelly himself.
All this to say: Sometimes we have to stop making excuses and be happy with what we have. Coach Freeman commonly tells his team to achieve “team glory” rather than individual glory. He calls on the team to ELEVATE their condition as a group. In the second game of the season, they suffered one of their most embarrassing defeats at home to a much inferior team. A school I frankly didn’t even know had a football team: Northern Illinois.
This was such a bad loss that there was no room for error. They HAD to win every game from then on. Put another way, Notre Dame has essentially had 13 playoff games in a row. Lose and their season is done. Coming up on the Championship game, ND has 7-8 starters out, 2 of them captains. Freeman doesn’t use that as an excuse; he expects the next player to step up and make it happen. He knows that OSU probably has injured players as well. Remember my high school hero Joey Spaorito’s quote: “If ‘ifs, ands, and buts’ were candy and nuts, every day would be Christmas.”
Our bodies are much like the description of this team. Yeah, your kidneys, liver, heart, skin, lungs… none of these organs can go for individual glory. It is Team Glory or Team Disease. The body’s organs are the consummate definition of a team. In fact, most symptoms we experience are an individual organ taking one for the team, trying to help out an injured teammate.
Example. Many low level blood pressure issues start with the body drawing in more water to dilute sugar toxicity in the arteries. The kidneys absorb more salt (on purpose) to draw H2O in to dilute the sugar. Yes, it increases blood pressure, but it saves the artery from immediate damage. Many chronic conditions such as high sugar, high blood pressure, and high cholesterol are actually adaptations the body has made to avoid more serious and immediate organ damage. Suppressing those numbers and not getting to the root cause is like changing the jersey number of a player who isn’t cutting it, and expecting that to change their performance.
Coach Freeman talks to his team about fundamentals and building off of those good habits. Your health is no different. He also realizes he needs to be happy with the players he has; his job is to figure out how to help them reach their potential as a TEAM.
Happiness and health are achieved by looking down at the ground and deciding that you are going to make the best of where you are planted. Fertilize the soil you stand on, and it will reap rewards.
I can honestly say I am happy that Notre Dame has made the National Championship, and really just hope it is a great game. Okay, I’ll cut the bulls&*t. I really hope they win, because I have so many bets with family and friends from Ohio I may be bankrupt if they lose.🤪
In all seriousness, it is just a game. To quote my high school football coach, “Football is just a game. It becomes more than a game when you take the lessons from within it and apply them to life.”
Ashwagandha Complex – formulated with ashwagandha, licorice, skullcap, and Korean ginseng (the “herb of kings”!), these adaptogens help multiple body systems find balance, especially when it comes to energy, vitality, and sleep. Talk about a winning formula!
GO IRISH!!
Dr. Dan
P.S. Thank you Coach Kelly for hiring Coach Freeman!!!