Over The Pylon

Edge Rock Report

First Win Edition

It’s been a while for a rock report, but to be honest, I’ve been lacking in my home game attendance lately. Not that I haven’t been with our Cards in spirit (or on the couch), but life has a tendency to get in the way. That being said, I don’t want to just jump into the recent win and say we rocked like a non-stop block of cock-rock. That wouldn’t be entirely true, now would it?

Here’s what really happened. Our team had a multi-million, multi-platinum album on its hands for the first time in 2008. We’re talking Dark Side of the Moon here, folks. Near-modest success for a couple years, then all of the sudden – BAM! The game changes. Welcome to the machine, have a cigar, dear boy.

But instead of following it up with a thought-provoking and in many ways superior Wish You Were Here, we regress to the studio side of Ummagumma, or, God help us all, Atom Heart Mother. Are you getting my Pink Floyd references yet? If not, Wikipedia and Amazon.com are your friends. Or your dad’s record collection – they’ll be the ones that have the faint, nostalgic smell of, um, morning dew.

Here’s what happened to us. We lost our star talent, plain and simple. Going back to my Floydian comparison, it’s like losing David Gilmour and Roger Waters right after Dark Side. The real winning formula is gone, and now the guys on the sideline and the guys with the redshirts have the impossible task of maintaining the success.

Hopefully you got my key word there: impossible. We had the high hopes (pun intended) for the 2009 Cardinals to at least be a West contender. Even Alan and I had them at no worse than 7-5. But that was all pie in the sky – or perhaps a “momentary lapse of reason”. The truth is, at the end of the day, we can sometimes be too big of fans to acknowledge our gut feeling that we may enter into the next Lynch era.

Let’s put this further into perspective. We just won our first game of the season a few days ago. And it was against a team that is arguably one of the worst four or five teams in the nation. Go ahead, try to prove me wrong. And at that, our Cards are probably in the bottom ten as well. Again, prove me wrong.

Yeah, it was great to celebrate on Saturday, but we need to face that reality that we’re not going to be hitting the Dark Side of the Moon level for a while, if ever. I hope to see the day we go 12-0 again (and don’t shit the bed at the end with two embarrassing losses…whatever), but it may not be in the cards.

So what do we do from here? Well, the first thing is we stop making our “Ronald Reagan was president the last time Stan Parrish won” jabs. That streak has fallen, finally. Second, we recognize that brilliance may still be ahead of us. We’ve yet to make our Wish You Were Here, Animals, and The Wall. There still seems to be an era of hope on the horizon, and I think we’ll see it sooner rather than later. Simply put, we’ve got the bricks, just no Wall. Yet. Now, I won’t predict another 12-0 in two to three years, but I can tell you we will not be a one-win team this time next year.

We have some seriously talented young men in the system, and once they grow into their roles (mentally and physically); Ball State will be a MAC force again. In two years, this offensive line will be experienced. Our quarterback situation will hopefully be solid. Our backs will be quicker and more experienced as well. I don’t want to start blowing sunshine just yet, but things will get better.

What we need to realize is there is not going to be some miraculous Live 8-type reunion… Roger Waters and David Gilmour may have come back for a one-off, but all our beloved former Cards stars won’t. Like Waters says in Live in Pompeii: “It’s like saying, ‘Give a man a Les Paul and he becomes Eric Clapton,’ you know? It’s not true.” Well, give Kelly Page the ball and he becomes Nate Davis? Give Stan a headset and he becomes Brady? No.

So for now, let’s ride out our bummer 2009 album (although there may still be one more hit single left in this one), and let’s look ahead to the possibilities the next couple years will bring. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a date with a bag of Doritos and Dark Side of the Moon. Rock on.

Filed under: Edge Rock Report |