“Momentum is only as good as tomorrow’s starting pitcher.” – Earl Weaver, former manager of Major League Baseball’s Baltimore Orioles

This is my first column to contain a trigger warning. Turn around now if you have high blood pressure, a weak stomach or might be about to operate any heavy machinery. It gets gruesome after this sentence.

I want to give Gary Danielson a little credit. Yes, I am talking about that Gary Danielson, the CBS college football color analyst. For the uninitiated, Danielson has covered Southeastern Conference football for nearly two decades and has an amazing knack to convince viewers he is somehow against your favored team.

This feat is even more impressive considering there is not one or two teams he appears to favor. He somehow comes off as hostile toward everybody’s favorite team.

Truthfully, I do not have strong feelings about Danielson one way or the other, but the one Danielson nugget I have come around to is his stance on momentum. You will hear the word momentum tossed around during a game almost as much as the football is tossed around in an Air Raid offense.

Team A races out to a two-touchdown lead and captures the momentum. Team B fights back to tie the game and now has stolen the momentum. Whoops, a lost fumble by Team B and Team A regains its lost momentum. Oh no, Team B blocks a chip shot field goal and returns it for a touchdown to take the lead. Now Team B carries momentum into the second half.

This was an exaggerated example, but it does sound a little silly, right? The idea of a mystical force surrounding sporting events choosing to flirt with one team and then the other. Yet, until I heard Danielson challenge the idea, momentum was just as real as the grass on the field and the egg-shaped ball.

Crediting momentum when a team gets on a roll during a game tends to ignore coaches’ and players’ abilities to correct previous mistakes and skillfully exploit weaknesses of the other team discovered during real-time game action.

Momentum also can discount the ability of some of the most athletically gifted people on the planet to make spectacular plays. When you have a player or two who are in the top 1 percent of the top 1 percent of athletic people on the planet, momentum tends to follow those guys around.

One distinction to make here is I believe momentum and confidence are separate entities. If your freshman quarterback falls to pieces when his team cannot hear him try to change the play before the snap due to the fog of sound enveloping the field at The Swamp at the University of Florida, it does not mean the Gators do not have momentum.

They just have an advantage because your quarterback is 18 years old, and nothing can fully prepare a young man for this situation until he experiences it. Few would claim momentum returned when your quarterback calms down and throws a couple of touchdown passes late in the game to make the final score look more respectable.

So does removing momentum from the equation also remove some of the magic and romance of the game for the average fan? It could, but I think understanding the details can also be fun.

Auburn’s Kick Six victory against Alabama is not any less spectacular when you realize speedy Chris Davis was able to run the length of the field because Alabama had a bunch of large, slower players in the game to block for the field goal attempt.

Danielson explained the situation more bluntly by saying, “There’s no athletes on the field for Alabama. They’ve got all fat guys,” which tickled my wife’s grandfather immensely.

And to be fair, Alabama’s fourth and goal play from the 2023 Iron Bowl is no less special when noting Auburn inexplicably decides to assign a player to watch Alabama quarterback Jalen Milroe and not pressure him in case he decided to run for the end zone – 31 yards away. The defensive play call essentially made the play 10 defensive players versus 11 offensive players.

Both of these plays are still beautiful or bitter, depending on your allegiance, even if momentum is not real and lapses in strategy or execution are considered. Monday morning quarterbacking is part of the fun, too.

Most of you football fans know Danielson’s network will not carry SEC games this season, so you will not have him to kick around any longer every fall Saturday. His departure may not elicit a fond adieu, but maybe we can acknowledge even a stopped clock can be correct twice a day.