Clark's Spot

Greetings and Happy Holidays,

Allow me to start with an explanation and apology. The tongue-in-cheek Christmas letter was long-penned by my better half. I know it was well-received by many as a way to lighten the mood of a stressful holiday season. I’m willing to give it a good attempt this year, although I’m sure that – much like her culinary skills – I won’t match up as her equal.

While 2011 was a year of just getting to the end, 2012 was the year we surveyed the wreckage.

The first major project for the house became a new heat source. While coal stoves are common in Northeastern Pennsylvania, I grew up in a house with geothermal – or as some people prefer to call it – magic. In brief, heat from several hundred feet below my back yard heats my house. (There’s physics and chemistry involved too, but that’s a little dense for Christmas unless we’re talking about the effects of gravity on Christmas trees and what to mix with your eggnog.)

When it came time to drill the well for my heat source, the drillers discovered an underground spring in my backyard. In the words of one neighbor, the 40-foot spray made it look like they struck oil. The drill rig sat in the backyard for more than a week, and other neighbors began to ask whether my geothermal was really an attempt to drill for natural gas. The project was also delayed while I demolished the coal bin in my basement after the help of family and friends in claiming and moving the coal.

Speaking of wreckage and landscaping, another year means another tree lost in the front yard to a hurricane. While the 2011 hurricane victim fell toward the house and hung suspended by dead branches of two other trees, the 2012 casualty fell toward the line that provides electricity to my house. I wasn’t surprised to lose power in the storm, but I was a bit shocked to see the very low hanging wire that I had to step over the next morning on my way to start the generator.

I’ve returned to the water for the first time since I was a teenager, this time competing in a kayak race down the Lackawanna River. The Lackawanna, not normally a large river, was particularly shallow that weekend. I spent more time in the river than in the kayak, and it had nothing to do with my ability to stay afloat. In fact, I never fell out without meaning to, and demonstrated my skills at water navigation by going through the rough parts, including a nice 5 foot drop over some rocks, backwards. Some of the people watching thought it clearly showed that I couldn’t control my kayak, but I knew I was just showing off for the crowd.

Finally, the house has been dubbed the beach house by a number of friends. While that elicits strange looks in Scranton, the repeated hurricanes, backyard spring, and general ambiance and decor on the sun porch definitely resemble a warmer locale with white sand and not the white powder that may have fallen since this was mailed.

Best wishes for a happy and prosperous 2013, and I hope this letter brings a smile to your face or happy memories of a better author. I promise to try to do better next year.

I first heard of Pelotonia in the fall of 2009. My wife and I even discussed my interest in riding in it in several years. Life, it seemed, was too busy for that commitment. We were finishing master’s degrees, planning to buy a house, and talking about starting a family.

One year later she was tired, in pain, not hungry. We began to visit doctors.

She passed away the next spring – 46 days after she was diagnosed with cancer.

I ride for Jess. And so that others, someday, do not need to walk the path that she, I, and our friends and family have had to tread. Please consider supporting my ride. You may access my rider page to make a donation through clarkspot.com/ride. Thank you.

(adapted from handwritten notes in June 2011)

One other item has been on my head lately. This is a saying that’s practically a motto for a place I’ve worked. I don’t know how many times this year I’ve heard this said. I’ve started saying it and repeating it just out of hearing it over and over. But I’ve found it helpful. Some things can’t be controlled. You have to let some stuff go. Worry about what you can control. The larger picture, sometimes, is something less than ideal, and you have to work with it.

On Friday June 3, 2011, a friend posted this statement (it is what it is) on Facebook. I liked it without giving it much thought because I’ve found it useful. I left a comment as well. Shortly afterward, she posted how much she didn’t like the phrase because it’s a sign that she had given up and was settling. That bugged me.

I don’t like the idea of settling. I never have. I think I’ve learned, however, that some things can be controlled and some things cannot. It isn’t settling to realize that you don’t get to shape the whole world. It’s being realistic, and it’s letting you turn your attention to other things that you can control and that *might* be more important to you. Shouldn’t I focus my attention on taking care of my home, discovering new things in my neighborhood, taking care of my wife’s affairs, developing new hobbies, finding new friends, helping others, and my personal happiness and welfare? That’s what I’ve taken this saying to mean. I remain the master of my fate and the captain of my soul. I’m just not going to try to be the master and captain of everything else around me. I can still impact it, I still have free will, and I still can make an incredible contribution to all sorts of stuff around me. This isn’t giving up. It’s deciding that I’m comfortable letting some things be what they are so I can devote my limited resources and time to improving and affecting other things.

After this year’s Ohio State-Michigan game (37-7), Ohio State coach Jim Tressel offered a statement that I never expected a Buckeye coach to say. “Michigan will be back. You don’t have to worry about that.” While some Big Ten fans (and even Buckeye fans) make comments about how recent lopsided runs have diluted the rivalry, I’m in no particular hurry to see Michigan return to the top of the conference standings.

But Tressel’s comment got me thinking about a fact I’d read once years before. A decent chunk of the wins that make Michigan’s football program the winningest in the country came in the first half of the 20th Century. If college football has changed since the days of Woody and Bo, it has definitely changed since the time of Fielding Yost.

College programs and conference strength is cyclical so I don’t doubt that Tressel’s statement was true. But I wondered how Ohio State and Michigan have fared over the life of their programs.

Michigan is clearly dominant early in its history, and it went through several down periods in the 1930s and 1960s before its current troubles. Meanwhile, Ohio State seems to vary much more. Its record is more spiky. When the Buckeyes are good, they’re good. And when they’re down, they’re down. But the only time they’ve fallen as low as Michigan in the past 100 years was during the 1940s.

This left me with one further question. How do the teams look when compared to the entire Big Ten conference?

I grabbed the season winning percentages for the 11 teams currently in the Big Ten since they began football. I wasn’t trying to capture the time since the school joined the conference. I wanted to look at how dominant the programs were overall – even if they didn’t line up against each other every year. Finally, I added a 10-year moving average for Ohio State and Michigan.

While other conference teams have surpassed one (or both teams) for a year or two at different times, the moving average is clearly well above the normal season for the bulk of the Big Ten. It’s normal for the single best team in the Big Ten in any given year to keep pace with the 10-year average for the better of these two teams. I was really surprised to see just how dominant the two programs are. One team or the other is always at the top – if not both teams.

The other big thing I learned from my two weeks of number crunching? Tressel’s comment was a bit off base. Michigan’s 10-year average still has two 10-3 seasons (2002 and 2003) and an 11-2 season (2006). But it’s only recently began to drop its moving average and is only slightly below the period of the early 1990s that would include the Earle Bruce-John Cooper transition years in the Buckeyes 10-year average.