Holiday Bowl Scene & Heard: Arizona fan looked a little stiff during casket toss

Malcolm Gladwell suggested in his book “Outliers” that 10,000 hours of practice are required to master a task.

But what if you only have five days to practice for something that’s never been done?

That was the challenge for UTC’s Garrett Berger, an Arizona graduate who was chosen from among 768 entries for the inaugural “casket toss” during Friday night’s Trust & Will Holiday Bowl.

As the third quarter ended, the casket was wheeled out from the southwest tunnel at Snapdragon, forevermore known as the coffin corner, and placed on the goal line in front of the goal post.

Berger had the opportunity to win $10,000 if he could throw a football 10 yards into an open red, white and blue wood box procured from Titan Casket. Berger planned to put his winnings toward college funds for daughters Ellie and Emmy.

Key note: the football was required to stay in the casket in order to claim the prize.

So how do you get reps for something like that? It’s not like you can block out practice time at the local mortuary.

“I’m not kidding, I thought about it,” said Berger, a surgery resident at UCSD. “I was like, these guys deal with death and doom everyday, and people are probably sad going in there.

“But what if I just went in there super excited. Like, hey, you guys have got to help me do this. They’d probably be pretty excited for me, I would imagine.”

Or not.

He might have purchased a casket and practiced in the back yard.

Costco offers a variety of caskets (online only), including the Lord’s Prayer model for $1,349.99.

Wondered if the Hail Mary model was out of stock.

Anyway, Berger settled for going to the park with an orange Home Depot bucket.

Like Patches O’Houlihan in “Dodgeball” — “If you can dodge a wrench, you can dodge a ball” — Berger figured if you can throw a football into a bucket, you can thrown one in a casket.

Berger’s prethrow strategy was to throw an arching spiral into the bottom of the casket, bounce it lightly off the lid and then have the ball settle inside.

When the moment of truth came, Berger stood at the 10-yard line and raised his arms to get some encouragement from the crowd. Then he eyed his target and threw. He looked a little stiff. The ball clanked off the right side of the lid and bounced onto the Snapdragon turf.

Berger hung his head in shame, fell to the turf on his back and looked to the sky. Then he got up, walked up to the casket, got inside and closed the lid.

“They told me the backboard would really eat up the speed, and I think I just threw it too hard,” Berger said.

All was not lost.

A Trust & Will official presented Berger with a giant $10,000 check, anyway.

Coaching is a calling

Arizona coach Brent Brennan and SMU coach Rhett Lashlee were asked what advice they would give to someone new to coaching amid all the changes surrounding college football.

“I hope we have enough who want to do this, because coaches are still valued more than ever,” Lashlee said. “Coaching is a calling. You impact young men in their lives. That’s why Coach (Brennan) and I do it.

“It’s not just a bumper sticker or coachspeak. If you coach high school or you coach college football, you got into it most likely for the right reasons, and that’s (because) you get to do a game you love, a game that had impact on your life, and now you get to pay it back to young men.

“Football teaches you more about the game of life than just about anything. And so now there’s so much more going on that, yeah, you’ve seen coaches run out, older coaches and younger coaches not wanting to get in. That’s the fear. Because football’s going to keep going. There are going to be coaches. We need good men doing that. …

“Kids haven’t changed. The surroundings around them have changed. The game is still the game and all the other things they have to deal with is more, and they need leadership and coaches that care off them, not just transactional, but a relationship more than ever. And just because it’s harder more than ever to do that, that doesn’t mean it’s not still needed.”

Said Brennan: “That’s a great answer. It really is. That’s a great answer.”

School spirits

It didn’t take long to notice the place was overrun by Wildcats walking around Snapdragon Stadium on Friday night.

Bartender Myles Lucas, 29, also noticed a significant difference in attendance between Arizona and SMU fans.

“I’d say it was 80/20 Arizona fans,” Lucas said. “Both schools were well represented in spirit though. They were both having a good time.”

Obviously, proximity plays a role. There’s 406 miles between Tucson, Ariz. and San Diego, while Dallas is over three-times that (1,358 miles).

When asked the all-important question of who tipped better, Lucas added diplomatically with a smile: “Arizona, but there were just so many more of them. Maybe that’s why they stood out.”

Passing fancy

An 80-yard pass from SMU quarterback Kevin Jennings to tight end Matthew Hibner on the second play of the game broke a 30-year-old Holiday Bowl record. Colorado quarterback Koy Detmer threw a 76-yard pass to wide receiver Rae Carruth against Washington.

Jennings passed for 248 yards by halftime. That still put him more than 300 yards away from the Holiday Bowl’s passing yardage record. That held by Koy’s older brother, BYU’s Ty Detmer, who passed for 576 yards against Penn State in 1989.

Any thoughts of challenging for the record were dashed in the third quarter when Jennings passed for 0 yards.

Parting thought

Arizona players wore white uniforms while SMU wore blue. Fans for both teams wore red, which made it resemble a San Diego State crowd, except for all the people.