Football and baseball are the toughest … but for completely different reasons.

Football is the toughest sport to coach well, and the toughest sport to get all the athletes you need to compete at a high level. It’s impossible to win a football state title without at least 15 high-quality players, and you probably need 20 or more. There’s a lot of parts that have to be in sync or it all falls apart. The X’s and O’s involved in football are more complex than any other team sport.

Baseball is tough because baseball has such a huge amount of luck/variance involved. Think about it … let’s look at the MLB, NBA and NFL. The top regular-season winning percentages in the NBA or NFL are usually at or better than .800. In baseball, the best teams may nudge just above .600. The worst teams in baseball usually still manage to win at a .350 clip, whereas the worst NBA or NFL teams are lucky to crack .250. It speaks to the variance involved — I’ve seen games where a team gets 10 hits and eight of them were bloopers or six-hop, seeing-eye grounders. I’ve seen games where a team hit 10 absolute rockets and eight wound up in gloves.

Now add in that the baseball playoffs are single-elimination, and it makes everything a crapshoot. What happens when your team’s No. 3 starter runs into another team’s ace? I’ll never forget the playoff game up in Cumberland when Williamsport’s Nick Adenhart — you’ve probably heard of him — no-hit Allegany as a junior in 2003, and lost 1-0 because the other pitcher — Allegany’s Aaron Laffey, who has gone on to start for the Cleveland Indians — threw a shutout with 19 strikeouts. Allegany then promptly lost their next game without Laffey available to pitch. Had the Wildcats not run into Laffey, they very well might have won the state title. Those are the kinds of things that happen. In baseball, perhaps more than any other sport, the team that wins the state title is not always the best team. They were just the team that got hot and ran good at the right time.