Back in Omaha, rumors begin to swirl about the fate of the UFL. One has the league folding immediately, just three games into the season. Done. Kaput. Another has the season being shortened, and the Virginia Destroyers (who are 3-0) and the Las Vegas Locos (2-1) playing in a media-and-league-friendly championship game that would pit Schottenheimer’s team against the two-time defending UFL champs. The third rumor—and the one most palatable to the Nighthawks—is that the winner of the Omaha–Las Vegas rematch will meet Virginia in the championship game.
Joe calls a coaches’ meeting early Monday morning, normally a time when the staff would be preparing for the next game. He tells them what he knows. The Sacramento owner, Paul Pelosi, seems reluctant to pour any more money into his franchise, which is 0-3 for the season. And with bills remaining unpaid, the problems that faced the league back in July have not been resolved. Joe believes the season will indeed be shortened, and that the Nighthawks season may well be over. He says he’ll have more information in a few hours, after a conference call with the owners. “This type of stuff has been going on all season, literally every week,” Joe says. “I’ve tried to keep these issues away from you guys so you could focus on your work.” That was no longer possible. The issues were now public.
The coaches shake their heads and look at each other across the room. The same jolt of sadness, of disappointment, that accompanied the delay in July is back. Marvin Sanders, the secondary coach, speaks up. His patience with the UFL’s problems is blown.
“This is absolutely ridiculous. Again? Joe, I’m really worried,” he says, speaking for everyone in the room. “The players are going to feel let down whether we play or not. Really, we are, too.”
Joe nods his head. A flash of shared frustration crosses his face, then quickly passes. He narrows his eyes. “Marvin…All of you. Look, this is where we come into play. The bottom line is this is what we have. We can feel sorry for ourselves. We can feel sad. That’s natural. But this is a test: Are we going to buckle? Or are we going to figure out how to make it work? Let’s figure out how to make this work.” The thought seems to buoy their spirits, if only for a moment.
With that, he dismisses the coaches. They file into their respective meeting rooms to watch film and prepare for a game that might not take place.
Later in the afternoon, Joe gathers the staff together again. He has news. Everyone nervously steals glances at Joe, trying to get a read on what he is about to say. Joe sits down at the head table in the meeting room, directly under the banner with the quote from the Gospel of Mark.
“Guys, I have some bad news,” he says. “Later today, the UFL will issue a press release that says the league has folded.”
Complete stunned silence. It’s over.
“Just kidding,” Joe says. He smiles.
The room explodes in relieved laughter.
All of the teams will be playing this weekend, he tells them. There’s a chance that if the Nighthawks win, they’ll play in the championship game. There’s also a chance that even if they win, the season is over. Nothing is certain except for the fact that this game is on.
Minutes later, Joe addresses the players and repeats what he’s told the coaches, minus the joke. “The bottom line is that whatever happens in the weeks to come, we absolutely have to win this game,” he tells them. “That part of the equation stays the same.”
In other words, now that the game is saved, all the Nighthawks have to do is go out and defeat a team that, just a few days before, had completely dominated them.
One afternoon after practice, Joe leads his third “Life after Football” seminar. This week’s topic is personal finances. All but sixteen of the Nighthawks players show up for the meeting; eight coaches are on hand as well. (The league’s probable demise has apparently jolted the men into thinking a bit more about a football afterlife.) Joe has brought in a group of managers from TD Ameritrade who will talk about credit card fees, retirement savings accounts, and stock portfolios, and answer what will turn out to be hundreds of individual questions from the players and staff, questions that range from mortgages and car payments to retirement plans.
But before the suits can take the floor, Joe stands up to address the room. He has a few things he wants to say first.
“Here’s the one lesson I’ve learned over the years,” he says. “No one, and I mean no one, cares about your money more than you do. It’s an absolute must for you to know exactly how much money you have coming in and going out. You can’t rely on other people to do that for you. I certainly don’t.”
Joe then hands out a sheet of paper that has thirty-six different categories listed on it, each with its own individual box. It’s his own monthly and annual budget worksheet. “You’ll see I’ve only included the categories and not the actual expenditures,” he says with a grin.
The worksheet includes categories that one might expect to see. There are slots for maintenance on cars, cash given annually to his children, and dues for his golf clubs (Baltusrol and Omaha Country Club). But Joe also gets surprisingly granular on his sheet. There’s a slot for the flowers he occasionally buys Amy and one for monthly cable TV. There’s another labeled “fish food.”
Joe, despite his millions, sits down with Amy every year and fills out this sheet by hand. Even though he has become a very wealthy man, he is as careful with his money now as he was back when he was a flat-broke high school football coach scrounging for change to buy sprinkles for an ice cream cone.
That the Nighthawks and Locos are playing each other twice within a six-day span is yet another challenging quirk in the UFL’s reconstituted season. The Nighthawks will have limited time to regroup strategically and—more important—emotionally. A team defeated in the manner the Nighthawks were can suffer a loss even greater than the game itself—a loss of confidence, in themselves, their system, their coaches. Joe’s task this week is to ensure that doesn’t happen. And that starts with coaching his coaches.
He meets with his three coordinators and their respective staffs individually. Olivadotti is still deeply embarrassed by his defense’s performance in the last game. “We screwed up and we will fix it,” he tells Joe. All week long, Olivadotti subjects his players and coaches to repeated viewings of their disaster in Las Vegas. He wants them to really feel the same embarrassment that he does. During practice, with every glare at a player who has made a mistake, and every pat on the back of one who has done something well, Olivadotti is telling Joe I won’t let you down again.
Kent, too, uses film as a motivator. He shows the special team units footage of all the kickoffs and punts. In every frame, the Locos physically dominate, making the bigger hits, tossing Nighthawks players to the turf. Kent refrains from showing the O’Connell hit again, but that play and injury serve as an implicit rallying cry.
Andrus says his side just has to put it together. The pieces are in place. But he wants more from Joe. In one meeting he asks Joe to more strongly demonstrate his faith in the offensive play calling. “I believe in you and this system,” Joe responds. “Just do your thing and do it well.”
The Nighthawks have more than a mental hurdle to overcome this week. There’s a physical one, as well, in the form of the team members they have lost to injuries. During practice, the injured players are on the sidelines watching the action, all in something of a daze, like infirmary patients gathered in the TV room. The team’s best receiver, Chad Jackson, stares at the turf below his tightly wrapped knee, perhaps in disbelief that he has suffered yet another injury in a career plagued by them. Dvoracek limps around in flip-flops. O’Connell wears a hoodie, peering out at the scene from the dark-circled eyes of a man who has suffered a serious head injury. Reynaldo Hill sits on a golf cart, foot on the dashboard, his injured big toe pointing skyward.
Although they’re close to the action, it’s as though the injured men have become invisible on the practice field (though they are well taken care of off the field). The coaches no longer talk to them much; their concentration is on the guys who will actually be playing. Even their teammates barely acknowledge them, an avoidance that seems almost purposeful. The injured players represent something unnerving to the healthy, a reminder of the sudden death blows that this game routinely and randomly doles out to men’s dreams.
The week wears Joe down. He can’t sleep at night. He’s on the phone every day with Hambrecht and Huyghue, trying to help sort out the league’s finances (this time, they’re joined by the other coaches). He is using every last reserve of energy to motivate his coaches and players for the battle against a team that just ran right over them. And, though he mentions this to no one, his own career is at stake here. He feels he must win this game. Going 1-3 in this league would pretty much verify the fears and doubts that all of those college athletic directors had about him. His team seems anxious as well. He decides they all need to loosen up.
At what might very well be the Nighthawks’ last practice, on a sunny and brisk fall day, Joe makes a request of George Glenn, his chief of staff. He wants Glenn to start practice by playing the Surfaris song “Wipeout” on the big speakers that are wheeled onto the field daily and usually used to simulate crowd noise. Glenn complies.
Joe calls the team together in the middle of the field, and then signals to Glenn. At the song’s manic opening words—“Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, wipeout!”—which lead to the equally manic and annoyingly hard-to-forget guitar riff, Joe drops his clipboard and starts to swivel his hips, harkening back to his pseudonymous, prize-winning dance during his Dartmouth days. Walter Curry Jr., a big defensive lineman always up for a laugh, joins in. The players are into it. They gather around, hooting and hollering. Suddenly, seventy-four-year-old Don Lawrence jumps in, doing his own slow-but-very-determined twist. (He will check in with the trainer immediately afterward, complaining of pain in his back.) A Nighthawks media relations intern films the dance and posts it on YouTube, but without any sound. Joe will have it quickly taken down after a few ribbing phone calls from his friends. “It was so out of context,” he says. “It was like seeing someone in his car singing his heart out when you can’t hear the music. I looked like a dodo.”
Still, Joe is never afraid to play the fool—in context, of course—if he thinks it will serve a purpose. And his performance is meant to set the tone for the practice, and for the game that is soon to follow: let’s be intense, but let’s stay loose and have fun.
It turns out to be one of the best practices of the year.
Realizing that this may be the last game of the Nighthawks season—maybe even the last of Joe’s coaching career—Joe’s family and friends rally to his side. Johnny, Mary, and Paul all fly in to Omaha with their spouses. His three oldest children, Kelly, Kim, and Kara, come with husbands and children in tow. (Kevin is stuck working back in New York.) Even Kathe briefly considers attending the game, but eventually decides to listen to it via a website radio feed (the only way for out-of-towners to follow the game thanks to the UFL’s inability to secure a national TV contract). Joe’s stepson Jeff, who has been an intern with the team (and was the “squirrely” guy who made Andrus so nervous during the tryouts) will of course be there. His other stepson, John, is flying in from Dallas. And a few members of the old Merrill Lynch crew—Roger Vasey, Bob Bertoni, Ed Sheridan, and Jim Smyth—make a surprise visit. Many of the TD Ameritrade gang are there as well, as they have been all season.
For Joe’s two oldest children, being at the game has a certain cathartic effect. Seeing their father on a football field represents something bigger than the game, bigger and in some ways even better than Joe’s attempt to recapture his dream. “It’s so cool seeing him on the sidelines again,” says Kelly. “I never really knew the Merrill Lynch and TD Ameritrade dad. Watching him coach again brings me back to a much better time, before anything bad happened, when he was just my dad.”
Having all of these people present is actually beneficial to Joe, and helps take his mind off the worst part of game week for football players and coaches: having to endure the excruciating hours between waking up and going out on the field when the big day finally arrives. “I absolutely hate the day of games, especially with a late kickoff,” says Olivadotti. (The Vegas game is at 7:00 p.m.) “The hay is in the barn. All you can do is wait.”
On game days, there is an optional prayer gathering in the morning, then the offense, defense, and special teams each meet for a quick ten minutes just to mentally walk through assignments and plays one last time. Olivadotti and Andrus like to have their game plans set in stone by the day before the game, at the very latest. They are both thankful that Joe is not a last-minute tinkerer. “[Don] Shula used to come up to me an hour before the game and say, ‘Hey, Tom, let’s change this and this and this,’” Olivadotti says about his former boss. “I loved the man. Still do. But that used to drive me crazy.”
In the midafternoon, everyone lumbers down to the dining hall for the pregame meal, exactly four hours before kickoff. The coaches always sit at the tables and let the players hit the buffet line first, like cowboys watching their cattle graze. The day of games is quiet, almost solemn. There is none of the usual laughing and horsing around, just the tink-tink of forks on plates and the gentle murmur of lowered voices. “Part of it I think is that they are concentrating on the game,” says Olivadotti. “And another part of it is just zoning out, trying to forget the game so the anticipation doesn’t drive you crazy.”
Olivadotti gets some good—and very surprising—news a few hours before kickoff. Somehow, despite a badly torn knee ligament, Dusty Dvoracek has decided that he will play in the game. The trainers have advised him that doing so risks catastrophic injury to his knee. Dvoracek knows that. But it isn’t stopping him. The coaches aren’t, either: it’s hard to deter a strong-willed, six-foot-three, three-hundred-pound nose tackle.
And, anyway, they need him. “Dusty is the most important player on our defense,” says Brandon Noble. On the face of it this statement seems nonsensical, since Dvoracek’s name rarely appears on the stat sheets (he averages only a few tackles a game). But what he does is perhaps the least selfish, least glamorous task in football. His job is to eat up space, to occupy at least two offensive linemen and hold them in place at the line of scrimmage. That allows the linebackers behind him, and his fellow defensive linemen beside him, to blast through lanes to attack the running back or the quarterback. Dvoracek does this at least as well now as he did during four injury-riddled seasons with the Bears.
This may very well be the last game that Dvoracek ever plays. He’s suiting up for his own gratification—he loves the violence, the battle of wills, the chance to prove on every play that he can overcome pain and push himself beyond his own limitations. But he’s also doing it for Joe. “I believe in him,” says Dvoracek, who has a cherubic face on which he’s raised a short but still scruffy, sandy-blond beard. “All of that ‘being a man’ stuff is true. It’s what life is all about.”
Dvoracek is a study in the contrasts that football seems to demand of its players. He is well spoken, philosophical and smart (he was Academic All Big-12 at Oklahoma). But he is also sometimes out of control. One drunken brawl during college led to his suspension from the Sooners football team. Another one after college resulted in an arrest.
He’s paid a severe price for his love of football. Both of his knees are shredded. He can’t lift his right arm over his head because of the 2007 tackle of Adrian Peterson, in which he tore his biceps. His hands are swollen to the size of oven mitts, and nearly all of his stubby fingers have been broken, sprained, or jammed at one point or another in his career.
In his unguarded and reflective moments, Dvoracek acknowledges the toll that the game has taken on his body, and what it might mean for his long-term health. Former NFL nose tackle Kris Jenkins once described his football job in gladiatorial terms: “You may not die now, like in an old Roman arena, but five, ten years down the road you could. You know that.”
Dvoracek agrees. He sees the alarming number of former professional football players—and, in particular, linemen—who are dying at premature ages, wracked with injuries to their brains, hearts, and other key parts of their bodies. “I’d be surprised if I make it to fifty-five,” the twenty-eight-year-old says quietly, with a calm, serious look on his face. “But I would do it all over again. I really would.”
Herein lies the modern conundrum facing football players: Thanks to scientific advances, they are now fully aware of the physical and emotional toll that the game will exact upon them. But most of them choose to play anyway, for as long as they physically can.
The reason that Dvoracek would literally die for the game is that it provides him with something that he feels he can find nowhere else, something, paradoxically, that he feels is vital to living fully. In this battle of wills on every snap with another man (or in his case, often with two other men), he reaches something deep and profound within himself, some sort of absolute clarity. Every play on the field for Dvoracek is what T. S. Eliot once described as “the still point of the turning world.” It’s something he is not willing to give up just yet, no matter the cost.
In the locker room before the game Joe introduces Bo Pelini, the Nebraska head coach who has come up from Lincoln to watch his former intern in action. “If it wasn’t for this guy, I wouldn’t have had this opportunity,” says Joe. Pelini waves a modest hello, then cedes the floor to Joe.
“Men, this is a gift we’ve been given here tonight. How many times in life do you get a real second chance?” Joe asks, before delivering a few succinct admonitions. The special teams units, he says, have to be more physical; they were blown away in the last game. The offense has to find its groove and score points. And the defense must redeem itself. Olivadotti nods, then stares grimly at the floor.
Angelo Crowell, the muscled linebacker and captain of the defense, walks to the middle of the room. “We all stood up individually before the season started and talked about where we were from, who we were, what our goals were. Tonight is the night we put all of those words into action, together.”
Then the teams take the field. It’s a beautiful, soft, Indian summer evening in Nebraska. The fans are out in full force, 17,600 strong, one of the biggest crowds in the UFL season. They are loud. They get louder when Joe and Pelini run out onto the field together. Then the sideline, in the VIP section, becomes a snapshot of Joe’s life: His daughters and their husbands and his grandkids are standing next to his stepsons, who are standing next to his former Merrill and TD Ameritrade colleagues and Bo Pelini. Amy is in a skybox, as always, nervously watching over the proceedings.
On the opposing sideline, Fassel paces back and forth, his face already worked up into a game-day crimson. Hambrecht and Huyghue are in attendance. It’s apparent that some decision on the league will be made here tonight.
Dvoracek runs out onto the field with a noticeable hitch in his gait, then takes a seat on the bench and starts violently vomiting. It’s part of his pregame routine.
The Nighthawks kick the ball to the Locos. Omaha’s defense sets the tone right away. Olivadotti has them ready. On the first play from scrimmage, four Omaha defenders run Locos quarterback Chase Clement out of bounds for no gain, their thudding feet sounding eerily like a troop of galloping horses. “C’mon, Clement, you got more than that, man!” seethes Crowell.
On the second play, defensive linemen Jay Moore and Kevin Basped plant Locos running back Marcell Shipp on his rear in the backfield for a loss.
On the third play, a slow-developing run, Dvoracek slaloms through a few offensive linemen. As the play unfolds, the Nighthawks players on the sidelines whoop and leap in the air, like a boxing crowd sensing an impending knockout. They get their wish. Dvoracek blasts into Shipp for another loss, this one of four yards.
The special teams match the defense’s intensity. On fourth down, Matt Wenger—the rookie linebacker who’d been signed to take the place of the injured Pat Thomas—slices through the middle of the Locos line and blocks the punt. The Nighthawks recover the ball on the Las Vegas 8-yard line. The crowd works itself into a frenzy. Everything is going the Nighthawks’ way.
But the offense doesn’t get the memo. After a six-yard run by John Griffin to the 2-yard line, Shaud Williams is stuffed for a loss. On third down, Masoli rolls out to his left and throws the ball to Greg Orton, who, with Jackson out, is perhaps Omaha’s best healthy receiver. Orton, in the end zone, is as open as a professional wide receiver could hope to be, which is to say that he has one small step on his defender, a narrow window that will close in a matter of seconds. The ball is thrown a bit low, but is catchable. Orton reaches his hands down to the tops of his shoelaces. He seems to have the ball in his hands for a moment. But then he drops it. Wolfert hits a field goal the length of an extra point.
Early in the second quarter, Colclough almost returns a punt for a touchdown, but is tripped up by the last man standing between him and the end zone. After a few incomplete passes, Omaha’s drive stops at the Locos’ 14. On fourth and eight, Wolfert comes on for a thirty-two-yard field goal attempt.
During the week’s special teams film sessions, Kent noticed that on field goal attempts, the Locos sometimes lined up only three men on the right side of the line of scrimmage, where he had four. Plays at the line of scrimmage come down to numbers. Whoever has more men usually wins. Kent thought if the situation arose, Omaha could run a surprise fake (they had not run one all season). The fake would entail Mante, the Yalie punter and kick holder, running the ball.
As the Nighthawks line up for the field goal attempt, Wolfert sees that there are indeed four Locos on the right side. He’s supposed to kick. But he and Mante, through some confusion, make the wrong call.
The ball is snapped and Mante takes off with it. Mante, who is not a big man as professional football players go, six feet tall and maybe two hundred pounds, gains only two yards before the unblocked Locos player crushes him. With the unsuccessful fake, the Nighthawks fail to score a point from the 14-yard line. And the tackle results in a broken collarbone for Mante—something he will neglect to tell Kent about until after the game.
The Nighthawks defense, however, is still on fire. Led by Crowell, who has four tackles for losses in the first half alone, and Dvoracek, who’s enabling Crowell and his linebacker brethren to have the space they need to disrupt plays, it’s working exactly as Olivadotti had envisioned. With eight minutes left in the first half, Schweigert intercepts a Locos pass. Masoli leads the offense down to the Las Vegas 1-yard line. Garrett Wolfe gets a carry on third down, and runs parallel to the line, trying to gain the corner of the end zone. But he takes only one step before being taken down by a Locos defender who has blasted Omaha center Donovan Raiola three feet into the backfield.
Raiola jogs to the sideline with his head down. Joe runs over to him. Joe’s face is flushed. Frustration with the offense is boiling over on the sideline.
“What happened?” Joe says.
“I wasn’t ready, Coach,” Raiola replies.
“What do you mean you weren’t ready? The guy was right in front of you. Block his ass!” says Joe. Then, as if trying to move Raiola past the mistake, Joe adds: “Donovan, you’re one of the leaders on this team. Now get your ass out there and show it.”
Wolfert kicks another field goal. The Nighthawks go into the locker room leading 6–3. They’ve held the Locos to minus-one-yard rushing in the half. They’ve owned the line of scrimmage. They’ve dominated the game. Being up by only three points feels like a huge disappointment.
Because the average play in the football game, from snap to whistle, is only four seconds long, it may seem like folly to try to reduce a game to a single one. But sometimes the success or failure of one critical play ends up being the standard by which everyone and everything—the offensive scheme, the players, the front office, the coach—is judged. Games can change in four seconds. Seasons can, too.
Had Greg Orton caught that pass thrown at his shoelaces, the Nighthawks would have been ahead 7–0 and had all the momentum in the game. Holding the Nighthawks to merely a field goal after they had the ball at the 2-yard line was a huge lift for the Locos, a confidence-boosting victory in a key battle in the larger war.
On their opening drive in the second half, the Locos finally get something going on offense, using a mix of runs and play-action passes to keep Omaha’s aggressive defense on its heels. But, deep in Nighthawks territory, a blitzing Crowell breaks through the line and pressures Locos quarterback Chase Clement into a forced throw. The ball sails directly at the chest of Omaha linebacker Steve Octavien, who seems surprised at his good fortune. So surprised that he turns his head just a second before the ball reaches his hands, already scouting out the lanes through which he’ll run with the ball. But there will be no running because the football slips through his hands and bounces off his chest, falling harmlessly to the grass. On the Omaha sideline, professed Christians use their Lord’s name in vain. A minute later, the Locos score a touchdown. And, astonishingly, they are now ahead by four points in a game in which they could have been down by at least fourteen.
The Nighthawks offense responds with an impressive drive, but one that ultimately stalls in the red zone. Wolfert, the UFL’s best kicker and one of the most reliable kickers in NCAA history, comes on for a forty-yard field goal attempt. Mante, his holder, now hampered by his broken collarbone—which he still hasn’t told anyone about—gets the snap and can’t quite spin the laces away from the spot where Wolfert’s foot is supposed to meet the ball. (Kicking the ball on its laces is thought to be a mortal sin; kickers believe it reduces their ability to control the flight of the ball.) The kick goes wide, and with it, Wolfert seems to lose the one thing he has relied on most throughout his successful athletic career, first as a diver, then as a placekicker: his confidence.
In the fourth quarter, on another Omaha foray into the red zone, he misses another kick, this one from thirty-seven yards. The Locos, buoyed by the misses, get one more drive going. They have a third-and-one at the Omaha 15. A touchdown will pretty much seal the game, given the state of the Nighthawks offense. But Basped tackles Shipp in the backfield. The Locos settle for a field goal. They now lead 13-6 with five minutes left in the game.
After a quick possession, the Nighthawks punt back to the Locos. Clement leads Vegas to the Omaha 20, where they face a fourth-and-one. Fassel, looking to end the game, decides to go for it. Joe speaks through his headset to Olivadotti in the coaches’ box: “One more stop.” They get it. Omaha has the ball back with two minutes to go. Masoli completes a pass, then scampers for twenty yards. The ball is on the Locos 33. But on fourth down, Masoli overthrows his receiver. The Locos take a knee. And somehow, the Nighthawks have lost.
Despite the devastating loss, Olivadotti and his defense have redeemed themselves, holding the Locos to 283 yards in total offense after giving up 401 the week before. “I couldn’t have been prouder of the effort you gave tonight,” Joe tells the defense. “You were physical, tough, and aggressive, and you made plays again and again and again.”
The special teams, too, have done their jobs. Kent, after a tough start to the season, has improved his unit dramatically. Wolfert’s misses seem an anomaly. “Jeff, you won us the game in Sacramento. You had an off night tonight. I still have faith in you,” Joe says.
But regarding the offense, Joe is mum. Masoli was off-target all night. The line had regressed. The offensive stats on the game were brutal. Omaha had gotten the ball in the red zone five times (three times, they had been handed the ball there by the defense and special teams). They’d had the ball within the 5-yard line on three different occasions. And they came away with only six points. “The absolute worst display of offense I’ve ever witnessed” is what Joe will call it later. Adding to his frustration was the fact that powerball—which employed exactly the type of scheme and play calls that put the ball in the end zone from the 2-yard line—still had not been fully installed by Andrus and his staff.
The dark mood in the Nighthawks locker room is brightened slightly by the news that in the other UFL game that night, Sacramento had upset Virginia. With two scheduled games remaining, Virginia and Las Vegas were both 3-1, and Sacramento and Omaha were 1-3. All of the teams are mathematically still alive for the championship. That is, if the owners decide to finish the season. The players and coaches are sure there’s no way they can call off the season now.
But any hopes Joe has of a continued season are dashed immediately. As he walks out of the locker room to go address the media, Huyghue—who had been waiting in the hallway—appears at his side. “It’s over, Joe,” he says as they walk down the hall. “Virginia and Las Vegas will play for the championship next week.” Cutting the season short will save the owners $3.5 million. Joe nods and shakes Huyghue’s hand. The bad news swiftly filters back to the Omaha locker room.
Later, as Huyghue stands in the elevator with a few others on his way out of the stadium, he shakes his head. “Man, they really pissed that game away, didn’t they?” he says, to no one in particular.
The Nighthawks players and coaches all believe that this is it, the end of the season. They head out of the locker room and out on the town to try to forget the loss as quickly as they can.
But no one realizes just how unwilling Joe is to take no for an answer.