Have you seen Sicario? Because if you haven't seen Sicario, I recommend that you go see Sicario. It's a good movie about the drug war in Mexico, and at some point the tough mean cop says to the young naive cop
You should move to a small town, somewhere the rule of law still exists. You will not survive here. You are not a wolf, and this is a land of wolves now.
Whoa that's a nice little quip you got there, Benicio del Toro! It's a tremendous shame that Sicario came out in 2015, because I know several hundred thousand college freshman who would've killed for a line like that to use as their AIM away message in 2003. Nothing says "I'm mysterious and cool as heck" to a dorm full of co-eds like a quote from a movie where a lot of actors pretend to die violently.
Instead they made do with some the more conventional Boondock Saints quotes (occasionally usurped by a Donnie Darko line or two) punctuated by blasting Flogging Molly at 2 AM every Friday night.
It's important to point out that for that guy, any movie quote about vengeance or survival or showing to the world that you don't take no guff would've worked. As long as it gave him the confidence to overcome some deep seated social anxiety long enough to make out with someone on a gross couch in someone's lawn on Chittenden, then it accomplished what it was intended to accomplish!
And frankly, good for that guy. Boondock Saints is a profoundly stupid movie but if its bloated sense of moral rectitude helped some college kids swap spit then maybe that's a net win for humanity.
By that same token, as cheesy and base and cliche as "land of the wolves" becomes out of context, in the hands of master motivators like Urban Meyer and company... it kind of works.
I don't know how it works, exactly. Maybe Urban's personality can make the phone book illuminating. Maybe football culture primes players to buy in to crazy slogans. Maybe I'm a horrible cynic and this stuff is truly profound and amazing.
The latter seems likely in light of the results that Meyer is able to get. From inspirational unis and cigar boxes to to Winner/Loser Day to Tim Kight's E + R = O mantra (which I've personally talked about with my high school students), Meyer and his staff have a seemingly endless supply of motivational techniques that keep their players engaged and focused.
"Land of the Wolves" doesn't make a whole hell of a lot of sense to someone outside of the program, but it really doesn't have to. If the goal is to create the next dank internet meme that gets reblogged on Tumblr fifty thousand times, then in that respect the Buckeye coaching staff has utterly failed. On the other hand, if the goal was to create a sense of urgency during winter workouts and spring practices, then it's mission accomplished.
"The land of the wolves mindset is as a wolf every day, I feel like you wake up and you’re just trying to find your next meal. You’re always attacking."
It's a pretty silly metaphor for offseason football practices, but when J.T. says it... dammit, I want to believe.
Another story: I played soccer all four years in high school. I was pretty bad and knew it, so maybe that changes the metrics of this tale, but at one point during my junior season our head coach thought it'd be motivating to show us Full Metal Jacket before we started two-a-days. Being that I saw a lot more of myself in Joker than in Gunnery Sergeant Hartman, I wasn't quite as motivated by R. Lee Ermey screaming unpublishable things at the bug-man from Men In Black as some of my teammates were.
They loved it. Absolutely ate it up. The team yelled things about stacked feces and Texas cattle and whatever other else they could remember as we ran ourselves stupid around a middle school several hundred times. It's more than a little ironic that lines from a movie about war's dehumanizing effect on people were being happily quoted by teenagers doing hours of laps before going to Burger King to smoke in the parking lot.
Somehow, our complete inability to understand the darker themes present in one of cinema's most scathing critiques of conformity had helped make us into a better team.
Motivation is weird.
The Michigan State loss last season was one of the most deflating losses that Ohio State fans have had to deal with in the last five years or so. A team that was supposed to live up to some incredibly lofty expectations crashed and burned due to a combination of listless play, poor coaching, and an opponent simply more motivated than they were.
In no way did I expect the Buckeyes to come out and kick the crap out of a supposedly game Michigan team under the leadership of America's hottest new coach. I similarly did not expect them to easily defeat Notre Dame in a bowl game many deemed beneath them.
This year most people aren't expecting a lot from Ohio State, and given the amount of players they need to replace, it's understandable. But as the 2016 Buckeyes emerge from the land of the wolves, it's really hard to remain a cynic when Urban Meyer is still the head coach. Sometimes it's better just to embrace the weird and silly and accept the proposition that hell, maybe anything really is possible.
