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The Dartmouth
July 9, 2025 | Latest Issue
The Dartmouth

Rollin' with Dolan

There's nothing better than stumbling upon a lay-up. Not a literal basketball lay-up, but you know, one of those lay-ups that occurs in everyday life. Like when you're playing poker and someone says "I'm small" (referring to the small blind), it's just too easy to make a joke there. Same with whenever someone refers to this paper as "The D" easy money.

While life's lay-ups are great, in the world of sports reporting, you never want to give someone you are interviewing a lay-up question. For instance, if you were interviewing Tiger Woods, would you ask him if he was going to practice hard in the offseason, or would you ask him when he's going to finally admit that Elin charged at him Rambo-style with a golf club that night?

Nevertheless, time after time, I see sports writers ask football coaches the biggest lay-up question of all. They ask them, "What's your favorite play?" Every single coach has exactly the same answer, "Taking a knee." Easy lay-up answer, next question.

Just to quickly explain for those who don't know, taking a knee is essentially what coaches do to keep the clock running once they have the lead in a game. It's also what unfun people do when they have the lead in Madden.

I was recently reminded of why this is their favorite play when I was sitting in a class that I hadn't done the reading for. The teacher was cold calling students and asking very specific questions about the reading. I glanced at the game clock and realized I had roughly 20 minutes to kill before class was over. Since most other kids had been called on already, it felt like I had fought hard all game and was desperately clinging to a tiny fourth-quarter lead. So, just like the coaches, I went to some of my favorite plays to take some time off the clock.

First, I went with old faithful. I took out my notebook, put my head down and refused to make eye contact with the teacher, hopefully giving off the image that I was taking serious notes. That move worked for about two minutes, but the content of the discussion wasn't all that note-worthy, so to avoid suspicion I had to call another play.

With 18 minutes left on the clock, I called the "rummage through your backpack acting like you're looking for something" play. Just as football is a game of inches, this is a game of seconds. It's all about timing. So, right when the teacher was finishing her next question, I put my head down and explored my backpack for a bit. The teacher called on some other kid and his answer took about three minutes.

I was starting to feel like the game was gonna go my way, when suddenly my teacher threw in a brutal curveball. Out of nowhere she drops the "Okay, let's see who I haven't called on yet." Just like that, with one backbreaking play, she ripped all the momentum away from me.

I knew I needed to counter and luckily I still had one bazooka left in my bag. While the teacher was finishing up her question, I got up and took what hopefully everyone else in the class thought was a "bathroom break." I know it's kinda an unwritten rule that you don't go to the bathroom with less than 15 minutes left in the class, but things were desperate, and I figured 10 minutes is the hard cutoff point.

This proved to be the play of the game. I didn't return to class until there were seven minutes to go and at that point I basically could just coast to victory. All I had to do was go through the usual motions. I checked something on the computer, underlined some words on a handout, "accidentally" dropped my pencil on the floor, wrote my name on some stuff, and finally, started shuffling my papers with about two minutes to go. Game over. Point Dolan. Wuz good.

That whole experience was just another reminder of how sports can teach us tools for everyday life. If you have an open lane to the basket, you take the points. If your friend leaves his Facebook open, you poke someone they used to hook up with. You always take the lay-up. Same with killing the clock, if you can buy yourself time to get out of sticky situations, you do it, whatever it takes.