Editing 544: Pep Talk

{{comic
| number    =544
| date      =February 16, 2009
| title     =Pep Talk
| image     =pep_talk.png
| titletext =Listen! They said a team of chess players coached by someone with no understanding of basketball would never be competitive in the NBA! Well, it turns out they're pretty perceptive.
}}

==Explanation==
Another comic where [[Randall]] takes a less than serious look at sports.

The halftime {{w|Motivational speaker|pep talk}} of a {{w|basketball}} game is commonly used by coaches to inspire their team to either turn the game around, or to defend the lead, and to make strategic changes that will help them do so. Unfortunately, the basketball coach [[Cueball]] has absolutely no fundamental understanding of the sport, and has pulled his team (of Cueball-like players) into the locker room while the game is still in progress, not during halftime, enabling the other team to score at will. 

He could have tried to get a {{w|Time-out (sport)|time-out}}, but still he would not have been allowed to take his team down to the locker room.

The title text parodies a common plot of, especially US, {{w|List_of_sports_films#Basketball|sports movies}} in which {{tvtropes|UnderdogsNeverLose|an inexperienced team (and sometimes coach) still manage to win}} a title after a highly motivational pep talk (see for instance {{w|Hoosiers (film)|Hoosiers}}). These pep talks usually take place during regular pauses of the game, and can lead to a come back from a seemingly insurmountable deficit.

It can probably be presumed that this is still Coach Cueball talking, but the precise meaning of the phrase depends upon who "they" are, or even if it's the same "they" in both instances. The classic interpretation might be that the both "they"s are his own team's detractors, possibly even the opposing team of {{w|National Basketball Association|NBA}} professionals, who have been trash-talking Cueball's team's chamces by pointing out that {{w|chess}} players don't have any innate qualities to make them transfer well into high-level basketball, especially when the person trying to train them to do so (Cueball) explicitly has no basketball experience. Rather than this being a case of overturned expectations, even Coach Cueball has come to realise that the detractors' predictions have been very accurate.

An alternative reading is that the first "they" are people who have been assessing the ''opponents''' chances. Coach Cueball is, in this scenario, playing against a team of chess-players with an inexperienced coach of their own. Yet even with these possible disadvantages (Cueball's players may even be legitmate NBA basketballers, although Cueball's misunderstanding of when to depart the court imply he's at least as bad at organising such a team, and his people seem like they would do better with no coach at all), the opposing players (the "they" in the "they're") have overcome their 'obvious' disadvantages, and appear to have been able to use their (chess-playing?) observational skills to good effect. And not just currently triumphing against the poorly-led players we see, but at least on a par with the rest of the NBA circuit. Regardless of how well Cueball's team normally competes in the more general competition.<!-- editor's note: I personally think this is too much of a stretch; somehow two 'wildly off beat' teams, yet with completely different fortunes (both subverted and enforced expectations), managed to sneek into mainstream competition like this... It's neither a realistic outcome nor a standard fictional trope. But a prior author seemed to primarily read it this way and want to commit to this stranger version, and (for the sake of all parties) it looked like it needed vastly more explaning to make sure all perspectives were acknowledged. -->

Further different nuances may apply if it is ''not'' Coach Cueball speaking the title text. But,whichever way it is meant, this supposed 'pep' statement ends up by admitting that the situation is hopeless, rather than the typically expected imparting of optimism and drive to try (however unlikely) to inspire a final victory.

==Transcript==
:[Coach-Cueball stands at the end of a double row of benches in the players locker room. He speaks to his team of five Cueball-like players, two are sitting with towels on the left bench, one stands behind them, and two are sitting on the right bench, one of them resting his head on his hands.]
:Coach-Cueball: Okay, team. We're sixteen points down. If we want to come back from this—
:Offscreen: Woo!! Score!!!
:Coach-Cueball: Okay, now we're eighteen points down. ...Listen—I'm starting to think we should only take these breaks at halftime.

==Trivia==
*In [[1392: Dominant Players]] Randall compares basketball with chess.

{{comic discussion}}
[[Category:Comics featuring Cueball]]
[[Category:Multiple Cueballs]]
[[Category:Basketball]]
[[Category:Comics with a Spanish translation]]