There’s a saying that misery loves company, and Atlanta Falcons head coach Dan Quinn probably had those words in his heart, when he communicated with a fellow coach, who knows what it feels like during the aftermath of a monumental sporting collapse.
A week after Atlanta choked a 25-point lead in Super Bowl LI against the New England Patriots, Quinn got a text from Steve Kerr, who a year ago, saw his Golden State Warriors squander a 3-1 series lead to the Cleveland Cavaliers in the 2016 NBA Finals, via Elizabeth Merrill of ESPN:
Steve Kerr waited about a week before he texted Dan Quinn. He knew how many sympathy messages the Falcons coach must be getting — Kerr got about 50 after his Golden State Warriors blew a 3-1 lead in the 2016 NBA Finals. The last thing a beaten man wants is people feeling sorry for him. Those first few days, Kerr found comfort in commiserating with fellow Warriors, who knew exactly what he was going through. Quinn did the same.
Kerr would go on to lead his Warriors back to redemption, beating that very same Cleveland Cavaliers team the following year in the Finals. While Kerr admits he hasn’t completely recovered from the sting of that meltdown – and that he probably won’t ever – he offers some more advice to Quinn, whose morale still needs some more uplifting even though months have passed by since that Super Bowl debacle in Houston.
“I think certain games, certain losses, probably will stay with you forever,” Kerr says now. “That loss will never leave Dan or any of those guys. But you know what? It's life, and you go back to work the next day, and you go out to dinner with your family, or you go to your kid's baseball game, or you go out to a movie with some friends, go to a bar, and you start living again.
It’s never easy to rebound from such a deflating experience, but Quinn definitely could learn a lesson or two from Kerr, who used a spectacular failure to motivate his team into climbing back to the top.
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