Finals week. Ready- No? Tough tinsel. The coach is putting you in anyway and you’ve got some big plays to make. You’re coming late into the game and there is nothing you can do to change that, so you’ll have to roll with it.

Take what you’re given and hopefully put on a little late semester magic. If you aren’t sure how you’re going to pull this off and hope seems lost, here is a rundown of some steps that should give you a game plan.

Check the scoreboard. Even if you have been paying attention to the game the whole time, you need to forget about it for now and look at the scoreboard. It gives the honest facts of the right here and now. It doesn’t tell you how you got lucky by guessing C three times in a row after a string of all A’s and B’s on that last quiz.

The scoreboard does not care about outliers, flukes, runs, momentum swings or any of that. It tells you that you have this grade,it can go up or down by this much with the final and how much time you have until it’s here. The situation is clear. Next up is a plan of action. This is where you bring back what you’ve learned over the semester. The professor curves, there is always true and false sections, the professor likes to take questions that people got wrong from the midterm, the test is cumulative – use these things to your advantage.

Lebron doesn’t go out onto the court and disregard the other team’s history of fast breaks and looking to score off of the transition.

If you weren’t paying attention and you don’t know these things, remember your class is a team. It might be a non-unified conglomerate mass of awkward kids who really don’t want to be there, but gosh darn it, Corbin, you’re all in this together; so make like a millionaire and poll the audience or phone a friend.

If you happen to be all alone on this one with no connections, well, you just really like an underdog story, don’t you? With no idea of what is going on in class and leaving yourself with no one to ask about specifics of the test or advice on what to study; you have really put yourself in the hotseat. It would be like stepping out to kick the game winning field goal and never practicing and not even knowing what team you play for. But I’m here to help. In this situation the playbook has only one answer. Hail Mary. Wish or pray to what or whoever you can, because your goose is cooked. Cram in as much preparation before the snap, roll out wide behind your strongest tackle to buy time and huck it up there.

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