Coaches and players of all sports love clichés. It’s actually clichéd to point that out, as the cliché goes.

Even if they are hackneyed, some truisms have stood the test of time. However, some haven’t aged as well.

But regardless of their merit, clichés even made it into movies. The scene in “Bull Durham” where Crash Davis, played by Kevin Costner, explains the finer points of clichéd quotes to his young pitcher, Ebby Calvin “Nuke” LaLoosh, played by Tim Robbins, is hilarious because we’ve all heard players utter those phrases that draw eyerolls from scribes.

The crown jewel from that scene is “play them one game at a time.” How many times have you heard a manager, a coach or a player utter that phrase? It is classic Zen, all about living in the moment and worrying only about the present, which is all we can really affect.

Or football, where it all comes down to “blocking and tackling,” the favorite answer to just about any question by a football coach. No matter what defense you run, be it the 3-4, 4-3 or the multi-defensive back madness run by former Mississippi State defensive coordinator Joe Lee Dunn, it still boils down to defeating blocks, covering receivers and putting a clean lick on a ball carrier or a quarterback. No matter the offense, be it a spread, a pro-style I-formation attack, a spread option or a triple-option, blocking is the biggest part of the equation.

But there are cliches that we could do without.

Like the phrase, “110 percent.” First, that’s impossible to get that level of effort from anybody. In the movie “Spinal Tap,” guitarist Nigel Tufnel, played by Christopher Guest, boasts that “ours (amplifiers) go to 11.” Of course when pressed on why they don’t just make setting 10 louder, he replies after a long pause.

“These go to 11.”

Or how about New Orleans Saints Sean Payton’s favorite reply to anything?

“It is what it is.”

He gives this answer about the offensive line, Drew Brees’ play, Reggie Bush’s girlfriends, whether Bush’s knees are the victims of a voodoo curse, the origins of Mardi Gras, how many licks it takes to get the center of a Tootsie Roll pop, is there intelligent life in the universe or any other pressing question.

When Sean Payton needs a go-to play, he trots out this phrase as easily as he’d call a double reverse on fourth-and-Baton Rouge to go or an onsides kick in the Super Bowl.

It sounds like controlling what you can control, an acceptance of things beyond your control and knowing the difference, but Payton uses it so many times, its effect has worn thinner than 10-year-old underpants.

How about the phrase, “play our game?” When confronted with this, one can only ask “what were you going to do, play badminton or perhaps cricket instead of baseball?”

Or how about “halftime adjustments?” The primary adjustment made by football coaches is lighting verbally into the backsides of their players getting dominated on the line of scrimmage. It’s an adjustment all right, just not the way the cliché purports.

So clichés can be a mixed bag.

A can of worms.

So maybe it’s time to quit beating around the bush and make them dead as a doornail.

Even if they are dyed in the wool.

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Steve Wilson is sports editor of The Vicksburg Post. You can follow him on Twitter at vpsportseditor. He can be reached at 601-636-4545, ext. 142 or at swilson@vicksburgpost.com.