Who Knows About The End

Denard Robinson went down in the second quarter against Nebraska. We all held our breath, this time under  far different circumstances.

Minnesota week went along, with the general expectation that Denard would likely play. He didn't, and the next week leading up to the Northwestern game was marked by conjecture and worry. Denard once again dressed but didn't take the field.

And so here we stand. With Michigan's last home game on Saturday, the last of Denard Robinson's career, conjecture with a tinge of hope has devolved into resignation and a sense of loss. Of all the times for Denard to miss a start, two starts, his last home game as a Wolverine, of course it had to be now.

After the Minnesota game, I expressed the concern that maybe we had seen the last of Denard Robinson during this regular season. After the Northwestern game, that concern grew roots and entrenched itself in the fertile soils of Michigan fan pessimism.

Denard is day-to-day, says Brady Hoke (aren't we all?). However, deep down, I am preparing for a Senior Day in which Denard Robinson does not take the field, that same field that he had taken many times before. The same field that he used to burn his aura onto our collective consciouness during the 2009 Western Michigan game; The Broken Play was only the beginning:

Michigan took the field in the shotgun formation. Denard Robinson's first play--the preface, the rising action, the climax, and the denouement--was one moment of aesthetic and philosophical achievement. In retrospect, its consideration invokes the past perfect, a recollection of a singular action at a singular junction in history: hemos visto el futuro.

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Of course, all is not quite lost. Michigan still has a trip to Columbus to go, as well as a bowl game, by which Denard should be ready to take the field again. This is not the final word, nor should it be.

I've said this many times before (almost to the point that even having to include this disclamatory preface makes me sit and wonder if its worth mentioning over and over again), but this sport exists beyond the plane of the field itself. Above it, around it, and deep below the turf itself, exists a mode of remembrance. Things do not simply happen and disappear into the cold, airless vacuum of the past. They linger.

Try and recall a spectacular run or one of many downfield heaves to Junior Hemingway, Roy Roundtree, and others. You can even seek the help of video if your memory is failing, and you seek a tighter verisimilitude.

You can even turn to one of many moments off the field: the speech at the Big Ten Media Day, his post-Under the Lights interview with Chris Fowler, general do-gooding, the shots of him behaving like one of us at Michigan basketball games, and so on.

Take those memories, the product of the literal mental reconstruction of those events, and cast them aside. You build a table and throw away the instructions, because you don't need them anymore.

Especially in a case like this, it is emotional memory that counts. I sit here, thinking of the times I got to watch Denard as a student--in 2009 and 2010--and thereafter, and the memory of the events themselves are good yet somewhat lacking in certain respects.

Denard went out and set the world on fire in 2010 after a transitional 2009 season as a backup. I remember the "shoelaces flopping in the wind"--Beckmann's call, that is--and the fact that it was an enormous play in an important game. Denard scored, six went up on the board

But it was far more than that. It exists in its own bubble, carefully archived like old, grainy film strips, coated in dust and threatening dissolution; emotional memory, manifested.

As I've grown older, more capable of deciding for myself what is what, a single overarching premise has come to dominate my fandom: it is people, not numbers, that matter. Of course, I will remember everything that Denard did on the field. I will remember the thrilling touchdown runs, each standing further in defiance of the laws of space and time than the last. I will remember the statistical milestones, the records broken, the wins accumulated and everything else that can be neatly written on a page like a curriculum vitae.

I will remember the way I felt when I watched him do something, I will remember where I was when I saw these things, I will remember how Denard changed the face of Michigan football for a short time, streaking across the sky like a magnificent comet, ineffably talented yet grounded, decidedly mortal, unceasingly likable.

Denard has given many such as myself ample material to write interesting --I hope-- about Michigan football. Most writers will tell you that a narrative cannot exist without conflict, without flaws, without tribulation. While it is beyond me to say that Denard's career has escaped all of those thing, I would say that Denard, the person, bucks the trend of the traditionally interesting written character. There is a reason for this: he is a man, a football player and an idea, all at once.

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On Tuesday, Zach wrote, emphasis mine:

Our memory is made up of a lot of little moments that have stood the test of time. Things that through the years grow larger and take on added importance as layers of context and circumstance are laid down to amplify things previously overlooked, as narratives are assembled from those moments and they take on meaning and significance not just because of how this or that led to something else, but more importantly how the whole thing makes us feel as we look back on it.

This is why, when Michigan kicks off at noon Saturday, I won't worry about the fact that, at some point that morning, an inevitable bit of news will come down and mar the day for a short time, kind of like if FDR added a "p.s. I would also like to add spiders to the list of things to fear" to his "the only things we have to fear" 1933 inauguration speech. All of us wish the circumstances were otherwise, but if you begin to wonder how things should be, you risk forgetting how they have been and how they are.

Michigan's 23 seniors will take the field to be honored on Saturday. Denard would likely tell you that he is no more important to Michigan than his fellow seniors.

When Denard takes the field to be honored, a tinge of sadness will wash over hundreds of thousands of people, in the Big House and elsewhere. Fortunately, we have not yet reached the end. I suspect that we never will. A light burns, forever, its fuel inexhaustible.

The sadness will subside, giving way to the ultimate tribute: everyone will smile.

(HT: Johnny) 

Return

(HT: Mike DeSimone) 

They expect again. It had not been a while since that had been so. Blood rushes back to the extremities, the warming elixir of life; they thought that you weren't going to make it there for a while. For a short while, perhaps you were gone. Although, as we know, no one or no thing is ever truly gone. An essence, a thought,  an underlying code: these persist.

Life goes in swings, some will argue. "You take the good with the bad," they tidily note. Maybe. But that's too easy, and it's not very interesting. It's the TBS (or CBS, NBC, ABC...homogenous) of life philosophies: it's like walking through a cemetery and saying "well, sometimes people die." Oh, okay.

That's not to say that the aforementioned is untrue. Yes, a football program's lifespan is a combination of good and bad, but that is obvious. Results are absolutes, things which we can seize upon for comfort, each a starry signpost in the sky: here and here and then you went there and that was not good at all. Either you're recovered or saved, waiting to return or or departed. Or maybe you're somewhere in between, a stateless nomad wandering in between these defined territories.

These are great, insofar as you immediately stop thinking about the thing in question--the after, when the result has come in and solidified itself into your consciousness. Beating Ohio State this past season produced a bifurcated path of emotion, two feelings derived from the same well of subconscious fandom. There was the now, the emotion in the present. At that moment in time, happiness--and to a much lesser extent, relief--was the singular end point of years of a subdued but seething boil. A stew of reagents, of sadness, disillusion, disbelief, and frustration.

Then there was the future, the what if, what next. Can this last, will it continue? This is the time for you to take inventory, to prepare for the season to come, for expectations met or unmet. This is the time to decide what those expectations are. Once this thing gets going, there'll be no time for that.

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You can talk about wins and losses, but that sort of misses the point. The 2011 season was something to behold, that much is obvious. What is less obvious but easily more important is the wholesale mindset shift that has taken place in the past 20 months. It was apparent early on, and the season only further emphasized the fact that something fundamental had been altered.

The wins only confirmed that. Each one was a step taken away from the specter of the previous three seasons, looming, waiting, anticipating the moment that things would fall apart in order to say "good job, idiot." When the Sugar Bowl ended and the confetti flitted to the ground like the last drops of rain after a violent storm, it was clear that the Michigan that we had all once known had returned, so to speak, even though it was never really gone.

However, homecoming is by no means an assurance of easier times ahead. Even Odysseus, after years of hardship and travels, came home only to find himself thinking "how am I going to get these dudes out of my house?" Now, a post comparing various Big Ten opponents to Odysseus's foes detailing win-loss predictions and other conjecture-based material is one for another day, but the point remains true: 2011 was a return to prominence, but it was not and cannot be an assurance that Michigan will stay there, indefinitely or in 2012 alone, even.

Of course, that is to say that Michigan could in fact take a "step back" this season. The reason I put that in scare quotes is because I'm going to continue being sarcastic about the "Team 133 will be better than 132 but have a worse record" pseudo-meme. It is true, though, and the last time expectations were this high, it was 2007, and I was a freshman at Michigan, walking to the the Big House in the early September heat to see Michigan play some team from North Carolina.

I made the basic, faulty assumption--one that many people make--coming into that season, that a senior Henne, Long, and Hart, along with almost universal acclaim, presaged monumental things for that team. As Eddie Izzard would say, that all collapsed like a flan in a cupboard. It was a lesson in the genesis of expectations: don't have them, and if you do, always imagine that somebody is waiting to say "I told you so" when your expectations, ones you hope to realize vicariously through 18-22 year-old athletes, go unmet.

Lost amid the gnashing of teeth and the wondering--why did this have to happen now, once I got here?--was the fact that several players who had meant much to me in seasons prior would be done after the end of that season. They would move on, never to take the field again except to be honored in some capacity, to receive a Big House cheer, to wave, and then to quietly walk back outside the white lines that had once been their domain.

Michigan may win 8, 9, or 10 games this season. They may win more...they may win less. I don't know. While the preseason hype now is not as substantial as it was back in 2007, it's still fairly lofty.

Expectations are good, in general, but for a fan they simply serve as a source of mental energy that shines light on the wrong things. That's not to say that going 6-6 and having likable players is enough for me, but I do feel that undue emphasis often placed on these sorts of predictions. These predictions, the domain of the fan, are a fuzzy confluence of conjecture, rampant extrapolation, the correlation of past and future results, and any other number of processes that lack meaning. They're fun and possibly even necessary, but let's remember to enjoy ourselves along the way. Let us also remember that it is just a game. (Yeah, it is. Trust me, it really, really is.)

Again, this is a good time to take stock of what you think to be the ultimate distilled essence of college football. Think about this game that we have, in a somewhat discomfiting sense, earmarked a not insignificant portion of our brief time on this earth toward following and collectively losing our minds over. Give that a second thought. Take the time that you spend each day on Michigan football alone right now and run through the arithmetic. What results is an almost grotesque sort of math. The number that emerges when you assume that you spend, say, an hour a day (an incredibly conservative figure), and extrapolate that over your remaining X number of years is fairly startling. We're talking years of accumulated F5ing, mindless message board thread clicking, and all the other things that go into being a Michigan fan in the Internet era. If you are literally spending multiple years of your life on one thing, you might as well enjoy it properly.

Don't be that person who spends an entire vacation pausing to take pictures, seeing through a lens and experiencing nothing. A record, for instance, is like a gravestone. It is nothing but an indicator that something was, and that such and such time was when it was. Here lies Team [insert number]. They won this many games and lost this many games.  That is the story because we only have so much time and so much space on which to tell it. There is so much more to this game than that.

You will go to bed on Friday with visions of Saturday night running through your head. It will be August 31st, and the coming stretch of four months will seem an interminable parade. Like it always does, you think that it will never end.

It isn't forever. Savor it. To do this, you will need to prepare. Set your expectations, rid yourself of petty, fleeting concerns. Before you know it, you'll wake up, look outside, and see the snows of an early January morning. Or, if you're lucky: palm trees.

Watershed

With a month to go until the start of Team 133's season--and fall camp starting soon--this is probably the last chance to sit and reflect on last year's team and this offseason as a whole before things start to pick up again. This is a time for the consumption of formulaic positional rankings posts, W/L predictions, and any other number of pre-season drudgery, sure, but it's also a time for thoughtful consideration of the things that have happened in the world of college football in the last year or so, Michigan-related or not.

Michigan finished last season at 11-2, its best record since the 2006 season. Needless to say, Michigan exceeded the hopes of even the most optimistic sort; personally, I had Michigan going 8-4, with losses to Notre Dame, Iowa, Illinois, and Nebraska. Like many Michigan fans, I was uncertain about Brady Hoke's ability to return Michigan to respectability and/or greatness...that is, until his opening press conference. After that, it became fairly obvious that he was the proverbial "good fit", and that many of the problems that plagued the RR regime would not be an issue under Hoke. I think I've mostly done away with the inescapable shame stemming from my brief and UNACCEPTABLE period of pre-press conference questioning of the hiring/The Process. But, as our old friend Rich Rodriguez once said: it's in the past.

The season began and it was immediately obvious that things were different. After Western Michigan had some early success moving the ball, Mattison's defense hunkered down and looked altogether like a unit that was receiving actual attention and coaching as opposed to being the ancillary complement to the offense that it was under RR (and I say that as a former RR uber-fan).

The Notre Dame game was...something. Almost a year later, I still don't know how to describe it. The title of the Monday game recap I did for that game just about sums up my ongoing state of mindless WOOOO-ing regarding that game. It has become a dream-like substance that requires revisiting because of its exciting nature and yet in some paradoxical way loses some of its merit in the process. Watching last yea's Notre Dame game during one of the BTN's numerous offseason airings is kind of like explaining a joke to someone. Some things, when picked apart too much, lose their mysticism.

With that said, it was an unforgettable experience to be in the stadium that night. An midsummer autumn night's dream, it was.

Despite it all, there was still the creeping underlying notion that not only was Michigan very lucky to win, there was still the possibility that, like the previous two seasons featuring heart-stopping victories over the Irish, Michigan might not be all that good for all its theatrics. However, those concerns were allayed as the season went on, partly due to a relatively easy schedule but mostly due to a defensive renaissance and a strong running game.

As I stood in the Superdome terrace this past January, watching the confetti fall and listening to Junior Hemingway's voice quaver under the atmospheric weight and mountains of circumstance, I marveled at how little all of this meant to me. Let me explain. The fact that Michigan had gone 11-2 was unbelievable, made even more remarkable by the fact that it was probably a top 5 season in my career as a watcher of Michigan football (dating back to approximately 1996, the season holding my first real-time memories of watching) in a year which no one expected to be nearly that good. Michigan had won its first BCS game since the turn of the millennium, the Orange Bowl game on 1/1/2000 against Alabama. All of this was done with essentially the same roster that RR had the year before. Think about it: the odds of Michigan experiencing a similar statistical defensive turnaround again during your lifetimes is highly unlikely (which, I guess, is a good thing). The end product of Michigan's season was spectacular, but not nearly as impressive as the path Michigan took toward reaching that end.

Yet, none of that mattered to me. What did endure was the fact that players like Mike Martin and Ryan Van Bergen and Junior Hemingway all stuck it out, despite having the misfortune of attending Michigan during its leanest stretch since the '60s. They improved year by year, incrementally but noticeably, and they were endearing and fun to watch. Michigan did not win a national title or a Big Ten championship last season, and yet I found it almost on the same plane of worship as the 1997 season. In past years, I would have been upset that Michigan had lost to Michigan State and Iowa the way that they did, that Michigan had simply bungled yet another opportunity to win a national title (not that that was a realistic outcome), but last year I really wasn't.
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Many other changes in my fandom have come to pass in the past year or so. As anybody who reads this humble blog with any sort of regularity would know, I've become decreasingly passive-aggressive in  my distaste with the business of recruiting, a distaste which has become more and more unconcealed by the day. I'm not sure exactly when this transformation took place, but maybe this is the natural result of getting older and become slightly more mature (only slightly).

I generally think that the mania surrounding Terrelle Pryor's recruitment was the beginning of the end for me with respect to the hyper-obsessive following of recruitment. I, like most other Michigan fans, had an almost nonsensical obsession with the tracking of Michigan's recruiting efforts. I spent time reading recruiting round ups on MGoBlog and elsewhere, mindlessly storing names of various recruits in my brain--mental storage space that could have been occupied by something useful, and yes, brains do work exactly like pay-for-storage businesses--that often had no realistic chance of landing in Ann Arbor: a wideout from California, a tailback from Georgia, a defensive end from Florida.

Maybe it was graduating from college--and consequently finding myself older than even Michigan's senior players--that did it, but eventually I realized that this recruiting hobby was all mostly an incredible waste of time. The fact that I was no longer worried about what this would mean for the precious vitality of my Michigan fandom/Mandom was a harbinger of other wholesale shifts in my philosophy as a college football fan.

Like others, the Penn State scandal, among many other more consequential things, allowed me an opportunity to reassess what I find important about Michigan and all the connotations that go along with being affiliated with Michigan, as a fan of its athletics and a recent alumnus.  This is in no way meant as some sort of haughty reaction to the Penn State fan base's response to the scandal (generalization is a bad thing), but it has become very obvious to me, in the year and a few months after graduation, that what makes me miss Michigan does not begin and end with football, or basketball, or hockey.

At the same time, with the PSU scandal, the NCAA issues at Ohio State, Oregon, Miami, UNC, and elsewhere, the NCAA's seemingly arbitrary timetables and rationale for the levying of punishments, in addition to the insanity of realignment and the playoff debate, this offseason was also one that fostered a burgeoning nihilism regarding the game that I have held above all others. Other than Michigan football, I follow Michigan football, four pro teams, and Michigan hockey to a lesser extent, but there has never been any question which sports reigns supreme in my eyes. However, all of these things started to make me question my admittedly very, very naive perspective of college football as this inviolable concept.

Unfortunately, college football at a macro level is becoming increasingly unappealing, like looking at anybody under those doctor's office fluorescent lights: everything looks a little bit worse. It's not that I dislike change, it's just that being older and thus more capable of understanding the minutiae of the business--and oh is it a business--of college football makes for a significantly more conflicted experience. In fact, it makes for an infinitely more conflicted experience, because without said knowledge, the only conflict is the ultimately Knowing the pettiness of these proceedings and the frivolous nature of most discussion about college football (and sports in general, really), have forced me to think twice about this obsession. Ignorance truly is bliss.

After a while, as I did with recruiting, I stopped paying attention to the daily bits of innuendo in the world of realignment and the playoff debate, and I was much better off for it. Both of these targeted downsizings of my fandom allowed me to retreat to a more local, Michigan-centric level. However, it also gave me an opportunity to devote more time to understanding the rich tapestry of variegated tradition that is college football, one which I think is unsurpassed in the world of sports.

I've written ridiculously long posts about each Alabama positional group, previews of the SEC East and West, the ACC Coastal and Atlantic, and, in the coming weeks, posts on the Pac 12, Big 12, and Big East. When I first started this blog two years ago, there was literally no way I would have even considered doing any of these things, let alone writing at length about any of them with some level of comfort.

Reading Pre-Snap Read and various team-specific websites--whether independent ones or teams' respective SB Nation sites--has allowed me to increase my knowledge about college football exponentially. Never before would I have considered reading a lengthy offseason post about, say, Northwestern, but I have done so this offseason. As a result, I will enter this college football season with a body of knowledge dwarfing what I had going into any other season.

Speaking of Northwestern and following along with the theme of a more macroscopic, non-Michigan-centric view of the college football landscape, I will be attending Northwestern this fall for grad school. As a result, I have taken to reading blogs like Sippin' on Purple and Lake The Posts with regularity, almost as regularly as I read MGoBlog and EDSBS, which is saying something. This would explain the seemingly frequent Northwestern references here throughout the last three or four months. The point is, my appreciation for the game as a whole has driven me to do things like, gasp, maybe care a little bit about teams other than Michigan. This doesn't even have to do with some absolute value of fandom, which is not the zero sum game that many so called superfans make it out to be (i.e. that supporting another team in any way somehow subtracts from your love of your first team). Rather, it's an expression of appreciation and curiosity, both of which are decidedly good things. I'm not saying that I'm going to miss Michigan games to go watch the Wildcats play, but I might end up DVRing and watching them later. At no point in the past have I ever thought about doing that for any team, let alone Northwestern.

I mean, in no other offseason would I have been as equipped to write a post like this about Iowa or one like this about Northwestern. It just would not have happened, and I think that's partly a testament to the writing practice that I get on here as well as my willingness to venture out into the great unknown of college football, also known as "teams other than Michigan."Believe it or not, there are a lot of great and interesting things going in the world of college sports outside of the University of Michigan; familiarizing yourself with these things, in my opinion, actually serves to make you a better Michigan fan and/or Michigan Man (if you're that sort of person).

But Fouad, why are you saying all this when you said before that this is all frivolous and basically a waste of time? Well, you're right. This is frivolous, and if there is anything that has changed the most in my outlook in the past year or so, it's that this is: a) supposed to be fun and b) that this is so laughably not life and death.* You would think that the latter would be obvious, but it's amazing and honestly somewhat frightening how much the actions of a squad of 18-22 year olds can affect the psyche of an otherwise well-adjusted adult human. Whereas games like the 2010 Penn State game and the 2009 Michigan State game (and many, many others) left me in a world of hurt, I found myself shrugging off Michigan's 2011 losses fairly easily. Progress!

*A phrase in the sports fan's lexicon that is almost matched in thoughtless by the analogies drawn between sporting events and things like war or other disasters.
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I've said this about Denard approximately 372 times in the last couple of years, but if there is anything to take from college football, anything worth tethering yourself to, worth clinging to like it is the sole source of nutrition for your fandom, it is the memories of the players themselves and the component parts of your favorite triumphs. The latter is, of course, in contrast with the remembrance of the end result of the triumph itself--the fact that it yielded a win, the final score, yardage totals, records set. Remember the way that Denard ran that first time against Western Michigan, not that he would go on to break all sorts of records that in the end are sterile and meaningless things. Drop a statistical nugget, an ugly bundle of numbers, into your metaphorical pool of memory and it sinks to the dark bottom. Drop the memory of Denard dropping the snap, picking up and running past everyone on his first play floats, even runs, atop the surface of those same mental waters.

These people that we watch every Saturday are not only players, they are human beings with a set of differentiating characteristics that make the existence of another person like them literally impossible. As such, each player, even the little-used or the not very good, should be given their due respect. Even Jareth Glanda produced a memory for Michigan fans to lock away and store forever, a point of raw memory that many will recall thirty years down the road when thinking about the 2012 Sugar Bowl. Sure, it helps that Michigan won, but Glanda's simultaneously hilarious and timely "reception" might prove to be a more lasting note in the annals of Michigan football than the fact that Michigan won the Sugar Bowl, a glorified exhibition game.

Also, lest I verge too far into the realm of the morbid, it is always good to appreciate these players that give their time, their bodies, and their minds to Michigan, simply because you never know how much longer they (or anyone else, really) will remain in this world. This is true of everybody in every walk of life, but for a sport that is often, as I said, considered "life and death" by some, it is important to remember what life and death actually are. Death is final. The extinguishing of a life is final. Your sadness after a Michigan loss compared to these things is like the Earth's place in the Milky Way galaxy: it is an incredibly insignificant speck of dust in a larger speck of dust within a Universe holding billions and billions of these larger specks.

That little spot is how important the result of sporting events ultimately are vis-a-vis everything else in existence...i.e. not very. Still, there is considerable good to be found therein. 

As we approach, I will pour more time into this sinkhole of an obsession, running down my various predictions for various teams, players, conferences, etc. Whether or not the things I write here are widely read, this has been a fun thing and a good outlet for my thoughts on the teams and sports that I love. In a way, creating this blog and tasking myself with formulating thoughts on various offseason and in-season happenings has subconsciously molded and changed my opinions on a lot of things: recruiting, realignment, playoffs, the overall intentions of the principle players of college athletics, the ultimate importance of any of this stuff.

Let us praise great men and appreciate what has been accomplished. Just as importantly, let us question the things that need questioning. If this post seems incredibly disjointed, that's probably because it reflects the inefficiencies and hypocrisy of the NCAA and collegiate athletics. In a way, such an entity can only be responded to in kind with a similarly disjointed and conflicted message. Even so, this is a good time to tinker with that message, to reformulate and recalibrate the reasons and mechanisms of our fandom.

In a month, the season will start and there will be plenty to talk about. The Alabama game will produce some sort of significance, good or bad, a sort of barometric measuring of the strength of Michigan's football program. Michigan will travel to Notre Dame, Nebraska, and Ohio State, and will attempt to end Michigan State's winning streak at home. Very soon, there will be a lot to talk about: narratives to build up and deconstruct, statistical models to analyze and fit to certain theoretical frameworks, and a bevy of new memes and hilarious gifs.

For now, let's also savor this ephemeral silence. Very soon, things will become much louder.

Anatomy of a Play

History has its turning points, this much is self-evident. In life, we stumble through the days, unappreciative of the fact that our individual decisions--and the actions borne of those decisions--change the way that everything unfolds thereafter. Whatever your beliefs on the subject of Fate may be, the following is a crystallized absolute: something happens, and something else comes from that something, and, necessarily, something else that could have happened otherwise does not happen, nor do its descendant reactions. The latter, discarded drafts, are left to, as they say, the dustbin of history.

It was September 5th, 2009.

It was 7-0. Tate Forcier had driven Michigan down the field for an early score; the Big House was buzzing. In vintage Tate circa September 2009 fashion, he scrambled as he so often did, physically obfuscating and delaying until the moment in which he saw fit to point: Junior Hemingway was open down the sideline.

Imagine a funeral, and then imagine its antithesis.

The early September Michigan heat was a detail, beside the point, in the background. The heat wasn't meteorological or natural, it was atomic; the raw physics of unadulterated emotions crashing against each other, unseen and powerful, unleashing untold amounts of that feeling, happiness, which in its nascent construction is known as hope. The sun bore down, seemingly cauterizing the wounds that had been opened the year before.

Later on in the quarter, something happened. Legend became reality. The myth which we had been told for many months before--he's from Florida, you see, people whispered in exasperated, hushed tones, as if it was a secret so great that its obvious meaning merited its telling with restraint--was no myth, but a man.

Denard Robinson, who was the avatar of the Rich Rodriguez's offensive raison d'etre even before it had all gone down, stepped onto the field.

A bell, when struck to indicate the hour or some spectacular happening, rings. After some time, its reverberation weakens, and the sound recedes into the time-space of the recent past. Slowly but surely, it rings and rings, each passing moment becoming less and less and less, only to eventually and somewhat abruptly stop, the molecules of its genesis resigned to staticity.

Hemingway scored, and the bell was rung. The roar was unimaginable; cathartic, even. In a moment of physical improbability, the ringing did not decline, and when Denard stepped onto the field, it only surged. The bell hadn't been rung again, and so it seemed that such a curious happening was a harbinger.

Michigan took the field in the shotgun formation. Denard Robinson's first play--the preface, the rising action, the climax, and the denouement--was one moment of aesthetic and philosophical achievement. In retrospect, its consideration invokes the past perfect, a recollection of a singular action at a singular junction in history: hemos visto el futuro.

Nobody could have predicted what came next. The sun continued to bear down on everything, and all the while the crowd began to sense, not know, but sense. Nobody could have known, after all. It was, in a way, a perfect summation of life.

Life as we know it is a probing venture, fraught with pitfalls and mistakes and non-linear progression against the backwind yielded by the present's ceaseless advancement into the future. Its parts are incongruous. It often goes wrong. It usually proceeds without a plan, no matter how hard we try to impose upon it the notion of premeditation (a folly, really).

The crowd waited, practically aching for something to happen. The great mass of 109,000 people focused their collective 218,000 eyes--give or take--on one spot. Sight lines converged like so many lasers on the Western Michigan 48 yard line, their trajectories bent under the weight of expectation. Denard took the snap, and dropped it: oooh. 


He picked it up and looked, spurred on by the nearly instantaneous reactions of the adrenal glands, which worked in order to signal go go go go go go go. For us, this works when we are about to knock a cup of coffee off of our desk, catching it right before it falls over the precipice into the valley of Commonplace Disaster. For Denard, this mainstay of our physiology means something else entirely.

Denard picked it up and reacted in the way that only he could. People have created neologisms like "Kafkaesque" and "Nabokovian," and I would argue that "Denardian," if it hasn't already, should enter the English lexicon. He ran right, probing that side for an opening, for something. Well, maybe I should take this liberal arts degree and apply for law school okay great let's do that first let's take the LSAT and then OH GOD NO NO NO NO NO ABORT FOR GOODNESS SAKES ABORT. 

No. No, that's not it at all. You make a mistake and it becomes apparent in the moment of its making. I shouldn't have done that, but what is there to do? Are some actions and their consequences irrevocable, doomed to doom us? There must be a way to fix this. There must be a way to undo what has been done, to take this tabula rasa that has been afforded us and to write the next line of this history which we are, partly, casting in the roiling deep of history.

An opening, a chance. Or, what appears to be one. Maybe taking some time "off" wouldn't be such a bad thing nobody would fault me for it oh who needs law school anyway but here I am and I suppose that I might as well do something shouldn't I yes I should and I believe that I will. 

Broken plays are very dangerous. A man without a plan strikes at that which the man with a plan cannot even see or imagine. Denard left the past in the past, obviating the future by becoming the future: touchdown.

--------------

The body of witnesses formed a rollicking crescendo, a feedback loop of wow and did you see and wow. It was six points, yes, but it was so much more. There are turning points in history, in football, that are self-contained. When I said that this was the past perfect, a moment contained in hardened amber--we have seen, we have witnessed, we have been--I was partly right and partly wrong, because the moment was marked, in truth, by duality. It was surely a moment in and of itself, but it was also something else. We were seeing, and witnessing, and being. The moment, like an excitable subatomic particle, could not be held in place. It spilled over and over, conquering the vast fields of Midwestern memory-space that exist in each of us, waiting to be claimed.

That play, the first play, lingers on. Each play that Denard made thereafter, and each play he will make in 2012, is a subtle nod to that original antecedent. Even today, we are still, in a way, experiencing it. It is the present, and the past perfect, and the past imperfect. It was the beginning of something, a something which became its continuation and its current state.

The unfortunate cruelty of it all is that all of this, in one way, must end. After this season, Denard will graduate, and he will no longer wear the winged helmet in the Big House, the venue in which his atypically typical actions have escaped traditional notions of time and space. The play took place on September 5th of 2009, but saying it this way strips it of its meaning. It happened in a specific time and a specific place and a specific atmosphere with specific circumstances, a multi-veined convergence which will never be replicated for as long as this world continues to exist. It is an idea rarer and more worthy of praise than any championship or trophy or accolade. It is important to remember that, in spite of all the college football topics of the day, this is in fact what it is "all about." To see history--not just happenings, but history--and to recognize when things are happening because to recognize is to canonize is to understand.

Denard's first touchdown was the beginning of everything that came after it, and those of us who saw it unfold--whether in the heated, exalted Big House or elsewhere--knew without knowing that something was happening. Even after this chapter of constant wonder and amazement is over, the moment and what it was live on. The past makes the present and the future, but, in reality, they are all one and the same.

Time and Quarterbacks and Yesterday

This upcoming fall, Denard Robinson will be a senior. It will be his last year as a Wolverine.

Was this yesterday? It is yesterday like that moment from your childhood, the one that, through some process of by and large senseless mental natural selection, survived the years and became entrenched, a moment so brief--and potentially, probably, trivial--yet definitive of an era.

In 1997, after the Wisconsin game, I remember walking through a Toys R Us parking lot with my parents. The asphalt was wet--I remember this--and I could only think about how good the team had looked--in fact, I think I remember saying "They looked really good"--and what was in store for Michigan, before the BCS and realignment and any other number of post-modern gibberish diluted and sullied the product. This, and I was about to get a toy of some sort. Things were as good as they could be. The wind in my sails was forceful but kind.

I remember watching the 1998 Rose Bowl, a week before my 9th birthday. I was eating Skittles--I remember this, Wild Berry, I think--and watching the action unfold in my Midwestern living room as the Wolverines and Cougars took the field in a sun-soaked Eden, all of which I couldn't truly appreciate but knew was something to be in awe of. Living in the suburbs of Chicago at the time and thus concurrently experiencing the second Bulls 3-peat, I was spoiled. I watched every game expecting the Bulls to win, and they almost always did. When they went 72-10 in the 1995-96 season, each loss seemed a grave indignity by virtue of their infrequency, my reactions then to those losses only matched by my modern-day consternation on Saturdays when Michigan's helmets decided to spot an opponent more than 14 points. It was the closest that the NBA--or any other brand of sport--was ever elevated to and allowed to coexist on the same plane of existence that Michigan football occupied, occupies, and will continue to occupy.

I remember always feeling a sense of unspoken dread whenever the Bulls wore black in those days. Whether backed by fact or not, it always seemed that they would lose when donning the black road uniforms as opposed to the red ones. This relic of superstition survives to this very day, as useless as the appendix. When the Bulls wear black, I reflexively expect defeat. 

I only got to experience the last three years of Jordan's career in Chicago (I hear he played somewhere after that--for the preservation of my idyllic view of that time, I continue to ignore that Pretender arrogating the throne of MJ), but those three years were arguably the longest years of my life. They were three years of unadulterated sports bliss, and they were probably best consumed in the time my life in which they were consumed. Each year was a triumphant march toward what I felt was rightfully Chicago's, and I mean that in the naive way that a child believes it and not an adult's rage-filled insistence that his team deserves and should win it every year in an invocation of Divine Right. The adult could learn something from the child; Divine Right in sports comes from this world and not on high (whether literally on high--a Heaven of sorts where sports is the chief concern--or as a part of an artificial notion of deservedness interwoven within a city's character vis-a-vis its sports teams.

All of this was taken in while Michigan was making its push for the Rose Bowl (and if I had only known about Michigan hockey circa the mid to late nineties, my understanding of how sports fandom is supposed to work might have been irrevocably stunted). Naturally, I was eight, and so the particulars of it all were never there in real time (what I know of that season is a combination of impressionistic recall and retrospective viewing and reading of whatever I can find on the Internet and elsewhere). The year, 1997, was marked in my mind by three things, things which aren't so much plays as they are concepts: Woodson's interception against MSU, Woodson's punt return, and Brian Griese waggles. Now, when a Michigan quarterback play actions and comes the other way, I rise out of my seat, conditioned like Pavlov's dog.

Fandom grows and changes and I don't think that necessarily means that something definitively good or bad is happening in the process. I will say that that time of my fandom--that period between 1996 and 1998--was the greatest era in my relatively brief career as a fan of sports. You would think that the reason for this would be four combined titles won between my two favorite teams at the time--the Michigan football team and the Jordan Bulls--but that is not the case, anymore. As the years have passed and I've been able to more fully appreciate what I had the luck to experience as a kid, the entire thing boils down to one issue. It is a concept that dominates everything around us, whether we choose to be aware of it not. We get older and relative duration is exchanged for clarity.

Time, time, time. It's all about time.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

As we get older, Time has a funny way of passing. As children, we are pushed through the fabric of space and time (Space and Time if we want to pretend about any number of things) slowly, as if to ease us into what lies ahead. Take your time, kid. High school and driving and college are all other such things are so far out of the realm of a child's comprehension that they can barely exist. Life is like a water slide: it starts off slow, giving you enough time to understand and enjoy the fact that THIS IS A WATER SLIDE before taking you through swiftly and with less meaning than you might want. 1996-1998 was like the initial part before the precipitous drop, before days shed hours and weeks and months flew by with astonishing speed.

Another watershed moment in my fandom occurred in 2004. Michigan was replacing a significant amount of firepower, of which quarterback was probably the most difficult to immediately replace. As good as Chris Perry was, the quarterback position is in a league of its own, and John Navarre was a good one in his final season despite what many will tell you.


Matt Gutierrez went down and true freshman Chad Henne became the starter. The following January, Michigan found themselves in the Rose Bowl on the heels of remarkable freshman seasons from Henne and a little guy named Hart--to the satisfaction of pun and sports cliche enthusiasts everywhere--and although Michigan had lost to two mediocre to bad teams in Notre Dame and Ohio State (and a Vince Young-led Longhorns team in the Rose Bowl), things were looking good. It was 2004, and we had three more years of this. It would only get better.

A few years later. I was a freshman at Michigan, watching my first game as a student. The senior year, which had been talked about for so long as if it were a Holy Grail, was here. Like Thomas Hobbes's opinion on the nature of life, it was short and brutish. The following season elaborated on this notion.

Then, Denard Robinson burst onto the scene in 2009. Unlike Henne, he had to wait a year before becoming the starting quarterback. A boon and a curse, the year came and went with efficient, heartless speed. This is the crux of the matter. When you get older, when the gravitational pull of life is strong enough to have pulled you into its orbit like the wayward bit of interstellar rock that you are, you are moving too fast for you to truly appreciate everything that is transpiring. Now, there is not enough time to even say that this will never end.

Some things are cynic-proof. 

2010 and 2011 came and went, each replete with their own triumphs and misfortunes. He ran and ran but Time outpaced him. There is only one year left.

---------------------------------------------------------

Getting older has its negatives, as I've made clear. However, getting older allows the benefit of experience and hindsight. In 2004, I, like many, assumed that some combination of national and conference championships was an inevitability. In doing so, I think many lost the way. By 2007--and after the first two games of that season--there was a sense of dead weight, of a wasted something, an unattained ideal, all while things were happening that were worth really talking about.

Michigan went 11-2 this past season. Denard is now a senior, and Michigan returns much in the form of hope and a promise of the continuation of last year's successes. It is difficult to believe, however, that this will be the last season in which Denard Robinson will lead the Wolverines. When I think about it, I think of his run against Western in 2009, the 2010 ND game, and last year's Ohio game, wondering how it could have possibly happened this fast. Is this really it?

The boon of fandom, post-childhood, is that we can retain and store memories more precise and comprehensive than we could have imagined or been capable of as children. It is a simple fact of biology, and yet, it is the most endearing tool in our favor, as adults rooting for Michigan, attempting to revive the unburdened glow of childhood.

If you haven't started storing these sorts of things, start doing so. You'll wake up soon, January knocking at your door. The snow will be falling, perpendicular to the ground and in step with time, and Denard Robinson no longer playing for the Wolverines will have become a reality. This corporeal January will either scold you or shake your hand for what you've done, how you've handled the in between.

There will never be another Denard Robinson, just like there will never be another Chad Henne or Mike Hart. I made a mistake, in 2004, of establishing expectations, a reasonable projection. Wait till 2007, ad infinitum. 2007 is now, in a way, 2012.

To take on expectations--say, that Michigan won 11 games last season so they should logically win 11 again, or, even more ambitiously, more--is a mistake. It draws attention away from the reality on the field, whatever that may be. We have less than a year left with Denard, an allotment of time that would have once been an eternity. If time insists on moving faster as we slide, we might as well take notes. The curvature of the slide, a mental rendering of its layout in realtime, the exact feeling of the slide--the intermittent harshness and smoothness of it--and the exact moment when the realization that it's over descends, allowing itself to be described and understood as it happens. This is what we can do. It's the only thing to do; to take note, review, and bask in the clarity of memory in formation.

A Good Man Is Hard To Find

Michigan 23, Virginia Tech 20

Civil War and World War II historian Ed Bearss said that "You can't describe a battlefield unless you walk it." If you were to ask Hemingway, Van Bergen, Koger, Woolfolk, Martin, Odoms, and Molk, and all the others, to describe that battlefield, they'd give you a blank stare that wasn't so much blank as it was an attempt to recharge and think. David Molk stares off into the distance as Doug Karsch asks him something, rocked by the gravity of it all, knowing that Karsch knew he wasn't listening, and that the question could be asked again. He earned that much.

Jump in the shower tomorrow morning and make the water as hot as it can be, then turn it all the way back as if you planned to understand what plunging through an ice-fishing hole in Northern Michigan would feel like. What happens is your breath becomes labored and your heart pounds and you think you're in shock and then you have to just turn it off altogether. The back and forth of unadulterated sensation overwhelms. It takes a second to think, to recoup the moral courage to confront an inevitable end. The end of a career, a war, a struggle that became a philosophy that become a way of life.

Koger, Martin, Van Bergen, Woolfolk, Hemingway, Molk. In twenty years, these names won't be weighed against everyone that came before them and after them by the numbers. These names are impervious to numerical categorization. They're Kleenex and Coca Cola, brand names associated with something, synonymous. They are a name of something and that something itself.

Hemingway is not defined by 1,638 yards and 11 touchdowns. He is youthful exuberance, the willingness to take a chance. He left South Carolina and ended his career in New Orleans, telling Chris Fowler how Michigan had been through so much. Soooooooooo much he said, elongating the word like a child waking up on Christmas morning, emotional and excited and raw, uninhibited by irony or pessimism or the burdensome weight of everything. As a freshman, I remember him trotting onto the field against Eastern Michigan to block, the designated Lloyd Carr freshman blocking specialist. From my row 93 seats, he was #21 because that was all I could see. That 21, running from the sidelines to the huddle, for a brief few seconds entirely apart from the masses of sun-washed helmets on the sidelines to the line of scrimmage to tell Henne, Hart, and Long what the next play was. It was a running play, and Hemingway would block. This time, he catches a touchdown pass that would, on an ordinary day and under ordinary circumstances, be intercepted; he takes it to the end zone and looks around for someone, anyone, to share his surprise at getting that set of Legos he's always wanted.

Ryan Van Bergen is not an accumulation of sacks, of double teams stonewalled, and tackles for loss made. He is, was, will be, toughness personified. He spoke of an injury played through that seems like a thing that only happens in war.

I got stuck under a pile and my foot got bent down in an angle, so my foot was parallel with my shins, so that was an awkward angle. That was early in the game, and that was bothering me. I had a cut block actually fold it the other way. So I was just trying to battle it off.

That was an awkward angle, a mere mathematical misfortune. Each step precedes and follows a look of agony with an automatic and never-ending I have to firing in his brain somewhere that doesn't exist in you or I. It is a football player's child-birth; you can't ever know. You just can't.

Kevin Koger isn't a collage of spectacular catches and seeming under-use paired with frustrating drops on 5-yard drags. He watches Dragon Ball Z and wears funny hats and speaks with a subtle lisp that lingers through eternity. He reminds you that it's "Koger," not "Kroger," because he has been many times been mistaken for a generic grocery store and not a guy that forsook Ohio State in a time when it was not only taboo but perhaps unwise to do so. 

Troy Woolfolk isn't injuries or resurgence and decline in one succinct utterance. We knew his father. He got injured and then we realized that maybe he was a bigger deal than we thought. So much of his time was spent looking on from afar. Looking on; dutifully. On a crashing plane, he puts the oxygen mask over your mouth first before he helps himself. 

Mike Martin is not feats of Herculean strength or musculature that defies a number of UN resolutions. He wants to be an entrepreneur when he's done shedding blocks and leaving the field only when his body is physically incapable of allowing him to go on, and to that I say, businessmen of the world, good luck saying no to this man. He is a wrestler, a sport defined by not only tenacity and strength, yes, but subtle exertions of technical superiority. Lou Ferrigno does not talk like Mike Martin does. His presence in the middle of that line is an unspoken no, that you won't pass unless you plan to lose a lot in doing so. He was a Balrog and a monster and a leader when leadership meant nothing but grimly looking into a horizon of oncoming tanks kicking up dust and stomaching it. He was, is, will be, someone you want beside you when things come crashing down, begging to be built back up, to be told that it will be okay because I am here. 

Heiko

Martavious Odoms isn't a small receiver that went into hiding after writing his Catcher In The Rye in 2008. He isn't a guy without an NFL future or an abundance of touchdowns or any of the things we think are meaningful but expire, eventually, like the things sitting in the back of the fridge behind the milk and the Chinese food and the stuff you tried to make the day you decided to change everything by starting to cook. He is another that was given a chance, and, in turn, took a chance. I came to Michigan not knowing how I would handle the cold or not knowing anybody despite having the chance to stay close to home. In a sense, I know how he feels like an astrophysicist knows how Neil Armstrong felt when he stepped on the Moon. Odoms is sandpaper, coarse and at times out of the picture, but through it you grind away until you get a smooth, clean surface. Then you put the sandpaper aside and admire what you have finished. Odoms is the final block, the unmentioned piece, the thing you don't notice until the job is nearly done, and even then you put it away awkwardly. Martavious Odoms is the slightly uneasy goodbye said between you and a friend after he drops you off at the airport at 6 in the morning. 

He is selfless and soft-spoken; you have to really listen to hear him, and not the kind of listening that we often do, the type that is mere osmosis by comparison. He was the child star that fades into obscurity for some time only to appear for one final, triumphant exertion of existence. He is the college kid that ventures far from home only to realize that maybe the world isn't as great of a place as we once thought when we were small, a world with three inexhaustible dimensions and endless possibilities obviating failure or disappointment or the ideal Maximum Potential of our lives that exists and speaks like a Kantian passage but combusts upon contact with real life in an explosion of chemical disillusionment. And yet, despite these things, he stayed, and that speaks louder than anything else. 

Most of all, he is a player I will miss. 

If he is lost in the shuffle then we are all lost in the shuffle. 

David Molk is not magnificently executed reach blocks and a consistency of production that is incongruous with the physical space he occupies. He is ornery and endearing and dismissive of you and your feelings and expectations. He lives in a world where there's a job to do and he does it. He lives in a world where you're struck down right before you can finish your magnum opus, which you then have to dictate to a friend while there's still time. 

He is quiet loss. He is, five, ten years from now, you or I. He wakes up at 6 in the morning and gets up to a barking dog and two little kids hanging from the sides of his legs on a Saturday morning. He is acerbic and bleary eyed and a little bit perturbed at the things people are saying. He pours his coffee and eats a breakfast of eggs and nails and turns on the television only to wonder what are those people doing? 

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

They are people in and of themselves. Yes, a part of a team, yes. They are surely that. They would assert that they are just that before they would say anything else, like their name or their favorite movie or the jersey number they wanted that Jon Falk wouldn't give them when they were 18. 

The game ended and I wasn't exactly sure what had happened. It was disjointed and a little bit horrifying in that Michigan did a lot of things that in years past would have yielded a different result. Michigan squeezed blood from the stone that was the 2011 season one more time, and in light of everything, to quibble over the particulars of the game is to cheapen it. We can worry about what it all means later; there will be plenty of time to do that between now and Michigan's next game in Dallas. 

Like life, however, it wasn't always pretty, and progress was far from linear or even ordered. After all, like in life, there are competitors, countless others trying to do the same exact thing you are, fighting against the same currents and hardships and doubts. 

What mattered is that Michigan won. The empty seats didn't matter. The yardage totals didn't matter. The fact that some people seem to think that it's okay to reject something that doesn't fit into their pathetic, warped worldview doesn't matter. Nothing matters except that the seniors, that Michigan, left the field victorious. 

As for the seniors, there is so much more to say. I haven't even talked about the rest of the team. Think about that. I haven't mentioned Denard Robinson, or Fitzgerald Toussaint, or Jordan Kovacs, or Blake Countess, or Jake Ryan, or Craig Roh, or Taylor Lewan, or any of the others that were a part of this. The day of their eulogies will come. Next year there will be another, new class of seniors, consisting of their own sum of stories, achievements, memories. And then there will be another. And another after them. And another. Think about that. 

I mean, really think about that. 

Tuesday's Gone

It was a year in which everybody, from #1 on down, was severely flawed, on probation, suffering the rocking waves of a coaching transition, or started Joe Bauserman. It was dysfunctional and crazy and, outside of Michigan's season, had an ending that was obviously a little bit unsatisfying. Yet, if you asked me to recall my memories of it 20 years down the road, I'm sure that I could reproduce the following with some level of consistency, while nothing of Generic NFL Season X will come to mind save "Oh, that's the season that my hapless Bears were terrible at everything."*

It was exciting, even through all its occasional senseless incompetence and Craig James being Craig James all over your television. Most importantly, it still manages to be so fun despite the unfairness and general stupidity of the system through which everything that happens from September through early January is so hamfistedly pushed. Despite all of the infrastructural flaws of the college game, I still find myself excitedly watching Utah State-Ohio play a meaningless bowl game on a blue field while yawning through field goal fests played on Sundays, where games played in Seattle and New Orleans and Green Bay are considered intimidating environments while relatively small college towns like Eugene, Auburn, Tuscaloosa, and yes, Ann Arbor, make all those place seem like they are emitting nothing louder than a cell phone alarm's irritating ringing on gameday.

If someone were to consume the 2011 college football season and vomit it out all over the place like it was a plate of oysters from NOLA's French Quarter, this is what you'd get: memes, haikus, and nostalgia.

*Also known as "every season."


Two thousand eleven
What a year it was this time
Let us talk about it

Hey, Wisconsin looks pretty good. Sure, it was UNLV but they have a quarterback now and not a handoff connoisseur. That defense though...that defense. Surely that won't come back to bite them at any point.

Click! (via, of course, LSUFreek, the illustrator of our times)

Wow...TCU. Gary Patterson, what happened? Here we introduce RGIII to the uninitiated masses (to be fair, uninitiated masses, he was pretty good all along). He's pretty good. TCU's defense not being TCU's defense is a signal that maybe things aren't going to be that normal this year. But, who knows at this point.

Cupcakes everywhere, little guys collecting paychecks for beatings as they face the Nelson Muntzs of the world. South Florida had other ideas. Utah State did too until Auburn realized that losing players to free agency is no excuse in major college football. On the other hand, how about Ohio State? Sure, they faced something called "Akron" but how about that Joe Bauserman...he surely does not look like a terrible person to have running your offense and/or flinging your hopes and dreams from a powerful but by and large completely inaccurate arm. Joe Bauserman is like the Needler in Halo; if that's what you're rolling with then expect to a) not hit anything ever and b) probably die.

Michigan comes out, looking indistinguishable from years past at first...but that changed quickly. Brandon Herron ran and people asked: "That's a linebacker?" Two brief moments, immortalized. Then the rain fell.

This blog was found via the search term "Brady Hoke wet" a disturbing number of times this season

Boise State traveled to enemy territory again; anytime, anywhere. But where the SEC was shamed in Atlanta, they rose to the occasion in Arlington. Chip Kelly looked across the sidelines and stared into the very maw of Chaos.

The week after first
Noon and three, no game is played
Because we play at night

Iowa falls...to the Men of Steele (sic). The Buckeyes stumble to a win against the Rockets of Toledo (Not That Toledo) as electron receiver Eric Page ran around Buckeye defenders with regularity, and one could tell that something wasn't right in Columbus (only this time that "something" was on the field). Auburn wins by inches; Mississippi State's preseason expectations, shot into the atmosphere on a vessel fueled by the tears of Michigan fans collected on January 1st 2011, collapsed somewhere in Auburn, Alabama, burnt to a crisp by the fiery descent and cast here and there, piecemeal. Some of the pieces can be find near the Auburn goal line, where the Tigers rebuffed further progress in the final seconds. Auburn scored 41 points, led by something called "Barrett Trotter", and Starkville pines for the days of Manny Diaz.

Minnesota lost again, and yet some things are more important than football.

Nick Saban and his defense of No Country For Old Men Javier Bardems traveled to Happy Valley. They thought the name, the word, happy, distasteful. Nick Saban, equipped with Bardem's weapon of choice--also known as Dont'a Hightower and the rest of the Alabama defense--efficiently eliminated all factors of resistance. Hightower stared down Penn State's two-headed quarterback monstrosity and said heads or tails Friendo. No matter what Bolden and McGloin said, the coin always landed with the other side facing up. After it was all done, he left the Valley like it was nothing more than a gas station pit stop on the unending highway of Fate.

Ah, Purdue. Like Bardem's coin, there are two sides to every happening. Sometimes you live, sometimes you die.

Mark Richt wonders how the seat beneath him got so hot; how quickly one's fate can turn on the actions of others, the prejudices of those outside of the proceedings. It seems a hopeless situation.

It was late. Carl Grapentine said "Good Morning." I smiled.

The week after second
Once champions were no more
The charade, over

Auburn loses to its mirror image, and in defeat cast aside the once champion's burden with a sigh. It was fun while it lasted. Northwestern loses, America wins. Indiana and Minnesota win, the relief palpable. Wisconsin continues to run over its foes with a reckless abandon; Bielema, unsated, consumes untold amounts of low-grade liquid cheese post-game to make up for meaningless points lost.

Michigan, a flawed entity still, won yet again, as Brady Hoke looked across to see a man coaching a team from the depths of nothingness, a man who once thought that maybe he'd start his head coaching journey...elsewhere. As uncontroversial as the game was, you couldn't help but feel a little bit sorry for the man, Ron English. Whether or not he was qualified or the most qualified for the job back when, having a dream and having someone say "no" to you and your dream...that is a bitter medicine.

Ohio State falls; Mister Kurtz's last words were surely a presciently grim nod to the Buckeye passing game. THE HORROR.

Florida State: I believed in you. I really, really did. You and Notre Dame continue to disappoint large segments of the American populace every year on the basis of the results of the distant past and recent upticks in competency, those being 10-4 and 8-5 seasons respectively. The fact that these two teams will play each other in a bowl game is so thematically appropriate. Welcome to the Endless Disappointment Bowl, Sponsored By The Writers of the Last Several Seasons of The Office.

The week after third 
Rocky Long and Company
Come to lose a game 


 I returned once again to watch the Wolverines. It was a warm, sunny day. The echoes of two weeks prior rung about the stadium, and because things were far more subdued you could hear them if you listened close. Whenever I try to recall that game, a mental video of Ryan Van Bergen running through my line of sight to tackle Ronnie Hillman from behind--and force a fumble--is what comes to mind first. A relentlessness that mitigated all other shortcomings was evident in every play. Even then it was clear that this was a different team; it was still in that awkward teen phase, but you could tell that we'd see great leaps being made very soon.

Toledo and Syracuse played a game; Syracuse "won."

LSU traveled to Morgantown to face a revamped WVU team, who ousted the cranky Bill Stewart for the offensive-minded, "eccentric" Dana Holgorsen. As they left, having won by 26, Les Miles burned all the couches for the locals as what he thought was a favor, clapping as the team bus pulled out of town, his nose stuck to the window like a dog, as he admired all the lights.

The week after fourth 
Badgers forced to play a team
Goes bad for a team


Texas A&M falls to the Hogs in Arlington in the final minutes. Surely this is a fluke.

Auburn leaves Columbia, and after everyone has left Willaims-Brice Stadium, one can find the visor-shaped indents on the turf near the Gamecock sideline. Stephen Garcia, why? Ever the philosopher, he deflects the criticism with a forceful, constitutional apathy: chill, bros. 


Clemson is 5-0. Clemson just won in Blacksburg. Clemson is 5-0. CLEMSON IS 5-0.

The Tide rolled through Gainesville, leaving no survivors. They crushed poor John Brantley, then they crushed Florida's will...and by "they" I mean Trent Richardson, whose S&C staff doesn't allow him to up his weight room stats for the very same reasons that Cyclops isn't allowed take off his visor.

Ohio State and Michigan State played a "football game" in Columbus. It was pretty much this...

...over and over again.

Michigan also played a "game," but this one was of the other kind of "game" (i.e., the blowout kind). Minnesota, they are not good. They might not win another game and no they will surely not defeat Iowa the week before they--Iowa, that is--plays and beats us. No, this will surely not happen. Surely.

Wisconsin welcomes Nebraska to the Big Ten; the carnage was considerable.

The week after fifth
Florida begs for the end
Here you go, Les says


The Gators, once proud, limp into Death Valley. The final score is 41-11; they call it Death Valley for a reason.

Ron Zook's Fighting Illini are 6-0. Ron Zook to Illini faithful: The world is your oyster! Great things lie ahead, we simply must go out there and not lose the rest of our games seize the opportunity!

Oh Florida State...I am disappoint. This is the last season that I tell people you are going to be good.

Alabama meets Vanderbilt in Tuscaloosa. If Nick Saban had a soul or a sense of humor, in an alternate universe his pregame speech is thus:

Unfortunately, he does not have those things. Sorry. Hope a nice, tidy 34-0 strangling with no drama or emotion will suffice. If not, Nick Saban doesn't care about you and your "feelings."

Ohio State escapes Lincoln with a wi--just kidding.

Michigan travels to Evanston, where they will decide to play one half of football. Thankfully, Northwestern is Northwestern. Steve Watson's first--and last--catch of the year, a touchdown; rare moments exist among the ordinary dreck.

The week after sixth
The first punch always hurts most
No, really; Gholston. 


4th & 1. Pick 6. The Spartans beat the "University of Whatever" for the fourth time in a row...some things will have to wait. The Big Ten Championship's "still out there", says Denard. It is, but where?

Penn State continues to stumble along like the Millenium Falcon, a 6-1 bucket of bolts. Parts are flying off as it hurls headlong into the Big Ten season having beaten everybody but Alabama, so it's working, sort of.

Indiana and Wisconsin take the field. Prediction? PAIN. Result? PAIN, but not as much as last year.

Iowa celebrates America, beats Northwestern (redundant?).

The Gamecocks enter Starkville and leave with a 14-12 victory. Lattimore, lost for the year...a Pyrrhic victory. Cowbells ring incessantly, a droning white noise that is probably what Stephen Garcia hears in his head when he tries to read a defense. Steve Spurrier walks the fairways on Sunday, pining for Danny Wuerffel. Those dang cowbells.

Alabama, LSU, Oklahoma, all trudge on in their parade of ruthless dominance. Trent Richardson makes his case in Oxford against the Washington Generals. Les Miles bludgeons a once proud Tennessee team in Neyland, the drama of the 2010 game a distant memory.

The week after seventh
The format is off right here
I think no one cares


Michigan rests. There is much to do and much to play for yet.


Big East football on a Friday night, the height of college football. West Virginia and Syracuse, interchangeable dreck. Flip a coin and place your bets.

Tommy Tuberville does what Tommy Tuberville does: TROLL HARD. A Texas Tech team that would not make a bowl game of any sort (not even the soul-crushing, ham-fistedly corporate ones) rolled into Norman and dropped 41 on the unsuspecting Sooners. Oklahoma hadn't lost a home game since 2005, but when they decided that had to end, they ended it in spectacular fashion. Oklahoma's secondary was porous, as sieve-like as Roberto Luongo when impressed with any sort of even vaguely pressure-packed situations. As they gave up 41 points at home, falling to a wholly inferior team led by a coach who could not be any worse of a fit, I thought back to all the times that Michigan had done this sort of thing and felt that thing they call sympathy.

Illinois, after winning its first six, loses to Purdue after losing to Ohio State at home. PURDUE. Ron Zook, just win one more and then you can partake in all the water sports you want in the offseason. You've got this under control, right? No, no you don't.

Eastern Michigan chugs along, asserting its dominance over the other directional Michigan schools. Ann Arbor roots for its downtrodden neighbor.

Oregon travels to Boulder, winning 45-2. The 2 is akin to the spare change you throw in the tip cup out of laziness; here, take these pennies. USC travels to South Bend; Notre Dame quits. Tennessee travels to Tuscaloosa, rings the doorbell and waits outside for what seems like 30 minutes. Eventually, Alabama emerges and punches Tennessee in the face and shuts the door.

Michigan State, in the spotlight in earnest. Impressively, the Spartans take it to Bielema's heretofore dominant but completely untested team. Ball goes down and it is decidedly not a great time to be a Badger fan (HURR). Then, this was a touchdown while Hemingway's at the end of the Iowa game was not:

Click through for post-bye week REAL GOOD TIMES.