So, I got a little lazy last week and decided not to finish the Pac 12 preview in a timely fashion. With that said, this will probably be the last preview, because the time spent to page views ratio is pretty grim, not unlike Nick Sheridan's completion percentage on passes going farther than five yards past the line of scrimmage. Yeah, that means no Big East preview (or worse, MAC, Conference USA, etc.). I have my limits. After this post, I promise that it'll be all Michigan the rest of the way until 9/1. No more of this "talking about other teams" business. I will do this in spite of the fact that there is really nothing Michigan-centric to discuss/write about right now other than maybe some Denard Robinson fan fiction and possibly a season overview that features some variation of the following: "the 2012 team will have a worse record than last year's team but will actually be better." You know, mostly annoying things. Anyway, here's some stuff about the Pac 12 South for all you tens of search engine wayfarers getting ensnared in this shoddy SEO web.
This man wears sunglasses inside--at least, I think it's inside, but since it's the Pac 12 he might also be on the top of a mountain somewhere getting all zen and whatnot--and might actually be good at coaching football, which flies in the face of pretty much every pre-conceived notion regarding Lane Kiffin that you've ever had.
Prologue The 2011 season in the Pac 12 South was like when you're watching Jeopardy and you're just killing it, getting every answer right and generally making your friends look like they're operating on a plane of existence several levels beneath yours. After a while it just gets sad, and you just sit out a round to let somebody else shine for a little while. You jump in and nail that question about Rachmaninoff just to remind everyone who the boss is, but you generally let your weaker peers fight for second best. Anyway, don't pretend like you didn't cheat on a few of those questions...yeah, I'm looking at you, USC. You know what I'm talking about, the 'ol "mouth the answer right as the guy on TV says it, pretending like you knew it before but just wanted the pleasure of feeling like you came to the realization of that answer at the same exact time as this ridiculous dude with the encyclopedic brain" maneuver. We've all done it. Hey, I've done it, and I'm not proud of it but dangit not getting a single question before Trebek takes you into that first mid-round commercial break is not a good look, man.
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 tabularasa 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.
Return of the King: As you know Trey Burke has decided to return and the pendulum of life, which swings back and forth between "OMG AWESOME" and "OMG THIS IS TERRIBLE WHY"--and only these two things--has swung back to the good side. Now that this mildly stressful ordeal is over (if you were actually freaking out about this then you need to reconsider the manner in which you deal with things), these are some points of note, for me:
WOOOOOOOOOOOOO,
On a less cheery note, if you think about leaving early for the NBA, Michigan fans will downplay your ability, backtracking only once you've decided to stay.
With Burke returning, it's very hard for me to imagine a 2009-10 season Redux. This comparison will be drawn approximately 12, 485 times this offseason, but I think it's fairly clear that 2012-13 Michigan basketball>>>2009-10 Michigan basketball. It's not even close.
I wouldn't get too excited about our newfound point guard "depth." It really wouldn't surprise me to see Trey play similar minutes again next year, even with Spike in the fold.
An early 2012-13 forecast? Predicting how a team will perform in the NCAAT a year in advance is like trying to decipher Oregon football picturized offensive signals. With that said, this team is a Final Four contender. I think Michigan might have some minor growing pains as the freshman get up to speed and Michigan tailors the offense to its new personnel (see, "actually having bigs on your roster").
And, last but not least: be more than a little skeptical about CBS's investigative reporting. It seems that Goodman is arguing that it was a sure thing when he reported it, but, you know, people change their minds all the time, and it's his job to discern what the odds are of a change of heart. Does that sound sort of ridiculous and/or impossible? Yes, which is why the media should cool it with the "being the first to report something that really doesn't need to be known NOW NOW NOW" operating philosophy. It's almost as if some journalists are becoming professional versions of Internet commenters that post "first!!!11!!!" on things.
Spring Highlights: Some more spring scrimmage highlights, courtesy of MGoBlue.com. These little 2-3 minute videos don't mean much, but they are giving me the general feeling that Fitz is about to have a monster year.
Urban Meyer: I gave the Sporting News piece on Urban Meyer a quick read and, to be quite honest, didn't find it to be all that surprising or revelatory in any significant way. As for the favoritism re certain star players and rampant drug use...does that really surprise anyone (not that either are of course desirable in any way)?The implication is that UF won in despite all of these problems simply because they were better than everybody else and it wasn't even close. I tend to believe this, but the problem is that guys like Tebow and Harvin don't come around all the time. At the same time, the talent gap between Ohio (and Michigan) and the rest of the Big Ten is typically far wider than that seen between the top SEC team and the next tier of teams in that league. So, maybe this sort of stuff can happen again and work out fine for Urban and the Buckeyes*.
In short, find me in three or four years and maybe this will all be relevant again as part of some trend that I care to talk about for more than two seconds. While the writer here is of course biased, I had a somewhat similar reaction to all of this:
"They were all smoking dangerous street drugs and choking coaches and doing all of their homework with the help of Wikipedia," said some bitter injured backup no one ever heard of who got a mercy invite to Florida's pro day because why not. "I read OverSigning.com and began to think I had lyme disease."
*And by "work out fine" I mean winning championships.
Rivalry!: RR and Todd Graham throw out the first pitches at an Arizona Diamondbacks game. RR asks Graham if he's "ready" to throw before they toss to home plate in unison. This polite gesture shows that RR does not GET IT or the rivalry that is Arizona State-Arizona. Also, the RR I know wouldn't have waited for his opponent to get ready: RR clearly doesn't even GET his own offense anymore.
Jibreel Black Position Switchin': In light of my post on Alabama's OL yesterday, this piece on Black's switch to the inside has me thinking one thing and one thing only: somebody get this man a copy of "The Gittleson Diet: Weight Gain for the Modern (But Not Too Modern) Athlete," ASAP.
Black says he's upped his weight to 270 this spring (up from 260), and plans to add about 10 more by fall. This is encouraging, because there's no way in the world that a 270 pound 3-tech would be able to stand up against an interior line as large as the Warmack-Jones-Steen triumvirate. Then again, our own DL coaching triumvirate is pretty formidable, too.
In other "please be good" news: It's never good when something is referred to as a "carnival of missed assignments," but, nonetheless, Jerald Robinson has being acquitting himself quite well amongst it all. I very much want him to be good because he offers something that almost none of our other wideouts have (at least until the 2012 guys, Darboh and Chesson, come in), but, at the same time, Robinson seems like he's the only guy who even could be termed a "breakout" guy vis-a-vis this position group, so this sort of praise, while better no praise, might be indistinguishable from your common spring fluff.
History and Stats re: Burke's draft status: Dave Ryan over at Maize n Brew compares Burke to a mystery player who was at one point in a similar situation. I won't spoil the surprise, but the cogent points are many here, namely that "marketing" and overall exposure are often as important to NBA scouts' perceptions of a college player as cold hard stats. Trey might not have a "better" year in 2012-13, but it's hard to envision his draft prospects getting any worse as long as he has a comparable encore season.
Hoke Exhorts You To Do Something: In addition to the card stunt that is going down this Saturday, Coach Hoke wants YOU to get to your seat fifteen minutes early for a tribute to Lloyd Carr.
So that's happening and it won't be slightly awkward for everyone that has read Three and Out. Nope, not at all.
War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Regression is Progression: In actual football-related news, Hoke gives Denard the ol' vote of confidence:
"I think he’s gotten better every week, within the offense," Hoke said Tuesday during his weekly conference call with reporters. "I think the way he goes out every day, and his work ethic every day, his leadership and his real attention to detail, whether it be in the pro-game or carrying it, (helps him adjust)."
Wait, he's getting better? If following Michigan football the past several years has taught me anything, it's that every individual mistake or bad game is reason to sound the OMG REGRESSION alarms. Coach Hoke, are you saying that there are certain things we can't necessarily see, and that the world isn't a black and white caricature of regression and progression? My God, this changes everything. I guess we can all breathe easy and stop presaging the fall of empires every time Denard throws an incomplete pass.
Opponents, They Watchin' Us: The straightforwardly named Corn Nationtakes a look at the Wolverines. Most of it actually seems to be a pre-season preview, but I only mention it to include this part:
Throughout Rich Rodriguez's three year run at Michigan, we've repeatedly noted the similarities between Rodriguez and Bill Callahan's career at Nebraska. Granted, they were mirror images, taking teams in opposite directions philosophically, but the result was the same: square peg, round hole.
/weeps
Job Huntin': Rich Rodriguez talks to Tim Brando about his job prospects. The only noteworthy parts--other than RR's declaration of still having the "hunger to coach"--are: a) Houston Nutt said something sort of intelligent and b) RR's legal issues with both WVU and Michigan are over and should not present a problem for future employers (per RR, at least).
To the first point, Nutt, the SEC's Zook, explained who I thought would be a good fit at a place like Ole Miss, mentioning Mike Leach in the process. Basically, Ole Miss needs somebody with a "different" (see: "spread") approach in order to mitigate the talent, facilities, and tradition gaps. Despite recruiting enough people per class to fill CHEM 1800, things haven't worked out for Coach Nutt, but that doesn't mean that nobody can do it. Nutt is just a bad coach; RR is not. However, as long as Miles and Saban are chilling in the SEC West (and even Petrino, I guess), it'll be hard for anybody to really be successful*.
He says we'll see what happens in the next three or four weeks, so whether or not that is an actual timetable...you've got to think that things should start to move in the near future once certain guys get fired and ADs fire up the university jets.
*Dan Mullen says "Hey, remember me!"
Early Season Hoops: Michigan defeated Towson on Monday, 64-47 (UMHoops, as always, has it covered with a phenomenal recap). This means very little in the grand scheme of things. The fact that Michigan got outscored after a 21-0 run to start the game? Not really too worrisome given the protean nature of the lineups at this point, not to mention the fact that the team is still fairly young.
The only thing that really matter is that Michigan got the win, which teams like UCLA and Vandy can't say. I'm pretty sure nobody is going to remember Duke's one point win against Belmont come tourney time. That said, winning each and every one of these games is critical because you don't want to see a cupcake under the 'Bad Losses' line of the ESPN bubble team graphic. In any case, a few meaningless observations:
Horford looks pretty solid so far. The added weight is definitely a plus...where as he was sort of useless on the offensive end and was just sort of a tall noodly guy on the defensive end last year, he could be a contributor this year, especially if Morgan continues to suffer from the departure of his benefactor Darius Morris.
Smotrycz also looks like a guy who will see the added weight pay off once the conference schedule begins. He caught a lot of flak from some people last year but I'm pretty excited to see him develop.
Burke will be a good one. It's refreshing to see the outside shooting coming from that spot on the floor (one of Morris's few flaws as a player), but it's hard to gather much else given the limited serious pressure he got in this game against a severely overmatched opponent. Let's see how he does against an athletic Memphis team, Duke/Tennessee, and even UVA on the road in Charlottesville.
3-point shooting was pretty terrible, which should generally be pretty scary but especially for a Beilein-coached team. But, like I said, it's early in the season and everything will come in time. These games are basically practice, man.
Michigan looks to go 3-0 on Thursday against Western Illinois (8:30 ET, ESPN3). I won't be coming in for the Nebraska game until the following morning so I won't be able to make it but, Ann Arborites: can we sort of try to fill up Crisler this year? This team is exciting and for the first time in a while we have a guy that can evaluate talent and get his players to confidently execute a system. I know these early season games aren't the most exciting but it's pretty sad to see Crisler look so empty outside of the Maize Rage.
The final seconds ticked off and Michigan had lost again. It wasn't even close and by the time it was over I was already numb to it all. Chris Relf plowing through the line become a philosophical reality, and Bulldog linebackers streaming through our line on all-out blitzes like so many Haley's Comets turned life-destroying asteroids, wiping out Michigan's chances like the dinosaurs. An era was over, and despite the brief hope I held that somehow the vast layer of dust left by the impact would catch fire from some random wayward spark--reigniting the hope that once existed about the spread and Rich Rodriguez and the new and certainly better Michigan that would arise of it--it did not, and everything went dark for a while. We were left, leaderless, to madly wander the heath like King Lear, in the cold and in the dark and without direction or any sense of purpose or meaning. We were kings reduced to common men, crazy men.
Rich Rodriguez waited for his fate after the catastrophic failure that was the Gator Bowl (and much of the rest of his tenure) like Meursault, waiting for the gears of justice to finish grinding in order to provide a favorable verdict. After a while, it is easy to trick yourself into believing that something will turn out better than it will. Meursault's lawyer told him he expected a "favorable outcome," which, for me, would have been the retention of Rich Rodriguez and his offense, with, of course, some serious changes being instituted in an attempt to fix what had obviously been broken. Maybe those fixes were impossible because they were fixes to problems caused by things so deeply rooted in Rich's personality that it would've been like telling a consistently pessimistic person to look at the bright side of life. I convinced myself that maybe that would happen, but, like Meursault's case, it did not.
When the bell rang again, when the door to the dock opened, what rose to meet me was the silence in the courtroom, silence and the strange feeling I had when I noticed that the young reporter had turned his eyes away. I didn't look in Marie's direction. I didn't have time to, because the presiding judge told me in bizarre language that I was to have my head cut off in a public square in the name of the French people. Then it seemed to me that I suddenly knew what was on everybody's face.
Five days later, Michigan had a coach. Each day seemed like a lifetime in and of itself as the program wandered like Lear, with the rain falling down turning the ash and the dust on the ground into a soft, extinguishing mud. Each day was stretched out and miserable, leaderless and void of anything, not even anything bad, by which to define ourselves. Each day we were left to twist in the wind, hoping for Harbaugh, for Miles (not me), for someone to come and say that they were the leader of this program and they would get on it then and there. Finally, we had that man, and, for a while, I was unhappy. But, as they say, it's in the past.
We're 72 hours and a tailgate away, and yet I get the feeling that it's happening too fast. I wonder if I've done everything I needed to do this offseason? I wonder if the team is ready? I wonder if Coach Hoke believes the things he is saying or if it's all a show? I wonder how media savvy Coach Hoke really is? Is Greg Mattison really that good? Does Borges really understand what he has in Denard? Does Denard really understand how fast he is, and how when there's nothing there on the pass he needs to go?
These aren't questions so much as expressions of anxiety. After a long hiatus, the 2010 season seems like the distant past, as does most of the Rich Rodriguez era. What came out of the Llody Carr era was rebirth, and from that hope, and from that resistance, and failure, and partial rebirth into failure and failure and failure and part of the partial rebirth into dread, the dread of the end and the dread of the beginning, like stabbing at the surface of a pool once, twice, three times before eventually taking the plunge for better or worse.
We're embarking on a slow shift the other way, the way we desperately strove to distance ourselves from after Crable blocked the outside guy on the final field goal against Appalachian State. The old way of doing things, whatever that may mean. There's nothing sarcastic or critical in that designation (particularly since this old way was more successful than the new way), as trying something new necessitates the existence of a prior way, an SOP of Michigan football. Everybody needs definition or else they risk extinguishing the fire of themselves, the thing that makes them do the things they do. For those five days, the fire fell to a low, dull glow, sickly and meek and embarrassing. It's a wonder what eight months can do. I went to bed on January 1st, thinking about what had just happened, what would happen, wondering what another restart would do to that flame. Those five days bore out our biggest inefficiencies, our at times hamfistedness, our determination to revert, to tear down, to criticize. Some threatened to leave if changes weren't made. Some said that all of this was a mistake. I had poured my entire heart into the revolution, and in the end, too many people had put down their guns and gone home.
I, myself, am furthering myself from certainty. This weekend marks the first home game for which I won't be in attendance since 2006. I don't know what I'll do, or how I'll handle it. This coming Saturday last year, I was in the stadium when Brock Mealer walked across the field. It got dusty.
I was starting my senior year, which I thought would never end, as people always do at the beginnings of things. I've had to adapt, to realize that things are now irrevocably different, that they won't be the way they've been the last four years, where I could walk to my window any evening of the week and hear a faint and distant rendition of The Victors, chopped up in pieces, played and replayed and perfected. I always wondered how they could practice it so many times, because when they played it during the games it sounded the same every single time.
I'm in New York now, a place that represents the antithesis of college football culture. I've seen my share of Michigan gear here and exchanged Go Blue's with people I would never see again. On my way back home to New York after a trip to Alabama in June, I met a Nebraska fan in the airport in Huntsville, AL. I told him I wished him well and that I hoped he would enjoy the Big Ten conference. He said that he was looking forward to it. I had over an hour until boarding; I ended up talking to this stranger, who was kind enough to approach me upon seeing my #16 jersey. He asked me if I was a Michigan fan, and I laughed and said yes while thinking how no answer would ever convey what I was thinking.
I got to watch Mike Hart and those guys for a year, my freshman year, after watching them play for three years while I was in high school in north Alabama, surrounded by Alabama and Auburn fans. Michigan won the Big Ten when Mike Hart and Chad Henne were freshmen, and even they they lost their last two games that season you had the feeling that an endless future extending to infinity existed, that three years of Henne and Hart might as well have been an eternity. Everybody said to wait till 2007, when they would be seniors. If you think this is good, wait till they're older, better, more experienced. Everything gets better, everything is linear and un-tampered with, watch this success unfold methodically. It was the height of certainty, as far as knew it, as certain as I could be as a 15-year old. I got to Ann Arbor in 2007, and things did not happen the way people expected them to, and uncertainty ruled the day.
Even then, the fire burned. It never wavered because I saw Mike Hart carry the ball 44 times against Penn State with strep throat. I saw a gimpy Chad Henne lead the Wolverines to a victory in Evanston after the young upstart Mallett proved to be unworthy of the throne. I watched Mike Hart pick up a fumble that miraculously bounced into his hands--on the first snap that Mallett took after Henne hobbled to the sidelines midway through the fourth--as if he was picking up his laundry and it was all perfectly logical and true to life.
It was absurd and irrational but it was memorable and it kept things alive. Hart did that his entire career; just when you thought things were over, when you thought that Michigan would lose to Michigan State for the first time in six long, dominant years, Hart pulled out a big bucket of kerosene and poured its contents all over his own body and set it on fire to prove a point. Even at the bottom, the smallest, most ridiculous events spawn things beyond their original scope. A seed becomes an apple tree, a fumble picked up like the stray singular sock on your bedroom floor becomes victory; unadulterated, undiluted victory. When I look back, I remember the defeats, but they litter the landscape light stray leaves, secondary aspects of a grander scene. Disappointment is relative, but memories are not. I remember Mike Hart doing that thing, and it was. It still is.
This team has has its heroes. I could go through them, but to draw attention to them is superfluous and most probably not what they would want themselves. The thing that's most worth knowing is that heroes will be born this season, but you might not know it until next year, or the year after, or 20 years down the road when you're wondering what happened to that guy or that guy.
We can't control what happens on the field, but we can control the fire that burns, that must burn, if you're a fan of any sort. I choose to relish the moments, the players, and the experiences I have with Michigan football. There's always a time for moping, a period of days or weeks when it's justifiable to be a cantankerous, horrible version of yourself. We are all allotted this time by ourselves, a special time we've set aside at the beginning that we've condemned yourselves to lose, like walking into a casino and saying you'll lose this much and that it's okay.
I've learned, in four short years of horrible, frustrating, and exhilarating Michigan football, that you've got to take what comes, assimilate the failures into the overall sum of memories so that in the end they're indistinguishable. Selective memory is just another name for optimism. As long as you keep the fire burning, as long as you feed it and nurture it and remember why you even do it when it shoots up smoke and burns everything around it to the ground, leaving unseemly trails of blackened earth and ashy detritus, then you'll understand, and everything along the way becomes a part of the process, a part of the burning. After all, sometimes the only thing that lets you start over in earnest, is fire.
It's curious how some days in life are just like any other. Bland and anonymous days, days you wake up to and do what you have to do to make it through them, then you go to bed and wake up the next day to do it again. Days can come and go without anything interesting coming along to break up the monotony. Days like a generic, forgettable cheeseburger, a mind-numbing dubstep beat*, and most of Ohio's soul-crushing landscape. They're just there to whittle away the time you've got, like pieces in a utilitarian sketch, a model of something boring and practical like a road or a courthouse. These types of days do nothing to deviate from the General Mean, the accepted middle of day-to-day life. Things happen in moderation, in restrained apathy.
Not all days are like that.
*Still don't know what that is, really...NOW GET OFF MY LAWN. --------------------------------------- Needless to say, the 27th of September of 2008 was not one of those days. Michigan was 1-2, giving a tough Utah team a fight while stumbling their way through an ugly win against Miami (OH) and a frustrating loss on a rain-drenched day in South Bend. Things were bleak to say the least, and they would of course get worse...but that's neither here nor there.
It was a day of extremes. We were down 19 at the half, having just played one of the worst halves of offensive football that I've ever seen.
Michigan Drive Summaries
START
QTR
POSS.
YARD
PLAYS
YARDS
RESULT
12:38
1
01:10
MICH 20
3
7
Fumble
09:03
1
02:15
MICH 16
5
7
Punt
01:18
1
01:27
MICH 17
3
1
Punt
14:42
2
01:22
MICH 45
3
1
Punt
10:49
2
01:10
WIS 48
3
3
Punt
04:47
2
00:59
MICH 18
3
1
Punt
02:29
2
01:14
MICH 10
3
1
Interception
00:10
2
00:10
MICH 39
1
0
Interception
And yet, I stayed. Honestly, I feel a little bit odd having to say that, as if I did some laudable thing. No, I stayed because I watched the 2000 Alabama game, the 2003 Minnesota game, 2004 MSU game, the 2005 PSU game, and many, many others, and I knew that no lead was safe. More importantly, I had (and still have) an unbendable faith in Michigan paired with a lifelong aversion to all that is fickle and wishy-washy, all that folds upon itself when assailed with even the slightest of stressors. This was one of the most ridiculous days of my Michigan fandom, and its memory is in fact lifted up even farther by the fact that none of it really meant anything at all.
The Michigan players and coaches run for the tunnel, down 19, to a cascade of boos. Other than a solid majority's predilection for key-jingling, there are few times in my life when I have ever truly been ashamed of anything I'd seen in the Big House. Having just graduated in April, I had the pleasure of experiencing four of the worst years of Michigan football history...and yet, I say it was a pleasure still. I'm not entitled to anything, but apparently some people are. It was a moment when I wished I could not be where I was. It was embarrassing.
I've never quite understood the concept of booing, to be quite honest. It's a strange act to begin with, if you really think about it. Somewhere along the line it became a primal evocation of dissatisfaction, and along the entire way since it has been a stupid, stupid thing to do. If you're going to boo a pro team for not trying or for being just plain bad, fine. If you're going to boo a hockey goon for being a goon, I understand. Why would you boo college kids? This was the worst, most incompetent display of Michigan football in the Big House that I have ever seen, but I never thought that booing would be a logical way to make anything better. Steven Threet, Rich Rodriguez, Terrance Taylor...they all ran off the field after an offseason of Barwis Beach and family values and learning new schemes only to be told they weren't good enough, that whatever they had done was not enough.
What does it accomplish? Nothing. In any case, those are probably the same people who left shortly thereafter, or who dipped out before the end of the Northwestern rain-slow apocalypse game because it was too cold. We all know somebody like that, and they are insufferable. Many of them probably jumped off the bandwagon at some point, maybe as early as the 2008 season, and they will be back soon. It's too bad, too.
I sat and wondered how we could spring a comeback from so much flailing incompetence. I had faith, but it was that kind of belief that eats at itself if exposed to the light.. It's propped up by rubber bands and paper clips and a little bit of measured delusion and naivete.
Somehow, Michigan pulled itself together and willed themselves through a halfway decent touchdown drive in the third quarter, capped by Kevin Koger's first touchdown reception. A promise of a bright future. Michigan went down the field on the arm of Steven Threet, the legs of Sam McGuffie and Kevin Grady, and the hands of Martavious Odoms and Greg Mathews. Greg's last name only had one "t," but people managed to always get it wrong, and they probably still do. This wasn't Henson, Terrell, Walker, and A-Train. It wasn't Henne, Manningham, Arrington, and Hart. It wasn't Navarre, Braylon, Avant
Minor ran towards the end zone as if he was running from a cloud of hornets.
John Thompson, who hipsters liked back in 2005 when he was "that linebacker who was actually kind of good against Iowa that one time," put Michigan ahead.
Rich Rodriguez would later joke that he'd hoped that ball would have landed in somebody else's hands, but I think even he would admit that Thompson was the perfect man to carry it to the end zone, like Frodo carrying the ring. He's not your first choice, but that's how things go sometimes. This was one of the loudest moments in the often times moribund Big House that I have ever experienced. It wasn't over yet, but those who had stayed were certainly better for it already.
Michigan rushed three on the ensuing Wisconsin drive...and made the stop. What more could you want?
Then, in perhaps the most absurd moment of the day, Steven Threet ran and ran and ran, looking behind him like somebody who clearly hadn't run that far without being stopped before.
In 58 yards, disbelief in things great and small was shattered and a lot of people were feeling the thing we call shame. How could you have abandoned this team?
Sam McGuffie scored, and then Wisconsin scored after being rebuffed in the red zone on the previous drive. Wisconsin scored, went for two and converted but had it called back. Then, the Big House rose to the occasion:
This win didn't make up for the rest of that season, but I was glad to be there, just as I was glad to be in the Big House for every single game of sloppy, unsatisfying football in my four years in Ann Arbor. There are a lot of people wishing they had stayed, and they deserve that feeling of regret. Sadly, people will continue to leave games early even after this. You'd think that this game would serve as a prime example for why you should never leave early no matter what. But, backwards hat-wearing dudes and sorority girls will continue to exist, so the odds of that coming to an end is...unlikely.
In any case, it was a lone bright spot in a season of misery and an era filled with in-conference failures. It was not without its imperfections; Michigan stumbled for more than a half before finding its way, and maybe that's representative of the program's path in general. Sometimes it takes a try or two, but if you stick it out...good things happen.
Hello, Internet. I am Fouad Egbaria, a Michigan grad ('11) and recent graduate of the MSJ program at Northwestern's Medill School of Journalism. This is a blog that attempts to analyze the highs and lows of Michigan football and basketball; I'm just trying to capture the spirit of the thing. I will also write about general Big Ten news, as well as Chicago professional sports (from time to time).
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