Deep burn

I had an odd delay with Portrait of a Lady on Fire. We saw it last week and I haven't gotten around to writing about it until now; not for any particular reason, like disinterest, but because I simply haven't. But I was writing something for ThereWillBe.Games about women in gaming and it occurred to me that I hadn't actually put down any thoughts about this film that's about as "woman-centric" as any major release is going to get.

In most cases, I make an effort to not get any of these reviews hung up on questions of identity, unless that topic is central to the story of the film, as it was in Les Misérables. I don't want to call out Portrait as a film about women because it really isn't that broad in its approach. It's a very simple story about a love affair that just happens to be between two women. Whether the discussion of its quality should be identity-focused seems to veer somewhere between irrelevant (it doesn't matter what kind of people it's about if it's a good story and a good film) and stilted (Are we talking about it being good because it's so unusual (all female cast, vast majority of the crew including writer, director, and producers also women)?) I think the former distracts from the quality of the film and the latter possibly detracts from it. People should be looking at Portrait as a work on its own merits, rather than whom it was created by. But the other thing that occurs to me is that this is a film that would often be derided as a "chick flick" and, notably, I think I, as the only male in our little film-going group, was the one who liked it best.

Now, again, that shouldn't determine or predetermine anything. The fact that I identify as male and the movie was made by women shouldn't affect anything about how I feel about it. It's either a good story and/or a good film or it isn't. But in our typically aggressive, masculine society, the phrase "chick flick" is usually meant to dismiss things that "guys aren't supposed to like" and it struck me as funny that all three women that I watched it with seemed to have reservations and I really didn't, aside from the usual French tendency to make little things have dramatic import when they often don't need to. It makes me wonder if my delay in writing about it was a subconscious instinct not to talk about those "non-male" things like (gasp!) emotion and how I felt it was the basis of a good film whereas everyone else I was with (i.e. three women) felt it was less so. The popular concept is that women generally engage their positive emotions more often than men do and are more comfortable expressing themselves in that fashion. Is that an implicit bias? Am I assuming something on the part of my girlfriend and friends that may be doing them a disservice simply because they didn't think a movie was as good as I did?

The story is set in the 18th century, as a painter (Marianne; Noémie Merlant) is hired to create a portrait of a young woman of Brittany (Héloise; Adèle Haenel) who is being married off to a Milanese noble. Héloise isn't interested in this whole transaction and, over the course of Marianne's attempts to complete her contract, the two have a brief and intense affair. The story doesn't need to be more complicated than that and director Céline Sciamma does a good job of keeping the focus on the intensity between Merlant and Haenel, as they explore life outside of 'adult' supervision (Héloise's pragmatic and traditional mother, The Countess; Valeria Golino), around the studiously indifferent glances of the housemaid, Sophie (Luâna Bajrami), and from altered perspectives (recreational opium.) The most important aspect to any tragic romance is that the audience go away not feeling like it was a completely downbeat tale, but appreciating it for the time that was spent enjoying it, whether in sympathy with the main characters or simply because it was a good story. One can hearken back to the basis of modern Western literature and Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet as a case example of this. Again, I think Sciamma does a good job of keeping the audience aware that the story is simple, but allowing the emotion to play out in any number of ways; from the obvious to the mildly surreal. One moment that was especially poignant was when Sophie had traveled to a local wise woman for an abortion and had to lie in a bed waiting for it to take effect while the woman's adorable infant crawled over her.

Those are the small moments that I thought brought depth and feeling and a realistic veneer to an occasionally phantasmagoric story (Marianne seeing ghostly images of her lover in a wedding dress throughout the house.) They were moments that resonated with me because of the ability to tie them to moments in my own life, even if they were based on scenarios that I have never encountered and, very likely won't, such as Sophie's abortion. That speaks to me of the essential humanity of the picture and the players, which I think was the central premise of the film: Even these people not like you are still like you and they inhabit a scenario that you'll know, even if it initially feels like a far off painting of a woman in flames.

Obscene confessions of a lapsed Michigan fan

[With apologies to the indomitable Craig Ross, esq.]

I've been a Michigan fan since I was six years old. The year was 1976 and my dad was watching the Michigan-OSU game. I instantly became interested in the team with the cool helmets. When Michigan stopped OSU right before halftime with an end zone interception and proceeded to score 22 unanswered in the second half, I turned to my dad and asked who those Cool Helmet Guys were. He said: "The University of Michigan." I responded: "That's where I'm going to school."

That prediction turned out to be accurate. I did attend Michigan in 1986, having become a rabid fan of both football and basketball teams in the decade prior, and graduated four years later, living and dying with every moment that either team played (and adding the hockey team to that cycle of death and rebirth (mostly death in those early years...)) But I come to you now with a confession that requires no great effort to utter, despite it having been laughable for the majority of my life:

I am no longer really a Michigan fan.

I think many things fade as you get older and your outlook and priorities change with both age and, hopefully, wisdom. But to use the easiest comparison, I am no less the diehard Liverpool fan that I became only a couple years after that football game. In fact, given that LFC is in probably better shape, with better leadership on the field and off, than it has been in 30+ years, I may even be more of a fan now than I was then. No, the change in my Michigan loyalty is based on a series of factors that have grown more prominent in my mind and more inimical to the basic enjoyment of the teams as the years have gone by. To wit:

The game:
This aspect is largely centered around football as, in a few ways, I feel like the game is broken. Like most other sports, if you have endless talent, you have options. If you don't, there's a way to take advantage of the modern development of the game and then there's a way to cling to tradition in an exercise of futility. Too often in the last decade, it seems like Michigan has gone the latter route. When Jim Harbaugh was hired, I was the least excited among the fans that I know. I was attending Michigan when Harbaugh played quarterback there and I had kept an eye on his pro career and his subsequent coaching career. Despite considerable success at the latter, he didn't exactly strike me as a forward thinker of the game, so I was hesitant upon his arrival because Michigan had gone through a series of upheavals transitioning away from the hidebound Carr era, to the more modern but disastrous Rodriguez regime, and then a return to what the English would call a Proper Football Man in Brady Hoke. That label is always applied cynically to someone whose thinking is largely outdated but who embodies some unknowable spirit of the game the way it used to be when men were men and daffodils sang on the sidelines. The Ann Arbor-centric parallel is the "Michigan Man"; a term I have grown to loathe for the blind loyalty it's meant to instill, despite the lack of success which often follows in its wake (see: Hoke, Brady and Carr, Lloyd.)

Jim Harbaugh, in many ways, is a Proper Football Man. By that, I mean that he clings to a notion of the game that was outdated when he was playing for Bo Schembechler. What that has produced in the last four years is the inability of the football team to defeat its greatest rival (heretofore led by one of the preeminent modern football minds of the game), which means not only a lack of what most Michigan fans would identify as "success" (conference titles, Rose Bowls, playoffs), but also performances that are often somewhere between grueling and soporific. I spent the first game day last year accompanying my girlfriend's son to the tailgate that he was being paid to watch while its owners were inside Michigan Stadium. Despite Michigan playing on the widescreen in front of us, I spent most of that time watching Georgia Tech on another TV to my right. Why? Because Tech's offense was actually entertaining, even if also outdated. Better the fossil you don't know than the one you do when it comes to interesting football, I guess (although, admittedly, I know the triple option very well because Michigan ran it when I was a kid...)

On top of that, the continuing prostration to the gods of commerce has made the game largely unwatchable in the first place. Three minutes of action followed by three minutes of commercials is awful for fans in the stands, as well as those trying to watch at home. American football is already a slow-paced game, given that the ball is actually in play for only a fraction of the time that the game clock is running. When you combine that with the constant interruptions (touchdown, commercial, kickoff, commercial, end of quarter, commercial; one minute of game time just took 15 minutes of actual time), it simply saps the life from the proceedings. I've gotten to the point where even the four commercial breaks in every half of basketball is more annoyance than I'm willing to tolerate, so I frequently watch those on "DVR delay", so that I can speed through the ads.

But the most disturbing aspect to football, of course, is the health risk. Unlike basketball, I think football is on a clock. As the evidence of the dangers of the game, CTE-connected and otherwise, continue to mount, I find myself no longer interested in watching people kill themselves for my supposed amusement. It's even worse when watching them kill themselves in an often brutally boring display of offense. I can't look at hits on the football field in the same way anymore and I'm usually just thinking about how much damage these kids are doing to themselves for our entertainment... and for someone else's money.

The NCAA:
As usual, it's always about the money, and this incorporates basketball and hockey, as well. The NCAA is one of the more corrupt institutions in the sporting world and when you consider that said world includes organizations like the NFL, FIFA, and the IOC, that's saying quite a bit. Unlike those other organizations, which exist to profit off of the games they oversee and only occasionally via the abuse of the athletes which play those games, the NCAA goes all-in on the abuse. There are many, many other locations where you can read about the ongoing circus that is the NCAA's attempt to preserve the notion of "amateurism" (including their admission that the term "student-athlete" was created so that they wouldn't have to pay workmans' comp to what were obviously employees.) I find that I simply can't continue to be a paying spectator to that circus. The only other institution in this country where your labor produces profits for others but only in-kind "payment" for you is prison. There is no other institution where you are expressly forbidden from using your talents for payment. There is no other institution where people the same age as you and attending the same school as you can make money from an outside job but where you are forbidden to do so because of your talents and consequent special status ("student-athlete".) There is no other institution or status where you are forbidden from even taking a job that has nothing to do with those talents. While you are a "student-athlete", you're essentially indentured to your university, while no other student, including those on "full ride" scholarships as these athletes often are, is so burdened. The fact that the image in front of us is largely a bunch of young, Black men making billions for old, White men while not able to take a dime of that money can't be more disturbing, because that scenario has never happened in this country before...

John Beilein, a career college basketball coach, recently resigned that post at Michigan, at least in part because of the farcical system that the NCAA has in place. All the man wanted to do was teach and coach basketball, but the NCAA has set up a host of policies that prevented him from doing just that, supposedly to protect the athletes from being exploited by their coaches, but mostly to ensure that they're not classified as employees so they can continue to be exploited by their universities. These policies are given the guise of preserving some kind of "life balance" between sport and school, but given that the NCAA has been unwilling to enforce its rules against some of its biggest offenders (and biggest moneymakers), it becomes apparent what (account) balance they're really trying to preserve. All indications are that he was also frustrated by seeing his players regularly leave school early for a chance at the money that they should be making now.

I find myself unable to support that system- directly by buying tickets or tacitly by watching TV -any longer. I don't want to contribute to the wallets of those old, White men while we hear example after example of athletes being unable to go to the movies or even have enough to eat, while their in-kind "payment"- an education -is often a scam only perpetrated until their usefulness to their non-employer is served. I'm not interested in supporting the profoundly elitist and often racist perspective that athletes can't be trusted with the millions that they've earned, while programmers who develop a new app in school (Mark Zuckerberg, anyone?) aren't given a second thought about how they might spend their windfall. I'm not interested in helping to perpetuate the idea that athletic departments are strapped for cash and therefore can't pay their laborers, when any tour around a major university will show you exactly how and where that money is spent. You might even see the host of middle managers and special assistants walking out of their well-salaried jobs and well-appointed offices on your tour. Major athletic departments exist to make money and spend money so that they can claim that those that earn the money can't have a slice. I live with enough lies already, thanks. And the key thing here, of course, is that...

The university:
is the NCAA. The NCAA is a membership organization. The schools that follow its rules are the ones who write the rules. Michigan is one of those members. But, even beyond that, there's no way to escape the truth that Michigan is also a giant, profit-seeking corporation. The facade of an educational institution for most major American universities disappeared long ago and Michigan is no exception. Athletic departments are just a manifestation of the same phenomenon that is rampant across academia. From the never-ending building sprees to the vast gulf in salaries between department heads and those who actually do the bulk of the teaching, Michigan and universities like it are far more concerned about their bottom lines than they are about the welfare of most of their employees or the education of their students. How else does one explain the university refusing to extend a decent contract to its lecturers without a walkout? How else does one explain the confrontational nature of the relationship between the university and the city in which it resides? (Mostly about tax issues. It's always money...) How else does one explain the ridiculous increase in university cost of attendance, far outpacing inflation over the past 40 years? That explanation is simple: the University of Michigan is a profit-seeking, multi-billion dollar corporation and is following in the same behavior pattern of most of its brethren (Wal-Mart, et al.) The university is sitting on an endowment of over a billion dollars and yet it can't find a way to give its staff a decent cost-of-living increase or maintain their health insurance? What does it say when the university with one of the most famed medical schools in the world regularly threatens to cut back on the health care access of its employees?

It's not just that I don't really want to be associated any longer with teams that bore me or a system that exploits athletes in the name of a mythical status while gathering increasing profits. It's that I'm questioning the nature of the institution from which I hold a degree. That institution owns its identity and it's one that I'm not really comfortable with anymore. To draw a comparison with Liverpool again, I'm happy to say that LFC is a club that is extremely conscious of the livelihoods of its employees and the community that surrounds it. The club goes to great lengths to assist local charities and has instituted a ticket price freeze for the past few years after fans objected to an increase in the already expensive seats at Anfield. The only time Michigan ever instituted a ticket price freeze was when students stopped coming to the games because the team was so awful (see: Hoke, Brady.) Ownership matters. The actions of owners matter. Michigan's teams are "owned" (there's that disturbing scenario again!) by the university. They represent the university and their respective actions are impacted by each other. I look at recent activity by my alma mater and confess that I'm not particularly proud of it or proud to say that I was once part of it.

So, yeah. I have no problem walking away from the football program. I'm mostly there already and my interest in hockey was slowly hammered by Red's almost decade-overdue departure. But I did (and do) really enjoy watching Beilein's teams and I'm intrigued by what Howard might do. I'm also intrigued by a member of the Fab Five, one of the more prominent collective voices talking about the injustice of the NCAA system 30 years ago, being the guy who basically has to live by and enforce that system with his players. I'd like to think he's no happier about it than I am, but he doesn't have the choice I do to simply not play ball anymore. And, despite my interest in his team, that's what I'm going to do.

Just a little rain on the parade

Rain is on my mind. Not like Harvey rain. This ain't Michigan State's impending debacle. (Tangent: I've seen people on the Web blaming Houston's zoning regulations, or lack thereof, for the flooding. These people apparently haven't registered the concept of 50 inches of rain falling in a few days. 50 inches! 50! I don't care if your zoning regulations say: "Only one building, wetlands, and a dirt road per 10 acres." 50(!) inches of rain is going to flood ANYWHERE. /tangent) But some small rain on Michigan's latest gridiron campaign, beginning tomorrow, is clouding my thoughts.

I've been having a tough time getting excited for this season. My fandom has been slipping away for the last decade, mostly because I can't justify the existence of the NCAA any longer. Even if I was aware of the issue when the Fab 5 were complaining about it in 1992, the fact that an increasing number of billions of dollars is being made on major college sports and none of it is going to the athletes is something that just hangs over me when I watch the game. Nowhere else in society do you have adults be expected to put their skills to use and be explicitly forbidden from being compensated for them. At a minimum, you call that exploitation. At a maximum, there are much darker parallels to be drawn, especially given that the majority of those athletes are African-American. The fact that the only professional outlets for those skills in the US collude with the NCAA to deny those athletes access to those paying jobs for three years (in the case of football, 1 in basketball) past the age when most of them have legal standing as adults just makes the crime, and the associated hypocrisy, even worse.

You can add to that the issue of concussions. American football is a violent game, full stop. It's why so much protective gear is worn. Even sports that are considered contenders for the title holder of violence, like rugby, don't require so much gear because the game isn't predicated on extremely powerful collisions. Those collisions lead to concussions and I find that when I'm watching a game these days, I spend a fair amount of time thinking about what those kids are doing to themselves in the name of getting permission to be paid for what they're already really good at.

These feelings are in stark contrast to those of Michigan's current coach, who feels that football embodies everything that's good about life. In truth, no one else that I recall can so accurately be said to "live football." Every day, during almost every waking moment (he does have a family), one could make a fair argument that Jim Harbaugh is thinking about football and how to be better at it than he was the day before. My slow alienation from the game has reached its pinnacle right around the time that most around me, energized by the dynamo of his personality and the success that Harbaugh has maintained throughout his career, are more enthusiastic than ever about what Michigan could accomplish on the field. But I try to blot out the stain that is the NCAA and the scourge that is the threat of CTE and think in similarly positive terms and realize that I just don't share the faith anymore.

Brian did his usual excellent review (I can't call anything that exceeds 50K words a "summary") of the team and his expectations for the season and came down at the 9-3/10-2 mark. You know how many of those I've seen in my life? 12. Two more at 9-4, a 9-2-1, a 10-1-1, 5 10-3s (including the last two years), and 3 11-2s. There were a couple 10-1s, an 11-1, and a 10-0-1 in my lifetime but I was too young to know what was going on. I've seen a lot of apparently successful seasons for Michigan that, in many ways, don't really add up to a whole lot. I mean, yeah, a lot of Rutgers fans would kill to have the program that Michigan has, but their first problem is that they're Rutgers fans, so I don't really care about that. I just imagine sitting in front of a game, mildly irritated that these kids are sacrificing their health and bodies to make millions of dollars for someone else, and think about the impending 10-3 season and... I just get bored.

Do I really want to see Michigan slaughter Rutgers again? Do I really want to see the ritual sacrifice of Cincinnati or the slugfest with Wisconsin or the inevitable loss to Ohio State again? Do I really want to be implicitly supporting a system that denies these kids the opportunity to make a living off of their natural talent and developed skills, unlike 99% of the rest of humanity? Make no mistake. These guys are professional athletes. The only thing not professional about it is that they're not getting paid. Having recently been looking for jobs in a sphere where my only experience is of a volunteer or self-employed nature, I can tell you what most employers think about the "professional" standing of someone who's never received a paycheck. These kids are basically modern corporate America's favorite class: unpaid interns, who are supposed to be eternally grateful to the monolith that tells them that their time and effort aren't worth a dime without the guidance that the monolith provides. Insert Kubrick's giant black slab conveying the thought of tool use (violent tool use, incidentally) and it's kind of hard to deny the imagery.

I still enjoy the game, to a certain degree. I was watching Indiana and Ohio State play last night with an appreciation for what was happening on the field (and utter amazement at the modernity of about half of Mike Debord's offense; I'll never forgive 1999.) And despite a similar appreciation for Harbaugh's gung-ho personality and the dynamism that he brings to some parts of the offense, I find myself unable to join the Harbaughdyssey because I don't see the breakthrough that so many friends and others I respect insist is taking place. I don't see Michigan contending for national prominence on a regular basis because I don't see Michigan getting past OSU to win the division or go to the conference title game, which means 10-2/9-3 and some irrelevant bowl in Florida on an annual basis. Incidentally, the last irrelevant bowl game that Michigan participated in cost TE Jake Butt millions of dollars as his draft stock plummeted when he injured his knee during said game. "Come to Michigan! Do lasting damage to your body for free, because it's the only way to (hopefully) get paid for what you can do with that body!"

I look at that last paragraph and I feel mildly ashamed that I'm even contextualizing my apathy toward the record that Michigan might achieve, given the other concerns that I can't shake. I mean, certainly my interest in the game is grounded in what Michigan can achieve in it. I'm a fan. I have been since I was six years old. I could go on being just like all the other fans who love the game and all the kids who play it for that same, simple love. But I wonder. I wonder if that new coach who's supposedly the greatest thing to ever grace the sideline of Michigan Stadium (I've lived through six now; admittedly a ridiculously low number compared to many programs) is really enough to make me think that being a fan for one more 10-3 season is worth supporting the economic injustice or watching people risk the rest of their lives on a game that was probably a bad idea taken to extremes in the first place. I remain a fan, but I struggle with the idea of continuing to be a fan. Do I step out of the rain or keep walking to where I'm going?

The purity of struggle

22-0

I saw my first Michigan football game on November 20th, 1976. Michigan picked off OSU in the end zone to secure a 0-0 tie into halftime and then came out and scored 22, unanswered, to beat the Buckeyes for the first time in 4 years. I remember being fascinated by the helmets early in the game, with a design so unlike the animal pictures or simple letters of other teams that I'd seen; a simple design that implied uniqueness and the power that came with that; yellow wings on a blue field and lines that could be claw marks or simply the streaks of light as the last thing you'd see as they went racing by. I turned to my dad and asked which team it was that wore them. He said: "That's Michigan." I replied: "That's where I'm going to college."

That's actually a game against West Brom.

I saw my first Liverpool game sometime in April, 1979. It was a replay on CBC of the match between LFC and ManU that had taken place on April 14th. Kenny Dalglish scored just before the half and Phil Neal scored just after it to secure a 2-0 win at Anfield. I remember being fascinated by the all-red uniforms of Liverpool, even though that was the diametrically-opposed color of the hated Buckeyes. Of course, by then, I'd only seen 3 straight wins over the Bucks, so I didn't have quite the visceral response that other Michigan fans would have had. To me, the Reds looked glorious, menacing, dominant, flames alive on a field that burned only when and where Liverpool wanted them to. Of course, they were dominant and would go on being so for much of the decade that followed, just as Michigan had and would. My fandom was born in the bonfires of success, like many people. One tends to follow winners because winners are more fun.

Times have changed. Michigan is just now emerging (we hope) from an extended streak of futility and Liverpool hasn't won the Premier League since the top division was renamed to that, 23 years ago. Michigan has been irrelevant to the national scene in football since 2006 and Liverpool has seen its place in the traditional Top Four of the first division usurped by Manchester City, previously not even good enough to be considered an afterthought, and Chelsea. I'd thought before about how similar my main rooting interests are, since they're both entities and fanbases that have great history and expectations to match, despite current struggles on their respective fields, but a great article by Brian Phillips on Grantland the other day kind of crystallized a few things for me.

Happy, happy! Joy, Joy!

In it, he questions whether the Liverpool fanbase, mired in the tradition of their club and the majesty of that tradition, can handle the ebullient, energetic and, yes, happy Jurgen Klopp. The picture is of the brooding fans of LFC, having famously adopted the grudging respect nature of the home city; its port lessened in importance by the Manchester canal, its musical glories long since faded; the only thing left being its football team (Oh, yes. Fine. Teams, if you stoop to including Everton. /LFC fan) and its heroic record from previous decades.

At this point, the easy answer is: Of course we can! [pause] As long as he wins. The piece echoes the many questions surrounding Rich Rodriguez's arrival at Michigan back in 2008. Could he handle Michigan? Could he handle Michigan since he's not a Michigan Man? Could he deal with the expectations of playing real football, as opposed to that spread stuff that won't possibly work in the Big Ten? Uh, yeah, on that last point? Urban Meyer would like a word.

The tone of disgust in that last paragraph probably reveals my attitude toward most of that glory and majesty routine. The last few years have drained a lot of the prototypical "arrogant Michigan fan" out of me, in part because they've been so awful, in part because my distaste for the injustice of the college athletic system has only continued to grow, and in part because I find it really aggravating to be identified with a lot of people who don't know shit about the game even after decades of watching it. I've gone through a similar transformation with LFC, in that even though I still sometimes think of ManU fans as bandwagoners, there's no denying that they've been one of the best teams in football for the past 25 years. That's a long time to be on a bandwagon. But it's more recent to me because I was watching Liverpool dominate the world for over a decade prior to that. I have the same reaction when people talk about Wisconsin "always being good." While I was growing up, Wisconsin was bloody awful and we routinely beat them by 20 or 30 points. So, no, they haven't always been good. But they have been quite good for over 20 years now, so it's easy for people, especially younger people, to think that way. There are probably any number of younger people out there right now who think that Michigan and Liverpool always suck.

I think that's part of what Philipps was referring to, in that (like Rodriguez) Klopp represents a younger, more modern way of approaching the game and Liverpool is so mired in its history that it makes him wonder if people can enjoy a brand of football that doesn't try to overwhelm you with the ominous nature of how "This is Anfield" but tries to shock and bewilder you and score before you realize what's happening and you're already on the way to the next fixture on Monday.

(As a side note, I've always been really disappointed in the appearance of the "This is Anfield" sign. I mean, really. That's it? Just the words and the shield. Shouldn't there be a picture of Shankly melded with Leonidas, roaring at you with the liver bird embedded in gold on one extended fang: "THIS! IS! ANFIELLLLLD!"? Maybe a little OTT...)

But right there is both sides of my mindset, struggling with each other. The expectation is for the grandiose, the glorious, the dominance. But is that just covering for the club's inability to meet those expectations for most of the past couple decades? Should the implied majesty of the simple sign and the simple phrase be enough, akin to the "This is Michigan" tagline that will be Brady Hoke's one positive legacy for much of the fanbase? By the same token, as much as I can acknowledge the failings of Michigan's program for the past decade, when people dismiss them as irrelevant, I can feel my chin starting to stick out. More wins than anyone in the game, man! Biggest stadium in the game! Best fight song! Most recognizable helmets! Huge TV audiences! Everyone wants to see Michigan, whether they suck or not! Because we matter! Same thing with LFC: Most wins! Most points! Highest average finish for the past 50 years! 2nd highest for the 20th century! The only reason I knew they existed as a kid was because everyone wanted to see them and they showed up on the Windsor station! Because they matter! Man!

It's a fight response because it's touching on something that I grew up thinking was worth fighting for. As Philipps notes, there's a kernel of that in the Liverpool fanbase, as well. If the Reds get back to the top of the football world by hopping on the Klopp Joy train, will the purity of the struggle be sidelined? Is it possible to get to that position of dominance while making the struggle... fun? Does that diminish the seeming righteousness of the whole thing? Or is victory enough?

The question has meaning to me because I've spent most of my life in that mode. Most of my major interests have centered around the struggle to change things, whether it was building a political party in the face of the systemic obstacles and massive corruption of the American system or running a tiny business in a market completely dominated by two players who spammed a genre that we weren't interested in. The struggle, for many years, was my life and was always pursued with the idea that we were doing the right thing, if people would only listen; similarly to how many Michigan fans wax poetic about doing things the "right" way, even if it derails pursuit of a national title, but then go on to extol the virtues of the dominance of Michigan's program, anyway. My two major rooting interests are actually the mirror image of my life's other pursuits, in that they have been dominant, whereas consistency would say that I should be rooting for Purdue and West Ham. But winners are more fun. Or is it the struggle that makes it fun? Is there purity in struggle or is it simply a way to spread a salve over the fact that you keep losing, as I have, so often? I wonder sometimes if it's been easier for me to keep struggling in other areas, simply because when I turned to the sports world, I could go back to being a kid when Michigan and Liverpool simply couldn't lose.


In the end, I can't say that I identify very much with the fanbase that Philipps describes for the Reds, in the same way that I don't identify with much of the Michigan fanbase. I like modernization. I like change. I like looking forward. That's what most of my life has been about. The past, in many ways, seems magical, but it's easy to see it that way through eyes that were 6 and 8 years old. Jim Harbaugh is doing a great job of returning Michigan to some of that past, in more ways than one, given the Stone Age roots of his favored form of offense. But there are enough tweaks in it that it's an odd form of back to the future. I think Klopp will do the same for Liverpool, even if his strategic route is more direct; less borrowing from the past, more pushing into the future. At least, that's my hope. It'll be fun to win again, as we return to the flashing helmets and the flames on a field that won't die and, of course, the glory.

That's our guy. And our sign. YNWA.

If all you have is the past, then everything is shiny

Bentley Library

That's a picture of the University of Michigan football team in 1901. That was the first year of Fielding Yost's lengthy tenure at Michigan. They finished 11-0, outscoring their opponents 550-0, inaugurating the title "Point-a-minute" that Yost's teams would carry for the next four seasons. They were recognized as national champions by a number of different committees or foundations that took the role of doing that kind of thing both then and in later years. That's all wonderful and glorious, but it's also 113 years ago when the game was very different.

Bentley Library

That's a picture of the University of Michigan football team in 1964. They went 9-1 that season, losing only to Purdue, 21-20, and they won the Big 10 title and beat Oregon State in the Rose Bowl, 34-7. They didn't win a national title, but they were the best team of a very fallow period for Michigan football and the best one under Bump Elliott, whom everyone agreed was a very nice guy. That, too, is wonderful and glorious, but it's also 50 years ago when the game was very different.

Bentley Library

That's a picture of the University of Michigan football team in 1997. They went 12-0 that season, winning the Big 10 title, the Rose Bowl, and the national title according to everyone but the USA Today Coaches' Poll, who awarded it to Nebraska. That team also had the 1997 Heisman Trophy winner, Charles Woodson, who won the award as the only primarily defensive player in its history. All of that is wonderful and glorious, but it's also 17 years ago when the game was, yes, very different.

Michigan has a wonderful history in the game of football but, in today's Tautology Lesson, that is exactly what it is: history. It has relevance to the modern game only in that people continue to pine for it as an example of how they think things should be if the world were "right", but wishing the world were what you'd like it to be is why they call it "dreaming" and this here's reality.

Sporting News

Brady Hoke, by all accounts, is a very nice guy and clearly loves the program. Brady Hoke is also stuck in the past and all the wonder and glory that comes with it. He was hired with a career sub-.500 record; hardly the record you would expect for a program the adherents of which like to stress is the all-time winningest (based on total wins at the moment, since we surrendered the percentage basis to Notre Dame when we lost to Kansas State in last year's Buffalo Wild Wings Bowl.) Hoke revels in the history of Michigan, even after appalling losses like last night's 26-10 drubbing by Utah at Michigan Stadium. Watch yesterday's post-game press conference. He mentions telling the team that the 1998 team lost to ND and Syracuse and still rebounded to tie for the conference title (Wisconsin, however, went to the Rose Bowl on tiebreakers and Michigan ended up in the Citrus Bowl.) He also mentions Woody Hankins made a great play in the 1996 OSU game. 16 years ago. 18 years ago. It's all in the past. That's where the glory was. None of it has anything to do with the modern game.

The modern game is one where the spread punt formation actually limits the opponent's ability to gain yardage on punt returns. It's a modern approach and the vast majority of college teams use it because it allows them to send more gunners down the field and contain the return guy. Hoke, OTOH, uses the old pro-style formation, which doesn't. That seems to be a rather galling tactical flaw in the first place but it's compounded by Hoke's preferred offensive approach, which is ball-control, power running... and field position. If you're giving the other team an additional 10-15 yards per return, you're surrendering field position.

Rampaging across Twitter from Utah fans

Of course, if you only have 10 men on the field for the punt that Utah returned for a touchdown yesterday, then you have more problems than formation issues...

In that press conference, Hoke talks about how "all our goals are still out there." Those "goals" he's talking about are the conference title and the Rose Bowl. I don't think I need to remind anyone about how wretched the B1G is as a conference at this point and how unlikely that conference title will matter to anyone, mostly because it hasn't mattered to anyone in a very long time. Everyone has talked national title for the past 25 years, if not longer. The last Michigan team that is heralded as genuinely great is that 1997 group above, because they won a national title. The next most recent team mentioned is the 2006 team, which played in a #1 vs #2 matchup with Ohio State that had implications for the national title. The conference title was a complete afterthought, even to former Hoke superior, Lloyd Carr, who thought that his team deserved a shot at the title game even after the narrow loss to OSU. The conference title hasn't mattered to anyone in a long time but it matters to people living in the past when college football was more regional. Those are the glory days: the Ten-Year War between Bo and Woody for the title to the most prestigious conference in the land and the secondary hope of catching the pollsters' eye and maybe getting the not-as-important, voted-upon national title. That latter thing is now the only thing. We even have a playoff to decide it, which the B1G champion will not have access to and Michigan can't even dream of.

It's not wrong to dream. It's not wrong to have goals. It is wrong to not have a plan to deal with the modern game and find a way to actually achieve those goals, instead of just stating them as platitudes. Hoke's ideal image of Michigan football is planted firmly somewhere in the 70s which, like the punting scheme, is oddly contradictory, given that Michigan was mostly an option team (i.e. running quarterback) in the 70s and the current offense is predicated on doing anything but that. Despite having a mobile QB, there were no designed quarterback runs yesterday. Despite Utah loading the box with 8 men and daring Michigan to run, Michigan rarely tried to stretch the field. Again, this is borderline solipsism, where attempting to impose one's belief on a reality that won't cooperate seems to be the only way for this coach to function. Certainly he needs more time than most in order to carry through on his beliefs, since Michigan is the second-slowest offense in the nation. In both losses this season, even while down by double digits, Michigan still took 35 seconds to run almost every play. There is no urgency there because the past is always with us and will always be glorious, no matter what happens now. But the facts say that Michigan hasn't even been in the red zone in two games against real competition. The facts say that Michigan is among the leaders in the nation in turnovers and tackles for loss, just like last year. Facts get in the way of dreams and belief. If you squint really hard, you can imagine there were 100,000 fans in the stadium yesterday, too.

goducks.com

I was talking with Brian Cook of MGOBLOG yesterday and we were mulling over Hoke's almost-inevitable replacement at the end of this year. He suggested Scott Frost, the offensive coordinator for Pac-12 powerhouse, Oregon. As some of you may know, Oregon's offense frequently keeps it in the conversation as a candidate for a national title (i.e. relevant to the modern game.) As some of you may remember, Scott Frost was the quarterback for that aforementioned Nebraska team who campaigned long and loud to get Nebraska a share of that national title. When I brought his name up on the board today, there was one immediate visceral response rejecting the idea because of college football "tribalism" and the actions of not just Frost but his apparently voluble mother, who wrote to Michigan magazines after the Nebraska win in the 2005 Alamo Bowl.

But that stuff is in the past, just like the glory, and it deserves as much credence as that glory does right now. The attachment to "tribalism", notably the "Michigan Man" misnomer, is an enormous part of why Michigan is in the trouble that it is. I loved Bo, too. But Bo is dead and most of his direct descendants in the coaching world have long since left it. Michigan doesn't need a link to the past. It needs one to the future. I don't know if Frost is the right coach. I just know that Hoke isn't and neither is anyone who thinks like him at this point. If all we rely upon to move forward is what we had before, we're not Michigan any longer. We're Minnesota, last relevant to the college game in 1960 and that was 54 years ago, when the game was very different.

It's always someone else's fault

I'm going to do a horrible thing to my fellow Michigan fans. I'm going to bring up The Horror. Not because the Rematch That Only an Idiot Would Schedule is a week away, but because of this article on The Wolverine.com. Dave Brandon, Creating the Future™ was kind enough to offer another litany of excuses about the expected sparse attendance at next week's soiree and, per usual, blame everyone and everything but the most obvious factors (i.e. those connected most closely to him.)

"The biggest shift was in the student section. There was a big decline in level of interest, and we've seen historically there's a lot of correlation between success the previous year, strength of schedule and level of excitement. And television does such a great job covering games that younger people are more comfortable getting content in digital fashion on a screen."

Yeah! Those damned kids these days! No responsibility. No tradition. No willingness to get kicked in the face and come back for more! I mean, really, Dave. It couldn't be because you've treated them like ATMs and are charging them the highest student ticket prices in the conference (the nation?) for a declining product and an awful home schedule, could it? No!

"But it's a one-year transitional situation. I don't like it any more than anyone does. It was not my idea to play at Michigan State two years in a row."
No, it wasn't. But it sure as shit was your idea to schedule Appalachian Fucking State. I mean, it probably seemed like a lark to you, didn't it, Dave? You'd roll in here, pick your genius successor to RR and, coming off the undoubted conference title and Rose Bowl win three years later, we'd exorcise the demons of debacles past.

Except...

No one really wanted to revisit that debacle except App. St. fans and MSU fans who still count that as their greatest sporting memory from their years at State. I can go out on a limb here and speculate that almost no Michigan fans wanted to be seeing the greatest upset in the history of the game every day on BTN for the next week. (I know that ESPN likes to claim that the Stanford upset over USC (JBC!) was somehow bigger because it was on their network and the spread was bigger, but there's only one team in college football history that has gone from a top 5 ranking in the polls to out of them in a single week and, uh, that's Michigan. Because they lost. To Appalachian State.)

"Combine that with what he expects will be a great year with young talent and you'll see a bigger response from the student section next year. At that point, he said, they want to make sure those tickets are available to them.

That, of course, puts pressure on Brady Hoke and this year's team to win at a high level."

Uh-huh. You see, I was at that game in 2007. I picked up a couple tickets for free because, well, there were a lot of them available, just like this year. No one wanted to see a game against App. St. then, when Michigan was coming off an 11-2 season with one of the most dominant defenses of recent memory (albeit with a season-ending duo of losses to both OSU (again) and USC in the Rose Bowl (again.)) Michigan was ranked in the top 5 with seniors aplenty, but there were gaps throughout the crowd from the opening kick to the miserable ending. So, as long as you're insisting that people's TVs are what's keeping them from attending games and not the ridiculous prices ($65 face for App. St. this week), you're likely to keep being mystified and blaming everyone else 3 or 4 years down the road, too.

"I've been able to get to a couple practices, and I can tell you the pace and the tone and tenor are different than what I've seen in the past. Everybody is extremely focused, understand this is a real important season we have ahead. There's a lot of disappointment people remember from last year, and we want to fix it. The best way is to achieve great things. I'm excited about the season and can't wait to get it started."

I've been to a practice, too, and I can say that it looked pretty much like every other practice I've seen over the past 40 years. Everybody spouts the same bullshit in between seasons that didn't end "successfully". They're always going to be "more aggressive", "more focused", and "more intense". The problem here is that they're also "more expensive" and the first game is against an opponent that most Michigan fans would like to forget about and which the rest of the football world simply deems forgettable. And no one scheduled them but you.

"I don't go into any season with any coach laying out standards by pulling a record out of the air. Too many things can happen over the course of the season in any one sport that create variables. We can't predict the future. My expectation is like anybody else's. We're going to play like Michigan plays football. We have a lot of great talent coming back on defense, a fun and exciting defense to watch, and it will be really interesting to see the work Doug Nussmeier is doing with the quarterback and offense, how we can clean up some things that led to last year's disappointment … we just want to see continuous improvement."

Funny, because what you're saying is indicative of why people aren't buying tickets this year. So, you don't have a guideline for Coach Dante's ("He's not even supposed to be here today!") success, but it sure is important to be more successful because, otherwise, people will gladly stay home and watch... their... TVs? Hey, if the team really is bad and/or the opponent really is unappealing, what makes you think that people are going to bother to watch the game on TV? "Continuous improvement"? Yeah, that's be great. Is that just within this season with the awful schedule or is that a brand-new philosophy that you coined right there in front of Balas, because looking back at the last three seasons under your hire, I see 11-2, 8-5, 7-6. Something doesn't seem right about those numbers...

"I like the recruiting pipelines, the quality of student athlete Brady and staff bring in to program. I like all the things I hear from players about growing, and believe the program is going in the right direction despite the second half disappointment. That' spilled milk. What we're focusing on is the future."

Dave Brandon, Creating the Future™.

Oh, and don't forget that part of the scheduling problem is that stadia might be used for other events.

Anybody getting married? Head to the App. St. game and be reminded 7 or 8 times where you can hold it...

Fandom

Brian’s recent brief explanation (last question) about how to pick an EPL team to root for got me to thinking. As some of you know, I’m an LFC fan and became one largely because it was the only professional club that we could get footage of when I was a kid (mostly via public TV and occasionally CBC) and that was largely because Liverpool was the dominant team of England’s first division at the time (late 70s/early 80s.) I knew of the other big clubs like Arsenal, but I mostly saw Liverpool so I developed an attachment for the Reds. I’ve been accused of having a similarity in my rooting interests for aged teams with great histories but little recent success to show for it, because Michigan is the same way. But that sentiment is accurate in that I had the geographic advantage of living in the state where one of the most successful college football programs in the history of the game happened to exist. I became a Michigan fan because that’s what I saw and one of the first things I vividly remember is the cool helmets compared to almost every other team that they played against. Coming full circle again, I remember thinking how distinctive the all-red kits of LFC were compared to their opposing numbers (young communist even then…)

But the point that Brian made that triggered this post is his measure of disdain for the “petrosheik” clubs like Chelsea and Manchester City (even though the former is owned by a Russian, not a ‘sheik’, it’s still oil money.) While both of the latter clubs have history in the Premier League (Chelsea’s considerably superior to City’s), their recent success is (ahem) fueled largely by their respective owners’ status as billionaires. This allows both clubs to spend vastly more than most of their rivals and, therefore, sweep up the world’s soccer talent and use it to create championship teams. The Premier League’s spending rules are fairly few; nothing like many American sports’ leagues salary caps or luxury taxes and certainly nothing like the Bundesliga’s defined spending limits, as most of those clubs are municipally-owned. That kind of largesse is looked upon by Brian and many others as, ironically, ‘cheap’ in that the club didn’t work to build its own development system or “play by the rules” in direct competition with its rivals, but instead bought its way to success. Consequently, they’re considered less viable from a fan interest standpoint because they’re seen as artificial and it’s assumed that a new fan would only be interested because they’re two of the best teams in the top division right now, rather than something more genuine. Of course, part of my attachment to teams like Liverpool and Michigan is the fact that they were very successful. That meant it was gratifying to watch them play, because they usually won, but it was also one of the main reasons that I saw them in the first place: lots of people wanted to see them because they usually won. Therefore, TV networks were glad to show them because the networks made money and they also paid out money to the teams in question, enabling Liverpool, at least, to pay more for players and Michigan to at least create better facilities under the NCAA’s artificial “amateurism” system.

Considering that the NCAA is currently wrestling with critics of that artificial system that prevents giving athletes a share of the money they’re earning and requires schools like Michigan, with vastly more resources and far greater fanbases with even more resources, to play by the same rules as the Ball States, the disgust with teams like City is a bit questionable from a college sports perspective. It’s not as if I don’t understand the reaction. I share it. Liverpool is one of the most successful teams in the history of both the Premier League and international soccer (although they haven’t won the home league in quite some time, just like Michigan…) Man City has long been a member of the top flight, but has almost always been an also-ran. Their recent run of success has been created entirely by their essential status as “Qatar FC”, as Brian refers to them. They lack anything remotely like the fanbase of LFC, Arsenal, or their crosstown rivals, Manchester United, but they’re the hot item of the moment because they’re winning with a lot of the talent from the Continent and South America, bought and paid for by oil money. It seems cheap, in a sports sense, that they simply tapped a few holes in the ground and are suddenly winning the League and competing for the Champions League title on a regular basis.

But, what, exactly is wrong with that?

When the stake is finally driven through the NCAA’s heart and some share of the billions in revenue is distributed to the players of major college football and basketball, it stands to reason that the archaic rules of amateurism in terms of recruiting will also be swept away. If that means that Michigan and its huge alumni base can suddenly bring their full powers to bear in terms of attracting talent, why wouldn’t they? Michigan, the school, can outspend all but a few other institutions. Based on occasionally quantifiable evidence, it seems that the world’s largest alumni organization can outspend anyone. If we can bring the best athletes here, would that make Michigan a different form of Man City?

The counter-argument is that Michigan, while playing by the rules, built up one of the largest and most devoted followings of any program via sustained success. Consequently, the school has money to spend because it won within the rules and isn’t winning because it has money (barring the fact that facilities and other incidentals generated from that success are pretty attractive to the average athlete.) Michigan, ostensibly, earned its fans the “honest” way and now benefits from succeeding in that effort to a degree greater than any other school. But is being a dyed-in-the-wool, “traditional” winner a better choice for a new fan than another school simply because that team has the institutional and historical advantages that other teams do not? Liverpool is in the same situation. Sustained success earned sufficient money and fan support to enable that success to be continued until LFC, too, was purchased by very wealthy Americans (former money managers and now sports, specifically the Red Sox, not oil) who now spend considerable amounts of money trying to keep the club at the elite level.

Contrasting again is the question of: What makes fandom worthwhile? Is it more satisfying to root for a little guy like Northwestern, long the stepchild of the Big 10 until achieving decent success in the last couple decades? Or for a Purdue, which has almost never been able to rise above the traditional powers of its league? Tottenham and Sunderland are good comparisons in the Premier League. But would you suggest that to a new fan, to immerse themselves in the frustration of watching an average or poor team simply because they’re the little guy and it might be extra satisfying once a decade when they make 5^th place? Is it likewise a bad idea to suggest that they simply join the crowd and root for one of the other big powers, because that’s what so many other people do (the best example in this case from an EPL perspective being Man U over the past 20 years)?

I guess my answer to that would be: watch what you like. Watch a ton of EPL (or college football) and see which teams’ style you enjoy or which players you really like to see perform. That one is likely to be your favorite almost regardless of record. Winning will still affect things, of course, because people are naturally drawn to successful things. But it won’t be everything. As Brian notes, Chelsea, while enormously successful in recent years, plays godawful, suffocating, boring football. Man City, OTOH, plays an up-tempo, attacking style which is far more entertaining. From my own interest, I’m thankful that Liverpool’s current style is also the attacking game, as they’re striker-heavy. In contrast, watching Michigan’s team in the past couple years on both offense and defense has been an exercise in head-pounding against the nearest hard surface. I can imagine new fans of the game enjoying LFC on the field. I cannot say the same for Michigan, but I know there are plenty of other fans who would say otherwise, because that's essentially what fandom is about.