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.

There is no door but the revolving one

The latest escapade of the Idiot's administration is both amusing and frustrating for one very significant factor that precisely none of the current major actors in our public farce will admit: This is not new. This is the same old story played out once again in front of a public only too willing to jump up and scream "Save the children!", even if the consequence of this action will be that many, many more children will die, and probably even American ones when they're sent over there from backwoods Alabama, since joining up was the best employment prospect they had. The fact that most of said dead children that the GOP is howling about saving are precisely the ones that they've insisted shouldn't be allowed into the country is just the kind of thing that wouldn't be brought up at the right parties.

There are the usual politically-driven complaints about acts against a sovereign nation and/or doing so without Congressional approval for an overt act of war, but that's all window dressing. The concepts of "sovereign nation" and "Congressional approval" are both irrelevant to US foreign policy at this time and have been since 1915 for the former and the early 60s for the latter (Haiti and Vietnam, respectively.) The US military goes where it wants and does what it wants and dares anyone to say otherwise. The fact that the US Navy has 19 aircraft carriers while the rest of the world, combined, has 22 should symbolize just how often anyone would be willing to take that dare or be capable of doing so. Democrats, Republicans, and the media are all falling in line with said military because of the usual hysteria over CHEMICAL WEAPONS, which is laughable on its face because the US has not only encouraged puppets to use said weapons frequently in the past (Let's use Iraq in the 80s, just as a casual, not even relevant to the situation at hand example...) but enabled the sale of materials to said puppets by signing off on various pharmaceutical producers doing business with them. 

But it's not really about that. This is the continuation of the grand game that hasn't changed under administrations going back to FDR. It's a bunch of old white guys who meet up in their various orgs with names like "Committee for the Restoration of Iran" or some such thing. They're still fighting the Crusades, 1000 years later, not for some spiritual god, but for the real god: money, and the oil and weapons which it is based upon. This agenda has not changed nor will it ever change until massive corporations and old white guys are no longer the predominant owners of our government. Obama did nothing to dissuade them. The Clintons were both ardent hawks. If anything, Trump was less of a hawk on the campaign trail than Clinton was, although it's certainly debatable whether he was so because he didn't have a clue about Syria or anything that's farther than three miles from one of his hotels (likely) and she was so because she had to be "tough" as a woman in a man's world of politics (also likely, although that doesn't excuse it.) This is the real agenda. All this noise over the past few months about Trump's incompetence and his family grafting off the government and health care and blah blah blah; none of that is the real story. This is. It always is. The ownership class signs off on presidential candidates only with the implicit understanding that said story will continue as it has for the last 100 years. Trump has finally engaged his 15-second attention span and signed on to the real agenda because he saw a news report about a chemical attack and, less than a day later, decided to follow the time-honored tradition of boosting his poll numbers with an act of war. It's the same thing every president has done for the last 50 years (Grenada, Panama, Iraq, Serbia, Sudan, Afghanistan, Iraq again, Libya, and many more.) They all do this. The fact that it gains them some political capital at the same time is an ancillary benefit. But this was destined to happen.

Now, granted, it's slightly more of a concern when the world's largest arsenal is in the hands of a person with the maturity and impulse control of a five-year-old (read: none whatsoever) but it doesn't change the inevitability of something like this occurring. Those rich, old, white guys still own the government, no matter who's sitting in the Oval Office. This is their agenda. This is how the system works and both Democrats and Republicans have long since signed onto it. So has the voting public, who always flock to the idea of the glorious American Heroes stepping out onto the world stage to murder someone. Americans who actually read the history often like to laugh at the idea of so many happy people watching their soldiers parade off to certain grinding death in 1914, but the same thing happens here for a certain segment of the population every time this event occurs, no matter where it occurs.

The usual response to any protest is: "So you're saying it's OK to use chemical weapons?!! On women and children?!!" No. That's not what I'm saying. That's what you're saying to serve your political favoritism or demonstrate your outright ignorance of the situation at hand. What I'm saying is that the United States should not be killing anyone to either benefit someone's poll numbers, justify the Pentagon's ridiculous budget and the corporations who feed at that trough, or enhance Chevron's bottom line. Not now. Not ever. If anyone really cared about the human beings involved in the midst of this, that would be the message they'd deliver.

The fascism of the oompah-loompahs

Now that Donald Trump has become the most likely winner of the GOP presidential nominating contest, the attitude toward him from most of the major media outlets has transformed from one of disdain to one of outright fear and concern. Where before the hook was "How could modern America actually be nominating this guy for president?", now it's become "How could modern America actually be looking like 1930s Italy or Germany?!" And that is a many-layered question and, consequently, a many-layered response.

First off, there's a certain segment of America that's always looked like 1930s Italy or Germany. Always. From the time of the Alien and Sedition Acts to the Know-Nothings, determined that immigrants shouldn't ruin the glory that was America, the Immigrant Nation, there's always been a portion of the electorate only too happy to blame their problems on "the other." The modern manifestation of it was, of course, Nixon's Southern Strategy, where it was convenient to sweep up racist Southern Democrats' votes because the Johnson Democrats new policies wouldn't let them continue in the historic tradition (i.e  telling poor white folks that their misery, created by rich white folks, was actually caused somehow by poor black folks.) Trump's other is two-fold: it's not only poor Mexicans stealing your jobs but it's also Muslims coming here to kill you (who are, inevitably, Arabic Muslims because how else could you tell them apart from non-Muslims at the border? Plus, what other kind of Muslims are there?!)

Psst. Don't look here.

Interestingly, though, the original fascists, Italy's National Fascist party, didn't really have an "other". There was no racial or religious component to the Italian Fascist ideology. It was simply hyper-nationalist: the idea that Italy should be great because ancient Rome was great and ruled most of the ancient Western world at one point. Sounds like Trump, right? "Make America great again!" Why? No reason. Just because America should be great because it's... America. City on the hill. Greatest nation evah.

It was only later that the racial elements become dominant in the popular conception of fascism because they were so integral to the German brand of the ideology, tied up in the concepts of eugenics and the Master Race and so on. Germany couldn't be great because some ancient precursor had been great. There's wasn't one. Germany had to be great because its people were inherently great. And because die Juden were keeping it from being great. Of course, Godwin's Law springs into effect as soon as any comparison is made between Trump and the Nazis because, of course, no one can be as bad as the Nazis! (Certain regimes, like Stalin's USSR and Pol Pot's Cambodia, beg to differ. Actually, they probably wouldn't beg.) But I don't think anyone is saying (now) that Trump is as bad as the Nazis. They're drawing a comparison between the movement supporting him and the historical movements that emerged around people like Mussolini and Hitler because the similarities abound.

Take, for example, the polls that indicate the number of Trump supporters who dislike Muslims, in general. This is indicative of a populace who's been given a boogeyman without any foundation in reality. It doesn't help that the leader of their particular political movement of the moment fuels that fire by suggesting that he'd institute a way to register and track Muslims in the US. I mean, obviously you probably won't tag them with a yellow Star of David like they did back in the day, but I guess a yellow crescent would be OK? Maybe? The hilarious part of this is that the "news" outlet so responsible for creating the boogeyman that Trump is so interested in tracking, Fox News, has been one of the leading voices trying to kill the Frankenstein's monster that they created, usually kind of sidling their way into the idea that Americans aren't really racists (read: fascists.) But, of course they are.

The Tea Party began as a response to one man: President Obama. And, no, it's not because Obama is a socialist. Far from it. As I've mentioned before, nothing in Obama's record or anything he's done in the Oval Office would indicate that he's a socialist. What he is, of course, is black. The kneejerk response to this disruption of the social hierarchy ("It's not just black people takin' OUR jobs! Now they've taken THE job!") was to form a party that spoke for the Common White Man, since neither of the major parties was interested in doing that anymore (Just FYI: They never really have been.) Hence, the Tea Party and the immediate labels of Obama being a Muslim, a socialist, not an American (Remember one of the loudest voices proclaiming the birth certificate controversy? One Donald J. Trump...) or anything else that would get an immediate response from the bulk of the electorate that is both ignorant and has been encouraged to think that they have no impact on the political process and no avenue by which to change that status, other than to vote for rich, white guys who promise to change it. Somehow.

Fascism, of either stripe, is not new to Americans. It's been here for a long time. The fact that it's now the dominant aspect of one half of the major party is as inevitable as the Mississippi changing course. A lot of people just don't like to admit it because things like systematic racism (in the name of freedom!) and registration (in the name of freedom!) and internment camps (in the name of freedom!) just don't tend to ring out the tones of the Land of Opportunity and Liberty for All. But those have always been nice illusions, too.

So, yeah, calling Trump a fascist is not a label that anyone should shy away from. He could also be labeled "demagogue" because he's that, too. But the bigger question is why it takes the public and the assembled media so long to admit the truth that's been right there in front of them. The real question isn't why a buffoon who looks like the loudest and most abrasive of the Oompah-loompahs is a leading candidate for president. It's why the apparently most popular candidate opposing him is a war criminal (among a host of other less-than-salutary activities over the past 20 years) and why that whole situation seems to be acceptable to the bulk of the populace. It's just like what happens after every time someone pulls a gun and commits a mass murder: "There's nothing we can do!" says the only industrialized nation in which this happens on a regular basis. At some point, you'd think people would get tired of it.

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.

Calcification

Some of you are Michigan fans who had the temerity to endure the most recent season of a fairly-talented team looking about as inept as any produced by Michigan in the history of the program, including the disaster-laden Rodriguez years. The dreary minor-league bowl game produced a suitable performance and came within a final drive of being the fifth game under Brady Hoke in which Michigan produced less than 200 yards of offense and the sixth to fail to score a touchdown (Number of such games under Rodriguez? Zero.) Even so, it became the 11th under Hoke to produce less than 300 yards of offense. In the modern game, 300 yards is a pretty pedestrian number, even against solid defenses. But the key phrase in that sentence is the first: "In the modern game" because that's precisely what Hoke and his offensive coordinator, Al Borges, are seemingly doing their best to avoid.

Bill O'Brien recently left his job at Penn State after two years to become the new head coach of the Houston Texans (Only the NFL could produce a team name that's essentially a tautology: "We're the Texans. From Houston." It's like going to Europe and telling people that you're Americans. From, you know, 'Murica!) While few had high hopes for O'Brien, taking over the presumed crater that would be the whole of Penn St. football for the next decade, he actually did remarkably well there and one would assume that the fanbase would be more than appreciative for what he was able to accomplish with a team full of no-one-wants and walk-ons.

But O'Brien was saddled with the expectations of a segment of the PSU fanbase who had grown so long in the tooth with their former coach that they apparently have a hard time imagining anyone else doing as well as the old man. O'Brien went 8-4 and 7-5 in his two years there. Paterno went 7-6 and 8-4 in his last two years. But it's not so much about the records as it is the preservation or calcification of "the way things are done around here." (I'm not even going to get into the Sandusky scandal. This is just about football and institutional blindness, thanks.) So, when he left, O'Brien allowed some derogatory comments about "the Paterno people" to be printed:

“You can print this: You can print that I don’t really give a (expletive) what the ‘Paterno people’ think about what I do with this program. I’ve done everything I can to show respect to Coach Paterno. Everything in my power. So I could really care less about what the Paterno faction of people, or whatever you call them, think about what I do with the program. I’m tired of it,”

This was apparently in response to fans complaining about the departure of Ron Vanderlinden, Paterno's last hire, from O'Brien's staff. So, you're giving grief to the guy who has done a better job with your undermanned team than anyone else could expect, because he didn't keep an assistant that the old man hired? Is it because Vanderlinden was, by fiat, a "Penn State man" and O'Brien somehow wasn't? Where have I heard that before?

Oh. Right.

Michigan has a similar problem in that there's a fairly large segment of the fanbase, alumni and, most notoriously, former players and the athletic director, who live in the fantasy of the "Michigan Man." Spencer Hall at EDSBS has turned the "Michigan Man" concept into a favorite punchline because that's really what fantasies are often suited for. The idea is that no one can truly understand what it takes to lead Michigan football to success if he isn't a "Michigan Man", mostly because they think that Bo Schembechler, the man who revived Michigan football from its dolor of the 60s, was a "Michigan Man."

Except that he wasn't.

Bo had been an assistant at Ohio State(!) and the head coach at Miami (not that Miami) of Ohio, a rather pronounced unMichigan Man. So was Fritz Crisler, who came from Princeton. And Fielding Yost, who came from West Virginia. There were no "Michigan Men" until Bo inadvertently popularized the term before the 1989 NCAA basketball tournament. Bill Frieder had announced his departure to Arizona State and Bo appointed Steve Fisher as interim coach, saying he wanted a "Michigan man" to lead a Michigan team. It was only later that it became like a religion, mostly promoted by Lloyd Carr and his sycophants, such that "Michigan Men" became very like the "Paterno people"; both quite pod-like and equally disturbed by those who were not like them (read: everyone.)

The casual reference becomes tradition and then ironclad law. When Rich Rodriguez became the head coach at Michigan, he was immediately treated with outright disdain, with several of Carr's former players openly stating that he was not welcome until he had earned his way in and that the program was "theirs".

And so we come to the present day, where former Carr assistant, Brady Hoke, is now the coach and the cheerleading athletic director and former Bo benchwarmer, Dave Brandon™, is busy making excuses for his rather lackluster performance. That performance is largely based on a perception of what Michigan football should be and, of course, really never was. The modern game moves faster. The modern game incorporates new ideas on an almost monthly basis. The modern game learns and adapts and realizes that opponents will be doing the same on a weekly basis. Michigan football currently does none of those things but instead plunges ahead as only a stalwart "Michigan Man" can.

Just like water pipes, too much time doing the same thing in the same way leads to a slowing down of the flow of information, a buildup of detritus that inhibits the overall structure from functioning. The "Paterno people" are wedded to a distorted ideal of a coach who created their program 60 years ago and have driven out a capable coach in the process. The "Michigan Men" are wedded to a distorted ideal they've created around the coach who revived the program 45 years ago and they're helping to retain a coach who should have never been given the job in the first place and wouldn't have if he was not numbered among the carriers of pods.

The Rose Bowl kind of brought that problem to the fore again in an oblique manner, won as it was by the former Little Brother of football in the state of Michigan. I say "former" because it's highly unlikely that Michigan will be able to regain its former status under Hoke, whether nationally, in the conference, or in its own state. But the problem was brought into sharpest focus by watching the offense of MSU's opponent, Stanford. Stanford was brought to its recent run of glory by one Jim Harbaugh, former quarterback for Bo and latterly-heralded "Michigan Man." Harbaugh, who actually played for Bo (unlike most currently outspoken "Michigan Men"), installed a power running game at Stanford with a rather complicated system of checks and blocking, just like the old man. David Shaw, his successor, has reverted to the style seemingly favored by Hoke and Borges; that of "manball", often cited by ignorant football fans as a way to "impose your will on the defense" by hammering away at the line even when the defense is clearly lined up to stop just that kind of play. It's more like "imposing your willingness (to give up and die)" on the defense than anything else. Shaw tried it, MSU ate it alive (just like they did to us this season!) and Stanford lost. Michigan tried that, too, and gave up more plays for negative yardage than any other team in the nation.

Oh, but they were "Michigan Man" plays and that, for some, makes all the difference.

Writing sonnets to Vivaldi this time

Nulla in Mundo Pax Sincera, to be specific. Why is it that this works best with baroque composers? Don't ask me. I just spew here. Following on the heels of the Bard, perhaps. Once again, just trying to exercise the form and not have it come out as complete doggerel. Remember now, class. The rhythm is like a heartbeat: ba-dum, ba-dum, ba-dum...

Ahem.

A spark alit with thine emergent word
Of int'rest piqued and thoughts aloft to try
Intent and energy were borne and heard
And no moment to stop and question why
The past pursued with seeming earnest zeal
Our present heralded by growing fire
No thought as to whether this may be real
A future left in visions of desire
Claims of anticipation 'til we meet
The days suffused in dreams of further light
A message ling'ring flash a peal so sweet
The truth a cloud a trick of fading light
Now to the yoke of mem'ry flames are lashed
Plunged into darkness soaring hopes are dashed

Exeunt.