hats

9/4/2021 – Michigan 47, Western Michigan 14 – 1-0

I've got a spreadsheet now. I put it together a month ago when the idea of doing something, anything at all, was appalling. It has columns and if I do the thing in the column I get to bold it. Some columns are daily, or at least they're daily without the extraordinary intervention that causes the "shruggie" column to get bolded. Others are, uh, less daily. Kind of got knocked off a thing I wrote about in a column this March.

please come weed my backyard

The idea is that as we go along more things get bolded. Just two things are currently getting hit 90% of the time: walking, and people. I get to bold "people" when I undertake an activity (that does not count as another activity) in which I interact with another human, socially. Not usually 110,000 of them.

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Being in Michigan Stadium was an experience bifurcated into competing feelings. One was a sense of unreality that this was actually happening. Carl Grapentine's "good afternoon" was met with a roar unlike any other "good afternoon" to date. Before the formal pre-game festivities were initiated it was just… nice? To sit in the stands as people filed in and the team went through its pregame warmups was nice. These days people use the word "nice" to mean "not nice" when describing an experience. Here I am saying that there was a real, mild pleasure derived from sitting in a place and doing a thing I used to do and then did not do as part and parcel of massive society-wide problems. It felt strange, like amnesia lifting.

The other was a sense that life had finally, truly resumed. Like the last year was about to be dumped out of the movie, replaced by a smash cut to kickoff. There was a guy with bad jokes on a microphone narrating three guys parachuting into the stadium.

we gotta talk about the smoke color though [Barron]

The band came out. I was vexed by first-quarter playcalling against a MAC opponent. A man holding a toddler was incensed enough to stand up and berate an official.

those are daddy's sports words, kiddo [Barron]

This was undoubtedly after the Bell OPI call and was thus justified. It was all very normal.

For a window on a fall Saturday you could believe that 2020 was a bad dream. I have to admit that I was not much moved by the game itself—I'm spending this fall's emotional capital on things closer to home—but even I, person about ready to drop-kick college football into the next town, could do nothing but see a real college football season as a ribbon-cutting ceremony for something called Real Life.

We can talk about whether all of the above was, you know, wise*. Even outside of the context where young men hurl their heads at each other for our entertainment and now the occasional sliver of NIL money, what with a pandemic on. But we can all admit that even in the depths of our collective malaise, sitting with our people and experiencing our thing together felt better than it had any right to.

There were some preteen kids sitting behind me who predicted a screen, and then a punt, on a third and long. (They were wrong, but correct spiritually.) They were possessed of a world-weary cynicism that made me wonder if the thing actually oozed from pores in the stadium concrete and seeped its way into our bodies, the environment guiding us into a common way of being. COVID was probably the less transmissible thing in that stadium Saturday. That just goes in your lungs. Michigan goes in your bones.

That's why we're all still here, in whatever capacities we are. Not hope or fun or desire, but a giant "we." A community, one that may be loosely bound but is nonetheless real. I felt that when I posted The Story and got hundreds of comments, DMs, emails, and texts expressing support, asking if there was anything they could do. The answer is both no, and also you've already done it. I bolded my people box Saturday, continuing the thing that's letting me climb out. Hopefully it meant something to you, too.

*[For me the combination of vaccinations, open air, and the fact that vaccinated people apparently don't transmit Delta readily if asymptomatic is makes me comfortable with the situation, though I'd prefer Michigan require proof of vaccination to attend games.]

AWARDS

Known Friends and Trusted Agents Of The Week

[Barron]

you're the man now, dog

#1 Ronnie Bell (RIP). Well... crap. Bell had the catch of the year taken off the board by John O'Neill Crew Hijinks, scored a long touchdown, and ripped off an impact punt return... on which he was lost for the season. This set off a firestorm on Michigan twitter, which is addressed later.

#2 Blake Corum. Corum had the most touches of anyone on offense with 14 rushes and two catches; he had two TDs and averaged 7.9 yards per carry. He also had a 79-yard kickoff return. That eases him out in front of Hassan Haskins. The two guys will likely continue splitting carries right down the middle, and that's fine by me.

#3 Dax Hill. Hill's your new spacebacker; he deleted every attempted screen to the wide side of the field and had a PBU on slant that looked impossible about a second before he made it.

Honorable mention: Seth's likely to hand some hardware to Andrew Vastardis in UFR. AJ Henning deleted a pursuit angle on long reverse TD. Mike Sainristil blocked like a demon that's into blocking instead of torturing souls. Haskins ripped through a tackle on short yardage to score and did well otherwise. Aidan Hutchinson had a sack-strip on which the WMU QB wanted to leave the state.

KFaTAotW Standings.

(points: #1: 8, #2: 5, #3: 3, HMs one each. Ties result in somewhat arbitrary assignments.)

8: Ronnie Bell (#1 WMU)
5: Blake Corum (#2 WMU)
3: Dax Hill (#3 WMU)
1: Andrew Vastardis (HM WMU), AJ Henning (HM WMU), Mike Sainristil (HM WMU), Aidan Hutchinson (HM WMU), Hassan Haskins (HM WMU)

Who's Got It Better Than Us(?) Of The Week

[Barron]

McNamara nails Bell on his 76-yard touchdown, which followed on from the Bell catch wiped off the board and may indicate dude has a deep ball. Would be a major development.

Honorable mention: Swing pass to Corum on the first drive causes me to say "touchdown" as soon as Corum motions out. Henning and Wilson rip big gains on end-arounds. Corum's kick return.

​MARCUS HALL EPIC DOUBLE BIRD OF THE WEEK.

Bell is lost for the year. Awful.

Honorable mention: Bell's catch is taken off the board, violating every principle from "it's too cool to call back" to the actual rules dictating college football. WMU drives down the field and scores a touchdown on their first drive, resulting many "here we go" feelings in the stands.

[After THE JUMP: Baldwin is crazed]

Hurray issues. So this morning an iframe insert got put in the js file. It has been removed and we are monitoring that particular file intently; the good news is that no other files on the server have been changed. I've turned off js aggregation, which will make the site marginally slower for first loads. We are still looking for the entry vector; if a js file gets updated we will know about it and check to make sure it does not have the malicious code in it. We have a request in to Google for a clearance.

If you are concerned, running a noscript module on your browser is a good idea. Apologies.

(Note: this is unrelated to the scattered reports people were having of malware from the Google Ads, which are client-side issues.)

Fun with hats. Ace has it:

There's Waldo. Insane axe-murdering Waldo.

Hatch update. Via his CaringBridge page:

By the grace of God, Austin James is showing improvements everyday. He is comfortable and stable. He has begun opening his BIG BLUE EYES a little bit more! We understand that his healing will be a very slow and gradual process; we're not sure whether Austin has any awareness of what he sees yet.

He's got a long way to go, but it sounds like he's getting out of the woods.

Further evidence for the skinflint theory. The Big Ten continues to pile up the cash:

They continue to not spend it on football coaches:

The SEC paid its assistant coaches an average of $276,122 in 2010, according to figures compiled by St. Louis attorney and agent Bob Lattinville of the firm Stinson Morrison Hecker.

The Big 12 was second at $232,685 and the Big Ten a distant fourth, behind the Atlantic Coast Conference, at $187,055. In each instance, the averages do not include salaries at private schools such as Baylor, Penn State and Vanderbilt.

You may have noticed that Penn State is not a private school, but they have some sort of state law that protects them from FOIA requests. They likely pay their assistants more than the Baylors and Vanderbilts of the world but Northwestern is also omitted and Penn State isn't closing a 50-grand gap with the Big 12, let alone the 90 grand to the SEC.

Not that I have a problem with not heaping even more money on football coaches, but Braves & Birds's theory that the Big Ten is falling behind because they refuse to lay out money for proven coaches is looking pretty good these days. At least Michigan bucked the trend by 1) wildly overpaying their version of Gene Chizik and 2) finding their own Mahlzahn in Mattison.

Dominoes go further. College hockey lurches towards its final configuration apace, with Northern Michigan making the obvious move to the WCHA. Northern was in (an almost completely different) WCHA until the late 90s and returns, renewing a conference rivalry with Michigan Tech and easing their travel burden.

Interestingly, word from Marquette has a surprising second school on the WCHA hit list: Alaska. The WCHA retains Anchorage and the conventional wisdom holds that two Alaska schools are too many for one conference since teams could be required to make more than one trip up north per year. If the WCHA's endgame is an eight team league, you'd think the conference schedule would be 28 games—four each against seven opponents. That would require two trips per year. Even if you go to a division system where you play four teams only twice, you're averaging 1.5 trips to Alaska per year. Lake Superior seems like a more logical option due to its natural rivalries with the other UP teams.

Meanwhile, the smoking husk of the CCHA takes another hit. Notre Dame's gone sooner or later. Western Michigan's openly pleading for someone to take them. Lake State has to be angling for a WCHA invite along with Alaska. Poor Bowling Green and Ferris State are hanging out in Fred Pletsch's basement drinking the cheapest beer on the market until Atlantic Hockey teams start to look attractive.

Current wild-ass guess at what college hockey in the West looks like in two years:

WCHA	CCHA	Big Ten	TCHA
St. Cloud	BGSU	Michigan	Miami
UAA	Ferris State	Michigan State	Notre Dame
Minnesota State	Mercyhurst	Penn State	WMU
MTU	Robert Morris	Ohio State	North Dakota
NMU	Niagara	Wisconsin	Minnesota-Duluth
Bemidji State	Alaska	Minnesota	CC
LSSU			Denver
Air Force(?)			UNO

If LSSU does not move to the CCHA you can insert Cansisius, another Buffalo-area AH team, or UAH into the CCHA to make eight.

Is that viable for everyone in the WCHA and CCHA? I think the WCHA will be okay. Most of the programs there have recent financial commitments from their universities; at all of them hockey is unquestionably the top dog. That's the case for everyone in the CCHA, as well, except for Ferris (no recent insertion of capital) and BGSU (MAC football and basketball probably more important). I think Ferris would be able to keep its footing.

What would really help is having a formal state of Michigan championship. In this new doomsday scenario Michigan teams are split across four leagues, making the previous plan—which relied on a lot of conference games being counted for the championship—dubious. On the other hand, in this new world there are a ton of nonconference games that need filling.

Have fun storming the castle. Even if Russell Wilson isn't certain doom for Wisconsin's opponents this year he's better than whatever the Badgers had before. KC Joyner makes an interesting point, though: Scott Tolzien was one of the most underrated players of the last decade in the league and Wilson won't approach his insane efficiency.

Etc.: Michigan's new white hockey jersey is going to be regrettable in a few years, and I miss the cool Rangers-esque lettering on the maize one. Outrage is low because they'll just change them next year anyway. Yost Built also says "you're out, White Jersey" in a flat sexy German monotone. Holdin' The Rope assembles things.