michigan man bler

[Eric Upchurch]

As you might have heard, there is a new John U. Bacon Michigan book today. This one's full title: OVERTIME: Jim Harbaugh and the Michigan Wolverines at the Crossroads of College Football. If you want it, you can start at Bacon's website, or you can come down to Hill Auditorium tonight for the event hosted by Literati, ask your questions to the man himself, and get a signed version.

FULL DISCLOSURE: Bacon's publisher is advertising this book on this here site, and I make my living by selling the advertising on this site. They're not paying me to write a review, and I had most of this review written before they offered. I think if you compare this review to Brandon's Lasting Lessons, you'll be able to gauge how much bias crept in. Anyway, you're a Michigan fan and you read this site, so the rest of this is superfluous: you've known you're going to start it tonight since you heard about it.

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Revelations

I heard about it early. I was trying to pitch Bacon on writing an article for Hail to the Victors 2018 called “Recruiting Harbaugh,” paralleling Michigan’s pursuit of the young quarterback in 1981-‘82 with that of its savior head coach in 2014—”You know, like Godfather II.” Bacon kindly explained his publisher had other ideas for a Harbaugh story contrasting the rise of the Comeback Kid with the administration of the family operation he rescued.

As with previous books, Bacon spent a year embedded in the program, catching stories you wouldn't believe, and a lot more you suspected. Coming off the Brandon one, I can see why reviewers and excerptionists would prefer to focus on the few compact tales of cartoonish villainy and incompetence. A barrage of "I can't believe he actually…" stories were a feature of Endzone because they were a feature of the man in charge of things. In Overtime, the ol' rogues gallery provides enough to keep things spicy and tickle some confirmation biases, but focusing on the controversies is antithetical to the story being told. My friends will be happy to know the Michigan Man™ stuff isn’t as belabored as the tweets make it seem.

[After the JUMP: A sequel to someone’s lasting lessons]

META first: Happy to announce that Ace's thing was diagnosed and he's gonna be fine.

Out of the Blue. It was refreshing, wasn't it, when Hackett killed off the Michigan Man Bler.

Bo retired with a cult of personality because he was great at coaching football, and great at improving the lives of people around him. Trusting him and his guys served Michigan well enough so long as he and those guys and their guys continued to do things well and righteously.

Camus
Camus on why Candyland is the greatest game ever. [Existential Comics]

Hoke was righteous; he didn't do well. Outside Michigan circles there was general bewilderment that Brady could come to this year's football bust, sit beside the men who fired him for fielding progressively worse football teams, and receive a standing ovation. Winning football games can you earn you a lot of respect, but it's not the only way to get it.

I too want to move on from the Cult of Bo, and I too concede that most football coaches out there are good guys. I don't see any problem with recognizing these things and also recognizing that Brady Hoke stood out among his coaching peers. You see it in his players. We'll see it again in the coming years when there are more transfers and more off-field things to wag fingers at, because Brady is an extraordinary human who genuinely cares about people beyond the normal good guy capacity. That quality isn't what got him fired; it's what got him a shot at his dream job in the first place.

We needed to get out of this Blue Bler and relearn how to make decisions with something other than faith in a dead man—sadly it took the people in charge two transitions to realize it. There's no way to eradicate the bler people; fortunately there is a home run-seeming candidate who grew up around the program and quarterbacked it for a time.

Ultimately the question on Harbaugh is 100% "Will he?" Communist Football made the case for the thing we want to believe. If it happens yay for Michigan and the world and the ozone layer. If not, we're…

Into the Black. If we're not looking for the next Bo Schembechler to run Bo Schembechler's program, what are we looking for?

Nobody's telling us. In his Highlander movie-themed discussion of Michigan's pursuit of Harbaugh, I think Gameboy absolutely nailed the coaching search process, which goes:

  1. Big list of candidates
  2. Whittling of candidates into a pool
  3. Precision ranking and clarity among top tier
  4. Pick the guy

Because fans don't get to be part of the process, the bits that leak out make no sense. We are the mortals who keep finding bodies beheaded by swords all over town, plus a few bread crumbs left by those who seek to use us for their own ends, and start drawing conclusions.

Rock and Roll is Here to Stay: In looking for a new paradigm a lot of us have settled on Urban Meyer's regime and coaching tree. Copying a successful rival is as good a strategy as any; in fact it's exactly how Canham chose Bo in 1969.

In that vein, Kyle Whittingham is the next Urban Meyer-like candidate to get the alum96 treatment. Among Urban-like names being tossed around, Whittingham is probably the most palatable to the residual bler in Michigan's brass—Mullen carries the stench of the SEC and we have no idea whether they see the things in Herman that we do. Like Harbaugh, his candidacy is more of a "Will he?" than a "Can he?"

[After the jump, there's more to the picture than meets the eye.]

ut_interstellarOpener_f

On the nature of Hoke, life, the universe, and everything. Upcoming Christopher Nolan movie Interstellar went to great lengths to produce the above image, the best yet of what a black hole looks like based on the mathematics of relativity—not just the lensing of space behind it but the surprising twisting of the accretion disc around it due to the warping of space where it's formed.

What's spooky about it is the thing you're seeing isn't the thing that exists. What exists is a disc around a spinning supermass, like Saturn's rings. What you're seeing however is space itself getting so warped by that mass that you can see it in 4D, bending space like a piece of paper.

Best and Worst posted a trailer for Interstellar and raved about the "our place in the dirt" quote while neglecting to mention the one in there by Dylan Thomas:

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

This is how I want Michigan to finish the season: certain of its own mortality, fighting anyway. Last year's blowout to MSU was an apocalypse, but at that moment I was profoundly mad, not embarrassed. I was embarrassed when they went out flat and uncaring against Mississippi State in the Gator Bowl. Whenever I wonder if we were right to can Rodriguez when we did, I remember that act of cowardice. Whenever I wonder if we're being too hard on Brady, I think on how he gives up without looking like giving up. Bronx had a different explanation:

This might be semantics, but I don't think Hoke is a quitter.  He's (sadly) calling the game the same way in the 1st quarter as he is in the 4th quarter.  He's like the worst movie version of artificial intelligence.

So he's a robot who faces adversity by going back to his safe place, i.e. the way Lloyd Carr would coach a 1st quarter. I'm not buying it. I think he closes up shop when he thinks it's hopeless, and believes we're not smart enough to notice it.

Ron Utah nevertheless argues that at least that Brady is an essentially good man. I subscribe to the DFW method of rating people: their expectations of other people tend to be the greatest insight into how they themselves think. For example the dude on the board who thinks everything is about political warfare is just a really partisan dude. Brandon's emails were relevant not because they explain how he alienated fans—if he wrote 300 of these that's still a thousandth of the 300k waiting list his policies expunged. Rather they showed us how arrogant Brandon thinks his critics are, thus how truly arrogant Brandon is.

Hoke's goodness is best exemplified, perhaps, in his weaknesses as a coach. He doesn't ever seem prepared for enemies who want to gut him, because he doesn't have that killer instinct. Perhaps he doesn't push his players hard enough—maybe that comes from not expecting other coaches to be doing so. His players seem stunned when there's a cheap shot against them—we look at that like "where's your spirit?!"" but it could just be they're not the type of dudes who expect the other team is trying to scramble their brains.

It is a mistake to see the obvious flaws in Hoke and assume we would make better head coaches. It is not a mistake to see these flaws and assume more successful head coaches would make better head coaches. Perhaps it was our own naivety to think Michigan's particular advantages could compensate for the weakness of goodness.

This football program is as doomed as matter in an accretion disc. Some of the players in it won't be here (Peppers at least said he will be the last to leave), and there's no guarantee that the next step will take us to the dark core of the black hole or shooting out into space to form a new star. Michigan looks headed to 4-8 by Massey estimates, which LSA matrixcised.

REMAININGWINS_zps651a7a1b

This is mathematical reality. The above is how the universe is arranged. But what separates life from every other arrangement of matter is how we approach our doom. Life doesn't just ride the mathematics arc until it spirals into nothingness. Life rages.

It probably won't change anything, but the players on this doomed team plan to rage against that probability. It almost certainly won't change anything, but most fans have chosen to march back to the Big House, and the other home field in Evanston, and even down to the darkest place in the universe, and rage against the dying of the light.

If you'd like to do so and don't have tickets, head to this thread before 3pm today and tell us about the crazy thing you've done. I'm now up to 8 tickets to give away.

[Jump for metaphysical beings—ghouls, goblins, zombies, etc.]