punt counterpunt

[Patrick Barron]

Bama Links: Preview, The Podcast, FFFF Offense (chart), FFFF Defense (chart).

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SPONSOR NOTE. We still need your help to keep our team. Last year, Champions Circle® launched the One More Year Fund to support key Michigan players like Blake Corum, Trevor Keegan, and Zak Zinter who elected to return to Michigan for One More Year. Now, we’re launching the Those Who Stay NIL Campaign.

Our rivals are coming after many of our key players, trying to induce them to leave Michigan. It's time for the Michigan Family to show our players how much we appreciate them and want them back in Maize and Blue!

To keep the momentum going, please contribute now.

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Something's been missing from Michigan gamedays since the free programs ceased being economically viable: scientific gameday predictions that are not at all preordained by the strictures of a column in which one writer takes a positive tack and the other a negative one… something like Punt-Counterpunt.

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PUNT

By Bryan MacKenzie

@Bry_Mac

Sometimes in the morning, I am petrified and can't move

Awake, but cannot open my eyes

And the weight is crushing down on my lungs, I know I can't breathe

And hope someone will save me this time

- - - - - - - -

I sit here like the rest of you. Not knowing how I feel, yet feeling it with uncomfortable, unyielding, unsustainable intensity. A million thoughts and nothing coherent to tie them together because AHHHHHH. I mean, look at the title of this post. Read it aloud. Picture tonight. Imagine toe meeting leather. Hear it in your mind. Now reduce that to words.

Yeah, me neither.

- - - - - - - -

In August of 2009, on the heels of the worst season of Michigan football in living memory, MGoBlog put together a somewhat atypical preseason hype video, set to Rilo Kiley’s “A Better Son/Daughter.” The gist of it was, “yes, that sucked, but it will get better.”

(As if any Michigan fan could forget how THAT season went, the fact that a similar video set to the same song was created the following year should remind you.)

A Better Son/Daughter might seem like an odd choice for a hype video. Aside from spending the first 100 seconds with nothing but melancholy vocals and an organ accompaniment, the lyrics detail the struggles of a person battling bipolar disorder and trying to find happiness, knowing that the highs and the lows will never truly be separable. In the post explaining the editorial thought process, Brian explained: “in desperation there's that shred of hope; people who are down and not desperate are resigned. I could be ignorant or desperate.”

 

[After THE JUMP: Sometimes when you’re on.]

[Patrick Barron]

Bama Links: Preview, The Podcast, FFFF Offense (chart), FFFF Defense (chart). Primer on Alabama switch D.

Something's been missing from Michigan gamedays since the free programs ceased being economically viable: scientific gameday predictions that are not at all preordained by the strictures of a column in which one writer takes a positive tack and the other a negative one… something like Punt-Counterpunt.

image

PUNT

By Bryan MacKenzie

@Bry_Mac

If you hang out in Michigan Internet circles long enough, you’ll come to the conclusion that everyone has a favorite random astrophysics fact. The kind of thing you’ll throw out at parties or social gatherings with the slightest provocation. Things like “the observable Universe is 93 billion light years across despite being only 13.7 billion years old” or “the atmosphere of a neutron star is 4 inches high” or “because of gravitational lensing we once watched the same supernova four times over the course of several months.” Now, some of you will say this is nerdy, to which, shut up.

My current favorite astrophysics factoid is this: it takes sunlight eight minutes to reach Earth from the surface of the sun… but it takes that same sunlight thousands and thousands of years to escape heart of the sun and reach its surface.

You read that right. Light is generated in the core of the sun, and when it travels, it travels at the speed of light. But the core is astonishingly dense, and as a result the photons keep, in scientific terminology, bumping into shit. So they keep getting reabsorbed and reemitted in random directions, over and over again, like a caffeinated toddler in the world’s largest house of mirrors, until it happens to stumble upon an exit. Bottom line: the light you’re seeing right now is the result of the fusion of two hydrogen atoms into a helium atom millennia ago.

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Photon escaping the sun, or Semaj Morgan touchdown run?

[After THE JUMP: Photons ranked by luck.]

/Tony Petitti pulls up a spot. So how do we do this? [Patrick Barron]

Iowa Links: Preview, The Podcast, FFFF Offense (chart), FFFF Defense (chart). Iowatch Episodes 13, 12, 11, 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2

Something's been missing from Michigan gamedays since the free programs ceased being economically viable: scientific gameday predictions that are not at all preordained by the strictures of a column in which one writer takes a positive tack and the other a negative one… something like Punt-Counterpunt.

image

PUNT

By Bryan MacKenzie

@Bry_Mac

Today, we lose something beautiful. Something pure. Something unsullied by outside world and the excesses of modernity. A testament to a bygone era, when men wore flannel and donned massive mustaches, coffee was black, modems said BeeeeebBaBoopBabDingDingDingEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEAHHHHHHHHH, and punting was winning.

Before the clock strikes midnight tonight, the Big Ten West will cease to exist.

The addition of Washington, Oregon, USC and UCLA gave the conference no choice but to abandon the concept of divisions, and to instead adopt a "whatever dogpile arrangement yields the biggest television ratings" structure. Likewise, the structure of the conference championship game will fundamentally change. Everyone will be thrown in the same pot of Hormel chili, with the expectation that the best two teams will emerge by the end of the season and play in Indianapolis (or Chicago or Vegas or Qatar or the deck of the U.S.S. Nimitz or the moon).

[After THE JUMP: an otterbox.]

This. This is peanut butter jelly time. [Patrick Barron]

Bet.

Gamification and the poor pig.

James Randi exposes the haters.

The best revenge is beating their asses.

Big Noon.

You have flies in your eyes; that's probably why you can't see them.

The return of Blockbuster.

A rivalry Rutger is when you have more games against a team than memories from those games.

Top-ten most phoned in season.