2013 football

[Ed-S: Bump]

There are going to be references to wrestling here.  I might link to some dumb Youtube clips.  You probably won’t agree with everything I say.  Even the positives are pretty negative.  I don’t care; deal with it.

Best:  Crown Their Ass!

"That everything is on fire, slow fire, and we're all less than a million breaths away from an oblivion more total than we can even bring ourselves to even try to imagine..." -

David Foster Wallace, The Pale King

This is UM football in 2013.  It’s a collection of mismatched players and coaches groping in the dark at 2am, looking for a light switch that is connected to a single outlet with frayed wires that at any moment could spark and burn the whole house down.  For 5 games, though, it was enough and UM kept on winning, despite enough “stirring” comebacks against mighty Akron and UConn that ESPN had a video montage queued up for late in the game.  They probably should have lost a game before this one; now they have it out of the way so people can stop being teased with the least impressive run at perfection seen in Ann Arbor for decades.  The house has officially burned down and now, perhaps, they can try to build something from the ashes. 

UM is what we all thought they were; it just took the weirdest f’ing game to come to reality.

Supplementary Best:  Now THAT’s MANBALL

And you know how people constantly argue over the meaning of MANBALL?  Well, we just saw what it probably means to this staff and, really, throughout most UM history save for a divergence of sorts under RR.  It’s about playing the percentages to an extent, but also cutting your playbook into a tiny sheet that says “Run dat ball dog!” and “Whatever, let Devin do something” once you get a 10-point lead.  It means looking at your offensive line, seeing a bunch of first-year players and Schofield in the second half and figuring you might as well abandon the only positive running plays you have (read options and/or designed QB runs) for the same crappy -2-yard jabs into the line. 

And perhaps most criminal of all, it’s relying on a college kicker, in a very hostile environment, to kick some game-winning FGs instead of trying for first downs in OT because you’re afraid of, I don’t know, turnovers or dragons or something equally asinine.  I don’t care if Borges or Funk are around tomorrow, but this offensive staff has been stuck in this broken loop of playcalling for most of the year, and maybe a loss like this, the way it happened will snap them out of it.  Or, you know…

KR0Jx

For lack of a better term, once UM secured that 10-point lead Borges and Hoke adopted Heroball as the base offense: holding onto the ball until the last moment, telegraphing every play from a drastically shrunken playbook, and replacing any semblance of misdirection or creativity that got them that lead with predictable play-calling and the misguided hope that “everything will work out.”  Well, it didn’t.

[Jump for Worst (ever).]