brendan gibbons

So, here's a quick Outback Bowl wallpaper for you all featuring "Captain Gibbons" and his parrot.  This was a fun wallpaper to make, so I hope you enjoy it and get a chuckle out of seeing Gibbons as his boyhood dream.  Now, let's kick some South Carolina/SEC ass!

Desktop (16:9)

Enjoy!

- JonValk

BONUS CONTENT! Here's my avatar, in case anyone is interested.

If anyone had told you this would happen two years ago, you would have been completely justified if you had sucker punched them in the face for insulting your intelligence.

His stats on the year are 13/15 for 86.7% field goals made, with a long of 52 yards.

Due to time constraints the past couple of weeks, I caught only parts of the Purdue and Illinois games.  Luckily, what I saw made a post like this unnecessary, unless you think “Best:  Everything”, “Best:  I’m Kirk Herbstreit and I like to jinx Purdue” and “Worst:  Moar Fitz rushing” embodies deeply thoughtful analysis.

Plus, I was kind of saving up for this MSU game.  The first two weeks of the B1G season looked like tuneups to start the season, with MSU being the unofficial beginning of “Run for the Roses” in Pasadena, and nothing transpired during those first couple of games to change that opinion, at least in UM’s eyes.  MSU, though, stumbled to start the season, and were definitely looking to dig themselves out of a Sparty-inflicted hole that included tough loses to OSU and Iowa.  And so a rivalry game + MSU reeling + “William Gholston isn’t a jerk, he’s just misunderstood” = a fertile ground for highlighting the waxing and waning of UM’s first victory in the history of this series.*

*  This series having started in 2008, one year after Microsoft Encarta and the Mayan calendar apparently arrived in East Lansing.

Best:  Duh…Winning!*

UM was only 1-4 against Dantonio heading into this game, and for all of the negative press the guy gets here and across the greater UM blogosphere, he’s turned a mediocre State program into a consistent winner, something it hasn’t been since, I don’t know, the 1950’s.  Seriously, check out these season records from 1950 to 2011.  People around here complain about UM not making a bowl game for 2 years; MSU had won 10 games only twice in the past 60+ years before Dantonio glared his way onto campus. 

And it wasn’t just the losing to MSU that drove people crazy, it was how.  Sometimes they won in dramatic fashion in OT after UM made a miraculous comeback; other times it was a dominating performance on the ground.  Almost always, though, MSU had the better team AND found a way to confound not only the Michigan players, especially Denard Robinson, but also the coaching staffs.  There’s a reason that the game previews for 2010, 2011, and 2012 kept pointing out that MSU was successfully jumping the snap on virtually every play, yet it kept happening.  Or how MSU found a way to consistently gash the UM defense for yards on the edges despite everyone knowing that MSU’s gameplan was taken from the 1959 game program.

So beating MSU needed to happen to not only restore order back to the world, but also to validate the notion that the program was back on its way to the relative dominance most people remember from the 90s/00s.  The OSU win last year was a nice step in that direction, as was the bowl game, but beating OSU is rarely presumed when the season begins; beating MSU is far more the norm.  And while I’m sure many fans are loathe to admit it, this iteration of UM football needed to beat them to dispel the notion that Dantonio was plated in some impenetrable Wolverine armor (a similar feeling seemed to have set in on Notre Dame until this year).  He’s been cut by Hoke and Co., and once that happened that tightening you have in your chest when MSU takes the lead late will hopefully disappear. 

* I know this is a super-tired reference.  The “good job, good effort” kid was the next in line.

Best:  “It’s an in-state rival. But we have bigger expectations”

I’m sure this is a bit of coach-speak, but it is also something that needed to be said.  Since, oh, the Eastern Michigan game, I don’t think most people saw MSU as a legitimate Big 10 championship team.  The offense was too crippled by a porous line, poor WRs, and a somewhat-shaky QB to keep pace with teams like Wisconsin, UM, OSU, and Nebraska.  The Iowa game cemented their ceiling for the year at 7-8 wins, even with an elite defense. 

Outside of the Alabama game, though, UM’s ceiling was never defined.  Notre Dame was a tough loss but one that felt more self-inflicted than the team meeting a superior opponent.  Purdue and Illinois proved only that UM was probably as good as Louisiana Tech and and Marshall.  MSU, frankly, was not going to validate UM’s season, but only give them another breakpoint from which to calibrate their potential. 

And that’s what Hoke encapsulates in this statement.  He recognizes that MSU is a rival and the game mattered, but this wasn’t the season.  Nebraska and OSU will be tougher opponents, and the near-certain B1G title game and (hopefully) the Rose Bowl bid will be far more emblematic of Michigan’s 2012 season.  Last year expectations were such than an MSU win would have been one to hang the team’s hat on; this year, they’re another 4-4 team that gave UM their best shot and came up a little short. 

Worst:  “Rivalry” game?

Listen, I can totally get behind belittling MSU’s fans.  I was at school there for 3 years, and I witnessed two riots, one “celebration” of a hockey championship during a season in which tickets to games were very available, and thousands of instances of drunken 40-year-olds hitting on college girls outside of dorms as the men’s belies jiggled under super-tight “Go Green!  Go White!” shirts they picked up from the local Quality Dairy.  It is a school that prides itself on making boxes*, having “awesome parties with hot chicks!”, and being able to count, and while the people there are not as bad as you think, comparisons between the two schools tend toward the Blue Team.

That said, the oft-repeated refrain from UM faithful that MSU isn’t a “rival” is just silly.  Sure, OSU remains UM’s most consistently-excellent foe, and 30 years ago the Notre Dame and Michigan clashes typically featured top-10 programs shooting for a national title.  But MSU is the other major program in the state, and really the only one in the footprint that features two public schools that (at least ostensibly) draw from the same high schools and communities (Purdue and Notre Dame and Illinois and Northwestern feature the whole private/public differences and the related non-geographically draws).  In my high school class of around 160 kids, we had 3 who went to UM and about 40 who went to MSU.  At other schools, the numbers were a bit closer, but the fact remains that if you go to either university, you are more than likely to have spent years of your life cohabitating with peers on the other side. 

For Michigan fans, beating MSU feels like it should; despite EVERY MSU student claiming he/she was accepted but declined/never wanted to apply/”totally loved MSU the minute they walked on campus and never thought Ann Arbor was anything special”, you secretly felt most of them wanted to go to UM but couldn’t. It also poked a weird hole in the meta-argument that the “jocks” went to MSU and the “nerds” went to UM (which never made sense since it’s not like either team is comprised of the general student body).  For MSU, beating UM was a clear rebuttal to all the crap I spewed above; a tangible instance of MSU beating UM in something that both schools’ fanbases cared about.  This wasn’t a “our Particle Physics major is better” or “our mascot is cooler according to Playboy.com”, but a win for MSU and a loss for UM.

The point is that it matters to both sides, and anyone mouthing off about how beating MSU didn’t matter, that they are not UM’s rival, is just displaying his/her naivety and/or unfounded arrogance.  And while I definitely see this year being the end of MSU’s “dominant run” in the Big 10, they will remain a key opponent for championship game and bowl bids under Dantonio.  MSU ain’t going anywhere, and trying to ignore them or minimize their threat doesn’t impress anyone.

* I know that packaging engineering is more than making boxes, but that ESPN special a couple of games ago didn’t help to dispel that idea.

Worst:  Still with the unimaginative offensive schemes?

Al Borges seems like a nice guy, and I definitely see how the offensive skill players he inherited don’t mesh with the play-calling he prefers to call.  Denard is great for the offense that RR runs, where his feet lead the way and defenses worry about gap control and QB Oh Noes! for 4 quarters.  Under Borges, he’s an oval-ish peg trying to fit into a parallelogram-ish hole.  He’s not super-accurate, the WRs he throws to are either too small, too slow, or too inexperienced for complete optimization, and the dominant tailback and massive linemen are either in red shirts or still playing HS.  It’s like owning a 3DO in 1994 – it looks really cool on paper, but the controls don’t work the way they should and the pictures on the game boxes always look cooler than the games themselves.

That said, this offensive ineptitude against anyone with a top 50-ish defense needs to end.  2011 Notre Dame and Nebraska are the only decent defenses that Michigan really scored on, and even with those two performances there were a myriad of factors beyond “offensive efficiency” that led to those outbursts.  It’s gotten to the point that I’d rather the team spot opponents 10-15 points just to get Borges out his routine and let up on the reins a bit. 

Everyone knows about the much-bemoaned I- and screaming “multiple TEs in on the line so we are clearly running”-formations, but it’s also the option runs that are almost never options and a vertical passing game that can charitably be described as “adventurous” at times.  It’s a mindset that calls for plays that he knows his team just cannot execute the way he wants, and while I get the argument that he needs to run what he knows, it is infuriating to see this team get stymied in the red zone or go three-and-out repeatedly with offensive play calling that only calls on Denard to run 6 times in the second half before the final drive.  The Denard Borges Fusion Cuisine is like a restaurant in an airport – it looks good because you are starving and have a 2-hour layover with the only other options being a Sbarro’s and one of those airport bars where businessmen from Des Moines hit on the “mature” female bartender who also doubles as the short-order cook.  Chop the menu in half, sprinkle in a bunch of designed runs and screens to keep Spartan Pride from killing him on gap blitzes, and wait until Shane Morris is a Sophomore. 

Best:  This is how we do it!

On the other end of the coordinator spectrum stands Greg Mattison, whose work restoring the validity of “Greg” after Mr. Robinson, Mr. Williams (I’m ignoring the superfluous G), Mr. Davis, and Mr. Brady  tried their best to ruin it deserves serious nomination come the off-season.  In 2010 Michigan was ranked 110th in total defense, above a bunch of directional schools and below such juggernauts as Rice, Duke, and Baylor.  Today?  They’re 10th.  That’s not just impressive, that’s damn near a miracle.  Every time a see Jake Ryan burst through the line to snag a QB in the backfield or J.T. Floyd break up another pass attempt, I involuntary pull one of these:

Yes, this is the same video.  No, I won’t apologize for my love of mid-90’s R&B.  You’re just lucky I couldn’t think of anything catchy/appropriate for Next.

Say what you will about MSU’s offense this year, they still had one of the better RBs in the country in Bell, a competent QB, and the laser-focus to circle the Michigan game on the calendar and pull every goofy play they can out for it.  Yet, outside of two drives that netted MSU 170 yards (helped in part by a fake punt that accounted for almost 30 yards), they record 134 yards over 9 more drives and barely broke 300 yards for the game.  Bell, who was used as the human battering ram that in years past gashed the Wolverines, had a quiet 68 yards and nothing longer than 8 yards.  Maxwell threw a pick and a TD and never looked super-comfortable out there, and his repeated failed attempts to pick on Floyd at the end of the first half should shock anyone who remembers watching this only a couple of years ago.

Michigan won yesterday because the defense is a legitimate threat, and that transformation is due in large part to Greg Robinson (and Brady Hoke) making it so.

(Of course, this raises the questions surrounding why big-time coordinators were apparently “out of budget” under Carr and RR, but that’s for another day.  Minnesota, let’s say.)

Best:  Poor Sinead O’Connor

Everyone likes to say that Brenda Gibbons’ fondness for brunettes powers his cold-as-ice heart as he kicks yet another game winner.  Personally, I think he derives his power from hair follicles in general, their faint aroma wafting by his nostrils as he lines up a half-dozen yards behind the ball.  2 years ago he was 1 for 5 in FGA, with a long of 24.  In other words, a shade over an extra point.  Two years later, he’s 10 of 12 with a long of 42 and a couple of game winners to boot.  Someone needs to be in Columbus at the end of the season with whatever machine they use to fumigate Abercrombie & Fitch with their “cologne” and make sure whatever subconscious memories that are triggered in Gibbons are ready to go.

Worst:  Recidivism on the rise in East Lansing

Usually the MSU-UM game coincides with the yearly East Lansing work-release program.  I leave it to the reader to

read between

bunch of convicts

the lines

to see what I am referring to.

Best:  Liveblog Moderators are people too.

A redundant but totally necessary thank you should go out to the posters who moderate these liveblogs.  I’ve yet to moderate one, as my proclivity to immediately approve anyone who references TMNT or “No Fear” t-shirt slogans would bog down the proceedings immensely, but watching the feed yesterday made me happy that no matter how many whiny posts go through, there must have been literally millions that didn’t.  To imagine the horrors these men and women must endure every Saturday and yet function for the rest of the week is truly shocking, and they have my gratitude.  Of course, that and $2.99 would get you a commemorative “I Was There” pin from the 2011 B1G championship game, but at least it’s something.

It could be the ugliest trophy in sports, though I do like the base: a map of Michigan.

But now it's back in Ann Arbor, and given the guy who scored all the points, I thought it needed freshening up....

God bless you Brendan Gibbons.  You've come a long way.  Enjoy the moment.  And the brunette girls.

That is all.

ADDENDUM:

Kudos to Brian Bennett (of ESPN) for pretty much calling Gibbon's role in this game:

http://espn.go.com/blog/bigten/post/_/id/62355/big-ten-predictions-week-8-2

The hero of this game? Wolverines kicker Brendan Gibbons, who makes three big field goals.

Brendan Gibbons has been named to the pre-season watchlist for the Lou Groza award, the award for college football's best kicker (full list here).  He is one of seven Big Ten kickers to make it on the watchlist, making up nearly a quarter of the 30 total kickers.

Just the fact that he has made it on this list, after the abysmal season he and our other goal kickers had in 2010, is a testament to how much he has improved as a player in the last two years (and a testament to how much brunette girls have improved him).