Dear Diary, It's Winter in Michigan

Big House Blog

Dear Diary,

Have you been outside today? I wouldn't recommend it. It's cold. It's gray. It's just windy enough to ring the side of the road with ice, and penetrate your jeans so that when you get back inside somewhere, a good thigh rub will be in order. You're used to this: it's Winter in Ann Arbor.

But for a moment yesterday it wasn't. For a moment, the sun came out and it was 50 degrees. For a moment, Michigan's defense was attacking plays and the offense was rolling down the field and into the end-zone. For a moment, Michigan led 7-0. For a moment, I remembered watching the UConn game, when the ice laid down by Woolfolk's injury and Turner's departure was thawed by the revelation of Denard.

Then the sun disappeared. The temperature dropped. The wind picked up. Michigan's defense reverted to its season-long status as a minor inconvenience to opponent scoring, and Michigan's offense became an experiment to see how many ways they could find to make Roundtree drop a 4th down pass without the viewers switching to Penn State/Florida. And so the vicious, three-year winter of Michigan football continued in its lazy, hazy way, finding new jackets to penetrate and souls within to crush.

To pretend like there wasn't something beautiful about the Rich Rodriguez era is to say there was never any reason yesterday to be outside. The moments of joy have been fleeting: the overtime Tatefest against Illinois, two comeback victories over Notre Dame, UConn. Each sparse day in the sun we took for a sign of Spring. This is because we are Michigan, one of the great programs, and the great programs know greatness will return the same way the inhabitants of Earth know the snow can't last forever.

Tomorrow night Stanford will play Virginia Tech, and we'll see if whatever Jim Harbaugh has done to the Cardinal could beat the closest analogue to Lloyd's last Michigan team you'll ever find. Later in the week Dave Brandon will ascend the podium of Gobbler's Knob, pull out a prognosticating marmot, and tell us whether he sees Rich Rod's shadow. Either way, this winter isn't going to be over until our defense has the talent and structure and experience to stop somebody, which will take a lot more than six weeks on anybody's calendar.

Is it possible that the winter of our discontent can last forever? Well, sure, it's theoretically possible. But it would also take a major climatic shift for that to happen, because Michigan's place in the college football solar system is backed by a huge national audience, a ridiculously wealthy alumni base, the biggest stadium in the country, and an axis set by Yost when the universe was still young. Plus our helmets have wings.

On the other hand you can bet this winter still has at least one more good storm left in it. If you're going to survive it with your soul intact, I recommend a thick coat.

On Faith, Science & Business

I have a rough memory from something in college where we discussed three different paradigms of thinking. The trick was to identify which type your audience is and use his kind of reasoning: if you have a "believer," then discuss agreed-upon moral precepts; if it's a pragmatist make analogies to previous "successes," and follow these proven-successful decision-making processes; if it's a scientist, make the case with data and then argue against yourself until you've shown you can exhaust rebuttals. Nobody is just one or the other, but you're probably aligned more toward one and/or against one.

For the Believers:

Blazefire came in with a short essay on faith in leadership, specifically one's head coach.

During a sermon, a pastor once said that when you ask God for something, there are three possible answers; Yes, No, and Wait. I couldn't argue with this statement. That's logical for a request made of anyone or any being. The requestee can either say "yes", and provide, say "no" and refuse to provide, or say "wait, maybe later", and put something off till a later time. The implication of all this was to help understand God's answers, so on and so forth. That isn't really the part that hit me as far as the game and the program are concerned. The part that hit me was in the answer "wait".

For the Pragmatists:

Thanks to iawolve, we get a peek into how David Brandon's mind may be working given his experience as CEO of a private firm, from the point of view of another who has been through that same gauntlet and learned similar lessons. A few conclusions:

What does this all mean? It means Brandon spent 1999 through 2004 (IPO) under the management of Bain Capital. He survived the gauntlet and remained the CEO post-IPO for another 6 years. He would be a person that believes in:

• Pay for performance
• Strict monitoring of progress
• Taking chances by changing the status quo in order to achieve results
• No surprises

For the Scientists:

You've met Enjoy Life: author of your weekly in-season looks at college football's sabermetrics, as well as turnover tracking. This week, in true scientist's form, he calls his own work generally useless because, well, that's what the numbers say:

Uh yeah, we have all been wrong (myself included). I started looking at turnovers (TOs) in detail after the 2008 season when Michigan went 3-9 with a turnover margin (TOM) of –10. I wrote a series of diaries that concluded double digit TOs were caused primarily by the skill & experience of a team and not primarily by luck. Thus, good teams tend to have positive TOMs and poor teams tend to have negative TOMs. This is basically the opposite of believing that TOs are a primary factor in determining whether a team is good (i.e. winning record) or poor (i.e. losing record) – sorry, Phil Steele.

Previews That Didn't Say We'd Get Clobbered

Weekly Wallpaper by monuMental

At this point it's not all that helpful, but two hours before kickoff yesterday, jamiemac of Just Cover Blog finally hit "post" on this masterpiece, which previewed the smart money on the Gator Bowl. Jamie's conclusions gave warning that something ugly was possibly about to unfold, noting that RR has not been covering the spread in Big Ten play, and noting a likely (extant?) motivation question for Michigan.

When judging this Michigan team, you have to take into account their mental state with the coaching situation swirling around. We've seen West Virginia and Miami look like they'd rather be a million other places than playing with their coaching situation. But we've also seen Maryland rally around their deposed coach and play lights out. We also saw Oklahoma State send off their offensive coordinator Holgerson with a great effort, despite him splitting a lot of time between places in the bowl run-up, because the players were genuinely happy for him. None of the Michigan players know who is coaching them next year. But, they know who is coaching them this year. It's Rodriguez. As a fan, I'm proud at how the coaches have handled this situation. That will carry over to their players. I think the Wolverines will play hard for this coaching staff. This will be a lot more like the Maryland effort and nothing like we was with the Canes and 'Neers. At least that's what I keep telling myself.

Yes, then we got curb-stomped.

Still, though its shelf life was short, considering I didn't get last week's DD out until Tuesday so is my list of contenders; this is your Diarist of the Week.

Also written on deadline, BlueSeoul, on advice from counsel, gave us a final preview of the Gator Bowl based on his analysis of each game:

Well, maybe those last two were different, but it didn't matter.  Based on the results, you'd have to say that Tressel has been a master when it comes to The Game. 

If RR were going to make one of those for the gator bowl, it should read something like this:

1. Stop #28
2. Shadow #1, #27
3. Stop Relf with run blitzes
4. Pressure Relf up the middle on passing downs
5. Don't let Relf pull the ball down on a scramble and head up the middle
6. Yes, this means designed draws too! Especially on the designed draws!!
7. For god's sake, if you have to choose between going after Relf or someone else, go after Relf!!!!
8. Seriously, RELF!

Apparently, he forgot "CATCH THE DAMN BALL" and, uh, "play football."

Etc.

Michigan Paintball: This is serious. Michigan, in our quest to be better at everything, now competes in Paintball. It ain't varsity, but team member heffman has the lowdown on the team's successful start.

Michigan Men's Ice Hockey: For a brief moment this week, "CC" on this blog meant "Colorado College," not the other thing. During this time I managed to score tickets to see Michigan defeat CC at the Joe and replace that ugly green banner with a maize and blue one. Of course, I need not have gone through the trouble, since CC alum denverblue managed to preview the thing down to the color of Jaden Schwartz's bloomers.

Next week we'll let you know who's Michigan's head coach, and talk about how much longer this winter will last. Until then, maybe just stay indoors.