[Ed(Seth): Friend of the blog and Slate writer Ben Mathis-Lilley is working on a book about college football head coaches and the interactions of these men with the particular fanbases they stand astride. Or something like that. While he does his research we’ve dragooned him into attending Michigan games and studying the fan cultures he finds, while also keeping tabs on the Michigan mood. This week he met a bunch of MSU fans in their natural habitat.]

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The day dawned cold, wet, and gross.

I’m referring to the day before the day before the game. The day before the game also dawned the same way. Then the day of the game dawned that way as well. It was a long weekend of interactions conducted in and around mud.

It had occurred to me that this was the canonical way to spend three days in Michigan. I am working on a book, The Hot Seat, about how varying kinds of Americans express their varying personal and cultural preoccupations by arguing about college football coaches. Two weeks ago I went to Baton Rouge on what turned out to be the weekend that arguments about Ed Orgeron reached their conclusion. No one I contacted ahead of the trip was excited about the actual football game scheduled that Saturday, although it turned out to be a victory over Florida, now engaged in its own invigorating coach discourse. But there was a consensus excitement about making sure I enjoyed the Louisiana experience, which had a specific meaning. I sent a message to three contacts about what to do, in general, during the time I was going to be there. Within eight minutes I had gotten back twelve recommendations about food and none about anything else.

But what was Michigan’s thing? The weather suggested an answer. The Michigan way of life is acting normal, casual, and even enthusiastic when most of your energy and concentration are actually going toward keeping your feet from literally freezing in place in some wet grass and mud. No, let me correct that. The Michigan way of life is drawing power from its cold, misting, piss of a climate.

[After THE JUMP: a spec.]

This to me was the story of the weekend, which I mostly spent talking, before and during the game, to people who went to Michigan State. I expected these conversations to revolve around Michigan, which they did to some extent. Michigan graduates are condescending, they want to mention what car they drive and allude to how much money they make—basically accurate stuff. But a deeper context was explained to me by someone named Tim Alberta on Friday—which, admittedly, was kind of a cheat code because in addition to being an MSU grad Alberta is one of if not the leading journalistic experts on the way that “cultural polarization” has transformed United States politics in the twenty-first century. So his insights about the nature of a given rivalry could be expected to be a cut above those of a lesser brain like, to take one example, mine.

Let me give you, as background for Alberta’s observation, a short and probably oversimplified history of higher education in Michigan. It’s the 19th century. White people are moving from the East to various parts of the “West,” treating them as if they are “virgin,” uninhabited territory (big asterisk there), and trying to start their own cities and states. All these places are competing to attract more migration and Eastern financing and federal recognition, so they quickly found institutions meant to make themselves look more big-time.

In most places one of the things this meant was a flagship university that could turn out ministers, teachers, engineers, and doctors for the state. (In addition to the prestige factor, it was also very useful to be able to produce those kinds of professionals locally during an era when the fastest way to travel between states was often on a horse.) One of the places that gets started in this way is the University of Michigan. Michigan grows quickly because of an ahead-of-its time commitment to providing a fancy education to regular working people; thanks to this, as well as to the money and status accumulated because of the state’s stock of lumber and its centrality to the automobile industry, it’s able to grow even beyond its initial ambitions into one of the biggest and best in the world.

Meanwhile, though, here is this other university, Michigan State. It’s founded in order to study and advance the practices of agriculture and “applied science”—“land grant college” stuff. (Again an asterisk here as far as whose land it was to grant.) Michigan State also benefits expands beyond these origins and become a nationally relevant “research university.” It’s one that can go toe to toe, Alberta notes to me, on most measures of prestige and accomplishment with other flagship schools across the country. To name a few random examples—and to be clear, this is me talking at this point, or rather, me imagining the inner monologue of the median Michigan State alumnus—it’s just as accomplished as the flagship schools of Pennsylvania and Ohio. But because of a certain other university in its orbit, Michigan State gets treated less like a Penn State or Ohio State than like a remedial idiot asylum for people who write Ks backwards in ransom notes. Moreover, because this other university has gotten so busy creating investment bank CEOs, Silicon Valley billionaires, New York Times political journalists, and so forth, the job of actually educating the teachers and engineers and business-administration administrators who make the state of Michigan actually work—who have built a civilization and a way of life in this beautiful but essentially inhospitable peninsular forest—falls to the other school.

And yet what happens, Alberta put it to me rhetorically, when that second school has the best football team in the state for two solid decades, and starts a season 7-0? What happens is the national press goes nuts because the first school’s team might not be a big disappointment this year. All of the work and as much if not more of the achievement, but none of the credit or attention.

This imbalance is, perhaps, a good way to symbolize the UM-MSU rivalry from Michigan State’s perspective. Now, there can be nasty and inexcusable responses to it, like Mark Dantonio’s choice to violate sportsmanship and legal-discipline norms for his own benefit. Moreover, if Michigan State does not want people in the rest of its country to conclude that it lacks a certain sophistication and dignity, I humbly suggest that Michigan State could reconsider the tradition of responding to literally any major sports outcome by setting things on fire at the apartment complex where Barstool Sports just hosted its weekly show.

But the Barstool ethos, as perplexing as its appeal may be even to Michigan Men, was not in evidence during my conversations with MSU alums, who included a supply chain manager, a phys-ed teacher, and a critical-care doctor who was himself the son of a retired alum whose last job was keeping track of vehicle specs for Chrysler. They were all pleasantly surprised about their team’s 2021 record; several used the phrase “house money.” It was at one of their tailgates that I was treated hospitably to a Saturday breakfast of ribs and beer; later, I would claim to an MGoBlog editor that, for some reason, I was too tired to finish this post immediately after the game as I’d planned. At some point, my loathing and compulsion to see a humiliating “beatdown” became something less severe.

Which takes us back to the weather, the buzz, the nerves in the stomach, the multiple national camera crews and TV stages, the booming tailgate speakers, the constant rivers of people in every direction for miles, the trash on the streets—the sensory overload of Saturday’s game experience. It was so different from the Western Michigan-Michigan and LSU-Florida games I’ve been to this year that it feels ridiculous to describe them with the same word.

At one point during Michigan State’s second-half comeback, on a Michigan third down, I took out my phone and took a video from my seat in the 26th row of Section 3 in the lower bowl, holding the camera over my head and slowly turning in a circle.

You can see the mist and the gray sky and feel the circuit-busting sound of the Michigan State crowd, which, goaded by face-rattling PA cues, seemed less to build or explode than to whip back and forth around the stadium in a terrible wave.

In retrospect, regarding the outcome of the contest, I can understand that I should perhaps be peeved about the same things everyone else is peeved about—slow defensive substitutions, critical red zone mistakes, the worst video replay decision in the history of replay or decisions, and so forth. But at the time I was more impressed than upset. Frankly, I was impressed by Michigan, that it could continue to play at all under the circumstances, in the face of all that. 

This series of dispatches is ostensibly about coaches and what they are held responsible for. On that subject, in my little video, way down below, a speck in the maelstrom, you can see Jim Harbaugh. And when I was making the recording, the idea of blaming one person for the outcome of a football game—which involves thousands of interactions between hundreds of players during a four-hour opera of miracles and disasters that takes place in the eye of a hurricane of nature, history, and bouncing-ball luck—didn’t seem necessarily unfair, but it definitely just seemed absurd, like looking at a blue whale and deciding that the only thing about it worth discussing is the expression on its face. Sure, football is a game of decisions, strategies, and details, which is why we like talking about it. But it’s also a game of ancient emotions and unfathomable turns of fate, which is why we like it. Not all of them are going to turn your way. What is one man against the storm?