CSU Links: Preview, The Podcast, Chart

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.

PUNT

By Bryan MacKenzie
@Bry_Mac

It is that time again. The time when the morning breeze has just a touch of a chill (or, for those of us in the South, when the morning breeze just stops feeling like a convection oven). The time when children return to school. The time when Nebraska fans have to start digging just a little bit deeper to justify the continued existence of Scott Frost. The time when hopes are high, the days get shorter, the harvests are starting to come in, and all conversation inevitably shifts to our favorite topic.

That’s right. It’s time to talk about Plato.

I want to ADDRESS this issue

Plato, student of Socrates and teacher of Aristotle, was born in Athens around 428 B.C. You were supposed to read his most famous work, The Republic, in at least two of your English/Philosophy/PoliSci classes. You didn’t. That’s okay. Neither did I. No one did. That’s why we’re here. Kickoff isn’t for a little while. We’ve got time.

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Plato’s primary deal was that he thought existence consisted of several realms. The one we see, the physical realm, is where stuff like burritos live. There is also the realm of memories, where things like “that burrito I had last week” live. But those realms are just manifestations of what he called the realm of the Forms. That’s where the *concept* of burritos lives. It’s the Clippy of celestial construction, where you start thinking about tortillas and beans and guacamole and the universe asks, “it seems like you’re trying to construct a burrito; would you like help with that?” The realm of the Forms is where triangles and the color blue and the art of punting live. It’s a template library for reality.

(Two notes here: one, the Google search for “Was Plato stoned” shockingly returned no hits, and two, writing Punt on an empty stomach is a bad idea)

Plato used his Allegory of The Cave to demonstrate this concept. He imagined a group of prisoners who spent their entire lives chained in a cave facing a wall. Behind them, out of sight, puppeteers use firelight and puppets to cast shadows on the wall that the prisoners can see. In other words, the entire world the prisoners know (what we humans would call the physical realm) is what they see on the wall. They have no idea what’s going on behind them. They don’t know how their world came to be, or what “existence” means; they only know what they can see.

The original Twitter account

Plato was super concerned about the prisoners, and what it would mean to them if they ever discovered the outside world, with its sunshine and trees and other people and burritos. Which, great. Cool. I’m more curious about the puppeteers.

See, for a little while, those prisoners would have been awed, and the puppeteers would hold all the power. They were the masters of these captives’ universes. But, after a while, the prisoners would get comfortable, settle in, and just accept these shadow performances as ordinary entertainment. Eventually, they would start to expect a certain level of showmanship from the Ethereal Wall Shapes. They would start to distinguish between the great shadow puppet performances and the ones where the performers just sort of mail it in. And they would start to make their opinions known.

Eventually, the pressure has to get to those puppeteers, right? There are only so many ways to make shadows interact on a wall, and at the same time the audience is coming to demand more and more. And you know those puppeteers have bosses. They have staff meetings and performance reviews and metrics to hit, and if they have a couple of bad showings, they know they’re going to hear about it. And these puppeteers have mortgages to pay, so they can’t just quit, but goddang these prisoners are critical.

The worst part? Putting on a good show just increases the pressure to put on another good show. You can’t put on a couple of great seasons of Ethereal Wall Shape Theater and then follow that up with something pedestrian where try to you compress everything into six episodes and completely ignore the character arcs you’ve created for an ending everyone hates. People will get SUPER pissed if you do that.

College football has gotten more and more complicated for the people who put on the performances. The game itself keeps getting more complex, with every team adding wrinkles to tweaks to adjustments to schemes, each of which you have to scout and plan for. Roster management in the age of the transfer portal and NIL is a full-time job. You’ve got to prepare for early season opponents when 40% of their rosters are composed of transfers. You’ve got to prepare for early season games when 40% of YOUR OWN roster is composed of transfers. You’ve got bloggers breaking down the All-22 and podcasts discussing how bad your linebackers are, and now global warming just burned your stadium down and supply chain issues mean your hot dogs are $37 and the students aren’t coming to the games because your mission-critical media deal means your cupcake game is gonna take 4 hours. Oh, and you have two starting quarterbacks.

Michigan fans⁠—like most fans—don’t know what’s going on behind the parapet, nor do we really know the volumes of effort that go into this kind of performance. Nor, frankly, do we particularly care. We tune in to watch the Ethereal Wall Shapes, and we expect AND DEMAND those shapes kick the hell out of something. Last year’s success didn’t relieve the tension. Quite the opposite; it added to the tension, because someone did something new and cool with a shadow puppet and now we all want to see it again.

Are we asking too much to see a repeat of last year? Maybe. Maybe not. But are we asking too much to expect Michigan to come out and play Colorado State with the focus and intensity of a November rivalry game? Almost certainly. And even if last year was Masterpiece Theater, it took until the third act before fans stopped throwing rotten tomatoes at the performers. This year may be great, but give the performers a little while to warm up. Michigan 34, Colorado State 21

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COUNTERPUNT

By Internet Raj
@internetraj

It’s 2:37a.m. I am staring, with equal measures of stupor and concentration, at my computer, blinking only to snap my progressively blurring vision back into focus. The white glow of the monitor washes over me, the waves of melatonin-suppressing blue light gently lapping over the slouched shell of my body. My right index finger rhythmically spins my mouse’s scroll wheel, the precisely spaced whirs echoing off the walls in what may be the world’s saddest metronome.

I’ve reached that level of tiredness where you can actually feel the weight of your eyes. Like two puffed up bowling balls sinking slowly into your skull. I steal a glance at the clock. It’s 2:42a.m. On a Tuesday. Why the fuck are you still awake? I want to ask myself. But I don’t because I know the answer and it’s too shameful. I flick the scroll wheel again, with a surgical precision that betrays an instinctual expertise that can only be acquired through countless hours of practice.

I let out a deep sigh.

So, what exactly am I doing? Well, if you must know, I’m 76 comments deep into a thread on the r/electrictoothbrushes sub-Reddit, parsing a fierce debate comparing the newest models of the Oral-B and Sonicare toothbrushes. I curse myself. I don’t know how I ended up spiraling into this 2.5 hour Internet rabbit hole but it all started earlier that afternoon when I decided I needed a new toothbrush. In a long bygone, and a blissfully more ignorant time of my life, I would have simply jumped in a car, headed to Costco and picked out the first toothbrush I happened to see on sale.

There’s a Subreddit for everything.

But not now. Not with the Internet at my fingertips, with its endless flow of information seducing me into a “just 10 more minutes” endless cycle of obsessive consumer product research. No, these days one cannot simply buy a toothbrush. One must first collate buying guides, dissect YouTube unboxings, compare blog breakdowns, inhale Wirecutter reviews, unpack forum debates and engage in countless other tortuous acts of hedonistic consumerism. I spin the scroll wheel once more, the page settling on a post by u/DiamondClean4Ever on why the cleaning action of Sonicare’s oblong shaped bristle is superior to the circular shape of Oral-B’s brush-head. He includes some vaguely familiar formulae for angular momentum that sparks dormant recollections of AP Physics in the deepest recesses of my brain. I nod to myself as if I understand what I’m reading but I’m lying to myself.

I scroll again, this time fully taking in the luxuriously sculpted piece of ergonomic plastic in my hand. The mouse is a Logitech MX Master 3. It, too, was a product of four (okay, eleven, but only if you count the time I spent researching whether the programmable side button could be customized to open RCMB with one click after an MSU loss) hours of intense research in my effort to find the best mouse on the market. I bought it precisely because of its famed frictionless scroll wheel. I flick it again and the page scrolls another exact 9 rows. Such a fucking great mouse.

Scroll wheel smoother than Andrel Anthony.

The cruel irony of modern-day culture is that the abundance of choice, data and optionality can actually subsume us into analysis paralysis and an endless treadmill of frustration. Back in the day, if I wanted to watch a movie I’d just call the AMC hotline, pick an interesting sounding title and then wait for the recorded voice to literally list out showtimes until one worked for me. Now, I construct a full Excel pivot table with conditional formatting for Rotten Tomato scores as I scour hundreds of Netflix titles before tiring myself out and falling asleep before I pick anything. Back in the day if I wanted sweatpants, I’d just go to TJ Maxx and buy some fucking sweatpants. Now, I Google “what is the most comfortable pair of sweatpants in the world” and I reluctantly become an expert in synthetic lyocell and French Terry blends. Back in the day, you’d smile at the person sitting next to you in freshman-year Organic Chemistry, marry them, and have four kids in quick succession. Now, you may risk a repetitive strain injury in your thumb from excessive Tinder swiping.

Simpler times.

Confucius once said, “Better a diamond with a flaw than a pebble without,” a timeless nugget of wisdom that elegantly captures the modern world’s collective decision paralysis. And it may just be a foreboding warning for Michigan football. Last year’s Michigan squad was a sparkling diamond (Finally beating Ohio State! Winning a Big Ten championship! Making the College Football Playoff!) with the tiniest of flaws (getting shellacked by Georgia). Cade McNamara got us there through his grit, consistency and even-handed calm under fire. Yet, that hasn’t stopped a large contingent of the fanbase (this author included) from salivating at the thought of what a Michigan team helmed by the electric JJ McCarthy would look like. Even Jim Harbaugh himself seems to be tilting this way, with his decision to alternate starts between McNamara and McCarthy in the first two games of the season. An optimist would say too much talent and depth can never be a bad thing. A pessimist cynically points to the old adage, “if you have two quarterbacks, you have no quarterbacks.”

Me? Well, it took me forever but I bought a Sonicare and I love the shit out of that thing. Sure, my teeth are still yellow, but they’re slightly less yellow. And it looks way cooler than the Oral-B. Here’s to the eternal hope that Michigan finds that flawless diamond, whether it’s Cade or JJ.

Michigan 72, Colorado State 10.