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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

The James Webb Space Telescope is awesome in every sense of the word. It took more than two decades, hundreds of organizations, thousands of people, and approximately $73 Bazillion to design, build, launch, and deploy. The thing lives about 930,000 miles away, orbiting around an invisible gravitational parking space called a Lagrange Point at nearly four times the distance of the moon. Its mirror is 21 feet wide, which is one-and-a-half times the average length of a Spencer Petras pass attempt. It is a stunning scientific achievement.

According to NASA, the launch and deployment had 344 possible single points of failure, any one of which could have seriously impaired or doomed the thing, and because it was so far away, repair was impossible. Yet, in the face of Murphy’s Law and the sheer weight of the math, things went off without a hitch, and the JWST is going to spend at least the next decade aiming at the furthest reaches of the cosmos. And thus far, the returns have been amazing.

[After THE JUMP: Observable effects from the Galactic DMV]

 

When the initial pictures started coming in from the JWST, the natural comparison was to the comparatively primitive results from the Hubble. And to be fair, the differences were obvious. It was like how, prior to High Definition TV, we were all perfectly fine with regular ol’ television, but once HD came into our lives, we looked back at old games broadcast in standard definition as if they had been chiseled into stone by an antediluvian culture of half-man, half-apes.

You can barely read the player numbers in the Hubble broadcast

But one thing JWST hasn’t done yet, and may never do, is to capture a supernova in process. But Hubble did. Because Hubble knew where to look. Because Hubble predicted it. Because Hubble had seen it before.

See, about ten billion years ago, give or take, a star exploded. This happens from time to time. Somehow, that’s a thing they do. Which seems like a design defect, but bear with me. The light from that supernova traveled out in all directions. We see supernovae all the time, because they aren’t that uncommon. But this one was special; it occurred almost perfectly lined up with a big ol’ galaxy cluster called MACS J1149.2+2223. Galaxies, of course, are made of matter, and one consequence of Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity is that gravity bends light.

As a result, the gravity from that big ol’ pile of matter lensed the light from that supernova like a funhouse mirror. The light was bent in four different paths of different lengths (called an “Einstein Cross”), and it therefore arrived at Earth four different times, months apart. Scientists saw it after the first three arrived, did some wicked hard math, and accurately predicted the location and arrival of the fourth. It was the first time humans had ever accurately predicted and observed a supernova.

Nerds and their nerd math, man, I tell you what

College football is very much like outer space. Everything we see operates under the same rules and principles, but it can produce some WILD results. Predicting any specific event is incredibly rare, and the things we can predict are usually relatively mundane. Lots of programs explode at some point during their life cycles, but it usually comes out of nowhere or with minimal warning. For the most part we just kind of stare into the chaos with a sense of awe and wonder, and hope nothing cataclysmic happens in our neck of the cosmic woods.

But that supernova? That’s Maryland Football. They appear, every year, exactly as they were the year before. We know what they will look like, how bright they are initially, and how quickly they will fade. Because we’ve seen it before. They are one of the few programs in college football that are both dynamic and reliable. Every year they start out strong. Every year they beat up on some inferior competition and raise expectations, and every year they hit a wall the moment they run up against any (non-Texas) team who can match them in talent, which includes at least two-thirds of the Big Ten. Since joining the Big Ten, they haven’t beaten a Big Ten team that was either ranked at the time OR finished the year ranked.

The only catch this year is that Michigan gets the Terps earlier in their explody life cycle. Could this create a problem? Could this be the year that they hold on just long enough to notch a big win? Sure. I guess. Space is a big place, and on a long enough timeline, anything is possible. But we’ve seen this show before, and I wouldn’t expect anything new this time around. Michigan 44, Maryland 17

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COUNTERPUNT

By Internet Raj
@internetraj

It always starts the same way. A benign, barely perceptible tingle just above the knee. Distracted by the sensory overload of simultaneously listening to a podcast and robotically swiping through Instagram, you casually dismiss this first warning sign. Eventually, the tingle intensifies into a low thrum of prickles that shoot up and down the entire quad, a numbing sensation that your nervous system’s pain centers now register as uncomfortable but is still no match for the mini dopamine squirts drenching your brain from scrolling Twitter. This is unfortunate because it is your last opportunity for any sort of medical intervention.

Soon enough, the symphony of pins and needles crescendos into an all out feeling of… unfeeling, a complete deadness in which all sensation is robbed from your legs. This is the point of no return. Even if you finally put down your phone, close your fist, and pound your thighs into submission, there is no resuscitating those lifeless legs. Every millimeter of movement—even a wiggle of your pinky toe—now unleashes a feeling that can only be described as a tempest of tingles, fire ants and subcutaneous Sichuan peppers. You gingerly stand up, supporting your deadweight legs by wedging your arms on the walls on either side of you. Your grip slips, and you slam into the wall. You hear a tentative, confused and all too emasculating voice of a stranger waft in from the airport public restroom stall next to you: “Hey, everything alright in there?”

“No,” you think to yourself as you hold the industrial sized toilet paper dispenser for dear life and try to kick some blood flow back into your feet, which now have become entangled in a depressing nest made of Calvin Klein boxers and crumpled jeans. “Everything is not alright.”

Post Poop Paralysis (“PPP”) is a real and serious affliction that wreaks havoc on millions of lives every year. It is the product of man’s hubris, smartphone addiction, and the generally poor circulation of being an out-of-shape dad. At one point in time, a much simpler time, a poop was a poop. You went in, did your business, and came out. The decadence of modern-day consumer electronics, however, has introduced a new seductive accoutrement to a once routine, staid act of nature.

Source: Princeton University School of Economics

At its root, the principal cause of PPP is complacency. You sit upon the porcelain throne and get swept up in the distraction of your phone, e-reader, tablet or other handheld gadget of choice. You succumb to the thralls of easy gratification and lose sight of the true purpose of what you are doing. Seconds become minutes which, in some very serious cases of PPP, can turn into hours. You’ve lost the forest for the trees; you’ve lost the TP for the tweets. Distilled to its core, you’ve spent too long shitting.

The Michigan football team has also spent too long shitting. The Wolverines’ entire non-conference slate was one long, luxurious crap-fest. Colorado State, Hawai’i, and UConn. Turd, turd, and turd. Michigan has wiped away these cupcakes with nonchalant ease, callously abusing each more than Brett Favre does to state-appropriated funds. But it’s precisely at this time, the hemorrhoid of complacency can rear its head. It’s now time for the Wolverines to stand up from the toilet and face the Big Ten season.

It would be totally reasonable for the team to wobble and stagger around for a bit while they find their footing and they are fortunate enough that they can do so against a somewhat middling Maryland. The Terrapins enter today’s game with a 3-0 record that’s flimsier than the single-ply stocked at an Ohio truck stop – but they do have a legitimate offense helmed by Taulia Tagovailoa, a talented albeit erratic passer. In fact, a testament to the sheer unremarkability of Maryland is that one of the most interesting things about their team is their chaotic helmet design.

Entering “what skid marks would look like as a football helmet” into Dall-E

The verdict? Early game constipation that raises eyebrows (and maybe the concern of the guy in the stall next door), but a firm, strained push by the Wolverines in the third quarter will culminate with a decisive but unglamorous flush (or two – we did just eat a UConn for god’s sake).

Michigan 27 Maryland 20