IU Links: Preview, The Podcast, FFFF Offense (chart), FFFF Defense (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

I hate small talk. I’m guessing you hate small talk. Pretty much everyone hates small talk. But it isn’t as if our caveman ancestors decided, many thousands of years ago, “we should talk about sports and weather while we wait for the elevators.”

“…so I says to Kroog, I says…”

Instead, small talk is a natural and unavoidable part of human interaction that results from two conflicting issues:

The first is that people, by and large, are extremely uncomfortable with silence. One of the first lessons lawyers learn about taking depositions is to take advantage of that fact; if you ask a question and you don’t get the full answer you wanted, just stay silent for a second. The person being deposed will naturally try to jump in to fill that silence. Same with contract negotiations. And if you have ever been in a disagreement with a significant other, you know the withering power of giving an answer and being met with a silent stare.

[After THE JUMP: Wait, some of the rats DIED?]

The second issue is that individuals will usually have *VERY* different levels of knowledge and interest in different topics. You can stray from safe conversational ground as far as you like, but you’re running the risk of someone getting really mad or really bored. Do you think Albert Einstein’s hair looked like that because he was eccentric, or because he couldn’t afford a trim? No, his hair looked like that because the last time he got a haircut, he sat in the chair and the barber said, “so, whatcha been working on?” And faced with the prospect of trying to explain general relativity, quantum mechanics, and the quest to calculate the curvature of space-time to this gentleman, he got up, left, and never returned.

“you know, same shit, different shovel”

So, by mutual assent, we stick to common topics like sports and weather. But the problem with having sports on that list is that sports very much fails the second prong, at least for many of you who read this blog. If you are anything like me, and you’re the “Michigan Guy” in the office, the last week was has been people making polite chit-chat about the Michigan game, and you screaming a thousand thoughts internally but managing a polite “yep, it was quite the game” through teeth clenched so amazingly hard Fox would actually run a replay of them.

And so it was, late this week, that a co-worker asked “so, who does Michigan have this week,” to which I responded “Indiana.” And his reaction was, “oh, so they should win that one without a problem.”

It was at that point that the Must Explain Everything To Everyone portion of my brain perked up, and sprinted to a filing cabinet labeled “INDIANA SHIT.” He started pulling out files from 2009 and 2010 and 2013 and 2015 and 2016 and 2017 and 1979 and 2018. He paces nervously, waiting for me to WELL ACTUALLY this poor fool with tales of CHAOSTEAM and stupid Indiana games from days gone by.

And, for a moment, I consider it. But the coworker has adhered to proper Small Talk Protocol, so I likewise adhere. And in the end, this is the right approach. Because even if I did have to explain the full sordid history of football’s zaniest quasi-rivalry where one team has won 39 of the last 41 games, I would then have to dive into the current state of Indiana football. Their 2-6 record. The fact that they are being outscored 170-63 in conference play. The idea that they are on their third string quarterback, a true freshman. I would have to explain that they hadn’t found any consistency on the offensive line, that they couldn’t run the ball at all, and that despite having a veteran secondary they are second-to-last in the conference in passer rating allowed and dead last in points allowed per game.

And then, after all of that, we would end up right back where my co-worker started the conversation: with Michigan winning rather easily. Only now, he’s looking at me like an insane person.

Quite the nice weather we’ve had lately, isn’t it?

Michigan 42, Indiana 17.

----------------------------

COUNTERPUNT

By Internet Raj
@internetraj

Most of the time, watching sports for me is a mindless distraction, a kind of a warm, luxurious bubble bath that my brain gently dips into for 3-hour intervals. Sometimes my teams win (Michigan basketball!) and sometimes my teams lose (Michigan football!) but, on balance, fandom has generally been an aggregate pleasurable experience for me, an opportunity to tune out the everyday anxieties of life and surrender myself to the gravitational pull of tradition (Hey, they’re running out and smacking the banner again!), nostalgia (Hey, I remember sitting in that stadium and rattling my keys around on third down!), and an enduring, if not tenuous, sense of affiliation and loyalty (Hey, I spent 7 years and $200,000 for two slips of paper from that school!).

When I was in middle school and high school, losses would hit me like an emotional freight train, a gut shot to the soul. It would ruin my day, often my week and, in extreme cases, would gnaw for months at the various dendrites and neurons tucked away in what is now most certainly the dumbest corner of my brain. When TJ Duckett caught that last-second-that-wasn’t-a-last-second touchdown in the Clockgate Game, I questioned the moral fabric of the Universe itself, feeling so deeply wronged that I walked around the halls of Groves High School in a shell-shocked malaise for the entire next week. As the years wore on, though, and I trudged through the viscous frustration of the late-Carr, Rich Rod, Hoke Eras, a combination of monastic acceptance and the realities of adulthood, with all its attendant responsibilities, numbed me from these sorts of visceral emotional swings.

When Blake O’Neill had Trouble With The Snap, I turned the TV off, threw my hands up in the air in resignation, and chuckled at the sheer misfortune of being a Michigan fan. When JT Was Short, I shook my head and sauntered out of the bar, not with deflated despair but with the battered acceptance of a loyal spy who just had two metal electrodes strapped to his groin in hostile territory. And, last week, when the Shin Was Down and then the 16-point lead that withered into an 8-point lead snowballed into a 4-point deficit, I watched with a solemn knowing, at various points nodding and muttering “we’re going to lose aren’t we.” In recent years, I find that is quickly becoming my Michigan football mantra – a deflated intonation of “we’re going to lose aren’t we.”

* * * * * * * * *

Several years ago, I saw a viral photo of an 11-year-old celebrating his eighth championship parade in Boston. At first, I was jealous. I’d kill for Michigan sports to have that kind of success, wouldn’t I? After all, the only thing I had to cling to was half a national championship from 1997 and a few runner-up trophies in basketball.

In a similar vein, I sometimes find myself seduced by what it must feel like to root for Alabama or Ohio State. Perennial powers that crush their rivals and win championship trophy after championship trophy. That has to be the dream, surely. Doesn’t it?

* * * * * * * * *

I once read a study on addiction using rats where the findings showed that if the rats can confidently predict that they will receive a food pellet when they do a task such as hit a bar, they will do just that until they are no longer hungry. But where the rewards were unpredictable—for example, where hitting the bar would yield no pellet or perhaps one pellet or maybe a jackpot of dozens of pellets—some rats became so addicted to the rush of hitting the bar that they let the pellets pile up and they would stop eating, drinking and eventually die.

* * * * * * * * *

It’s taken me a few years, but I’ve finally found my happiness in sports fandom. It’s not being the Boston sports fan or the Alabama fan or the Ohio State fan that smashes a bar that will reliably and routinely dispense a food pellet. Anyone can do that. It’s boring, to be honest.

What the average college football fan doesn’t realize is it’s not about watching your team win. That’s easy. It’s about hardening your soul to a hollowed out blackened core by watching all the disastrous ways they can lose.

— raj (@internetraj) October 30, 2021

Being a Michigan football fan is being the rat obsessed with the lever that sometimes dispenses a food pellet, but mostly doesn’t. Being a Michigan football fan is always looking to the future, which is invariably brighter than the present, waiting and futilely praying for that jackpot of pellets that will never come. Being a Michigan football fan is dying from starvation because you were so fixated on the elusive championship trophies that you failed to satiate yourself with the pile of 9-3 Outback Bowl loss seasons in the corner of your cage.

I’m ready to hit that bar today against Indiana. And I will next week, and the week after that. Who knows what’s going to come out.

But that, I think, is the ultimate fun of it.

Michigan 24 Indiana 21