MSU Links: 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 don’t want to talk about the Michigan/Michigan State rivalry.

Whenever people talk Michigan/Michigan State, everyone gets mad. And not fun mad. Mad mad. Couch-burning, midfield-kicking, knock-you-unconscious-with-a-hockey-stick-from-behind mad. Both fan bases seethe over this one. Players, coaches, fans, media… everyone loses their collective crap. Mark Dantonio made an entire career—a very successful career that allowed him to retire on his own terms and completely of his own volition⁠—off of being Big Mad about Michigan.

Coach, quick question for you…

I’ve been writing Opponent Watch for almost nine full seasons now, and the underlying ethos of Opponent Watch has been, and remains, “college football is good and funny because everything is bad and stupid.” Everything, good or bad, is to be laughed at. We laugh at Michigan and Nebraska and Wisconsin and Michigan State and Jim Delaney and the Big Ten and music and weather and science and the sun and the moon and the stars. It’s dumb, but dumb is fine.

[After THE JUMP: No joy. Only sportsball.]

In recent years the articles have been posted regularly over on Reddit’s r/CFB page. Fans from most of the Big Ten schools show up in the comments, and by and large every school’s fans ‘get it.’ They understand that college football is for fun and entertainment, and that it’s okay to laugh at yourself. Only one fan base gets super pissed about the disrespekt every week, to the point where Ohio State fans—OHIO STATE FANS—jump in with a “dude, you know this isn’t serious, right?”

Barron

There’s no joy to this series. Only relief for the winner, and the hope that your actual real-world relationships with friends, family, and neighbors won’t be marred by the sportsball. It seems unhealthy, even for a part of the world that derives its importance from the irrational value we place on it. College football is Bitcoin by other means, but this rivalry has reached full GameStop.

And that’s fine. I suppose it’s always been this way. I was knocked on my ass tailgating on the MSU tennis courts more than once a couple of decades ago by drunk Sparty goobers. Dr. Sap has video of fans in 1941 and 1943 getting their version of spicy (which is, like, great-grandpa what are y’all doing?). It’s one of the few rivalries where everyone seems to agree, “No night games, please.”

Because reasons.

Maybe I’m just getting older, and hatin’ is a young man’s game. Besides, the game on the field, while full of ANGAR and general grump, is pretty straightforward. The better team usually wins.

But if the teams are somewhat evenly matched and equally motivated by the hate of a million perceived insults, what’s the deciding factor? Well, one person on the field has extra motivation that exists on a plane that inside observers can’t appreciate. For Mel Tucker, this isn’t a hill on which to win or die. This is a stage on which to audition. There are bigger catfish to fry, and he isn’t going to let a silly thing like the pathological need to become consumed by the pettiness and animosity stand in the way of business. And on this Saturday, that’s enough.

Michigan State 27, Michigan 21

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COUNTERPUNT

By Internet Raj
@internetraj

Nestled away in the corner Mel Tucker’s Twitter bio is a link to his decidedly low-key YouTube channel. When I clicked the link, I was hoping for some useful tidbits about the coach and, if I was lucky, maybe some fodder for a few jokes at his expense. My effort was rewarded in spades.

The headline video is his “Michigan State Football 2020 Season Hype Trailer.” I watched it and can dutifully report that it’s one of the more generically hollow, but wholly innocuous, videos I can remember. The video begins with a black screen and the ominous sound of metal clanging on metal ringing through the air. Slowly the screen fades in to an intense Tucker, who glares menacingly at the camera, using one hand to rhythmically bang a hammer into his other palm to punctuate a halting string of rapid-fire coaching clichés like, “Tough”, “Driven”, “Hard-working”, “Smart,” “Competitive,” and, of course, his trademark coup-de-grâce, “#Relentless”.

Interspersed between Tucker’s empty MBA buzzword utterances is stock footage of an unidentified blacksmith hammering away at red-hot bits of metal in a steel forge, most assuredly a heavy-handed metaphor of the “toughness” and “grit” for which Tucker wants his MSU squad to be known.

I’m not going to make too much fun of Tucker for this video – it’s harmless and don’t forget that our own head coach has his players wearing literal “blue collar” shirts to away games. But it’s hard not to laugh at how literal Tucker is. The banner at the top of his YouTube channel blares “SPARTAN DAWGS” with Tucker surrounded by two actual dogs. This is also the man who has dubbed Spartan Stadium “The Woodshed” and has made “chopping wood” his signature motivation tactic. With Mel Tucker, what you see is what you get.

In case you were confused

I kept scrolling through Tucker’s YouTube channel, though, and found something much more bizarre. Apparently unbeknownst to anyone, Mel Tucker spent the fall of 2020 posting a video series of “Word of the Week Wednesdays.” When I say unbeknownst to anyone, I really mean that. The videos, on average, have about 90 total views each, a jarring statistic for a bona fide celebrity head coach commanding a $5.5 million salary. I mean, the random guy from my high school who streams Olive Garden reviews in Fort Wayne, Indiana, puts up better numbers than these.

But forget all that. In each episode of “Word of the Week Wednesdays” series (I’ve watched them all), Tucker picks a generic word seemingly at random (“Vigor”, “Meritorious”, “Wondrous”, and more) and then, striking the tone of a gentle and patient elementary teacher speaking to their class of 8-year-olds, proceeds to explain the part of speech, definition, and an example of how the word is used in the sentence. Tucker caps each video by imploring the viewer to “do their part” and use the designated word in a sentence in the comment section. Even as a Wolverine fan, I couldn’t suppress the pang of sadness that reverberated through the inner core of my soul when I realized most of the videos had 0 comments.

These videos have twisted my brain into a pretzel. Tucker is by all accounts a great person and excellent coach. But why on Earth did Tucker make these? Who could they possibly have been for? For what purpose? Why, Mel, why? We’ll probably never know. “Word of the Week Wednesdays” aired its tenth and final episode in December 2020. Tucker has not posted since.

You might be wondering why this column eschewed the red meat of the UM-MSU rivalry in favor of a deep-dive of a very weird YouTube channel. I’ll leave the vitriol to the Twitter nuts and message board mavens. I don’t have the energy for it and as Bryan so eloquently put it in his Punt column, “hatin’ is a young man’s game.” Me? I’ll take the weird fringes of the rivalry all day, even if that’s Mel Tucker doing a completely bizarre outdoor camera unboxing video.

I don’t know if Coach Tucker is willing to revive “Word of the Week Wednesdays,” but if he is, I got a good one for next week: “Loss.”

Michigan 37, MSU 17