Rutgers Links: Miniprogram, The 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

The year was 1995. The Cold War was over. The Soviet Union had collapsed, and the world was breathing easier as the threat of nuclear annihilation seemed to have passed us by. Boyz II Men were on the top of the Billboard charts. Starter jackets were plentiful. All was right in the world.

Then, on January 25, Norway launched a rocket on a scientific mission to study the northern lights… and almost ended the world.

was it worth it?

You see, the thawing of global tensions and the spirit of Glasnost hadn’t changed the fact that Russia still had a metric crap-ton of nuclear missiles aimed at the West, and they were still attached to a vigilant but dysfunctional apparatus that was just ITCHING to launch them sumbitches. So, when their early warning radars told the Ruskies that this nerd-rocket was actually the first move of Armageddon, the Russian military prepared for all-out nuclear war. The only thing standing in the way of ultimate calamity was Boris Yeltsin.

[After THE JUMP: Asset bubbles and Russian drunk]

Boris Yeltsin was the first President of post-USSR Russia. And he was a drunk. An amazing drunk. An amazing drunk BY RUSSIAN STANDARDS. An LSU-tailgate-before-a-night-game drunk. I mean, if this was a story about your buddy…

Secret Service agents discovered Yeltsin alone on Pennsylvania Avenue, dead drunk, clad in his underwear, yelling for a taxi. Yeltsin slurred his words in a loud argument with the baffled agents. He did not want to go back into Blair House, where he was staying. He wanted a taxi to go out for pizza.

…you’d be like, “Boris, you need to get your crap together, man.”

And when Yeltsin turned the keys and fully activated the Russian Boom Boom Pow System for the first time in history, we were one mashed button away from the literal end of the world. We survived, but it isn’t clear how, or even how close we truly got, other than “really freeking close.”

This is far from humanity’s only nuclear near miss. If you want to never sleep again, you can fall down the rabbit hole of Able Archer, and the time during the Cuban Missile Crisis where a Soviet captain ordered the launch of a nuclear torpedo, and the time a dude named Stanislav Petrov broke all protocol to save humanity, and the time we almost nuked North Carolina (in the thermonuclear fusion way, not the basketball way) and later almost nuked Arkansas.

British mathematician and ardent nuclear disarmament activist Bertrand Russell argued that the problem with nuclear weapons wasn’t just that we might decide to use them, but also that, if we have the capability long enough, we might use them without really meaning to. His argument was that, “you may reasonably expect a man to walk a tightrope safely for ten minutes; it would be unreasonable to do so without accident for two hundred years.”

One can argue for and against the continued existence of Rutgers as a part of the Big Ten. We can look at them now, from the relative peace and stability of the year 2021 and say, “it is really dumb to have them, and we probably should never have created this situation in the first place.” But that’s easy in hindsight, when we aren’t trying to survive the Great Conference Realignment Wars of the early twenty teens. At the time, it seemed* like a necessary evil, and you can easily defend** the decision to go that route. But the dangers spawned by the sins of the past continue to haunt and threaten us to this day.

*No, it didn’t.

**No, you can’t.

Like nuclear weapons, Rutgers went off on Michigan once, in 2014. Since then, we have lived in an enduring but uncomfortable armistice. The chances of a Rutgers catastrophe in any given year remained remote, but the math says that on a long enough timeline, the odds are essentially 100%. And the consequences of such an event remain nothing short of dire.

some day

2020 brought us to the very brink of cataclysm. And despite the massive inferiority gap they’re trying to overcome, the Rutger continues to arm itself. Since the dawn of the modern (read: post-Hoke) era, they have knocked off five Big Ten teams. They added Michigan State to the conquered lands last year, and Northwestern seems primed to fall as well. This year seems safe, but eventually the wrong finger is going to be on the button… and then God help us all.

Michigan 28, Rutgers 24

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

COUNTERPUNT

By Internet Raj
@internetraj

Asset bubbles are a from of speculative mania that have persisted in economic markets throughout history. The hallmark example, and what is generally considered the first ever recorded bubble, was the Dutch Tulip Mania of the 17^th century. At the peak of tulip mania in 1637, a single tulip bulb sold for

• (i) 4 oxen;
• (ii) 12 sheep;
• (iii) 4 barrels of beer;
• (iv) 2 tons of cheese;
• (v) a bed; and
• (vi) a suit of clothes and a silver cup.

 

Recent history is also littered with examples of bubbles, the most hilarious of which was the Beanie Baby craze of the 1990s. Beanie Baby mania hit such a fever pitch in the late 1990s that, at one point, 64% of Americans owned at least one Beanie Baby. The value of Beanie Babies skyrocketed because Ty, the company that produced the plush toys, would artificially restrict supply by suddenly “retiring” certain models. Like other fixed-supply goods such as trading cards or precious metals, the limited Beanie Babies in circulation surged in value – at the height of the frenzy, Beanie Babies accounted for 10% of all eBay transaction volume. These are staggering, mind-boggling numbers but nothing quite encapsulates the Beanie Baby Bubble like a picture: in 1999, a divorced couple divided their Beanie Baby collection valued in the thousands of dollars in a courtroom.

Economic bubbles are as a tale as old as time because asset bubbles are entrenched in basic human psychology: an intoxicating cocktail of euphoria, contagious hype and FOMO. To this day, we see bubbles all around us: AMC, Gamestop, Tom Cruise’s ass in the movie Valkyrie, and JPEG’s of apes fetching $26 million at Sothebys. But no bubble has me as nervous as the one gaining steam in Ann Arbor.

Bubbles for Days

A couple weeks ago, I wrote in this very column about my fear that Michigan’s 1-0 start to the season was a “dead cat bounce.” Then, Michigan steamrolled Washington. And then, Michigan whooped Northern Illinois. And now, after three straight dominating performances, the entire country is in love with Michigan.

FiveThirtyEight, the website famous for coasting on the reputation of correctly predicting one (1) election cycle and subsequently brushing off criticisms of its statistical models with the sophistication of a junior who scored a “4” on their AP Stats exam, recently made a case for “Believing in Michigan Football”:

Michigan fans, I'm sorry for doing this. I don't mean any harm and promise I'm not picking you to beat OSU yet.

Michigan is good. I'm a believer. You should be too. I make the numbers case @FiveThirtyEight: https://t.co/b7qNyYmgP3

— Alex Kirshner (@alex_kirshner) September 23, 2021

Meanwhile, ESPN’s Bill Connelly has officially deemed Michigan making the Playoff as not “unrealistic.”

2 B1G CFP teams (and neither is Ohio State)! 8-4 Clemson! P12 champ Washington! 2-10 FSU! B12 champ Texas Tech! UTSA in the NY6!

I recapped Week 3 and walked through scenarios that are (a) not INCREDIBLY realistic but (b) more realistic than you think.https://t.co/BZryvkZKAe

— Bill Connelly (@ESPN_BillC) September 20, 2021

And, of course, local sports anchor Brad Galli has started drawing comparisons between Jim Harbaugh and a fictional television legend whose own bubble is so inflated that it’s at risk of bursting to reveal its milquetoast comedic core.

this was literally the only thing that could have derailed our Big Ten title run and it happened pic.twitter.com/ZBSh0dEa8e

— raj (@internetraj) September 25, 2021

The bubble in Ann Arbor is swelling. We’ve seen this before. I want to say this time is different, but I am jaded by the crumbling façade of Septembers past. I know that the success of this season is in a perilous quantum state, constantly flitting between genuine and mirage. That my Princess Diana Beanie Baby may not be worth $10,000. That my Bitcoiin2Gen might not be a ticket to early retirement. That Michigan football is in as precarious a position as Tom Cruise’s prosthetic ass next to a thumbtack.

The euphoria is in full force and the bubble may well burst. But it won’t be this week, because if there’s anything that can pump more Hopium into the Michigan fanbase, it’s a game against Rutgers. We’re going to win by a trillion and when it’s done, I’m going to be scrolling through Expedia looking for tickets to Indy in December. If there’s one thing Michigan football fans deserve, it’s hope—whether it’s unfounded and short-lived or not. So enjoy the Rutgers beatdown, plug your ears, and ignore the haters until things get real next week in Madison.

Michigan 51, Rutgers 10.