Wisconsin Links: 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

Welcome to Chaos Year. We’re really excited to have you. Please, come in. Have a seat. We have a lot to talk about.

This is not an aberration. Quite the opposite; the same way forest fires are an essential part of forest health and spark regeneration and regrowth, so too does the occasional year of batshit insanity allow us to reset and refocus our expectations. And for a sport that was settling into a predictable pattern, it could not have come at a better time.

But how do we know this is a Chaos Year? Well, there were early signs prior to last weekend, with losses by ranked teams mounting and FCS wins over FBS teams exceeding anything seen in prior years. But after last weekend saw five Top-25 teams fall, and seven more pushed to the brink, the evidence has become undeniable:

• Preseason Top-25 teams have lost 25 games through three weeks. There are as many preseason top-25 teams with two losses ⁠— seven ⁠— as with zero losses.
• Last year’s four CFP teams ⁠already have a combined four losses. Clemson, who has made the last six playoffs has two losses, and Ohio State and Notre Dame have narrow victories over Tulsa, Toledo, and Florida State (who are a combined 3-9).
• Arkansas, who has an 11-35 record over the past four seasons, is ranked in the Top-10. Ole Miss, BYU, Coastal Carolina, Fresno State, NC State, and Wake Forest are all ranked.
• Boston College, UTSA, Wyoming, and BRADY HOKE’S SAN DIEGO STATE are 4-0.
• Rutgers, Maryland, and Purdue have as many losses in their 12 games as Wisconsin has in its 3 games.

Chaos Year is real, it is now, and it is coming for each and every one of us. Other than Alabama.

This is far from the first Chaos Year. They arise periodically, though unpredictably. Michigan fans recall 2007 as two games, a bunch of mumbling, and then whooping Tim Tebow. But for the rest of college football, 2007 was the Chaos Year to set the bar for all others before or since. Five teams lost while ranked #1, and SEVEN teams lost while ranked #2. Teams that spent time at either #1 or #2 included Kansas, Missouri, Cal, USF, and Boston College. Stanford beat USC as a 39-point underdog. The Horror happened. It was madness from the drop.

[After THE JUMP: Somehow where he’s going with this is not “Indiana.”]

A bifurcation diagram demonstrating Chaos Theory in action, or what Graham Mertz sees of a route tree where r = yards downfield?

1990 was, likewise, really really dumb. Three #1 teams had lost by Mid-October, and the national title was largely decided on a 5th down touchdown that probably wasn’t a touchdown even on 5th down, which allowed Colorado (!) to split a national title with Georgia Tech (!!), as they were able to separate themselves from such illustrious company as Virginia (!!!). And 1984 saw BYU win a national title with quarterback Robbie Bosco by beating 6-6 Michigan in the Holiday Bowl.

So, now that we think we might be in a Chaos Year, what do we do now? How do we comport ourselves? Unfortunately, I can’t tell you that. We all have to chart our own paths through this world. However, there are a few pieces of wisdom, passed down from the Elders who experienced these Times of Troubled Bullshit:

First, if your team falls victim to the bedlam, or even if you just feel that the Grim Reaper of football stupidity may come for you next, you may be tempted to laugh less at other teams who succumb to madness and unforced turnovers. Don’t do that. Steer into the skid. The closest analogy in nature is the cicada; their entire survival strategy is “show up all at once so predators are literally too full from eating some of us to eat the rest of us.” Nature WANTS you to laugh at Minnesota for losing to Bowling Green.

Second, don’t brush off games that should be walk-overs. Sure, it’s fun to join the last couple of minutes of NC State upsetting Clemson. But it’s more fun if you can watch it develop. Invest a little time in, like, Oregon/Stanford or Rutgers/Ohio State.

College football finds a way

Third, don’t feel bad about anything good that happens. In this Martian landscape where no sustainable success will grow and dust storms can arise in an instant, don’t apologize for the good things that happen. Your receiver caught a lucky bounce to give you an undeserved lead? It still looks like six on the scoreboard. You only beat Rutgers by seven points? CONGRATU-FREEKING-LATIONS. There is nothing more Chaos Year than “lost to Rutgers.” You avoided that. There are no style points, especially now.

And finally, look at potential upside. There’s a reason entrepreneurial hipsters are always talking about “disrupting” stuff that doesn’t need disrupting (remember when we disrupted juice?). It’s because it creates opportunities, even if briefly, and even if people quickly return to sanity. Suppose you haven’t beaten a team in, say, nine years. Or you haven’t won at a certain venue in, oh, I dunno, twenty years. The status quo is your enemy. Embrace tumult. Come to know turmoil. May hullabaloo become your ally.

It appears for all the world like Chaos has come for Wisconsin, and that maybe ⁠— JUST MAYBE ⁠— it favors Michigan. That will almost certainly change, but for the moment, in the place and against the opponent that is as invariable as any in college football, let silliness reign. Michigan 21, Wisconsin 17

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COUNTERPUNT

By Internet Raj
@internetraj

In the summer of 2014, University of Virginia psychologist Timothy Wilson embarked on a simple study with grand ambitions to address a fundamental question of the human condition: do people enjoy being left alone with their own thoughts? Wilson and his colleagues asked over 400 college students to sit alone in bare, windowless rooms with nothing to do but retreat into their own minds. Afterwards, the students were asked to fill out a survey rating how much they enjoyed the experience from 1 (not at all) to 9 (extremely), with a midpoint of 5 (somewhat). Based on the middling self-reported grades, Wilson’s team concluded that “most people do not enjoy ‘just thinking.’”

To further probe their developing hypothesis, Wilson and his colleagues reached deep into the wellspring of scientific sadism to devise a new study. Over 40 college students were placed alone in separate rooms with their ankles hooked up to a machine capable of delivering an electric shock with the push of a button. The electric shock was described as “unpleasant but not painful,” which sounds a lot like clever lawyering to ensure the experiment fell outside the scope of the Geneva Convention. The participants were again asked to sit in silent contemplation, but this time they could jolt themselves at any time. Surprisingly, two-thirds of the men and one-fourth of the women gave themselves between one and nine shocks.

The results were prime red meat for the voracious fangs of news media, with alarmist viral variations of headlines like “NEW STUDY SHOWS MANY PEOPLE WOULD RATHER GET AN ELECTRIC SHOCK THAN JUST SIT AND THINK” blanketing newsfeeds across the internet. The study’s findings became one of those interesting pop-science nuggets that an annoying guy would use to impress an equally annoying girl at an even more annoying cocktail party where everyone thinks Malcolm Gladwell is intellectual gospel. The experiment also served as yet another arrow in the quiver of the anti-technology crusade. Surely, our inability to silently stew with our own thoughts is a byproduct of our social-media-addled brains and the dopamine pumping slab of glass and silicon we carry everywhere in our pockets. And, of course, there were the cynical detractors of the study, decrying the low sample sizes, lack of controls, and the usual array of other statistical buzzkills that are employed to ruin perfectly good fun facts.

But me? I don’t really care about any of that. I have no interest in drawing profound conclusions from the study or make any sweeping judgments about the philosophical shallowness of modern-day society or the dangers of technology and overstimulation. No, I really only care about one thing, a little footnote about one particular participant buried in the middle of the findings. A man who voluntarily shocked himself 190 times.

190 times. In 15 minutes.

When I first read that, my brain didn’t register the sheer preposterousness of this mystery participant. But soon, I became obsessed. Who in the world was this absolute sicko, this anarchist outcast who makes Joaquin Phoenix’s Joker look like a senior audit professional at Deloitte? Given the experiment subjects were college students, the grainy police composite sketch generated by my brain loosely resembled that maniac you see in college who wears cargo shorts in the winter and often chugs Mountain Dew straight out of the 2-liter at 8:15 a.m.

But is this guy, this enigmatic glutton for punishment, so insane?

Is he?

Are you sure?

Are you, the Michigan football fan reading this, so sure?

Yep, you, crazy bunch that spends 3.5 straight hours on 13-odd Saturdays a year voluntarily slamming a maize-and-blue electric shock machine attached to your collective eyeballs.

This season felt completely different, a welcome breath of fresh air from train-wrecks past. And then, in that second half against Rutgers last week, I started feeling that “unpleasant but not painful” feeling, with the dial veering dangerously close to “painful, god this is fucking painful.” Yet I’m still going to smash that button again. And again. And again. And so are you. Because that is the epitome of college football fandom.

Any rational observer would say that the 1,500 hours I’ve spent watching Michigan football could have been better spent silently reflecting, connecting with myself, or hell, learning a language or how to play an instrument. But nope, I’m a glutton for punishment. Unfortunately, it is our self-ordained fate of Nothing Ever Good Happening that the 20-year torture we’ve endured in Madison will continue later today. But I’ll be back next week, my hand hovering over the big red button, and so will you.

Michigan 4 (two safeties), Wisconsin 6 (3 safeties)