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

Michigan fans have been lucky in one respect for the last few years. For a lot of teams, defense is something you just watch in order to get back to watching the offense. The offense is where good things happen. The offense is the entertainment and the source of joy. Often the best you can realistically hope for with the defense is “nothing goes terribly wrong.” If the offense is your favorite show, the defense is the commercial breaks.

Michigan, though, has had a generally enjoyable defense to watch, even if Michigan is winning comfortably. The drama of “is Devin Bush going to kill someone?” or “will Southwest Central Technical College crack 100 yards of offense?” has sustained more than one Michigan fan through many a Maryland game.

But this week… this week will be different. When the defense is on the field, you’re not going to enjoy it. Because, as I’m sure you know, Army runs the triple option out of the flexbone.

Treat you like a princess

Again. And again. And again.

[After THE JUMP: Treat you like a princess]

Treat you like a princess

It’s the same thing. Over and over and over. You get why they’re doing what they’re doing… but good sweet lord WHY?

You can’t make it better by having offensive success. Because as soon as you score, you have to give the ball right back. And you know what happens then.

Treat you like a princess

The worst part? You can’t get them to do anything else. With most opponents, you can, with enough effort, get them out of what they want to do. You can’t do that with Army. Is it working? Cool. They’re gonna keep running it. Stop them a few times? Cool. They’re gonna keep running it.

They might change things up from time to time. They’ll run some other stuff out of the same flexbone formation. The occasional pass, the occasional reverse. But while it will be different, it won’t be DIFFERENT different.

And then they’ll go right back to

Treat you like a princess

I’m sure there are reasons that advertising uses the kind of repetition and saturation approaches they use. There is an accumulation effect that makes the whole more than the value of any one spot. I’m sure it’s called synergistic brand accretion or collaborative collocation or some other buzzword salad, but it isn’t that different than running the triple option. It only works the way it works because it’s 90% of what they run.

Treat you like a princess

Army isn’t that great. But they know exactly who they are and what they want to do. The difference will be that I can’t see Army stopping Michigan’s offense enough to allow the full weight of their scheme to take hold. So while I’ve come around on Michigan winning this game comfortably on the scoreboard, your eyeballs may not agree. Michigan 38, Army 9

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COUNTERPUNT

By Internet Raj
@internetraj

Each generation of Americans shares its own singular trauma. Our grandparents endured the one-two combo of a Great Depression that decimated the economy and a World War that threatened to reshape the globe into an image of untold evil. Our parents grappled with the horrors of the Vietnam War and the attendant fears of Cold War brinksmanship. Millennials, despite what the Internet will try to convince you otherwise, have suffered through their own fair share of adversity. Millennials have borne the brunt of a devastating global recession, have been saddled with crippling and unprecedented student debt, and will likely be the generation ultimately forced to reckon with a truly existential climate crisis. And I’m confident Generation Z will confront its own threats, whether it’s the Fortnite Rebellion of 2028 or the ensuing Juul Uprising of 2030.

But there is one more generation-spanning devastating hurdle we barely cleared that bears mention here. A shared trauma that at best will be relegated to a footnote of history and at worst be entirely lost to the tides of time: the pre-1999 computer mouse. More specifically, the cursed “ball mouse.” To this day, I cannot recall any other device that incited within me more anger, frustration, and annoyance. I am still plagued by visions of repeatedly smashing my old Compaq ball mouse—blinded by white-hot rage—against our custom laminated mousepad featuring a family portrait we took at Sav-On Drugs. The problem wasn’t the mouse itself — it was that godforsaken ball.

Army Football

The desultory tracking ball was a magnet for grime, friction, and utter chaos. It would collect specs of dirt like Thanos and the Infinity Stones and then, with a snap, poof, you were sentenced to a fate of a jittery cursor. It was at this point you would be forced to conduct a rudimentary form of technological open-heart surgery: remove the ball, clean the ball, reinsert the ball. And the mouse would work again, at least for a while. Until it didn’t. This unfortunate second instance of jammed-up-balls induced frustration afflicting my early teens was further exacerbated by the Pre-Scroll-Wheel Era of computing mice, a profoundly dark period when one was forced to cajole a tracking ball gunked up with dust and debris to navigate to a preposterously small scroll bar.

Today, the computer ball mouse is an anachronistic device, a vestige of an era best forgotten. In 1999, the optical mouse was invented and we as a society have largely never looked back.

Laser-tracking that works on any surface, including glass. Dynamic frictionless scroll wheel. Sculpted to ergonomic perfection. This is the Alabama of computer peripherals.

But on Saturday, we will take another glance back to this hellscape of an era. Because Michigan will be playing Army and choosing to schedule Army is like choosing to plug a Gateway ball mouse into a Cray Supercomputer. The Black Knights’ chief strategy is to gunk up the game of football with an infuriating cocktail of wasting as much time as possible on offense, diving at opposing defensive lines’ knees, and praying that the officials will respect the flag so much in the presence of troops that they will refuse to throw one on the field.

On offense, Army’s retrograde triple option attack stirs memories of one of those mid-90’s Dell mice that you connect to your computer via a trapezoid shaped port with approximately 9,000 little pins that is inexplicably buttressed by an additional two twist-in screws. It will be agonizingly slow, methodical, and brutal. There won’t be quick, explosive plays that have come to define modern day college football. Instead, think death by a thousand ACL tears.

On defense, Army runs something called a “404”. I have no idea what that means, but I hope it resembles the “404” defense we used to run under Greg Robinson.

Michigan too ran the “404” defense from 2008 through 2010

This is going to be a frustrating game, one that will conjure memories of smashing an old Packard Bell mouse in a fit of fury. And, by the end of it, I’ll remove my eyes much like those old tracking balls, wash them free of the Army-inflicted gunk, and reinsert them just in time for the Badgers.

Michigan: 28, Army: 24