[Paul Sherman]

PUNT

By Bryan MacKenzie

This has been a long week. The year 2016 has revealed and highlighted myriad cracks in an American society straining under stresses from all sides, and this week feels like the shattering culmination of those problems. Fortunately, today gives us an opportunity to return to a simpler time. A happier time. An Iowa time.

We return to a time when our playbooks, like our lives, were simpler. We didn't need five hundred channels, eleven types of avocados, and six different types of running plays. No, sir. Football was created as a union between an inside zone and an outside zone, and there was a time when we respected and honored that.

It was a time of honesty. People looked each other in the eye, and a man's word was as good as his signature in blood (which was how real men signed things). There weren't any efforts to deceive each other, or to try to cheat our fellow man. If a team lined up to run a zone left, you could rely on them to run a zone left. 

It was a time of greater economic certainty. There was a time when a man could come out of the humble beginnings of a Cleveland Browns position coach, get a job with a company, and keep that job for the next thirty years. They were good jobs, too, and they paid well. I know $4.5 million per year doesn't sound like that much to our jaded modern eyes, but there was a time when that was a solid living wage. And you knew that ten years from now, you would still have a job.

It was a time when people recognized that progress needs to come at a reasonable pace. A man shouldn't get out ahead of the sensibilities of the day. The play clock gives us all time for reflection, and only a fool would ignore such a precious gift.

It was a time when we recognized vices for the weaknesses they were. Gambling is the lazy man's shortcut to the fruits of a heartier man's hard work and determination. If you can't run the ball into a stacked box, don't take the easy way out by trying to throw over the top. That's just avoiding your problems, son. And I don't care where you are on the field; if you don't gain those ten yards in three plays, you haven't earned that first down. Punt and play defense, and work a little harder the next time.

There was a time when people understood that slow and steady wins the race. And while some modern revisionists allege that "slow" is literally the dumbest possible approach to any race ever, those people are probably nerds who put more emphasis on "numbers" on a "spreadsheet" than they do on gut instincts, gumption. and grit. Or they are communists. Probably both.

Analytics geeks say Michigan is going to trounce Iowa. So do the elitist bourgeoisie in Las Vegas. But as we've seen this week, those people don't know shit.  Iowa 7, Michigan 6

COUNTERPUNT

by Nick RoUMel

Road trip. Driving west, the landscape opening up and flattening out. If you were judging by its billboards, they’re into adult bookstores and fireworks. If by their menus, pork chops.

Hello Iowa, with your straight stretches of highway and plowed over cornfields. Hello to the Michigan caravan, beeping and waving on I-80. Hello to road music, blaring Bailey’s “Who’s got it Better Than Us?” and Pop Evil’s “In The Big House”, among a menagerie of shuffle play from Led Zeppelin to Alicia Keys to Vulfpeck. Hello to the Quad Cities, and the Homewood Suites in the middle of a desolate savannah, one hour east of Iowa City, the closest we could manage, even though we made our reservations two months ago. Dammit.

This is America. Crazy and all over the place: from serious, to porn, explosions, and football. Because if it weren’t for such distractions, we would go mad.

And what better distraction this year than Michigan football?

Week after week, nobody’s got it better than us. Michigan has gone from the depths of despair, almost as deep as this year’s Notre Dame or Michigan State misery, to #2/#3 in the country. It’s pretty exciting stuff. When I think about Michigan football, I’m not dwelling on my problems, or the rest of life. I’m just geeked, distracted and happy. Wouldn’t it be great if we won it all?

Can we do it? What does the Punt say, at the top of this page? He wrings his hands about predictions. I agree. It was reinforced this week that predictions are meaningless. Whether you call them predictions, polls, or cosmic ESP messages from another dimension, they have one thing in common: it’s all guesswork. Example: Bo would have these amazing teams, that would steamroll Big Ten opponents 45-3 and 56-7 and be poised to go #1, then go somewhere like Minnesota or Purdue as a 28-point favorite, and lose. Completely unexpectedly.

Nobody knows anything. As they say, “That’s why you play the game.”

What we pundits do, instead of making predictions, is crafting scenarios. “If” Iowa were to win, this is how it would have to happen. We’d go into Kinnick Stadium for a night game. The fans would be loud and drunk. They would have a “Hawk-Out” (people would bring their trained pet hawks). We’d get so intimidated that Wilton Speight, who is generally poised, tall, and happy, would throw four interceptions and fumble twice. J-Pep would get attacked by a random hawk and run the wrong way on a punt return.

On their side, Iowa would run a dull but disciplined game plan, with quarterback C.J. “I’m not as good as Rudock, and never will be” Beathard leading a boring but effective attack, sometimes gaining 5 to 6 yards per play, and even remembering to hand off to Akrum Wadley once in a while. They might score 14 or even—heavens!—21 points behind the drunken, hawk-tending crowd. And they would win, under that scenario.

Of course. What a sweet, simple, middle America scenario. Except for one thing: it is absolutely not going to happen. I can say this as confidently as Cassandra, or Nostradamus, who were more accurate than Nate Silver and @twosixtynine will ever be. Do you know why? Because nobody’s got it better than us. Nobody.

MICHIGAN 38, IOWA 10