PUNT

By Smoothitron
(@Smoothitron)

As a “Wow, cool uniforms,” fake Michigan fan raised in Indiana, the Notre Dame rivalry has always meant something slightly different to me than most of the fanbase, as theirs were the only fans I interacted with regularly. Sure, there is a smattering of OSU fans in the area; you see them on the side of the road whenever you roll by one of the 10-car pileups they created, but it’s rare you encounter one face-to-face unless he doesn’t like that you yielded to that school bus and follows you home.

Emulating a potato has its drawbacks in certain circumstances

MSU fandom is near nonexistent here. The only State fan I knew personally in Indiana was my 6th grade gym teacher. He was a 6’0”/350-lb Hoke-shaped man, the high school’s D-Line coach, and the only teacher I’ve ever had that would swear in class daily. Wearing his trademark socks and sandals, he would take on 11-year-olds in badminton and flex on us when we dove out of the way of his overhead smashes. He was also the star of a secret yearly tradition at the end of the first day of school. Coach would peel out of the teacher’s parking lot with his truck’s tailgate open and the hundreds of empty beer cans he had tossed out his window into the bed over the summer would tumble out onto the asphalt as the ag and shop teachers hooted and hollered. Knowing one MSU fan was all I needed to learn what that fanbase is all about.

[After THE JUMP: Bobby Knight shirtless.]

Notre Dame fans were common though, at least until New Year’s at midnight when they all spontaneously forget what a football is, dust off their Bobby Knight anime body pillows, and flip their starter jackets inside out to reveal cream and crimson.

If I had to view it in my mind’s eye you have to see it too.

In the most recent dozen entries of the series, Michigan and Notre Dame had a lovely gentlemen’s agreement to play early in the season so that the winner’s fanbase could go through September and October pretending the year wouldn’t end in overwhelming disappointment. This year, however, the vagaries of getting the series back on wheels after a brief hiatus has resulted in a midseason tilt where both team’s playoff hopes are close to gone already. Michigan needs plenty of help to even sniff the B1G title game, and even if Notre Dame manages to finish 11-1, something tells me that their best win being “@ Michigan” won’t be turning too many heads on the selection committee.

So, with few national implications and not even a September Championship on the line, we’re going to have to count on the game itself to make this one fun to watch. Luckily for us, this series has been pretty good about that, and as a child of the Amaker era, I’m pretty good at ignoring where Michigan sits in the national picture while looking for the small victories.

Michigan 87-84 2OT

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COUNTERPUNT

By Internet Raj
@internetraj

When you hear the words “Tom Cruise” and “YouTube” it’s only understandable that your mind reflexively conjures up images of the diminutive but maniacally explosive action star on the set of The Oprah Winfrey Show in the spring of 2005. In a spontaneous outpouring of love for his new girlfriend, Katie Holmes, Cruise unshackled himself from strictures of all conceivable social norms and leapt onto Oprah’s couch. As we all know, that leap would soon be immortalized in the annals of pop culture.

Tom Cruise, still looking more stable than Brian Kelly on the sidelines.

Cruise’s jarring behavior was immediately thrust into the gulf stream of internet virality where he was roundly mocked via the usual cyber accoutrements: remixes, memes, gifs, and clickbait slideshows. Cruise, a once bulletproof and universally adored Hollywood heavyweight, suddenly became late-night talk show fodder and a caricature of a deranged, possessed madman.

Everyone with at least a modicum of pop-culture awareness knows about Cruise’s bizarre misadventures on the Oprah set. But far fewer are aware of a much lower key but equally iconic Cruise public appearance one year later on the set of 106 & Park, the venerated hip hop and R&B music video countdown show, that aired on B.E.T. While Cruise’s appearance 2016 appearance failed to elicit even a fraction of the fevered reaction as his couch-jumping antics, it too has been (fortunately) immortalized by YouTube, in an upload featuring a paltry 56,676 views as of this column’s publishing.

Yup. You aren’t imagining anything—that’s actually Tom Cruise, in the middle of Harlem, dancing to It’s Goin Down by Yung Joc. In the opening seconds of the video, you brace yourself for a cringe-inducing trainwreck. As the chorus of the 2006 hit song begins playing over the loudspeakers, one of the 106 & Park hosts implores the clearly out-of-his-element Cruise to “come on!” while her co-host adds fuel to the fire with a cruelly intimidating “You ready, Tom?” At this point, Cruise begins to bob his body up and down in what one can only assume is an attempt at dancing but which far more closely resembles the involuntary bodily convulsions from a backroom Scientology electroshock therapy. The camera then mercilessly pans to his knees, which appear to be literally buckling (off rhythm of course) under the pressure of this extemporaneous dance challenge. “This man is going to flame out,” you think to yourself.

But then something magical happens. Fueled by the encouraging crowd chanting his name, Cruise eschews his nervous, tentative demeanor and begins to exaggerate his movements, his wooden gyrations imbued by a newfound confidence. He’s still wildly offbeat, sure, but he’s got a charismatic swag to him. At the 0:26 mark, he hits us with an absolutely diabolical head bob as he flashes his 1,000-megawatt smile. The hosts double over in disbelief. The crowd is in a tizzy. Cruise himself appears to snap out of his possessed state at the 0:32 mark when he tentatively smiles, stops dancing, and shuffles back to the edge of the stage all while sheepishly nodding to the “Go Tom!” chants.

After his dalliance with hip hop dancing at 106 & Park, Cruise steered his once veering career back on course, starring in iconic roles in movies like Tropic Thunder (where he showcased some equally brazen moves), Edge of Tomorrow and, of course, the Mission Impossible franchise.

Jim Harbaugh’s career has borne a striking resemblance to the career trajectory of Tom Cruise. We all remember his glory days at Stanford and San Francisco—the Risky Business, Top Gun, and A Few Good Men days. But those memories increasingly feel like fading parchment scrolls of an ancient past that will never be rekindled. In the meantime, we’ve all collectively spent the last five years on Oprah’s couch looking like frenetic lunatics in the grips of a shady, pseudo-religious cult.

Part of me wanted to just embrace the negativity. Open my arms and let the suffocating tendrils of BPONE envelope me. But last week, in that second half against Penn State, when the team could have just turtled into yet another trainwreck, I saw a spark. I saw an incredibly earnest, enthusiastic, and encouraging (yet very off-beat) knee bob. I saw some tentative shoulder shimmies.

The UTL crowd is going to be behind this team tonight, serenading them with the equivalent of the “Go Tom!” chants. Now let’s hit ‘em with that Yung Joc. The rules of this column demand one person predict the win and the other a loss. But to hell with those rules. And to hell with Notre Dame.

Michigan 24, Notre Dame 17