PUNT

By Bryan MacKenzie
@Bry_Mac

My Fellow Americans,

Well, we gave it a good shot, but it doesn’t look like it’s going to be enough this time. So, it is with a heavy heart that I announce that I have officially conceded defeat.

I have called my thirteen opponents, and professed my appreciation and best wishes for all of them going forward. Most were extremely supportive, and wished me nothing but the best. I had a little trouble understanding Wisconsin and Minnesota, but that’s been the case since I got here. Maryland was particularly sympathetic.

From the beginning, our platform was clear: Border Security. Restoring our waterways. Independence and Self-Determination. Student Loans and Greater Academic Opportunities. Drug Use. And I think these issues resonated with the people. By the end of our campaign, you could barely utter the name “Rutgers” without eliciting a smile. And the energy at our campaign events was palpable.

[After THE JUMP: Speech Speech Speech]

We started off so strong. We won two of our first four B1G conference basketball games, and beat Michigan in our second-ever conference football game. Michigan! Can you believe it? And after staff shake-up in 2015, I thought we brought in some real go-getters who were tough, smart, and didn’t throw basketballs at our heads on a regular basis. Everything seemed to be coming together. All of the pundits—and I mean ALL of them—spoke openly of a dynasty in the making.

Still, it wasn’t enough. Our message of hope, more hope, and hope straining credulity wasn’t enough to compete with our opponents. They had all the structural advantages of the establishment elite: resources, infrastructure, talent, offensive lines… and in the end, those proved too much to overcome. We’ve run the numbers, and with a conference winning percentage of .200 in football and .150 in basketball, it has become clear that we no longer have a path to victory. Any victory.

/crowd shrugs, nods.

In some ways, they were so close. (Barron)

I would like to thank my running mate, the New York Cable Subscriber Footprint. He has been a steadfast companion on this entire journey. He was actually the one who convinced me to get into this race. He was our campaign’s primary fundraising force, and he was really the source of energy on the campaign trail. Heck, sometimes I wonder if I would have even been IN this race if it weren’t for him.

/lighthearted chuckle

I would also like to thank all of you. If nothing else, I hope this campaign allowed you to become closer with your fellow man and woman, and to learn that we can cross party lines and embrace each other in a spirit of bipartisanship.

But this campaign wasn’t about me, and it wasn’t about the New York Cable Subscriber Footprint. And it wasn’t about you. And it wasn’t about the tens of millions of Big Ten fans throughout the Midwest and Mid-Atlantic. Hell, it wasn’t even about football or basketball, or athletics generally, or even academics. Honestly, I can’t even remember what this campaign was about. I’m not even 100% sure where I am right now, or how I got here. My point? I don’t know. Do you? I… uh…

/flips through cue cards

Oh, right. I remembered. This campaign was a campaign of ideas, and particularly one idea: that anyone, anywhere, can have value as a member of the Big Ten if we as a people decide that to be true. And I still believe that, despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary. I don’t know what I’ll do next, but rest assured, I’m not going away, and you haven’t seen the last of ol’ Rutgers.

…

Please clap.

Michigan 87.3%
Rutgers 11.4%
(97% of precincts reporting)

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

COUNTERPUNT

By Internet Raj
@internetraj

There’s something particularly insidious about growing up in an upper-class suburb while being squarely middle-class yourself: you occupy a unique rung in the social hierarchy wherein you are simultaneously privileged enough to be economically secure and have no real reason to gripe, but also constantly reminded about all the cool shit everyone else has that you don’t. My parents are extremely hard-working first generation immigrants who sacrificed everything for their children, including moving to a neighborhood that was beyond their means just so we could attend first class public schools. And while I can fully appreciate that now through the wisdom of adulthood and thoughtful reflection, my perspective was appropriately warped when viewed through the lens of an ungrateful middle schooler.

Middle school trends 1990’s were fast, furious, fleeting and almost always expensive. Limited edition Pokémon cards, Tamagotchis, Pogs, Fireball yo-yo’s, Beanie Babies, devil sticks, Game Boy Advance, Soap shoes—the list is longer than any fully-starched popped collar polo from Express. But I’ll always remember one trend that swept my middle school by storm: the Adidas three-stripe tear-away snap pants.

The ultimate middle school drip in 1998.

Looking back, the fact that athletic warmup pants took middle schools around the nation by storm is absolutely preposterous. But the fact remains that anyone who was anyone at my middle school had ‘em. Naturally, I begged my mom to buy me a pair and—as was the case whenever I made an impassioned plea for cutting edge fashion—she made her traditional pilgrimage to TJ Maxx. While I am confident my mom made a valiant effort, she ultimately returned home with a $9.99 generic brand version of the Adidas pants I so desperately coveted. In an apparent attempt to skirt intellectual property law, the pants featured a glaringly blasphemous extra fourth stripe. Summoning what would turn out to be misplaced courage, I decided to roll the dice and rock my new random Chinese brand pants at school the next day, only to be unforgivingly roasted by my classmates. I love my parents but damn, sending your kind to a middle school full of yuppies with four-stripe knockoff Adidas pants is an insanely savage move.

Much like my mom, Jim Delaney and the Big Ten went shopping in 2014 to address that era’s own en-vogue trend: conference expansion. Everyone was doing it, but instead of just sitting this one out and playing it safe, Delaney decided to barrel ahead with complete disregard of the consequences of his actions. Delaney eschewed the sexy Big XII brand names like “Longhorns” or “Sooners”, and instead visited the Big East TJ Maxx, where he went straight to the clearance rack. It was there that Delany found his own brutally hideous fourth stripe: the Rutgers Scarlet Knights.

Rutger Tag, retained in case customer service allows pity returns

Rutgers is uglier than any knock-off brand of warm-up pants could ever be. This season, the Scarlet Knights boast an overall record of 1-8 and are winless in conference. Last season, Rutgers finished 4-8. In 2016, Michigan roasted Rutgers by a scoring margin (78-0) that would even the most hardened middle school bully would consider over-the-line. In 2015–one year after being added to the Big Ten—Rutgers head coach Kyle Flood was suspended for three games for harassing a professor and five players were arrested and ultimately kicked off the team for their involvement in violent crime.

This column is traditionally supposed to provide some measure of analysis of the week’s game and conclude with a score prediction. But there are some games you just want to close your eyes, forget about, and quickly move on from. Later today, Michigan is going to have to wear its own version of embarrassing pair of four stripe pants and while it will surely come out victorious, it’s still Rutger. Nothing can make this pretty, not even that dope shirt from Hot Topic.

Let’s just get out unscathed and get on to next week, where Michigan will get to try on a marginally more chic pair of pants: JNCO jeans shipped direct from Bloomington.

Michigan: Metal Pogs slammer, Rutgers: Capri Sun straw that was broken when trying to break the pouch’s seal