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

A lot has changed in the 168 hours since we last spoke. I predicted a loss last week, but no one predicted that. We entered with the game with a vague foreboding, but we exited… well, actually, we didn’t exit. We got shoved, hard and ingloriously, into the Black Pit of Negative Expectations. And there we reside.

[After THE JUMP: Let’s explore!]

The difference, though, is that this isn’t the version of the pit where we constantly fear for the moment when the floor caves in, and where every positive thing is diminished and every negative thing enhanced. We’re used to BPONE, like a raven perched just above our chamber door, answering every hope, fear, and question with a threatening “eight-and-four.” We don’t know whether we want it to stay or fly away, but it reminds us that nice things are temporary and agony is always one false step away.

Lost contain

This isn’t that. This isn’t The Raven. The floor isn’t precarious. It dun’ collapsed. This here is some Pit and the Pendulum stuff. We aren’t sitting in a sad but well-lit bedroom in a state of passive ennui because our Lenore-like sadness over a losing streak to Ohio State. We aren’t seeking higher answers. No, this isn’t hypothetical. We’re in a hole in the ground. It’s pitch black. We don’t know whether the next step will make things better or worse, but either way, we’re wondering when the next torture will arrive and what will form it will take. Our worries have been whittled down to two: is there any way out of here, and can it get any worse.

Still more modern and comfortable than Spartan Stadium

But here’s the good news: we have only adopted the darkness. Rutgers was born in it. Molded by it. To them, the light is nothing but blinding, which may explain why they can’t complete a pass more than about three yards downfield. Michigan has been bad in the short-term, but Rutgers has been hanging out in the pit since 2015, and has been pit-adjacent almost continuously since approximately 1869.

This year, Rutgers has the potential to be even worse than they were last year, which says a lot when they were 1-11 last year with blowout losses to Kansas, Buffalo, and Illinois. Their only win is over the worst team in the FCS level of college football, and they trailed in that game 21-7 at one point. In their loss to Iowa, they threw for 47 yards on 27 attempts, which was the 11th time in the last three-and-a-quarter seasons where they have thrown for fewer than three yards per attempt. That’s 28% of their games. And then they lost to a Boston College team who lost by 24 points to Kansas the week before.

Michigan can’t get out of the pit this week. This isn’t that kind of game. But they can sure take care of this smaller but more immediate problem by immuring these drunk jester-hat-wearing buffoons behind a brick wall. If we’re feeling generous, we’ll leave them with a cask of something nice. Michigan 41, Rutgers 6.

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COUNTERPUNT

By Internet Raj
@internetraj

 

By all accounts, the 2007 film The Bucket List should be a completely unremarkable and forgettable exercise in prefab sentimental cinema. The film, which follows two terminally ill men embarking on one “final” road trip with a wish list of things to do before they die, was universally panned by reviewers. Esteemed New York Times film critic Wesley Morris casually dismissed the movie saying, “It's impossible to mistake the movie for inspired.” Meanwhile, Roger Ebert, who was dying of cancer at the time his review, issued the following warning: “I urgently advise hospitals: Do not make the DVD available to your patients; there may be an outbreak of bedpans thrown at TV screens.” Chris Vognar of the Dallas Morning News echoed the sentiments of most of his contemporaries when he pronounced, “Bucket’s rush to sentiment leads you to think the film, not its characters, is soon to expire.”

I disagree.

The Bucket List does in fact inspire. And it certainly was not doomed to “soon expire.” In fact, I would go so far as to proclaim that The Bucket List has perhaps contributed more to our contemporary culture than any other piece of post-2000 art solely by lending its titular phrase to our collective consciousness.

That’s right. Those 107 minutes of milquetoast banter between Morgan Freeman and Jack Nicholson—which scored exactly zero awards and garnered no accolades—invented the phrase “bucket list.” The phrase we all casually use with regularity, as if it was engrained in modern English vernacular since the turn of the last century? It was created by a movie with a goddamn 42% aggregate critics’ score on Rotten Tomatoes.

When I first shared this theory on social media, I thought it was a fun nugget of pop culture trivia that would amuse and hopefully surprise some people. To me, it was absolutely preposterous to think that a film with such barely registerable culture cachet could have had such a disproportional impact on our society. “Bucket list” has entrenched itself, on a truly global scale, as a commonly understood and immediately recognizable everyday phrase. But what happened next surprised me. I was met with a wave of steadfast denial and outright hostile opposition from a mass of people that I am certain had fallen victim to the Mandela Effect. Most of these responses were some formulation of “I was using ‘bucket list’ long before 2007.” I was confident that was just not true. So I did what any true journalist would do: I embarked on a tiring, comprehensive, and ironclad 15 minutes of deep dive research.

My findings are summarized here.

First, as a purely clarificatory matter, I am not claiming that The Bucket List invented the phrase “kick the bucket.” I emphatically concede that “kick the bucket” has existed for decades and is surely the inspiration of “the bucket list.” I suspect a non-insignificant portion of my detractors are confounding these phrases and my claim. That does not change the fact that “bucket list” is an independently popular and widespread phrase in itself.

Second, if “bucket list” was even a remotely popular phrase, it would have left some modicum of a cyber imprint predating 2007. That has demonstrably been disproven by an internet boutique, specializing in this type of evidence: Google.

Third, even if one remains unconvinced by the phrase’s lack of internet footprint, then certainly the phrase “bucket list” would appear in books predating 2017. Well, it doesn’t—outside of the purely distinct, independent use of “bucket list” in the context of computer programming, there does not exist widespread usage of the phrase in English language books:

Finally, let’s hear from Justin Zackham, the screenwriter of the decidedly middling film, himself. Zackham is on the record as having coined the phrase (WSJ ($) and Slate). For the sake of completeness and academic rigor, I reached out to Mr. Zackham myself, but he has yet to respond as of publishing time. To be fair, I sent the message 4 hours ago to an Instagram account I’m not even sure is his.

This is all to say The Bucket List invented its titular phrase. Yes, it’s wild. Yes, it’s unbelievable. Yes, it’s true.

And one day, when you’re old and gray, when you have creaking joints and a bathroom shelf full of orange-tinted prescription pill containers, when your ever-deteriorating motor skills cause you to spill your full glass of water on the carpet and your grandchild looks up at you and says, “Grandpa you just Rutgered” and you smile at them and tell them that word came from the really bad college sports team and they roll their eyes and retort, “No way a phrase that popular came from something so crappy”…well at least you can’t say I didn’t warn you.

Michigan 77, Rutgers 3.