Dear Diary,

Hello, I'm Misopogon. You may remember me from such entries as "The Decimated Defense," "Tate's a Quarterback, Yo!," and "Can I Get a Hero Up in Here?" It is my intention, Diary, to each week give you the latest and greatest in user-generated content from MGoBlog's Diaries section.

Tim used to do this feature, but with his permission, and because I'm the guy editing them anyway, I am taking over. This will again be a regular feature, probably on the weekends. They will also be shorter – this one's an extended edition to fill in everything that's happened since the last Dear Diary.

So - ahem - Dear Diary,

Sorry I Haven't Written Since July.

Allow me to catch you up on all of the history that's happened in the interim:

Aw, Hellenism

Back in late July, mankind was entering the 2010 season with a sense of wonder as his technology went from the Stone Age (when man could only throw rock), to the Bronze Age, then the Iron Age, The Steel Age, and finally that fateful day that MCalibur announced we had entered a true Dilithium Age.

In these kind days, the world was writ in poetry, and Rich Rod was building a new civilization (Blazefire). But whenever we seemed about to return from our long Odyssey (Mustaches4Michigan), some Angry Michigan [Position]-Hating deity or another would strike man down again (via – who else? - Shredder):

Aye, Rome fell, but thanks to MGauxBleu, it will not be forgotten.

(way more after the jump)

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The Dark Ages

Things got pretty bleak, Diary, and everyone got pretty busy. You see, formerlyanonymous wrote this thing called Inferno-Canto, and rather than reading it in installments (I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX, X and XI), I saved it all up then dedicated all of August and September to catching up. I'm now on the part where John Wayne transforms into a Korean girl:

…and we ascend to the final circle of hell (where I imagine we are given Obi Ezeh and told to tackle Denard Robinsons over and over again -- Owait: Denard plays for us! [pinches self]).

 

The Renaissance

With the emergence of Denard, Rome was Born Again (Coach Schiano), and a few MGoArtists, caught up in the spirit of the times, went beyond the medieval Paint tradition to herald a new age of artistic greatness. They were all front-paged individually, but here's a Louvre worth of MGoMasterpieces:

• monuMentalangelo's A Denard Robinson Action Figure
• mdocatello's Oscar-nominated Denard: The Happening.
• chunkums da Vinci channeling his inner Final Fantasy to come up with the Single Greatest Thing Ever Produced By Man.
• MGauxBleuphael provides the secret to hype videos.

(There's a Renaissance artist named "Splinter" too, right?)

 

The Enlightenment

The Mathlete made perhaps the single most useful chart in MGoHistory (above). It looks kind of like Michigan's helmets, and also tells people who coach Denard Robinsons when to go for it on 4th down.

MCalibur got bumped so hard for his Blue Moon, Redux, which looks at turnovers and decides Michigan 2010 will get better by not being ridiculously unlucky, and Iowa will be worse by not being ridiculously lucky (MCalibur also created a new, better way to calculate QB play, and produced this while fall-down drunk, in case you were wondering if the Lady of the Lake, clad in the purest shimming Samite, actually held aloft this guy's brain from the bosom of the water.).

Enjoy Life took this turnovers stuff one step further with a three-part study of turnovers and how they affect the game, following up each subsequent week of the season.

Six Zero completed his off-season series of interviews with this site's most prolific bloggers, concluding with a one-on-one with the MGo-man himself.

Next, larsonlo created a revolution in education with his Football Fundamentals series of online courses. To get your degree, the courses are available below:

• FF 101: Intro to Football Fundamentals: 1.) Syllabus and Basics; 2.) Offense; 3.) Defense; 4.) Offensive Line; 5.) Receivers
• FF 201: The 3-3-5 Defense: 1.) Advantages/Disadvantages; 2.) Against Tight Formations

And Misopogon (that's me!) tried to allay fears about Free Safety by going on a Campbell-ian hero journey of the postion's recent past. In Act II all went to hell, then Act III was posted mere minutes before the start of the season, and (despite the lack of Ewoks) nobody read it.
 

That's okay; it's still incomplete and outdated because it's got a lot of stuff about Vlad Emilien's speed in there and he doesn't play for Michigan. An update with 100-percent more Vinopal is in the offing.

Modernism, Post-Modernism, Post-Post Modernism, Posting Posts in a Post-Post Office World, and Post Routes

Then the Big~Ten annexed Nebraska (M-Dog makes a funny), and touched off the War to End All Wars over conference realignment, the bloodiest front being the attempt by Huns to make Michigan-Ohio State a non-counting game in early October that's played six times per decade (or at least that's what the propaganda said). Yet from among this Lost Generation who fought in the darkest days of the Great War would flower some of the greatest literature of the age, e.g. Coach Schiano-emingway's Memories of The Game, in which two titanic programs faced each other every November, and then it rained.

jajaja23 brought an MGoNation back from the brink by hacking into Goggle Wave and bringing us a five-part series of conversations between our coaches and players:

• Quarterbacks
• Coaches
• Secondary
• Big Ten Expansion
• What's Left of the Secondary (pictured)

And then, when Hal-like irreverence wasn't enough to break the malaise, saveferris went with Mario (obligatory Infinite Jest reference of the week) by reminding us there are things about this program that transcend recruiting, turnovers and wins, like a man walking.

That about catches us up to the present day. If you want to know the future, Diary, talk to the One Who Knows. I'm moving on to Indiana week.

The Half-Awesomest Thing Ever:

On Monday, Meeechigan Dan used his diary called Two Face to compare OSU and Michigan's offensive talent:

…against performance, the key being that despite a notable disparity in guru rating for our respective starters, we wouldn't want to trade our offense for theirs. Obviously, RR can coach offence, so Dan asked the potent question on every Wolverine's mind: "If he can coach the O, why not the D?"

In came resident MGoCoach steve sharik with a speculative, albeit intriguing answer:

I believe that Coach Rod loves offense and wants to run a program and coach offense at the same time. I believe that he was overly concerned about installing his offensive system when he got here more than building a total program. You can see it in practice priorities and you saw it in recruiting priorities, and I believe you saw it in hiring defensive assistants.

I believe that the most successful head coaches are managers, not coordinators who completely delegate one side of the ball. To make the next step from great coach to Hall of Fame coach, I believe Coach Rod needs to let go of the offense and let his excellent assistants (McGee, Smith, Dews, Jackson) run that show.

The other comments for M-Dan's diary are well worth your time.

For sparking the most interesting debate in awhile, and for that thing where Brutus gets punched in the kisser, Meeechigan Dan (three e's) is your Diarist of the Week.

The Coming Attraction:

Some excellent diaries were posted this week to get you ready for Indiana. BlueSeoul's Scouting Indiana (in brief), which includes the image above, gives us a preview of the Pistol Offense they run, as well as the Hoosiers' 3/4 defense and kind of silly new uniforms (on this: wait 'till you get a load of the Spartans' new duds).

For stat-heads, Enjoy Life put together his weekly National Rankings Update, etc., which if you're not statistically inclined may look like an airplane cockpit. In slightly more comprehensible numbers was mistersuits's bumped Our Defense, Their Offense – numbers offer hope!, which basically states that our offense being a constant (really good) against anybody, the power and execution of opponents' offenses will determine those games.

This Week in Things That Are Weekly:

Some users this fall (including some mentioned above) have begun regular weekly series to add to previews, UFR, etc.

MGoDiarist Extraordinaire The Mathlete, caretaker of the holy database, doles out the PAN (points above normal) to predict bloodshed:

This should be another bloodbath on the ground. No matter how you slice it, Michigan is really good at running the ball and Indiana hasn’t been great at stopping it and they have played some terrible teams. Based on the numbers this is projected to be between a 9 and 15 point advantage for Michigan.

Diary, don't tell anyone, but one day I plan to hack The Mathlete's computer, steal this database, and use it to write the definitive predictive model for recruiting classes based on star rating. I would then sell it to jamiemac, who would use it to predict the score of every college football game to within 3 points, and we would make a fortune, which we would then use to take over the world. Once we own Earth, we will all get large TVs and awesome cars and make Buckeyes feed us grapes…

[sigh]

Oriental Andrew's "Down with OPP" takes us to our next opponents' press conferences. User monuMental (pictured) uses his artistic voyez to paint your desktop. And for you fans of bad football, stubob's Ugly Game of the Week gives you the full rundown of upcoming pillow fights. jamiemac has the take from the guys with the financial incentive to be more accurate than a Freep columnist.

Etc.

User danross asks if Michigan's start to 2010 is the best 4-game offensive performance in modern Michigan history (spoiler: it is). Drakeep's Whoa! Not So Fast My Friend: Indiana and Rash's two-part series on Tempo-Free stats attempt to find a superior situational offensive proficiency stat to red-zone efficiency. West Texas Blue shows why Will Campbell is actually kind of exactly on track to be good (damn you burned redshirt). Wonk says true freshmen can punt, so long as they can punt and/or own space empires. And JLo interviews a guy from ESPN about getting video online, how the network skates around gambling, why LeBron's thing was aired (spoiler: it's $$$) and Erin Andrews's understanding of the Internet.

Keep penning 'em, carcajous. And if you're wondering why your commas are suddenly in strange places while "it's" and "its" are used appropriately, that was me.