Punt-Counterpunt: 2022 Illinois
Illinois Links: Preview, The Podcast, FFFF Offense (chart), FFFF Defense (chart)
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
People love outlandish hypothetical matchups. Okay, I may be projecting here. Because *I* love outlandish hypothetical matchups.
I’m not talking about “would Michael Jordan beat LeBron James one-on-one.” I’m talking about “how many titles would the Detroit Lions have won if the rest of the NFL had to wear ballet slippers” or “would Waterloo have turned out differently if Batman fought for Napoleon.”
It’s an impulse that dates back thousands of years, and it hasn’t always been hypothetical. In the Roman gladiatorial games, they used to pit random fighter styles against each other, because why not. They’d throw a retiarius (a dude with a trident and a fishing net) up against a secutor (a heavily armored guy with a big-ass shield). They’d have a lion fight a hippo. Why not. Throw some hyenas in there. Whatever. They were basically Tarantino Bob Ross.
Alternate jerseys used to be much more problematic
(The Romans obviously had some issues to work through. Yes, they built some quality roads. But they were also, as the kids say, a little extra. It’s probably good that we don’t let the Roman Empire control the entertainment industry anymore.)
[After THE JUMP: The skip button.]
I know I’m not alone here. There’s a Reddit page, r/whowouldwin, devoted to this stuff. YouTube has countless videos asking whether, for example, a modern marine platoon could defeat an entire Roman legion, or whether 1 million Spartan warriors could defeat 3,000 T-Rexes (for the record: apparently not). The Discovery Channel has a show called “Animal Face-Off.” And any college student who has ever been drunk or high, or who has been in a room with someone who was drunk or high, has gotten into at least seven argument like this.
The Internet: solving disputes through science
Having a 10-year-old son and an 8-year-old daughter is great for this, because they come up with some really interesting hypotheticals. The audacity and depravity of the young mind is not to be underestimated. Many of their hypotheticals involve animals and the weapons and/or superpowers those animals would possess. It’s also a useful teaching opportunity for kids, wherein you can encourage them to use critical thinking skills. How would the dolphin use the machine gun, as he does not possess opposable thumbs? If you give the hundred ferrets mind-controlled lasers, wouldn’t you have to worry about crossfire? Let’s do some problem solving and help them defeat the sloth in the M1-A1 Abrams Tank.
College football is fantastic at scratching this itch. You get Air Raid teams and hurry-up-no-huddle teams and read option teams and pistol teams and flexbone teams and pro style teams and MANBALL teams and Iowa ‘punting is winning’ teams. You have sunny late summer conditions and hurricane remnants in October and snowy sleety shitty conditions in November. You’ve got uber talented teams and gritty try-hard teams and Rutgery teams. You can slide the dials around and create some truly bizarre and fascinating matchups.
Michigan/Ohio State is a great example this year; Ohio State is built as a passing offense built around their supreme talent advantage at the skill positions. Michigan is a power running team built around the ability to move your ass by force and maneuver. Ohio State is the mounted light cavalry. Michigan is the heavy infantry. Ohio State is the hundred duck-sized horses. Michigan is the horse-sized duck.
A butterfly flaps its wings in New York, and as a result Hassan Haskins rushes for five touchdowns in Ann Arbor
Michigan/Illinois is… not that. Michigan/Illinois is “who would win: a large grizzly bear, or a somewhat smaller grizzly bear?” Illinois is just a less talented, less successful version of Michigan. Their run game is diverse and effective, but not as diverse and effective as Michigan’s. Their line is able to move people, but not as well as Michigan’s. Their running back is fantastic, but not as fantastic as Michigan’s. They move the chains, stay on schedule, and grind their opponents with efficiency, just not as well as Michigan. Their defense is good, but not as good as Michigan’s. They’re Spiderman pointing at a slightly shorter Spiderman.
Sure, a smaller grizzly can, in theory, beat a larger grizzly. But without more information, it isn’t a particularly interesting question. It also won’t provide the one thing we care about most right now: additional information about whether Michigan can beat MechaGodzilla next week. In the meantime, though, we’ll settle for learning that we are indeed the superior grizzly bear, lasers or no.
Michigan 35, Illinois 10
COUNTERPUNT
By Internet Raj
@internetraj
One of the decadent luxuries of modern life is the ability to skip past a lot of the mundane, the annoying and down-right infuriating travails of day-to-day existence. And nothing quite encapsulates this convenience like the deliciously juicy “Skip Intro” button that hovers over the screen on streaming service apps when you start a new episode of a TV show. In a long bygone era, you would have been sentenced to the cruel punishment of actually watching the tedious 49-minute intro title cards for Game of Thrones or the gratingly loud “WAAH WAH WAH WAH WAAAAAAAAAAH” theme song of The Office (the latter of which I remain convinced a rogue Netflix software engineer set at 10x the volume of the rest of episode).
The printing press, the internal combustion engine, Penicillin and this button.
Look, I won’t fault you for dismissing the “Skip Intro” button as a trivial afterthought of a feature, but I feel drunk with power when I smash it. A gluttonous king, lying slouched on his sofa throne, a half-eaten container of Chinese take-out balanced precariously on my pot belly and bobbing up and down with every one of my out-of-shape breaths, one hand sloppily extending the Apple TV remote outwards, poised to skip the intro of my 19th consecutive episode of Sopranos like I am about to order the decapitation of a treasonous royal subject kneeling before me. It’s intoxicating.
But the “Skip Intro” button can be a fickle mistress. For whatever reason, it disappears as quickly as it appears, a fleeting shooting star whose breathtaking light dissolves into the cosmos leaving only darkness behind it. And then you are forced to reckon with the aftermath of your slothful remote control response time: watching the 27 different CGI maps of random public school districts in Westeros unfurl before you.
The average human spends 17% of their life watching this map slowly unfurl
The “Skip Intro” button has several close relatives that provide an equally cathartic time-saving release, most notably the “Skip Ad” button at the beginning of every YouTube video. Of course, YouTube does subjugate you to watch the first 10 seconds of some guy hawking a multi-level marketing scam, Devry University touting its newest degree in how to insert a USB-C connector right-side-up on the first try or some extremely dumb task management app called Monday.com. But you can gleefully cut those ads short once the countdown ticker has hit zero and get back to watching highlights from last year’s 42-27 win for the 95th time.
Then there’s the analogue cousins of these digital time-savers. Things like “TSA Pre-Check” that let you haughtily stroll past the plebes in line at the airport. Using the Starbucks app to order ahead and breeze past all the winding line of suburban moms ready to execute incredibly ornate latte orders. The thrill of receiving your Oral-B electric toothbrush replacement heads using Amazon Prime’s same-day delivery. Modern day society is overflowing with time-saving shortcuts that generations past could only dream of. There was a point in our not-too-distant history that we would still have to call movie theaters and listen to minutes’ long recordings spelling out each and every showtime for every movie! Nowadays, almost every inconvenience is dispensed with and every itch is immediately scratched, probably by some tech company that is losing billions of dollars every quarter but is still somehow solvent.
But alas, there remains a particular class of odious struggles that we must continue to deal with, even today. There’s no way to skip a visit to the dentist. An 18-hour transatlantic flight is still an 18-hour transatlantic flight. There’s no sidestep to the process of taking a paper queue number at the DMV. You can’t fast-forward through the ten years you fully guaranteed a $95 million contract to a head coach with zero track record and who is in completely in over his head (sorry, Mr. Ishbia).
And the biggest disappointment of all: there is no “Skip Illinois” button. As much as you may pretend otherwise, there is no member of this fanbase of sound mind that is fully engaged on today’s game. All eyes are on next week. Today is the annoyingly long theme song. Today is the YouTube ad hawking a for-profit university. Today is a winding security line at Newark. But there’s no skipping it. Which means it will be, inevitably, a frustrating and anxiety-riddled affair. A white-knuckle paranoia-fest that will likely last well into the third quarter, prompting large swaths of the self-hating fanbase cynically muttering to themselves “here we go again, another classic Michigan football letdown.” But we’ll grind through it, likely by a razor’s edge.
And then we’ll have a full 7 days of calamity ahead of us. And there will be no “skip” button for that either. Buckle in, and I’ll see you on the other side.
Michigan 20, Illinois 19
November 19th, 2022 at 7:55 AM ^
Great work as always, gentlemen. Now, back to rewatching Hassan run wild over the evil Buckeyes.
November 19th, 2022 at 8:46 AM ^
I don't see the Buckeyes as light cavalry. More like Mongol cavalry...
November 19th, 2022 at 9:28 AM ^
I don't know about that. The Mongols could do their thing in cold weather.
November 19th, 2022 at 8:07 AM ^
Unfortunately, there is no skip button for the time between my body waking me up for the day and toe-meets leather. Thank you for always making it move a little faster with this great feature.
November 19th, 2022 at 8:08 AM ^
There is actually a sidestep to taking a paper queue number at the DMV nowadays.
November 19th, 2022 at 8:42 AM ^
Absolutely. Online order. I do it every year
November 19th, 2022 at 8:57 AM ^
Mine was to scoop up a handful of paper tickets discarded by the dispenser. Invariably someone had accidentally taken two and dropped the other there. More than once my number came up in first five minutes.
Now I live in a county so small that I can walk right in and talk to a clerk right away.
November 19th, 2022 at 10:31 AM ^
People still go to the DMV?
November 19th, 2022 at 8:13 AM ^
First, Go Blue. Beat Illinois.
Second, both BryMac & I. Raj took a conceptual path today that illuminates for me why their weekly Punt / Counterpoint is always so interesting.
That conceptual path wanders / strolls / runs into an alternate view of the world. We know what we know, we know what's familiar, but every once in a while we see something that's a little different, and our perception expands. And that's what they offer.
Brian Eno claims that's the purpose of art, to show the not normal. Making that claim, he's repeating the old Romantic formula, making the strange familiar, and the familiar strange.
But it applies to more than "art." Comedy also pushes our reset buttons. So does faith. Surgery. Anger. Love.
And football. Or at least the weekly musings of BryMac & I. Raj on Michigan football. They take what we know as a given—Beat Illinois—but then turn the prism slightly so we see something new, something we hadn't considered.
Thanks again, guys, for great work.
[EDIT: Having written this makes me realize they're following in the path Brian and Seth forged, close analysis delivered from odd & comic angles.]
November 19th, 2022 at 8:35 AM ^
Win the game, stay healthy(No dirty Indiana team today). Be Ready to take on the evil Death Star waiting in Columbus. Need the “skip first half” button- 10-10 halftime, 31-10 final.
Go Blue!
November 19th, 2022 at 8:39 AM ^
They use the word oskee but it stands for something
To our success....
Equals the knowledge...
The E stands for effort...
The last E stands for energy
"Oskee wow wow Illinois"
Sorry I was feeling nostalgic for the Tim Beckman years
November 19th, 2022 at 8:54 AM ^
You happen to show this on the first “tobacco free” campus football game. No vaping, no chaw, etc. for fans and head coaches alike. Sorry Jim...zero tolerance.
November 19th, 2022 at 12:17 PM ^
You can't just reference Epic Oskee. Let's go to the video!
November 19th, 2022 at 8:49 AM ^
The standard of excellence continues. Great work!
November 19th, 2022 at 8:51 AM ^
P/CP's well-taken points aside, I've always enjoyed Michigan-Illinois matchups the most (aside from the traditional rivalry games).
I don't know why, just something about their logo, mascot, fan base, etc. that makes me savor beating them into a blue and orange pulp.
So here's to a fresh squeezed three-score victory as prelude to THE GAME OF THE CENTURY.
November 19th, 2022 at 8:53 AM ^
Does anyone else refer to the skip intro button as skintro?
November 19th, 2022 at 10:05 AM ^
Gross.
November 19th, 2022 at 10:05 AM ^
No, but I did spend a day in Two Rivers, Wisconsin this fall and was told by a resident that it is pronounced Trivers. So, there's that.
November 19th, 2022 at 10:09 AM ^
What websites are you browsing, lol?
November 19th, 2022 at 9:11 AM ^
Ducks have hollow bones though; a horse-sized duck would break its legs if it tried to stand. Even if it didn't, hollow bones means it wouldn't hold up against aggressive tackling.
All I'm saying is that I think Michigan fits the role of duck-sized horse better than horse-sized duck. Besides, isn't a wolverine the equivalent of a duck-sized horse in real life?
November 19th, 2022 at 4:37 PM ^
On the other hand a horse sized emperor penguin would be terrifying
November 19th, 2022 at 9:28 AM ^
Sorry Raj, Ohio has a virtual BMV line
November 19th, 2022 at 9:29 AM ^
I coulda sworn Raj previously mentioned that he went with a Sonicare toothbrush, opting it over Oral-B. Has something changed??
Wonderful stuff as always, guys. Go Blue!
November 19th, 2022 at 9:34 AM ^
Is anyone else having flashbacks to the 1986 game against Minnesota? That's the only game I skipped attending as a student, and we blew it in similar circumstances with one of the best Michigan teams of that era. Pretending to study in Couzens listening to the radio while Rickey Foggie ran circles around us.....damn you, Foggie.
Someone please talk me down. Argh.
Also, I'm always wrong. Ask my wife.
Michigan 27-17.
November 19th, 2022 at 9:50 AM ^
Yes. That was Harbaugh's last home game as a player.
November 19th, 2022 at 10:24 AM ^
Let's just figure he draws a lot from that experience and we come out stomping Illini dudes into paste.
November 19th, 2022 at 10:46 AM ^
Foggie was certainly a pain in the ass that day, but he wouldn’t have beaten us if we hadn’t also turned the ball over four times to the Gophers.
If we’re- 4 in turnover margin today we’ll probably lose to Illinois too.
November 19th, 2022 at 9:36 AM ^
Does Batman get to use his Batcopter and Bat Shark Repellant?
November 19th, 2022 at 10:15 AM ^
Speaking of GoT, what if Michigan and Illinois, seeing a boring cold weather slog of Who Can Pound Who the Hardest, agreed to decide the game today via Trial By Combat with Harbaugh and Bielema as the champions?
Yes, Bielema is a very large man and one wrong move could get you ended. But Harbaugh was a professional athlete for decades with a sharp mind and quick feet. The Mountain and the Viper, if you will.
November 19th, 2022 at 11:12 AM ^
"The Mountain and the Viper, if you will."
I don't think you want me to tell you how that worked out . . .
November 19th, 2022 at 5:28 PM ^
Worst experience ever watching television. Do not recommend.
November 19th, 2022 at 10:26 AM ^
Illinois is a Bert Bielema sized brontosaurus. Michigan is a brontosaurus sized brontosaurus. Michigan 27, Illinois 6
November 19th, 2022 at 10:51 AM ^
Michigan 30 Illinois 17
November 19th, 2022 at 4:38 PM ^
Probably this, if Corum hadn’t gotten hurt.
November 19th, 2022 at 11:03 AM ^
good stuff guys...
Definitely need the team to remain focused here. Illinois is reeling from back to back losses, so they got nothing to lose here.
don't skip ahead on this one as it can bite you in the ass still.
November 19th, 2022 at 11:49 AM ^
As much as you may pretend otherwise, there is no member of this fanbase of sound mind that is fully engaged on today’s game.
Wrong. I am of sound mind (allegedly) and we only get 13-15 games a year over 4 months. College football season is fleeting and I immerse myself into every game, because there are so few every year.
life is short, football season even shorter. Breathe it all in, even the Illinois, Hawaii, and UMass games.
November 20th, 2022 at 12:16 AM ^
Couldn’t agree more.
November 19th, 2022 at 3:44 PM ^
Counterpunt almost nailed it.
November 19th, 2022 at 3:48 PM ^
Raj is a savant.
November 19th, 2022 at 4:01 PM ^
Spot on prediction
November 19th, 2022 at 4:11 PM ^
Damn Raj called this one.
November 19th, 2022 at 4:16 PM ^
Damn you, Raj-strodamus!
November 19th, 2022 at 4:20 PM ^
Counterpunt has been really sharp - scarily sharp.
November 19th, 2022 at 4:31 PM ^
🤔He has Biff’s book. Martelli used the DeLorean to give it to Internet Raj.
November 19th, 2022 at 5:01 PM ^
I used to “skip intro” to Breaking Bad…
November 19th, 2022 at 5:07 PM ^
Counterpunt almost nailed the final score
November 19th, 2022 at 5:18 PM ^
And 100% nailed the annoying, anxiety-ridden vibe. This one was painful to sit through. Wish I could have skipped the intro and just showed up for the final 10 seconds.
November 19th, 2022 at 5:13 PM ^
Scary prediction, Raj.
November 20th, 2022 at 1:40 PM ^
Raj, eerily close prediction! Now can you please predict a win for the good guys next week as well? Something like 42-27 would be more comfortable if you don't mind.
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