Raj is taking this week off to be with his lovely newborn son. And while we will obviously miss him, it’s wonderful to be working with one of the Punt/Counterpunt OGs again. Nick was serving as Michigan Football Nostradamus back when I was in school, and his presence is always welcome here. However, his timing isn’t great, because I have some rather unfortunate news.

The world is about to end in a cataclysmic inferno. Like, right now.

Okay, maybe not. But that was my takeaway from this week’s calm, rational headlines, like “Huge ‘planet killer’ asteroid discovered – and it’s heading our way” and “’Planet killer’ asteroid with the potential to collide with Earth found hiding in the glare of the sun,” and “'Planet killer' asteroid that evaded detection for years by hiding behind the sun could smash into Earth, scientists predict.” One could be forgiven if one read those headlines and muttered something along the lines of, “gee, that seems suboptimal.”

[After THE JUMP: It can travel far, but can it hit anything?]

Of course, you would have to read down a few paragraphs in each of those stories before you get to the “…in a few centuries, maybe, and even then almost certainly not, but we can’t absolutely rule it out” part of the story. It isn’t surprising; the old adage of “if it bleeds, it leads” still holds, as does the corollary principle of “if it shatters the Earth’s crust and showers fiery death onto all corners of the globe and covers the atmosphere in a blanket of debris that the sun will not penetrate for a thousand years, it leads.” But, jeez fellas. I mean, look at the accompanying art with one of those stories:

Artist’s rendering of a wicked awesome thing that isn’t going to happen BUT IF IT DID

Yet these stories actually bury the lede; the real issue isn’t “we found a cool rock that your grandkids’ grandkids’ grandkids probably won’t have to do anything about.” The real story is “there is a place where planet killing death-boulders can chill, like a Honda Civic being driven by a drunk 113-year-old wearing a blindfold in our celestial blind spot, waiting to wreck our stuff”.

We talked earlier this year about the James Webb Space Telescope and its amazing ability to see billions of miles into the deepest of deep space. But what it can’t do is stare at the sun. Most things can’t stare at the sun. The sun is bright. Really really bright. So any asteroids hanging out between us and the sun are all but invisible, and can theoretically jump out and smack us like an opponent in a post-game tunnel at any time.

The odds, of course, remain astronomically low (both literally and figuratively) that the world will end this way any time soon. But smaller stuff hits us all the time. And given the consequences if it DOES happen, people are understandably obsessed with the idea. It was the inspiration for two of 1998’s most popular documentaries. It was the source of a conspiracy theory that Earth would be destroyed by a rogue planet that the government knew about but didn’t say anything. It lives in the public consciousness, and for a good reason: eventually it WILL happen. Gravity and time will eventually bring a big-ass rock into our collective living rooms.

Yes, Michigan already lost to Rutgers in 2014. But that was in the Before Time. It was part of the primordial chaos, like the Theia Impact that created the moon and ultimately helped to create the world we enjoy today. But since then, Michigan Football has evolved complex life. The consequences of a Rutgers loss, however unlikely in any given year, are potentially devastating. We don’t know how Michigan would move on after that, but sufficed to say, it would be calamitous.

2020 was as close of a call as you can possibly get, but at least we saw that one coming. The barely-figurative End-Of-The-World nature of 2020 had us building bomb shelters and hoarding canned goods and toilet paper. But were we nearly caught off guard in 2021, which wasn’t scary because Michigan nearly lost (the game was close, but not THAT close), but because we didn’t see it coming. The danger came from a blind spot; Michigan was pretty good, Rutgers was pretty Rutgers, and Michigan was up 20-3 at home before we started to see a shimmer in the night sky.

It's obviously difficult to see how this year’s game could be The Big One. We’ve got a lot of data on both teams, and Rutgers’s trajectory doesn’t seem to take it within multiple touchdowns of Michigan at its closest point. But there is always uncertainty in that data, and it’s the ones you don’t see coming that pose the greatest risk.

Scientists are working on ways of deflecting asteroids and sending them off into deep space. But until someone can find a way to do the same for Rutgers, the risk will always be there. It’s only a matter of time. Michigan 27, Rutgers 24.