In “Adventures in the Screen Trade,” screenwriter William Goldman famously remarked “nobody knows anything.” Goldman’s refrain, which he repeats throughout the book, was a reference to the near-impossible and oft-bungled task of predicting which films would go on to become mega-blockbusters. Goldman offers Raiders of the Lost Ark as just one of many films that exemplify this phenomenon. Every single movie studio in Hollywood passed on Raiders with one (handsomely rewarded) exception: Paramount. The film would go on to gross $250 million, garner nine Academy Award nominations, and is now widely considered as one of the greatest films ever made. Goldman’s broader point was that even Hollywood—a $50 billion industry armed to the teeth with research departments, economists, focus groups, and advanced analytics—often struggles to predict how well a film will perform before it is released.

Nobody knows anything.

Philip Tetlock, a University of Pennsylvania psychologist, conducted a two-decades long study of expert predictions that he summarized in his 2005 book, Expert Political Judgment. Between 1987 and 2003, Tetlock recruited 2845 “experts”—people’s whose professions involved “commenting or offering on political and economic trends”—and asked them to make a series of predictive forecasts about areas within and outside their principal areas of expertise. Questions were designed to be concretely scored as “yes” or “no” and included questions like” “Will Gorbachev be ousted in a coup?” and “Will Quebec secede from Canada?” By 2003, Tetlock has amassed a staggering 82,361 “expert” forecasts, the accuracy of which he then statistically compared against those of uninformed non-experts. Tetlock summarized his findings in his now-famous quip: so-called “experts” were no more accurate at predicting the future than “a bunch of chimpanzees throwing darts at a board full of predictions.”

On the other hand, dart throwing chimpanzees are still more accurate than Joe Bauserman

Nobody knows anything.

Forest fires are a prime example of what is commonly referred to as a “complex adaptive system,” which can be defined as a system in which a perfect understanding of the individual parts (the trees) does not automatically translate into a perfect understanding of the whole (the forest). Generally accepted analyses of forest fires reveal that the level of damage is closely related to tree density. Not surprising right? However, computer simulations further reveal that if you hold other variables (rainfall, wind, etc.) constant, a fire started at one end of a forest with a 57% tree density results in approximately 10% of the forest being destroyed but the same forest with a 60% tree density results in more than 75% of the forest destroyed. A mere 3% increase in tree density, therefore, is responsible for a tremendous increase in the overall destruction of a forest. So, while density and destruction are indeed related, they are related in a highly unpredictable and non-linear manner.

Nobody knows anything.

On the one hand: we know that people love making and consuming predictions. Whether it’s a financial analyst on CNBC forecasting future stock prices, a political pundit on a news roundtable show prophesying the winner of an election, or me rolling the dice that my fart will “just be gas” after eating street meat in Vietnam, predictions are all-pervasive in our culture, and are often made with blustery confidence that is fundamentally at odds with their empirical uncertainty.

On the other hand: we also know that people get predictions wrong—a lot. It’s one thing to predict a ball on a flat surface will roll forward if I give it a nudge. It’s an entirely different thing to predict the future state of a complex adaptive system—whether it’s film, geopolitics, forest fires or sports—with any measure of certainty.

In any normal year, college football is already a highly erratic chaos machine of complexity. I mean, there’s a whole flavor of bingo dedicated to Pac 12 After Dark. In the midst of a global pandemic with no fan attendance and constant roster-flux? And then add in a raw, untested first-time starting quarterback? Forget a forest, that’s Jurassic Park but all the dinosaurs are armed with rocket launchers and injected with whatever Max Bullough was on.

You can set aside all the other myriad unknowns and variables for this Michigan team, and Joe Milton himself still looms larger than the 3% difference in tree density that determines whether the forest of our regular season will remain relatively unscathed or consumed by fiery destruction. A confident, poised and dynamic Joe Milton could lead Michigan to Indianapolis. A shell-shocked and shaky redshirt sophomore on the other hand? Well that will be another one-way ticket to BPONE.

I don’t know shit about fuck.

William Goldman’s mantra “nobody knows anything” rings particularly true for the 2020 Michigan football system. But I have to say, it is lacking in panache and sizzle. Luckily, I spent my months in quarantine binging Ozark, a show about a money launderer in SEC country that was somehow not about Ole Miss boosters. And, in that show, there is a character named Ruth who offers her own modernized take on Goldman’s famous words:

This is also Don Brown when designing coverages to defend speedy slot receivers.

I think I prefer Ruth’s formulation.

I have absolutely no prediction for this game or for this surreal season–Tetlock’s Joe Bauserman throwing a dart would likely be more accurate than me at this point. I can’t tell you what will happen Saturday night, I can’t tell you what will happen as the season unfolds, and hell I can’t even tell you if a full season will unfold. But I will tell you this—football, for now, is back so let’s fucking enjoy it and let’s fucking go.

Michigan: Nobody knows anything, Minnesota: I don’t know shit about fuck.