2020-21 michigan state #1

Things discussed:

• Does Minnesota hockey have a claim on the Big Ten championship? At least they’re not being total children about it.
• Craig Ross got a card to be part of a memory stimulation study for people with the memory of a goldfish.
• Difference between Games 1 and 2 is MSU hit their bad shots and Michigan missed their good ones.
• Worst Coach of the Year award
• Franz Wagner left off the all-defense team is insane. Conspiracy!!!
• Also we’re going to get @davidlectka some followers because this is the third time this week we’ve brought up one of his very good tweets.
• Preview of MSU-Maryland today
• Is the Big Ten the best conference? Yeah—the Big XII is just as strong at the top but they have several teams way worse than Nebraska. Iowa State is 2-22 this year.
• Are we going to play Sister Jean?
• Ohio State-Purdue preview.
• Do you play Eli in the tournament if he’s not healthy?
• Big Ten tournament preview.
• Hockeytalk: Unless the complete morons use Pairwise this year for something other than intra-conference rankings Michigan is in the tournament.
• Do you want Arizona State as the 8th Big Ten team? Illinois?
• Spring practice: they’re going to take a 2-week break in the middle. Do we know ANYTHING? Noooope.

[Hit the JUMP for the player, and video and stuff]

The Sponsors

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1. The MSU Games

starts at 1:00

The good, the bad, and the ugly officiating in the Big Ten this year (from th win). 

[The rest of the writeup and the player after The Jump]

3/4/2021 – Michigan 69, Michigan State 50 – 19-2, 14-2 Big Ten, Big Ten regular season champions

I have now watched a year of pandemic sports, and I can say that the most surreal thing to watch with nobody in the stands is college basketball. This was made plain when I turned on the Baylor-WVU game, which was about 20% full, and recoiled at the strangeness of an audio record of whether things were going well or not. People were furious at certain things. It was a sad (and unwise) echo of the Before Times, and at the same time it injected a fervor into the proceedings. It felt like a top-ten matchup, or at least the ghost of one. 

Alone amongst major sports, basketball puts fans directly adjacent to proceedings. Malices at the Palace do not transpire in other sports because there are barriers between athletes and the hoi polloi. Opportunities for portly gentlemen to confront and get absolutely wrecked by Jermaine O'Neal are limited.

This gives a basketball crowd an immediacy other sports lack. When you are close to the court the sport literally vibrates for you, each bounce of the ball resonating in your ears and feet simultaneously.

On top of that, a college basketball crowd puts several hundred dubiously sober students in prime position to mock, taunt, celebrate, wobble unsteadily, and wear varied animal costumes. The reduced number of games relative to the NBA, and the various ways in which you could succeed or fail heightens stakes. An NBA version of this MSU team is wondering whether it's worth making the playoffs just to get obliterated instead of clawing desperately to maintain a 22-year tourney streak. This turns up the volume further until a band-box arena in Vermont with maybe 3,000 people in it feels like a nuclear reactor during Championship Week.

Deleting that leaves you unsteady. The resulting season feels tangibly less real.

eight minutes to tip [Campredon]

When the confetti came down and Michigan paraded around a sign that said "2021 Big Ten Champions" I was happy, of course, but the emptiness of that building—the failure of several hundred people to appear on the court and mill around aimlessly—hit hard. A true and proper title celebration is far from the most important thing the pandemic has taken from us, but it could only be bittersweet to see Michigan be this team, to win this thing, 358 days after the 2020 Big Ten Tournament was shut down and Zavier Simpson skyhooks unceremoniously vanished into the G-League ether.

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You may have noticed that my output on this blog has dropped substantially. There have been more weekdays without a post from me in the past couple months than years-long blocks of time prior.

I have struggled. My weak connections to the people around me have been severed and the few strong ties leaned on unto their breaking point. A lack of reliance on other people has morphed from a marker of rugged individualism into a blank, gray loneliness. Existing addictions—mostly to video games, which I compulsively click at even when I am thinking about how boring this activity is—were exacerbated. Relationships strained. My personal life roiled until there was a sudden break. A look into an abyss, and a turning away from it.

I can't say the roiling has exactly stopped but at least I have a path I can see that leads forward. It is a repeated agony that it buckles and warps, cracks and shudders, rises and descends. Work gets put in and sometimes it seems like it amounts to nothing. But I suppose if Austin Davis can put Luka Garza in a blender, there is no depth that cannot be surmounted brick by brick.

This is a stupid and flimsy thing to latch onto, the actions of college players attempting to throw a ball through a hoop, but since a large part of this years-long slide was sitting on my computer staring at a football game I had no desire to comment on I'll take it and nestle it into place. Belief starts somewhere. An ability to take joy from other people starts somewhere.

Here at what feels like the end, or at least the beginning of the end, of being locked away from each other I have concluded that the only thing to do is get up in the morning and try again.

[After THE JUMP: a regular-ass bullets section! Like nothing even happened!]