Punt-Counterpunt: The Rose Bowl
Bama Links: Preview, The Podcast, FFFF Offense (chart), FFFF Defense (chart). Primer on Alabama switch D.
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
If you hang out in Michigan Internet circles long enough, you’ll come to the conclusion that everyone has a favorite random astrophysics fact. The kind of thing you’ll throw out at parties or social gatherings with the slightest provocation. Things like “the observable Universe is 93 billion light years across despite being only 13.7 billion years old” or “the atmosphere of a neutron star is 4 inches high” or “because of gravitational lensing we once watched the same supernova four times over the course of several months.” Now, some of you will say this is nerdy, to which, shut up.
My current favorite astrophysics factoid is this: it takes sunlight eight minutes to reach Earth from the surface of the sun… but it takes that same sunlight thousands and thousands of years to escape heart of the sun and reach its surface.
You read that right. Light is generated in the core of the sun, and when it travels, it travels at the speed of light. But the core is astonishingly dense, and as a result the photons keep, in scientific terminology, bumping into shit. So they keep getting reabsorbed and reemitted in random directions, over and over again, like a caffeinated toddler in the world’s largest house of mirrors, until it happens to stumble upon an exit. Bottom line: the light you’re seeing right now is the result of the fusion of two hydrogen atoms into a helium atom millennia ago.
Photon escaping the sun, or Semaj Morgan touchdown run?
[After THE JUMP: Photons ranked by luck.]
How many millennia? No one knows! Estimates on the Internet range from 5,000 years to 2.6 Million years, depending on (a) some wild-ass guesses about the behavior of super-crowded photons under tremendous temperatures and pressures, (b) some even wilder-ass guesses about what the heart of the sun is physically like on the molecular level, and (c) whether the estimator is good at math. But most calculations seem to land in the 10,000 to 200,000 year range, which means the sunlight striking some Instagrammer’s perineum [link technically SFW, but… man, dead dove do not eat] today was created somewhere between the beginning of humanity and the point when humans started cultivating crops.
The other, somewhat related fact I like is that only one out of every two billion photons emitted by the sun will strike the Earth.
So while photons aren’t sentient, I think more than a reasonable person should about their journey. Forged from the conversion of matter into energy in a galactic pressure cooker, spending tens of thousands of years slamming into things like in an unimaginable stellar Spirit Airlines Boarding Area at Hartsfield Airport, and finally reaching the surface, only to miss the Earth and hurtle through space for eternity, without ever interacting with a sentient being. All that work, unseen and unappreciated, for naught. Some will bump into Jupiter, which I suppose is something. Perhaps a few photons out of every gagillion will strike Mike Sainristil’s home planet (which I assume is named “Krypton But Chill”). But the vast, vast majority accomplish nothing and are just a huge disappointment to their hydrogen parents.
For some reason, this is how most of the college football world has decided to treat 2023 Michigan Football. The first 13 weeks are a completely opaque mystery, and only this last journey determines whether they’ve done literally anything.
Luckiest photons ever
For a team that has served as the Main Character for most of the college football season, one gets the feeling that no one has actually WATCHED Michigan this year.
I know people have seen Michigan. They've played in three of the ten most watched games this season, including the most watched game of the year. But Michigan has remained a caricature. A placeholder. A series of headlines in blue pants. The Burgergate Team, then the Team That Ain't Played Nobody Team, then the Connor Stalions Greatest Scandal In Human History Team, then the Jim Harbaugh Suspension Drama Team. Michigan has been in the headlines all season, but those headlines are almost entirely unrelated to the fact that they have played, and won, thirteen games.
This is partially because people are lazy, and the low-hanging fruit is extremely easy. That’s why you get stuff like CBS putting up this Baby’s First Statistical Analysis graphic about JJ McCarthy’s productivity dropping off “after Connor Stalions resigned,” ignoring the facts that (a) that’s a really weird line to draw (and was seemingly chosen to put JJ’s MSU performance on the Stalions side of the ledger), and (b) Michigan played 3 of the 5 best defenses in the country in those 5 games. It’s how you get the Athletic’s Chris Vannini completely ignoring how numbers work by stating that failing to be in the Top 2 for three consecutive years means Michigan isn’t a Top 5 program right now. It’s why 90% of talking heads are choosing Alabama, despite Michigan being a 2-point favorite in Vegas and a 9-point favorite to SP+.
But this is also partially Michigan's fault. Because everything you've seen between the lines this season has been calculated to not make you think twice about Michigan. They've treated almost the entire season like an Olympic sprinter knocking out the preliminary rounds at a light jog while holding a breakfast burrito. They've gotten control of games, they've put anything new and interesting in the barn by halftime, and they’ve simmed to the end of the game. This was obviously the right approach, but left with no intrigue between the lines, the world has gone off and ignored how absolutely dominant Michigan was from the first snap against ECU right on through Tony Petitti’s Worst Day Ever.
Bama is a very, very good football team. Hell, they’re Bama. They’re deep and talented at every position, and at their best, they’re able to beat anybody, including Michigan. But you also get the feeling that no one watched Bama this year either. The national scene disregarded them after they lost in Week 2 to Texas and looked like an above-average Sun Belt team against USF the following week. We then rejoined their journey when they kicked off against Georgia, where they looked like world-beaters, and we just decided that was the team they had become. But we have a whole body of evidence for the Tide as well, and it isn’t nearly as impressive, either statistically or by the eye test, as what Michigan put together.
The impulse of Michigan fans to doubt (and Big Ten coaches to hate) and Bama fans to believe has us doubting what the numbers say: Michigan is the better and more consistent football team. But don’t worry, even when they win, we’ll get one more week of people pretending we don’t know anything about Michigan yet. Michigan 27, Alabama 17
----------------------------
COUNTERPUNT
By Internet Raj
@internetraj
The lone ant is a simple, dumb creature. It doesn’t do much beyond slavishly adhering to its genetically imbued imperatives: namely, to seek out food, react to the chemical signals of other ants, and fight or evade attackers. The individual ant really is not so different than Ryan Day coaching a tight game in the fourth quarter or Ben Axelrod trying to cobble together a coherent thought on Twitter: a brainless automaton, mindlessly and primitively reacting to whatever stimulus happens to be in front of him at the moment. Biologist Nigel Franks once wrote, “The solitary army ant is behaviorally one of the least sophisticated animals imaginable” and that “if 100 army ants are placed on a flat surface, they will walk around in never decreasing circles until they die of starvation.” And yet, when you lump thousands of ants together, something remarkable happens. Together, these ants form an ant colony, with each individual ant’s rudimentary actions working together in concert to give rise to complex behavior, sophisticated information processing, and an adaptative ability to learn and optimize the survival and success of the entire group. For example, a colony of ants will jointly work to build incredibly large, resilient nests laced with intricate networks of underground passages whose temperatures are carefully controlled by surplus nest materials or the ants’ bodies themselves. Another example of the unique group behavior of ants is how certain species will build long bridges with their own bodies to allow the safe passage from one site to another. To this day, scientists have still not fully unraveled the mystery of how the individual simplicity of ants can give rise to such collective sophistication.
A bridge with more resilience than the Buckeyes in the trenches
This phenomenon is not just limited to ants. Consider the average RCMB or Bucknuts message board poster. Individually, these posters are, on balance, simplistic Neanderthals navigating their everyday lives with the mental dexterity of Brian Scalabrine riding a pogo stick on quaaludes. But the magic happens when you get a bunch of these smooth-brained simpletons together on one message board, where their individual primitiveness coalesces into a sort of collective virtuosity that would leave even the most expert sociologists in a slack-jawed stupor. How else can you explain the three four five six dark-matter-imbued-shimmering-black-hole dimensional chess like this? This, readers, is true genius.
Connor Stalions is an evil genius. pic.twitter.com/eI0o8MhEtk
— Message Board Geniuses (@BoardGeniuses) December 30, 2023
These mysterious phenomena reveal a fundamental truth of the universe: a system—whether it’s an ant colony or page 1,193 of the RCMB thread MGoBlog is imploding—is more than the sum of its parts. Dr. Russell Ackoff, a renowned organizational theorist, made the same point more eloquently when describing how one could theoretically engineer the best car in the world. You could take one of every automobile available in the world, bring them together into a single massive garage, and have the world’s best engineers decide which car had the best part. For example, the Rolls Royce may have the best transmission; the Ferrari may have the best axle; the Mercedes may have the best suspension; and so on. You could then instruct the engineers to remove those parts and assemble them into a hypothetical greatest car ever. But what you built would not be a car. It would not run, and the reason why is glaringly simple but profound: the parts do not fit. A true complex system, like a car, is a whole that consists of constituent parts, each of which can affect the behavior and properties of the greater system. A car, therefore, is not the sum of its parts, but rather the product of its parts interactions.
When Michigan plays Alabama today in the College Football Playoff semifinal, it will do so at a decided statistical disadvantage in at least one major metric. No team has ever won a national championship ranked outside the top 10 in the 24/7 Team Talent Composite. This year, Michigan ranks 14th and Alabama ranks first.
These are the 10 most talented teams in college football. What stands out to you? https://t.co/pfKvJeIlR8 pic.twitter.com/XKSFZJOXfF
— 247Sports (@247Sports) August 30, 2023
Of course, there are plenty of caveats to that metric: for example, it doesn’t account for player development and there may be better, more accurate measures of talent, like NFL draft output. But I don’t think one has to take a a particularly large leap of faith to conclude that Alabama’s roster, on a player-by-player basis, is more talented than Michigan’s roster.
But a college football team, like a car or an ant colony, isn’t the mere sum of its parts. It is the sum of the interaction of its parts. JJ McCarthy’s resilience. Blake Corum’s tenacity. Kris Jenkins’… mutant-ness. The comradery. The coaching. The team, working together, in harmony. The players on this team aren’t adorned with the with the elite level of recruiting accolades or five stars like Alabama’s roster. But they have something else and that is a well-oiled machine working in concert to create something bigger than their individual parts. Michigan may not have the best engine, tires, or brakes. But what they do have is a damn good car hitting on all its cylinders. Alabama, on the other hand, has all the fancy parts. But as their early season struggles and near misses have shown, it’s not fully clear that their Ferrari engine fits with their Maserati transmission. Today’s the day the Tide takes a permanent pit stop. Today’s the day the maize and blue ants swarm.
Michigan 20, Alabama 17
January 1st, 2024 at 11:21 AM ^
Go Blue!
January 1st, 2024 at 11:22 AM ^
Nothing in this life makes me more accepting and comfortable with my nerdiness than this blog. I thank you all.
January 1st, 2024 at 11:28 AM ^
Yeah, science!
January 1st, 2024 at 1:38 PM ^
NOW WE COOK
January 1st, 2024 at 11:28 AM ^
Regarding the TEAM Talent Composite - I am glad you can only have 11 on the field at any one time. Apparently, Alabama is deeper than Michigan at skill positions.
January 1st, 2024 at 1:18 PM ^
Also, I maintain that while Alabama's players are certainly talented, Michigan's are underrated because of a regional feedback loop between the Bible Belt's focus on football, NIL offers, and scouting camps.
Basically, if the scouting sites agree that someone like Caleb Downs is talented, they're probably right -- after all, measurables are measurables. But these services haven't spent the same amount of time scouting, say, some who-dat 3-star from Idaho. . . who happens to be one of the most dominating receiving TEs in the country now. Or a Mason Graham, a who-dat 3-star who's now PFF's #1 DT in the country. Or Kris Jenkins (3-star), top-ten DT, because from Maryland. Or Mike Sainristil, yet another 3-star, because Massachusetts may as well be a void as far as scouting services are concerned.
The scouting services are increasingly filled with blind spots, with eyes only for players SEC programs are going to get anyway. So Alabama's guys get rated, and Michigan's going after the 5-stars that are rated as 3-stars because the services can't bother with 90% of the country.
Michigan has the talent to win. The key question is if the coaches spent the last month on the right gameplan.
January 1st, 2024 at 9:44 PM ^
Thank you for the help. I wanted to mention the SEC bias but didn't know how to clearly make such a point.
January 1st, 2024 at 11:29 AM ^
Love these pieces. Bryan, Raj, you both knock it out of the park every week. Plenty of fun facts, nerd moments, plenty of humor, but just great writing.
Really hope to have one final write up next Monday!
January 1st, 2024 at 11:30 AM ^
Pretty sure that was my favorite Punt/Counterpunt I’ve read.
Go give Bama hell, leave no doubt. Go blue.
January 1st, 2024 at 11:50 AM ^
So glad this punt/counterpunt version was a win/win one. Got enough doubters out there.
Go Blue! Give em hell!
January 1st, 2024 at 11:33 AM ^
Dammit. Now I'm jonesing for a breakfast burrito.
January 1st, 2024 at 11:40 AM ^
Go Blue!
January 1st, 2024 at 11:43 AM ^
As long as we're nerding out, here's my counterpunt block attempt:
Consider the average RCMB or Bucknuts message board poster. Individually, these posters are, on balance, simplistic Neanderthals navigating their everyday lives with the mental dexterity of Brian Scalabrine riding a pogo stick on quaaludes.
Bad comparison. Neanderthals had larger brains than homo sapiens. It could be that RCMB and Bucknuts posters are what they are because their brains are smaller than your average Neanderthal -- significantly smaller!
Anyway, it raises fascinating questions about what they were like, because understanding the Neanderthal literally requires having brains larger than the ones we're stuck with.
January 1st, 2024 at 3:46 PM ^
Accurate
sub in Australopithecus
January 1st, 2024 at 5:35 PM ^
I would but Australopithecus is sitting out the bowl game.
January 1st, 2024 at 11:43 AM ^
Straight into the veins-great jobs, guys! Go Blue!
January 1st, 2024 at 12:03 PM ^
We got this.
January 1st, 2024 at 12:04 PM ^
I love the use of the physics analogy and light. Thanks for taking out the time for another excellent punt/counter-punt. And that counts for ants too. :)
January 1st, 2024 at 12:14 PM ^
This was, on so many levels, phenomenal. Great way to hit the T minus 5 hour mark.
January 1st, 2024 at 12:18 PM ^
Start preparing your Punt/Counterpunt for next week, gentlemen. Bet!
January 1st, 2024 at 12:19 PM ^
Fortunately, if they could read this, they couldn’t decode it.
That was tasty.
January 1st, 2024 at 12:21 PM ^
Nice. Go Blue!! Enough said.
January 1st, 2024 at 12:39 PM ^
Looking forward to some crimson tears today. The scarlet ones in November were nice, but crimson will be even better. Michigan rolls over the tide, 30-14.
January 1st, 2024 at 12:40 PM ^
Best Punt Counter Ever!
You guys (and your backup) killed it this year!
Can't wait for next week 🙌!
January 1st, 2024 at 12:56 PM ^
These are more brilliant than normal, which is a high bar indeed. The photons discussion in particular was gold.
January 1st, 2024 at 1:12 PM ^
Somewhere in my basement, I have at least a dozen or so of the freebies handed out by the railroad tracks from games past, mostly 1980s when I was a student and later an alum.
Not sure why they dried up (lawsuit from UM athletic department? too costly?) but sure do miss them.
At least the fun stories are here!
I watched the rerun (full game - even a few vintages commercials mixed in) of the 1981 RB game. Bo's 1st ever bowl win. That morning, I had the vibes we would finally win a bowl and we played a masterful 2nd half and won 23-6 over a pretty solid Wash team.
Today, I have the same vibes for our Team 144. Like the 1980 team, the chemistry really bonded them together after a rough (1-2) start. I remember Andy Cannavino saying how important it was that he and his teammates with this one for BO more than themselves. When Bo's being carried to the middle of the field for his handshake with Don James, none other than Andy is out in front cheering on his coach.
Let's have a history repeat today!
January 1st, 2024 at 1:18 PM ^
Only on MGOBLOG. Love it!
January 1st, 2024 at 1:44 PM ^
photons aren’t sentient
good luck proving it. #bet
also is it just me or did that photon analogy break down into Freudian territory? j/k… unless?
January 1st, 2024 at 1:58 PM ^
From astrophysics to ants, with a "perineum sunning" side step (or end run?) and chop-shop logic, these are brilliant.
Two questions and a statement:
• Where's MGoBlog's Pulitzer?
• Can my heart handle watching the game?
• Go, Blue! Beat Bam Bam.
January 1st, 2024 at 3:47 PM ^
I think the perineum sunning would be best described as a tan gent
I’ll l see myself out…
January 1st, 2024 at 1:58 PM ^
Although some of the knowledge I gleaned from this P/CP will forever... ahem taint me, this is as well done as always and....
LETS FKN GO
January 1st, 2024 at 2:01 PM ^
Brilliant response. T'aint a problem?
January 1st, 2024 at 2:21 PM ^
"Today’s the day the maize and blue ants swarm."
Yes, Brother, Yes.
January 1st, 2024 at 2:48 PM ^
Raj's vision of swarming maize and blue ants, depicted by Cosmic Dream
January 1st, 2024 at 3:03 PM ^
That was outstanding, thank you both!
January 1st, 2024 at 4:17 PM ^
Michigan is an Alien Ant Farm.
January 1st, 2024 at 4:22 PM ^
Bryan's vision of photons escaping sun, resulting in Michigan Wolverines victory, first quarter, depicted by Cosmic Dream
January 1st, 2024 at 4:23 PM ^
2nd quarter
January 1st, 2024 at 4:24 PM ^
3rd quarter
January 1st, 2024 at 4:25 PM ^
Victory!
January 1st, 2024 at 4:25 PM ^
God why did I click that perinium link
January 1st, 2024 at 4:53 PM ^
Thanks Bryan and Raj, for calming my nerves before kickoff. Go Blue!
January 1st, 2024 at 6:43 PM ^
Let’s Go Blue! We’re dominating every phase (including unfortunately screwups) and need to continue. Bet.
January 1st, 2024 at 9:20 PM ^
Bry Mac for the win
January 1st, 2024 at 9:20 PM ^
Hell yeah! You guys were both right!
Go Blue! 〽️
January 1st, 2024 at 9:50 PM ^
What an a’mazin prediction. Now if you can figure out a way to materialize tickets for the natty.
January 1st, 2024 at 9:50 PM ^
What an a’mazin prediction. Now if you can figure out a way to materialize tickets for the natty.
January 2nd, 2024 at 8:31 AM ^
As an Ohio State fan I wish any Ohio State fan site had even 50% of the thoughtfulness and intelligence of an MGoBlog post selected at random.
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