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

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 19^th 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 95^th 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