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

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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.

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 14^th and Alabama ranks first.

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