Previously: The Story 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008.

The internet (and probably some sacred documents) say that the Buddha found enlightenment after sitting under a Banyan tree for seven days. Cool! Way to go, Buddha. Ever try some goalposts?

om [Fuller]

I cannot exactly elucidate why these images have burned themselves into my head, and the heads of many Michigan fans. Maybe it's that the happy-go-lucky McCarthy seems like a breath of fresh air to a Michigan fanbase that was, until recently, beset by woe. Maybe it's just nice to have a guy who's a little different because it makes things more interesting. Maybe, I dunno, it's a different mode of leadership fit for the 24th century:

On J.J. McCarthy’s leadership:

It’s vibrant. It’s infectious; it rubs off on everybody.

Last summer, we took a team trip around Michigan and we got into this wiffle ball game. My kids were playing — a bunch of nine-year-olds, some of Jack's friends. And you couldn’t tell who the nine-year-olds were and who the 18-year-olds were. He's running, he's diving, he’s sliding. One ball gets hit out into the street and he's running out, doesn't even look. Dove into first base one time and barely missed this tree that was planted and had the bricks around it. He missed it by that much.

He's got the enthusiasm of a 10-year-old guy. It’s a beautiful thing. It's that vibrant, it's that infectious and it rubs off on the team.

Maybe next time demand McCarthy wears pads, but… maybe not. In fact, let's not.

I know what it is now.

[After THE JUMP: what it is]

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Some years back during an edition of The Game during what I hope we will refer to as the Dark Ages, I was seated next to a gaggle of Ohio State fans. (As anyone who went to those games knows, you were always seated next to a gaggle of Ohio State fans.) At some point early in the game, Michigan converted a third down and the OSU fans near me moaned "DAMON ARNETTE" in unison to each other. Arnette was a nobody recruit who had emerged to be OSU's nickelback that year, but I'd gathered from my then-constant internet searches that OSU fans were not content with him.

This was evidently 2017, given Arnette's career at OSU; the John O'Korn game. Arnette would become a four year contributor and three-year starter at OSU before becoming a first round draft pick. And these dudes, midlevel cubicle types all, scorned Arnette like he owed them money. I was miserable—beyond miserable—but at least I wasn't that kind of miserable.

These OSU folks have been recently overwhelmed in my rankings of least reasonable sports fans by a variety of Messi truther that I have happened upon because I have the bad habit of clicking on a bunch of dumb Twitter garbage. I have been flabbergasted by this. I thought that surely the arrival of the best soccer player to ever live on our shores would induce a sort of dumbfounded wonder amongst all. No, just amongst most. There remain these people:

I dunno. I was taught starting at age 8 if you are gonna stab you better win the ball or take out the player.

— Jacob (@uth3nt1k) August 20, 2023

I was taught at age eight that if you come up against the best soccer player in the history of the world that you should just not let him score a goal. This goal.

The United States would have won the World Cup if Walker Zimmerman had just been… ah.  I cannot continue this even in jest. Some people are just programmed to be Damon Arnette haters. I can't help them. I can try to not be them.

I have been that kind of miserable and documented it on this very website in the early days… and, unfortunately, in some recent ones. I remember crushing Ryan Mundy in particular, and just last spring Erik Portillo. To do these things, to play these sports, is a privilege and an honor and a tremendous burden. For most players that latter bit overwhelms all, because of course it does. So the narrative around sports, and football in particular, is one of effort and grinding and military discipline. It's fun, as long as you're not doing it. If you're doing it, it's a war.

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Also some years back, Spencer Hall came up for a game because he had to. He'd promised whichever fanbase donated the most money to New American Pathways would get a visit and an article from him, and because Michigan always points the money cannon he came up for a grim Michigan-Penn State battle where Brady Hoke and James Franklin exchanged bogglingly bad strategic decisions. Michigan won because Devin Funchess was eventually leveraged, but the two things I remember most were thus:

1. There was a fan a couple rows in front of us that kept screaming "Hackenberg, yer a bum!" It was impossible to discern whether this was genuine, sarcastic, or somewhere in-between. Spencer thought that a Michigan fan doing this was the funniest thing that had ever happened.
2. Dennis Norfleet was returning punts, and he decided to bring out his frat's idiosyncratic step dance. This electrified the crowd in a game that ended (approximately, spiritually) 0 to –3, and at some point Spencer said "that guy can play for Florida."

That Guy Can Play For Florida means a lot of things, some of them good and some not so good. Florida is a sheer unbridled minecart ride of a program. What it aspires to more than anything else is to be fun. Of late it is not accomplishing this goal, but the spiritual heart of Florida football is and always will be Steve Spurrier calling Mills up two touchdowns in the fourth quarter and then devastating the opposing coach in a post-game press conference.  

There are costs to this, of course, particularly when an amoral psychopath is leading your program, but at the time I envied the sort of program that would build itself around being fun. At the time Michigan football did not seem like much fun at all.

There has been a shift, as anyone reading this is probably well aware. 84% of this is based on finally beating Ohio State, twice in a row, by lots of points. But the chairs came before the first win. The chairs:

Somewhere on that field was a person who looked at the great black emotional nothing of Michigan football and said to himself "I defy you. This is fun." Then he handed the chair to someone else, and he said the same thing, and somehow the chair won, and then the chair gave something of itself to me.

When Wisconsin played "Jump Around" that year, Michigan jumped around and jiggled the chairs. The curse lifted, and now Michigan enters this year being picked to win the national championship by people other than Desmond Howard. (Also Desmond Howard.) JJ McCarthy sits at the center of that, literally.

And the thing about McCarthy, and Blake Corum, and Mike Sainristil, and Michael Barrett, and so forth and so on, is that they all seem to have a touch of the chairs in them. McCarthy more than anyone, because he goes about the very serious business of being the Michigan quarterback like it is not serious business at all. He goes about it like he's grateful, not burdened, and in this way he is Denard Robinson:

So this thing you dared not hope for starts to coalesce just from the things that happen on the field, and then yesterday morning I was struck by a sense of profound gratefulness when I watched the MGoBlue video of Denard's postgame presser …

I love how he smiles all the time and wears his heart on his sleeve and goes "AHHHH" when someone mentions Roundtree blocking for him and seems about as amazed as everyone else at what he's doing. I love how he drops to one knee after he scores in a way that seems genuine in a way I couldn't comprehend until I saw it.

They run like my kids run. My kids do not have keys, or a wallet, or a phone. They do not have objects they carry around every day that represent demands, obligations, responsibilities. Mortgages, credit card balances, texts you have to answer from people you do not want to talk to.

Unlike my kids, they do have all of those objects, and all of those demands, obligations, and responsibilities. They've signed up for an order of magnitude more than their fair share by playing football at the University of Michigan™. But they do not seem burdened by it. They are joyful. They run like there is nothing in their pockets, nothing at all.