blitz pickups

10/31/2020 – Michigan 24, Michigan State 27, 1-1

At some point over the weekend I was hungry and not in the mood to do something that required time, so I smeared some cream cheese on a heel of bread. When I bit into it, it was vastly more stale than I expected. But it is what I had signed up for. So I ate it.

It was unpleasant, but eventually it was over. And then I did something else. Silver lining: column theme.

I appear to be over it. This is not a decision I've undertaken, it's just what happened after the game: not much. I have become the popular internet meme.

We're at the Final Season Of Battlestar Galactica stage of Michigan football. (Spoilers for the aughts reboot of Battlestar Galactica follow.) Things really started to go off the rails for Battlestar when the season four finale dramatically revealed five main characters as secret Cylons without any setup, explanation, or plan. They just heard "The Joker and The Thief"—a song that does not exist in their society—and were suddenly activated. Then Starbuck blew up in a plane and mysteriously returned, again without explanation.

I kept watching, but my previous enthusiasm for the show waned. Eventually I was just watching out of habit and hoping against hope that somehow the people writing this suddenly absurd show could pull a rabbit out of their butt. Instead there's like a mystical piano(?) Starbuck plays that leads them to a prehistoric Earth. Then she pops out of existence. Literally! One minute she's talking to Edward James Olmos and then she says some sort of koan and disappears.

There were some poignant moments in there but when it was over I experienced relief that I didn't have to pay attention to it any more. I groaned "oh, come on!" on a weekly basis. This analogy is airtight.

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So the Black Pit Of Negative Expectations was ephemeral. Mad during game; as soon as it was over* apathy set in. This is for the best.

We're in year six of Jim Harbaugh, who has done well enough that no one would ever fire him lest the Curse of Frank Solich descend upon them as it has Nebraska. Harbaugh has done progressively worse against Ohio State, getting nuked the last two years, and is now set to go up against Justin Fields and a zillion five star receivers with one decent cornerback and four guys who run like Wario. He just lost to MSU as a more than three-touchdown favorite. Damning stats follow him around. This was a new one I saw this week: 1-9 in the final two games of the season.

People can talk about firing coordinators or even the head coach. The former won't matter; the latter won't happen. I picked the GIF version of the meme above because it repeats infinitely, one reset after another, an endless weary parade of going again.

*[Actually it turns out before it was over: I turned the game off after MSU recovered the onside kick because I thought Michigan had two timeouts and there were 37 seconds left. It turns out Michigan got bailed out of their initial timeout by the officials? This was not explained, and the chyron said two timeouts.]

[After THE JUMP: press cover defense with nobody who can run]

11/23/2019 – Michigan 39, Indiana 14 – 9-2, 6-2 Big Ten

Indiana waltzing down the field for an opening-drive touchdown was an ominous sign that the trademark Indiana Stupid Game was about to transpire. That feeling was reinforced when Indiana scored again in short order. They kept throwing wide receiver screens to their tight end. Some goofy pass interference calls and Michigan's punter kicking a 24-yarder that was somehow not a shank buttressed the structure further.

By the time Giles Jackson, hearing no whistle after having literally every portion of his body hit the ground, got up to "score" the world's most emphatically overturned touchdown it was a lock. Michigan would be embroiled in another one of those games, the ones which Indiana should win 37% of the time and wins 0% of the time. A traditionally stupid Michigan-Indiana game. Michigan would find itself embroiled in a stupefying conflict until their center went the wrong way in overtime and Michigan scored anyway or Jeremy Gallon racked up receiving yard #369, and then they'd win. I spent much of the first quarter thinking about the one where Indiana went on 15-play touchdown drives, whereupon Denard Robinson would score in two plays and the cycle would repeat. I braced for the kind of win that makes you want to shower afterwards.

This didn't happen. What happened is Indiana stopped doing anything and Michigan scored over and over again. After Indiana's second touchdown the Hoosiers gained 49 yards on their next six drives; by the time they did anything of note Michigan had put up 32 unanswered.

This has been a rarity over the past decade. Since 2009 the only other Michigan-Indiana game that hasn't been in serious doubt in the fourth quarter was the 2014 edition. That was 34-10 because the Hoosiers had to start Zander Diamont (career YPA: 4.6) at QB. Every other IU game over the last decade has been somewhere between pretty uncomfortable and having your nose hairs plucked out one by one by an old man regaling you with tales of his various lesions.

This was the best of any of these Indiana teams, the one Michigan stuffed in a steamer trunk and mailed to Peru.

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And so here we are. A lot of people are coming out of the woodwork now to say they always believed. This is a lie unless the person in question has also been scammed out of money by a robocall. If you have lost money because a recorded message says They Have Been Trying To Reach You, I believe you. I believe you if you are Raj:

you in October: will Shea Patterson ever complete a pass

me in October: check out this Monte Carlo simulation I programmed showing Michigan having a 0.05% to make the playoff pic.twitter.com/mqdWfIFzXD

— playoff raj (@internetraj) November 25, 2019

Otherwise, no.

Six games ago Michigan was coming off:

• a six-game stretch dating back to last year's Indiana game where they failed to cover the spread by at least 17 points, including horrible blowouts against OSU, Florida, and Wisconsin and a three-point OT win over Army
• Rutger
• a 10-3 win over Iowa in which Michigan gained 267 yards

Michigan's offense sat in the 70s in SP+ a year after finishing 25th and returning pretty much everyone. Jim Harbaugh said something about how his offense was on the verge of clicking that everyone on the internet and off scoffed at. I deleted a sassy quote tweet instead of sending it, not because I disagreed with everyone else but because it was more trouble than it's worth.

Even a couple games later Michigan was coming off a blowout of Illinois that featured an Illini run from 28-0 down to 28-25 and a Penn State game in which Michigan's many, many errors outran a down-to-down pounding. This was progress. It was easy to see but hard to feel. Those games appear vastly different when they're at the tail end of the eight games mentioned above than when they are the start of the final six games of this season.

But it turned out Harbaugh was right: Michigan was close to clicking on offense. Since he said that Michigan's been held under 38 points once, by Penn State. That game featured one Michigan drive end on a blatant uncalled PI, a second go in the tank after Nico Collins had a 45-yard catch wiped out by a horrible OPI, and a drop in the endzone that would have tied it. That was a 417 yard performance that should have been closer to 500.

Every other game has been a hamblasting, culminating in a game where Shea Patterson was undeniably elite. The offense has climbed all the way to 26th in SP+, with legions of Michigan fans badgering Bill Connelly to run the numbers after Iowa to see where this version of Michigan lands.

The looming cliff this weekend looks like it has handholds for the first time. Not many, and perilously spaced. But Ohio State is no longer a blank, unscalable wall of steel.

[After THE JUMP: thrown it to Nico]