The Rising Tide

I wasn't even supposed to be here today.

I had a wedding in Evanston this weekend.  I was going to let Geoff reclaim the rightful throne if he wanted and I was going to be content to hold my tongue.

And then Shane was nailed in the helmet, a targeting call that went uncalled, looked wobbly, and came out.  Devin comes in, Devin runs a few plays, Devin loses his helmet.  Bellomy can't find his helmet, so they send Shane back in.  They don't take a time out, which would have solved everything.  They send out an injured Shane Morris (who had a leg injury for sure, whatever other points you want to argue) for one play.

And then the rains of criticism come in, and rightfully they should.  No one is talking about how bad Michigan looked yesterday, and by the way, they did.  No, they're talking about whether your underachieving head coach is now also either willfully ignorant of head trauma issues, or so incompetent that he didn't know that Shane Morris might have had/probably did have a concussion.  Either way, Brady Hoke lost whatever remaining benefit of the doubt/goodwill that Michigan fans had for him.  While we may not handle losing very well, we certainly don't handle being the center of a national controversy well at all.

But you already knew all of that.

To go a little meta for a moment, I no longer know what to do in this space that I grant myself every week.  To wit, if I go silent, then I'm a fair-weather fan who is only interested in Michigan when they are winning.  Well, I'm not say.  So if I speak my mind and talk about the negative things I am thinking of about the team and the program and the department, then I'm being a hater and my negativity hurts everyone associated with the team.  But if I only look at the positives, I'm a propaganda machine for a team that already has plenty of them.

The new reality is that Michigan is in a dark place, darker than I have ever seen it.  And nearly all of it is self-inflicted.  And I'm not sure there's an obvious way out of it.  Some seem confident that the right decisions are being made.  But, being confident in having made the right decision is not the same as making the right decision.

Go buy one of these.  Keep it handy.  We're going to need it a lot over the next few weeks.  Because we're not going anywhere anytime soon.  You pissed us off.  Not because you are losing.  But because you thought you could tell us everything's fine when we know it's not.  So we're not going anywhere, no matter how high the tide gets.