A Sort of Homecoming

Man, he looks young...oh, right. (Mike Mulholland | MLive.com)

Homecoming is an odd duck when you attend football games on the regular with your college roommate in that it should feel like a chance to be nostalgic, but, I mean, literally, I'm sitting with the same person I sat with for four years of games as a student.  We have all the same in-jokes, all the same reference points, and so on.  It's not a blast from the past, it's Season 21 of the same show (and like The Simpsons the first 11 seasons were much more fondly remembered by the masses.)

It is also comforting to know that the same general miasma that surrounded Michigan Stadium during the first 20 minutes of the Rutgers game was not just one's self perhaps being too pessimistic.  Even after a thirteen play, 80-yard drive that took nearly seven minutes off the clock that broke the seal, the 65-yard bust by Janarion Grant off the direct snap took all of the wind out of Michigan Stadium's collective sails.  The alumni (and the half of the student section that showed up) were cold, wind-burned and frustrated.  So when you get a fumbled snap that leads to an O'Korn scramble that ends with a seemingly random slide, and two incompletes, you couldn't blame the defense for thinking "What the heck?" because it was seemingly the general thought among the Maize and Blue faithful, especially after Rutgers allegedly missing in action passing game saw Giovanni Rescigno hit Josh Hicks for 28 yards into Michigan territory.  If not for a supremely mediocre punt by the Scarlet Knights, Michigan could have been pinned deep without a lot of room to work.

Then it happened.  It was a small burst of noise, coming from the most observant in the stands, and then it rose as a murmur, then finally a crescendo as the crowd realized what had happened.  Brandon Peters was in the game at quarterback.  The noise became so much that the scoreboard had to make a "Quiet Please: Offense at Work" request, which might have also been "Can we please not put any undue pressure on the kid, OK thank you?" request.  The whole of the stadium was picked up, it seemed, as the offense perked up, hitting on runs of 8 and 12 yards, then Peters finding Tyrone Wheatley, Jr for 15 for another first down.  Then a Walker run for 4, hitting Poggi for 10 and another first down, Ty Isaac for 6, then a wonderful find of Nico "The Velvet Underground" Collins for the sideline for 12, and finally Karan Higdon in from ten yards out and all seemed right with the Maize and Blue world.   This assertion was only reaffirmed when Michigan pulled together a wonderfully executed, if short, two-minute drill, finished by that most beautiful of all plays, a wheel route to Chris Evans and Michigan went into the locker room up 21-7.

One of the concepts I am finding the most difficult to deal with in my life as it stands now is the difficulty in converting mindset into success.  There are those who have argued (and this is WAY oversimplified) that if you believe you have room to grow, to improve, that you can get better, that there are no practical limits to what you can achieve.  While this is a wonderful and noble goal, sports are a painful reminder that talent still plays a role.  If wanting to be good at something was all that mattered in being successful, Brady Hoke would have a much better shot at still being Michigan's head coach.  A desire to be good and a commitment to improvement are not enough, you still need to have some talent to do it, especially when you are surrounded by other motivated, driven, and talented individuals.  So I think it has to be hard knowing that you wanted to do everything you can to make the most of your shot as a starter and it was just not enough.  As much as people tell you to tune out what the fans and the media are saying, it's so much easier said than done, you know your own shortcomings, and as much as you are working to overcome them, it's just not happening.  You know that you don't have many more chances, which possibly makes you press more, press harder, make bad mistakes precisely because you didn't want to do so.  But college sports are a ruthless meritocracy, as much as loyalty should be rewarded, if you're not getting the job done, you're not going to keep getting opportunities.

What Brandon Peters did yesterday was a glimmer of what is possible.  I do not expect that this is the start of some magical end of season run that rights the ship completely, but I do think it gives Michigan a realistic chance to see what it has in Peters going forward, earning him and the other young players some valuable game experience, and hopefully winning some games along the way.  The Wolverines still have to play the #4 and #3 teams in the country at the end of the coming month.  They have a defense that will, hopefully, keep them in any game.  The question is, can the offense find a way over the next two weeks to be ready for those matchups and give Michigan a chance.  Logic says "Probably not."  Hope says "Sure, why not?"  Hope's more fun here, and I'm going to run with it for now, knowing full well logic probably wins out in the end.  Then again, maybe not, it's college football, and if there's one thing that college football has proven time and again to not be, it's logical.  We shall see.  But for now, it's Minnesota week and as always, Jug security is at a premium.

Atlas

Welcome home.

"Carry your world, I'll carry your world."

We're not going to be fair to him.  On some level, I'm OK with that, because there will be a compensation package commensurate to that burden.  But I also know that he's coming back and he knows the expectations and he relishes it.  He knows he can do it and he knows if he does, he becomes a legend, even more than he already may have been in our eyes.

For the last few weeks, I couldn't even bring myself to type his name, for fear that it was an illusion and saying it would shatter the well crafted fiction/delusion we had imagined for ourselves.  The most fascinating part of this is how the Michigan fan base, or at least the part I follow because there's a rationality even in the most irrational of times, one factionalized and divided, united under one banner. Our provincialism be damned, we fought against the NFL reporters and their agendas, and the unwavering belief that every day that he didn't say no was a day closer to him coming home.  Then the plane landed at Metro, and he was home, he was back.

There has been a tremendous amount of Biblical imagery thrown around in the last month.  Part of this is because it's one of the easiest cultural references to make, even in a more secular world, the references are still well known.  When Paine wrote Common Sense and The Crisis, he often sprinkled in Biblical references to give weight and gravitas to his arguments while still making them accessible to the common men and women of the colonies whom he sought to persuade.  I think we made use of these references because we know what Ufer taught us, or our parents or our grandparents: "Michigan football is a religion and Saturday's the holy day of obligation." Or as John U. Bacon said "Michigan football is a religion, not a business, and something economics can't accurately explain."  We've thrown our phrases like "prodigal son", "second coming", "wandering in the desert" and yet, we have to know in doing this, it's placing a ridiculous amount of expectation on one man.  But it is because that fandom is a faith, secular as it might be, but residing on a belief in the unseen, on "miracles", it sometimes come down to needing to believe in one man, because hope is still the most powerful fuel that fandom runs on.

In Gods and Generals, a Michigan native gets to give a nice little monologue, built on the Roman Civil War for a direct parallel to the American Civil War.  Watching as Union troops head to a slaughter on Mayre's Heights because Burnside is the latest in a string of generals not up to the challenge of leading the Army of the Potomac, Jeff Daniels, as Col. Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain begins by saying:

"How swiftly Caesar had surmounted the icy Alps and in his mind conceived immense upheavals, coming war. When he reached the water of the Little Rubicon, clearly to the leader through the murky night appeared a mighty image of his country in distress, grief in her face, her white hair streaming from her tower-crowned head, with tresses torn and shoulders bare she stood before him."
I believe that he knows this.  He's been told this by an Michigan fan, alum, teammate, booster, or general believer who can get his ear for one moment that his school is in distress.  He had to know and I think he wants to know that what was can be again and he may be the only one to do it.  It may not be the perfect moment or opportunity, but you don't get to pick when these moments come along.  He seized the moment because the moment was there.  And now we wait.

It will be a long eight months between now and fall camp.  There will be recruiting battles to try and salvage.  There will be anticipation for Spring Ball and debates and discussions. We'll know nothing and believe we know everything.  This is as it should be.  We will suffer the slings and arrows of the rest of the college football world.  We must because as much as people say college football is better when Michigan is great, they also know that they enjoy attacking Michigan because, well, uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.  While that crown has not been national or even a B1G championship of late, the #915 is still there.

He is not Bo, but he reveres him at least as much as we do, and while that may not mean anything anymore, it's a Hell of a place to start.  Until that Thursday night in Salt Lake City in August, we must survive on belief that it will be better.

So here's to that.  Welcome home, Coach Harbaugh.

"Heaven we hope is just up the road.

Show me the way, lord because I am about to explode."

Coach Rodriguez "LiveBlog"

The plan had been to liveblog this morning's presser, but there was not a whole lot of cooperation in, you know, watching the whole thing, and by the time I had figured out, well, they were well into the questions. That's my bad. So what you're getting instead is my sense of things...

I get a sense that the Detroit media are already excited about the new era, solely because Coach Rod speaks at a much quicker clip than Coach Carr did. Everyone wants to make it sound like Coach Carr was a humorless curmudgeon, but I've heard too many laughs at his press conferences to know that is a lie. But Coach Rod has a different feel. But the southern drawl and a world unseen await us. (By the way, I have believed for weeks that the Killers' "Read My Mind" was actually about the Michigan coaching search, and now, given the hire, I'm still convinced. Look up the lyrics, and you can see there's too many coincidences. I know it sounds crazy, but when you get an idea stuck in your head, strange things happen. It's also why I worry about close reading and linguistic interpretation.)

I'd like to think Coach Rod "gets it" about what coming to Michigan means to Michigan fans. He knows its a different place than West Virginia and he knows that he's got some things to learn about being at Michigan. That's not the worst thing. Similarly, he won't do everything the way it's always been done, and that may take some getting used to by us as a fan base. That's not the worst thing either.

Right now, we have the situation where the greatest thing that we as fans have as fans is hope. We see what Coach Rod has done with less highly thought of recruits at West Virginia and we salivate at the possibility of having top-notch athletes here in Ann Arbor. We think that it will be a cure all, that all of the pain and the frustration and the anguish. It's not going to be. No coach is perfect, no coach is a panacea for all that ails the football soul. We're also suckers for the new and shiny, especially when the new and shiny promises to be exciting as all get out. There will be times in the near future when Michigan loses a game because the offense could hold a lead late and we'll long for the old boring days. It will happen because it's who we are as a fan base. But let us keep things in perspective. Let us always remember that, no matter how important football may be to us, in the end, it is still just a game. From what I understand, it is that failure to understand things that helped push Coach Rod over our way.

There's an amazing difference right now between the not knowing of the coaching search and the knowing of whom we have hired and the not knowing of what the on-field future holds and seeing the results. I thought that this past summer was the most excited I had ever been waiting for a college football season to start. It shall pale next to the excitement over the anticipation of what is to come. It will be a rough transition, I know this, Coach Rod was already being very clear that there are "bumps" during the transitional period. But a new day begins today, and if we're smart, Michigan fans will do well to realize that history is what we make of it today.

Good luck Coach Rod and Go Blue. R2A2.