Engineering

Let's be clear, we've seen this movie a number of times and we still love it. (AP Photo by Michael Conroy)

(The great irony of this column is that I am the only member of the writing team here who does not hold an engineering degree from Michigan.  So I may get some of the details wrong, but I am not letting that stand in the way of a clever premise.)

Purdue gets a lot of play as an "engineering school" and there's obviously something fair about this*, after all, it is the #11 rated engineering graduate school in the country and it does have a lot of very successful engineering graduates.  But, here's the thing.  Michigan is also an engineering school, in fact, it has the #9 rated engineering graduate school in the country, in addition to highly rated law and medical schools to name just two more.  Basically, Michigan not only does the thing that Purdue does best as well as Purdue does if not better, it also does lots of other things better.

(*-I also think people think of Purdue as an engineering school because their mascot is a train and that's just how people's brains work.)

I think it was easy to believe that "Bad Denard" was going to show up because we only tend to remember the last thing we have seen.  But Denard's apology after the Notre Dame game, and all of the right things we heard from the team and the coaches during the bye week* brought me to the conclusions that this was going to be an OK day.  It didn't make me any less fearful about the game, but I had staked out my position ahead of the game on that ground.

(*-We call it a bye week, but technically it is not.  A bye is a round off in a tournament setting that allows you to advance to the next round of play without having played.  If anything, it's an open date.  This is also semantics.)

The first quarter was a clinic of what you can do with an extra week to prepare and to work on execution.  13 of 17 plays on a nearly nine minute drive were rushes.  Some were Denard, some were Fitz, a couple to Jeremy Gallon, one to Vincent Smith, but in the end, the variety and the execution put Michigan up 7-0 in the middle of the first quarter and everything started to click.  No matter how good people thought Purdue's front seven were on defense, Michigan looked better in all phases of the game.  Even the small things, like Brendan Gibbons dropping it exactly on the crossbar (which is actually harder when you think about it) or the bad exchange between Denard and Vincent Smith that led to the fumble and Purdue's late score in the first half and that slight tightening of the collar that you can't help but get when bad things happen.

But the predicted doom and gloom never came.  Michigan looked like a team that had two losses to teams ranked in the top ten and Purdue looked like a team who had three wins over some of the dregs of FBS.  We don't know a lot of things after September.  Some things are obvious, usually which teams are really good and which teams are really bad, but we also don't know a lot about the middle because of the imbalance of schedules.  Would we feel better about Michigan if the Alabama game had been, say, Buffalo or Ball State?  Probably, but we don't have that luxury now.  But we do know that no one who is eligible to play in the Big Ten championship game is really that much better than anyone else.  Today we saw Northwestern lose to Penn State, we saw Michigan State struggle with Indiana, a sentence I had difficulty typing over the sheer incredulity of it, and Nebraska and Ohio State trade points and make people question the existence of their defense.  Michigan answered its critics in a way that no other Big Ten team can claim today.

Michigan still has a way to go, but I liked what I saw today much more than I have at any point during this season.  Jake Ryan started out today strong, Raymon Taylor gives me hope, and I liked the tackling fundamentals out there.  Michigan isn't a great team, but it's a very good team, and a very good team may be all that is needed to win the Big Ten this year.

Never a dull moment!  Oddly, not pointing.  (AP photo by Michael Conroy)

So Homecoming week, a blast from the past to come, yet another game not starting at noon, and our second straight game outside the division.  Let's make it count.

Knowing

That kind of night. (Photo by Jonathan Daniel/Getty Images)

Feelings are always a difficult thing because they're not transparently logical and it is sometimes, even with a wide ranging vocabulary and a wholly developed sense of one's self, difficult to express how you are feeling, because it may not make any sense to anyone but yourself.  You try but sometimes you just end up more frustrated because the audience to whom you are speaking lacks the context or the empathy (or both) to not only understand how your feeling, but perhaps also the sense that you do not understand how and why they are feeling what they are feeling.  Almost every fight and disagreement in the world boils down to this and the intangibles surrounding it.

But sometimes, it is more than easy to express what you're feeling because it is a feeling shared by a larger number of people.  So, to that, the block quote:

"I want to say sorry to everybody who watches football, watches Michigan football and whoever follows Michigan football.  I want to say sorry and it won't happen no more. I'm going to be accountable for the rest of the season, I can tell you that much.  Whatever it takes for the team to win, that's what I'm going to do. I don't want to feel like this anymore."  

--Denard Robinson 

First of all Denard, that's a pretty big apology and probably unnecessary in the grand scheme.  The people who understand that you are still a net positive, that you are still one of the most dynamic and special players to have wandered through our football lives, well, they don't need it and those who cannot understand any of those things will not care how you feel, they will instead focus on what you did and why it was so awful.  But in an era when personal accountability is used as a punch line or a sound bite all too often, I appreciate the spirit in which it was offered, because I believe from everything I read, it was sincere.

But man, that feeling, that feeling of responsibility that it is all your fault, that you are the proximate cause of a disaster, that you, and you alone, bear the awesome burden of responsibility of failure when so many are counting on you, that has to be hard.  Any of us may have had that feeling, in a small scale, within the private lives we lead, but I don't know if anyone reading can say that they would have felt this way as a 22 year old* and one of the most famous athletes in the country who just laid an egg on national television.  But I do think, if we take inventory, we've had that moment of not wanting to feel a certain way anymore.  It's hard to shake, and sometimes you just need to say it aloud, to hear your voice say the words, even if just to yourself, but sometimes to a throng of assembled media.  You have to know that the road to feeling better comes with telling yourself that this sucks and I am taking personal responsibility to make it better.  It is in this knowledge, in this knowing that you have started down this path, that it, theoretically, makes every part of getting better and not feeling that way possible.

(*-And seriously, talk about having an awful birthday.  If I had time, I'd make up a list of nightmarish birthdays from history, but this one is up there.)

Not a night worthy of emphatic pointing. (AP Photo/Darron Cummings)

So you stare at a long two weeks, knowing that losing, while unpleasant, was not as devastating a body blow as it could have been.  Sincerely, when you turn the ball over six times, you pretty much need something resembling a miracle to win, and I think after the previous three seasons, that metaphorical well may have run just a touch dry.  Line play looked better on both sides of the ball, I thought Fitz looked like he was starting to get some traction, and I thought that there were enough easy what if moments in this game.  It is, at the same time, less and more frustrating than the Alabama game, because you can see a path through that leads to victory, but you also know that path was not taken.

(Worth noting as an aside: Purdue is the only game this season remaining on natural grass, which I also think didn't exactly help the cause last night.)

As I read countless times in my Twitter feed last night, all of Michigan's goals are still achievable, and the Big Ten suddenly does not look to be a scary monster but rather simply a grotesque.  So, you go out, you get some lipstick and you figure out the right way to dress things up to get to Pasadena, even knowing the whole time this isn't the way you hoped it would be.

It's Always Denard Time...

[Author's note: I regret nothing!]

Denard Time

Woah-oh-oh-oh

It's always Denard time

Woah-oh-oh-oh

It's always Denard time

Rolled out to right side of the line

Doesn't matter that the situation is third and nine.

Hands up if you're open for a first down tonight,

Cuz It's always Denard time.

Threw off my back foot like I didn't care

Lost a shoe, still couldn't tackle me anywhere

I'm in if you need a touchdown tonight

Cuz It's always Denard time

Good morning and good night

I do my best work Under the Lights

It's gonna be alright

Doesn't matter if were down by nine,

It's always Denard time

Woah-oh-oh-oh Woah-oh-oh-oh

It's always Denard time

Woah-oh-oh-oh

Doesn’t matter if we're down by nine,

It's always Denard time.

Freaked out missed the open man again

Checked out of coverage and hit my tight end

Let's find you if you're open for a first down tonight

Cuz It's always Denard time

Good morning and good night

I do my best work Under the Lights

It's gonna be alright

Doesn't matter if we're down by nine

It's always Denard time.

Woah-oh-oh-oh Woah-oh-oh-oh

It's always Denard time

Woah-oh-oh-oh

Doesn't matter if we're down by nine

It's always Denard time.

Woah-oh-oh-oh Woah-oh-oh-oh

It's always Denard time

Woah-oh-oh-oh

Doesn't matter if we're down by nine

It's always Denard time.

Doesn't matter when

Denard just made 'em miss again.

Doesn't matter where

Denard just made 'em miss by a hair.

Doesn't matter when

Denard just made 'em miss again.

It's always Denard time

Woah-oh-oh-oh Woah-oh-oh-oh

It's always Denard time

Woah-oh-oh-oh

Doesn't matter if we're down by nine,  

It's always Denard time

Woah-oh-oh-oh Woah-oh-oh-oh

It's always Denard time

Woah-oh-oh-oh

Doesn't matter if we're down by nine, 

It's always Denard time.

Ohio. Beat. Arts & Crafts.

I'm sure Craig will have a longer game column up for you later today, but for me two words will suffice: Hell. Yeah.

Many of you saw our Denard Robinson periodic table iron-on shirt design, and one of you was kind of enough to take a picture of my chest yesterday at the D.C. alumni bar - I love you, entertaining loud drunk guy! However, some of you are probably thinking, "Those are his 2010 stats. Why would I want to remember 2010?" Well now you can remember 2011 Denard instead with the updated version of the shirt:

Click for 1600 x 1600 version!

To make your Denard T-shirt, follow these instructions:

• Download the mirror image version of the design.
• Purchase an inexpensive T-shirt from a craft store or elsewhere.
• Purchase iron-on printer paper (e.g. Avery 3271) from your local office supply store.
• Print the mirror-image version on the iron-on paper. Follow the instructions that come with the paper to make the T-shirt transfer. Kids, make sure to have parental supervision.

The stats have been updated for 2011 with his slightly less impressive passing and rushing numbers, but with the infinitely more impressive 10-2 replacing his 4.44 fake 40 time.

You may also be saying, "Sure, I love Denard, but what about our seniors? They deserved to beat Ohio this year more than anyone." That is true, and over the next month or two we'll put out periodic table designs for each of them. We'll be starting right now with my beloved D-Linemen:

For the linemen, the numbers on the left are total tackles and TFLs.

All designs freely available under the Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0 license. Please attribute to "The Hoover Street Rag" and link to this post if applicable.

Bye Week Arts & Crafts!

So while I was in the middle of a pointless flame war on MGoBlog this week over proper statistical techniques - oh, the things we flame about at MGoBlog! - someone told me my icon should be turned into an MGoShirt. For reference, here is my icon:

Now, I don't believe that I should make money off of Denard Robinson's athletic exploits if the man himself cannot. So I'm making this design freely available under the Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0 license. Please attribute to "The Hoover Street Rag" and link to this post if applicable.

To make it into a T-shirt, do the following:

• Download the following large, mirror-image version of the picture by clicking below:

• Purchase an inexpensive T-shirt from a craft store or elsewhere.
• Purchase iron-on printer paper (e.g. Avery 3271) from your local office supply store.
• Print the mirror-image version on the iron-on paper. Follow the instructions that come with the paper to make the T-shirt transfer. Kids, make sure to have parental supervision.

Soon you will have an awesome Denard T-shirt you can claim you made yourself! For reference, the numbers in the design are:

• 16 (atomic number): Uniform number.
• 193.00 (atomic weight): Robinson's listed weight.
• +3, +7 (ionization states): probable outcomes of offensive drives led by Mr. Robinson. The +3 is outlined because it's not very stable.
• 2316, 1693 (boiling/melting points): Robinson's regular season passing and rushing yards for the 2010 season.
• 4.44 (electronegativity): His fake 40 time.

Hopefully making a new T-shirt will brighten your mood as much as the Purdue-Illinois game is brightening mine! (i.e. increasing my perception that Michigan can beat both of them.)

Let It Snow

I was going to turn this into a whole long form post, but as I lack the time, a quick insight:

For the second year in a row, Michigan has a finalist for the Chicago Tribune's Silver Football, given annually to the best football player in the Big Ten.  Brandon Graham shared the honor last year, Denard Robinson is nominated this season.  The article profiling Denard can be found here.

The whole story gives you some wonderful insight into Denard, but this is the money passage:

Robinson also packed snow into a plastic bag for his return flight.
"Melted on the plane," he said.

Can you, as you read that sentence, hear a slight chuckle and picture Denard smiling about it with that broad smile he has.  It's goofy, but you know, he's 19, he's from Florida, and the first time he ever saw snow, it was awesome.

We who have grown up in Michigan or the colder climes treat snow as a burden to be borne, but to someone who has spent 17 years of their life in Florida where 50 degrees is cold, this white stuff falling from the sky is pure magic.  We lose the wonder because we've been there before, but if you've never seen snow, you don't have to drive in it, or plow it, or walk in it, snow is pretty awesome. 


And even though it was likely known the snow wouldn't make it home to Florida, that's not the point.  The point is that that bag of water even represents the magic of seeing something unlike anything you have ever seen before, something read about, or seen in television commercials, or described to you, but not actually having been in the presence of until now.

Denard's melted bag of snow is a perfect metaphor for my memories of the 2010 season.  It was magical when we first saw it, and it melted, like we suspected it would in the end, but the memories that stay with us will be with us for a long time.

Excelsior

(photo credit: Michigan Daily)

I just don't know what to say. I've never seen a player account for more than 500 yards of total offense for his team outside of a video game. I've never seen a player take a team on his back with such ease. I've never heard a player who had such an amazing stats day say that he had no idea what his stats were, that he's a team player.

It's very simple. We know it's just two games. We know we spent too many words last year thinking that Tate Forcier was the solution to all of Michigan's problems only to find out that he was not. We know that we have learned that September means nothing without October and November. We know that Notre Dame might not be a very good team. We know that we need more evidence and that the next two weeks may not provide very much in the way of evidence. But for now, Denard Robinson feels very special, and this is a feeling that we have not known, perhaps not ever in our lives as Michigan fans.

One game at a time. One play at a time. Fix that which can be fixed. Improve that which can be improved. Everything will spill out from there.