An Ode to Maybe

It was at this point in the third quarter that we were all Don Brown (Patrick Barron)

I can't explain.  Illinois, a team that lost at home to Eastern Michigan this year and coached by a man whose beard looks like it comes out of mythology, was down 28-0 to Michigan, did not look like it could stop Michigan's rushing game on the edge, had a punt blocked which Michigan turned into a quick work touchdown, and generally looked, well, bad.  Oh sure, they got a touchdown late in the first half to at least make it interesting, but it looked like the only thing that was going to stop Michigan was stupid unsportsmanlike conduct penalties or fumbling.

So when Michigan looked bad in the third quarter, three and outs, lost fumbles, general malaise on defense, you could understand the building apoplexy in the Michigan fanbase.  But the math was telling a different story.  Ladies and gentlemen, the unhappy valley.

The lowest Michigan's win probability dropped to was 77.3% on the ensuing kickoff after the touchdown to make it 28-25 Michigan.  The moment Shea Patterson converted the 4th and 2 at the Illini 10-yard line, the win probability jumped back up into the 90th percentile and never looked back.  That the defense came out and immediately forced Matt Robinson to fumble, giving Michigan a short field, which they could not cash in on, only to then force Robinson into a sackfumbleception by Carlo Kemp on the Illini one-yard line, which Michigan did score on thanks to a plunge by Patterson and the score was something more like what Michigan might have expected.

The problem with pre-season expectations is that they put the best possible cast on every problem in the hopes that the concerns will be magically solved.  The weirdest part about college football is that, sometimes, they are.  Sometimes your new offensive coordinator works his magic and you look like an unstoppable machine [glances in a confused manner at Baton Rouge].  Other times, the legitimate concerns you have are well-founded and you keep trying to convince yourself that it's going to be OK.  The glimpses of Michigan doing things well in the first half today were almost enough to make you think maybe something was finally clicking.  Until, of course, it wasn't.  Even if Patterson did have an effective fourth quarter drive where he took care of business to get momentum back on Michigan's side, he still was only 11 of 22.  I know people were calling for McCaffery, but he just got out of the concussion protocol, I don't know how ready he was (yes, he made the trip.)  On a day when Nico Collins, Lavert Hill, and Kwity Paye did not see action, Michigan still ended up taking care of business, even if it wasn't how anyone wanted it to happen.

We've reached the halfway point of the journey and Michigan is 5-1.  The real tests begin in earnest next week with a White Out in Happy Valley.  I think the tempering of expectations has been such that Michigan fans are fully in "not in the face" territory, but strange things do happen in college football.  We'll just have to see what happens.

Reign

This is going to be much harder next year when the answer is not just "pick the cool picture of Denard."  (Photo by Gregory Shamus/Getty Images)

You're going to get wet.  I think you need to realize that.  So you call upon your years of Big House experience to do the little things, like have your poncho at the ready, put your wallet in a Ziploc bag, put on old socks and old shoes, and then don't really move that much when you get to your seat.  But you have a plan and you stick to the plan and everything should be pretty much as good as it can be.

Illinois is not a very good football team.  I think that anyone who has looked at them in the post-Zook knows it's going to take them some time to get back to competitive, but they don't really have a Juice Williams/Mikel LeShoure level talent on this roster right now.  Nathan Scheelhaase isn't bad, but when he was knocked out of the game in the second quarter with a concussion, it pretty much assured that Illinois had no real shot of coming back.

I don't know that you can call 45-0 "workmanlike" because there were a lot of exciting plays in the game, three scoring plays of 49+ yards will do that, but the whole game just felt like "This is an opponent on our schedule.  Let's go out and do what we did in practice and everything will be A-OK."  Denard continued to look like the mature senior quarterback we wanted him to be (7 completions on just 11 passes in a rainy day in Ann Arbor when you didn't really need to do much more helps the cause.) Denard's 33 yard run in the second quarter when he returned to the game after tweaking his pinky is a perfect example.  Younger Denard would have tried to make the end zone, get the last ten yards and get the touchdown.  Instead, Denard ran out of bounds, took the first down and then two plays later ran it in for six yards for the TD.  Solid positive decision making.

(Also, a side note, I feel like this is an inversion of the 2008 "Juice Williams runs wild game" where Illinois whipped RichRod's first year team 45-20.  The skilled running quarterback just running roughshod over an overmatched defense.  Bigger difference is Michigan held Illinois to zero points.)

Meanwhile Jake Ryan is playing like a man possessed.  His stat line is  was a career high tying 11 tackles, including three and a half tackles for loss, one and a half sacks and a forced fumble.  If you wanted a Legends patch on someone playing like a legend right now, Jake Ryan is doing the things to earn that approbation and acclaim.

So now it's on to Michigan State and the Michigan State that stands before us at the present moment is not the titanic presence that we were told to expect in the pre-season.  They're 4-3 and while their losses to Notre Dame and Ohio State are comparable to Michigan's to Notre Dame and Alabama, the loss to Iowa yesterday was much more reminiscent of the pre-Dantonio era.  I have no doubts that Sparty will be up for the game (In fact, I wonder if there will be any talk of "looking ahead" to explain Iowa away), but I think Michigan knows what is on the line.  I think they know that the trip to Pasadena requires taking out this divisional rival, the first of five in a row, and "restoring order" to the universe.

Time will tell, but I feel alot better about this weekend forthcoming than I did three weeks ago.

"Go with the flow." (Photo by Gregory Shamus/Getty Images)

Bullets (Updated!):

• I thought we had rid ourselves of "In The Big House", but no, now it has a music video.  Stop, just stop.
• My hands were too cold and my phone was ensconced in my jacket under my poncho so I could not get out my traditional "Damn You Journey" tweet out in time.  I do apologize.
• Dennis Norfleet, in addition to looking interesting on kick returns, was dancing along with "Seven Nation Army" on the sidelines.  Thought we wouldn't notice, but we did.
• Really, I could have like six anti-Special K bullets here, but will it really do any good?
• Josh Furman now holds my personal record for most obvious "Yeah, that's a penalty" I have ever seen.
• Michigan nearly covered the 48 O/U number without any help from the Illini.
• Um, what was up with the Wave going clockwise yesterday?  Are we blaming the weather?
• Props to the fans two rows ahead of us who helped out the dad with his elementary school age kid by giving them a poncho and trying to make a lousy wet Michigan fall day a bit better for a kid who was probably at his first Michigan game.  We often talk about negative fan experiences in the stands, but that was a great moment of kindness and deserves to be mentioned.
• It is only fitting that on a day when Gerald Ford was honored, Jack Kennedy got to complete a pass.
• That was win #899.  That should be kind of fun if things go well next weekend.  Also, it was Michigan's 352nd consecutive game with points, putting them just nine shy of BYU's all-time NCAA record for most games without being shut out.
• Man, these are way more fun to write than the dirges and elegies.

Error Bars

Something I find irritating about all college football polls, even the vastly superior Blogpoll, is they don't give voters room to express uncertainty. A search for the phrase "I don't know, man" on MGoBlog's main page yields 70 hits; surprisingly, only six of them are from Blogpoll posts describing the hebdomadal^* struggle to figure out who should be ranked 20^th and who should be ranked 25^th.

You could argue with a straight face that, based on results, Michigan could be the third best team in the country. After all, its only losses are to an undefeated Alabama and and undefeated Notre Dame. Michigan could be better than undefeateds like Kansas State, Oregon State, Louisville, or Rutgers, and you'd probably bet on Michigan to beat Rutgers right now.

Strict resumé balloting errs in the opposite direction and ranks each team according to how bad they could possibly be. Who has Michigan beaten? Purdue? Air Force? Illinois!? UMass!?? With a set of wins like that, you can reasonably argue that U-M is the 50^th or 60^th best team of the country. Especially if you argue that Notre Dame is a mirage that didn't actually beat Stanford. Resumé balloting is more honest than voting with your gut, but it still hides the fact that, six weeks into the season, where many teams should rank is still a mystery. Is Michigan third? Unlikely. Is Michigan fiftieth? Also unlikely. But we just don't know, man.

GIF of Stanford's overtime touchdown credit SBNation, obviously.

One thing we do know is the defense put in an amazing performance against Illinois.  They were held to 3.3 yards per carry (with a standard deviation of 5.1 yards). These two stats indicate that not only did the D hold the Illini in check, but that they kept them from pulling off many big runs; in fact, Illinois only had one run of over ten yards all day, the Nathan Scheelhaase dash that knocked him out of the game. If you calculate the standard error about the mean, it's 0.14 yards, suggested that if U-M and Illinois face of again and again, Michigan would hold them to under 3.5 YPC again and again and again. That's consistency. That's dominance.

On the one hand, we have a vast amount of uncertainty about how good this team is overall. On the other hand, we have a lot of evidence, especially over the last three weeks, to suggest that Greg Mattison has worked his magic once again and produced another unparalleled defense. There are lots of reasons to be confident about the second half of the season, but there are also lots of reasons to be unsure. If we can be leave this game 100% sure of anything, it's that Danielle is the luckiest girl on earth, even luckier than Tommy Rees.

Photo by Ace.

With Michigan State coming up, it's not the time for smack talk yet. Let's let Jake Ryan continue his hebdomadal smacking next Saturday and then we'll talk.

^*Hebdomadal means "occuring every seven days." Similarly, "nychthemeral" mean "occurring every twenty-four hours." These words have subtly different meanings than "weekly" and "daily." English is weird. Thanks to @sgtwolverine for retweeting the word of the day.

F. Scott Louverture

Photo by Melanie Maxwell/Ann Arbor.com

"There are no second acts in American lives."

Over the last few years, we've been told, by anyone who holds an opinion on the matter, what Michigan football is and how it should look and feel.  I've always viewed that notion as a mirror which reflects one's view of what one wants football to look and feel like.  As I've said before, I have weaknesses for running backs that blend power, speed, and the ability to make the key cuts and fundamentally sound safety play.  Jordan Kovacs has done a great job this season with the latter, but since Mike Hart left Michigan, the former has been solely missing.  (No offense Brandon Minor, I liked you a great deal as a back, but durability issues man, durability issues.)  So when Fitzgerald Toussaint emerged as the lead running back for Michigan after what seemed to be an interminable search, I wondered if he would be "enough" or could he become something more, something greater.

"Life is essentially a cheat and its conditions are those of defeat; the redeeming things are not happiness and pleasure but the deeper satisfactions that come out of struggle." 

I think we can all agree that yesterday's game was a classic example of "left wanting".  Though Michigan had a two score lead, on the road, against a team that considers Michigan its arch-rival*, it still felt like all of the missed red zone opportunities were going to come back to haunt Michigan, because we're taught that when you don't put the boot on the throat, it will cost you.  Except, it didn't.  Michigan's defense looked like "Michigan defense" again, they made stops, they pressured the quarterback, and while they made some mistakes (4th and 26?!?), they did enough that Michigan's counter punches on offenses were enough to bring home the eighth win of the season, one better than last year, ensuring a .500 record in the Big Ten (which shouldn't be a big deal, but come on...), and ensuring a .500 road record for the year (yeah, four games is not the best sample size on that.)  Michigan may not be Michigan again, but an eight win season, with a solid chance to win either of the last two games, if not both, well, isn't that what we were clamoring for?  Isn't that what we so direly wanted?  I've said it before, but it's true, the last four years changed us as fans.  For the first time in a very long time, certainly in the modern modern era, we know what the depths of despair look like in college football, so we appreciate not mediocrity, but the realization that true ecstasy in the college football sense requires perfection, and perfection is so rare that it cannot and must not become commonplace.

(*-Seriously, the Illinois people have an unhealthy obsession with Michigan.  It's kind of a compliment when you think about it.  It's also hilarious.)

"Nothing is as obnoxious as other people's luck."

Am I wrong here, or did like every replay review go against Michigan yesterday?  I realize that replay reviews are supposed to get things right, but man, every single break went against Michigan yesterday and Michigan still won.  Sometimes you don't need luck.

"You don't write because you want to say something, you write because you have something to say."

If I've been quiet on the last week's major story, it's because I simply do not know what to say that either hasn't already been said, or that would make much sense.  Besides, Spencer Hall and Joe Posnanski handled this (along with hundreds of other writers far superior than I am) and when you feel like every thing has been said, at some point you just realize you have nothing to add.  But I realized I did have one comment eventually that I wanted to make.  It has been so easy to show this last week as the final straw of a rotten system, that college football is irredeemably broken and that we should be ashamed to love it, feeding the rotten system.  Perhaps those people are right.  But the longview says something different.  The longview says that college football has always been screwed up.  College football has always meant too much to too many people, it has always been a target for critics for any number of reasons.  The violence, the money, the institutional racism, the money, the overemphasis of athletics over academics, the money, the lowering of admissions standards in the name of winning percentage, the money.  The criticisms are out there, and they are fair.  If you wanted to walk away, no one would blame you.  Our greatest danger is in making college football more than something than it is, fulfilling narratives established by ourselves, or by the media, to short hand our way through life in a metaphor.  If we understand what it means and do our best to not assign it value beyond that, its power to shock us when it fails to live up to any higher standard is diminished.


So, in the final end, bring on Nebraska, learn from the past, and make a better tomorrow.