At The Hundredth Meridian

For one brief moment at the start of the second half, there was a glimmer of hope. (Michigan Athletics)

Me debunk an American myth?

And take my life in my hands?

Where the great plains begin

At the hundredth meridian

At the hundredth meridian

Where the great plains begin

--"At the Hundredth Meridian" by The Tragically Hip from their 1992 album Fully Completely

On the surface, there are many reasons to fret about a 24-13 loss to a top-20 team on the road in week two.  Michigan wasn't aggressive enough; Michigan didn't let Bryce Underwood use his athletic gifts to their fullest; Michigan's offensive line is suspect, especially for one on a team whose HC is an OL guy.  There is validity in all of these things.  But it is a matter of degrees, and primarily whether this loss is somehow a referendum on where Michigan is or where Michigan will be.

I told myself that every possible outcome for this game, save Michigan blowing out the Sooners, was in play.  But I do find myself surprised that Michigan won the turnover battle and was kept in the game by a couple of critical Oklahoma miscues, but still never really threatened in this matchup.  A Brett Venables defense looked like that of Venables' past, confusing, confounding, especially with an 18-year-old starting in his first road game.  While there were a few nice moments, like Justice Haynes long TD run to start the second half, it was mostly an exercise in frustration.

If I die of vanity, promise me, promise me

They bury me some place I don't want to be

You'll dig me up and transport me, unceremoniously

Away from the swollen city-breeze, garbage bag trees

Whispers of disease and the acts of enormity

And lower me slowly, sadly, and properly

Get Ry Cooder to sing my eulogy

My only other takeaway from this game is that John Mateer played the kind of game for a college quarterback that you absolutely love to watch as a neutral and that you loathe deeply when he's playing the team you're rooting for.  To wit, at some point in the second half:

So, end of story, Michigan takes its first loss of the season, comes home to face the Chippewas, and hopes they can get a bunch of starters healthy ahead of the trip to Nebraska.  Will Sherrone take his two weeks of university-imposed exile to examine what needs to be better?  We can only hope.

Tales from the Spreadsheet

• 24-13 IS a Scorigami (we initially thought that 2011 Iowa was also 24-13, but it turns out that the score had been recorded incorrectly in the database at the Bentley.  We have alerted them.)
  
• 84,107 were in attendance for Michigan's first-ever regular-season game against the Sooners and its first-ever game in the state of Oklahoma.
  
  
• Michigan moves to 0-2-0 all-time against the University of Oklahoma.
  
• Michigan moves to 2-2-0 all-time on September 6 (The other loss was to 2014 Notre Dame on the road that ended the long "no shutouts against" streak.)
  
  
• Michigan improves to 19-16-1 when scoring exactly 13 points (as Hockeybear pointed out, the last time Michigan scored 13 points, we were all ecstatic).
• Michigan moves to 19-19-0 all-time when allowing 24 points to the opposition (including 2023's victory over Ohio State).
• Michigan has lost 10 games all-time by precisely 13 points, the four most recent examples were all to Ohio State, 1970, 2007, 2009, 2017.

How Freekbass woke up the echoes

During last Friday's MAC Championship game, I happened to catch the PSA that Northern Illinois's Department of University Relations ran during the game. By the hammer of Grabthar, it was horrible! Good university ads do not use a font that's a seemingly random mixture of small and capital letters. Good university ads do not use a bizarre strobe effect when showing their title cards. Good university ads typically spotlight more photogenic professors or, better still, don't spotlight any professors at all.

NIU won the game 40-37 in double overtime and crashed the BCS, overcoming the losing psychology of weasel ex-head coach Dave Doeren, whose bizarre decision to sit on two timeouts at the end of regulation would have been blamed for their defeat.

Dating back to Every Day Should be Saturday's classic "YOUR SCHOOL'S PROMOTIONAL AD IS TEH SUX0RZ" series, every university-produced ad that has been met with howls of derisive laughter from both the university's rivals and disinterested observers has been followed by an upswing in the school's football fortunes. Sitting up on their clouds, the football gods must smile upon schools that don't waste their money on media relations. This is also why the football gods love gritty NFL players from small colleges with cheap ads instead of the glory-boy types from the big-spending schools.

Humilibreakdown: "OU Anthem" vs. "We are ND"

The greatest period in Oklahoma football history was from 1953-1957, when the Sooners won 47 straight games until finally being toppled by Notre Dame, 7-0. The University of Oklahoma still seeks revenge against Notre Dame for ending their streak and they have been waiting for Notre Dame to show some sort of prolonged competence in football so that they can go out and best whatever record the Irish may set. However, their impatience has gotten to them, and OU is trying to defeat Notre Dame in the only area where the Irish are the undisputed champions: making humiliating hype videos. In the HSR's first-ever Humilibreakdown (TM), we judge between the horrors of "We are ND" and "OU Anthem."

1. TIMING. "We are ND" was posted on YouTube on April 29, 2010, reportedly after it premiered at Notre Dame's athletic awards banquet. In hindsight, this was a very poor time to release the video, as late April and early May is a fairly slow sports period, and thus the blogosphere had plenty of time to mercilessly savage it. On the other hand, "OU Anthem" was posted to YouTube two days before the biggest scheduled event on the Oklahoma sporting calendar, a Red River Shootout which also serves as a de facto elimination game for both Oklahoma and Texas's national title hopes. "OU Anthem" was also posted more than two years after "We Are ND," which should have given OU's administration a hint that videos featuring sickly idiots do not successfully motivate fanbases. DISADVANTAGE: OKLAHOMA.

2. SICKLY IDIOT. While Freekbass's performance in "We Are ND" is worthy of the legendary mockery it has garnered, we have to grudgingly admit that Freakbass does appear to be a talented musician, even if his style has as much place at Notre Dame as Lee Greenwood's has at the Sorbonne. Oklahoma's skinny idiot, on the other hand, does not appear to possess any talent whatsoever. DISADVANTAGE: OKLAHOMA.

Seal Block Week 4: We're Not in Kansas Anymore

The hardest part of this week's ranking of the Big XII seals was keeping track of which schools are in the Big XII. My most shocking discovery was that this blog has never used an "mst3k" label before.

10. Iowa State
What it's trying to say: The dog ate our original seal.
What it's actually saying: We just didn't give a fuck.

Looks like Kay didn't do so well in her graphic design course.