Vengeance Is Sleeping

All's well that ends well. (Patrick Barron)

"I'm not the man you thought I was

My love has never lived indoors

I had to drag it home by force

Hired hounds at both my wrists

Damp and bruised by stranger's kisses on my lips

But you're the one that I still miss

You're the one that I still miss

And the truth is that it comes as no surprise

I'm not the man you think I am

I'm not the man you think I am"

 --"Vengeance Is Sleeping" by Neko Case from her 2009 album Middle Cyclone

No one could be blamed if you thought the fumble was the end.  I thought it at the moment. The way that Penn State had been converting on fourth down after fourth down (three on that drive) and then got the two-point conversion, well, we've seen this movie before.  It didn't matter at that point that James Franklin had called a mystifying fake field goal, perhaps feeling it a little too much after his successful call of a fake punt that Michigan called an early time out because they thought they saw something.  The missed field goal into the wind two possessions earlier.  All of the breaks that Penn State was manufacturing for Michigan now looked to be wasted because, on the third strip-sack of the game, the ball went to Penn State (which had also happened on the two times that Michigan's ferocious pass rush got to Sean Clifford, Penn State held on to the ball.)  The math bore out the feelings:

In the following sequence, the Michigan defense stood as tall as you could hope, allowing just three yards and shutting down efforts to get the ball to Jahan Dotson, forcing Penn State to settle for their third field goal of the game.

It is funny, in retrospect, that we did not see that settling for field goals is often the doombringer.  Well, red zone field goals, the 52-yarder near the end of the first half hardly felt like settling.  We had said it all year.  We joked about it on Twitter that Michigan specifically seemed to start its two touchdown drives on the 21-yard line just to not need to involve the red zone offense.  How would Michigan respond?  Could Michigan respond?  That old feeling, of Michigan collapsing under the weight of its own expectations, was prevalent among the twitterati, myself included.  History is instructive, but it does not have to be destiny, and the offense decided to make sure it was not.  Haskins immediately ripping off a 17 yard run on first down set the tone.  Then runs of 4, 4, 2 (first down), and 1 and it looked like Michigan was going to put this game on the broad shoulders and insanely muscular calves of Hassan Haskins to see if they could get it done, or, at worst, get it in Moody's range, even if the wind was solidly blowing against them.  

Erick All of @UMichFootball for the go-ahead TD today 🙌 pic.twitter.com/S61Dy7EjSh

— Stadium (@Stadium) November 13, 2021

A series of unfair thoughts as this play developed:
1).  Hmm, trips right, I wonder if they are going to try something in a levels concept?
2).  Wait, is All coming the opposite way on a crossing route?  OK.
3).  OK, he's got the first down, this is good.
4).  Wait, he's still going?  Is there someone off-camera?
5).  MOTORING!
6).  All right, one man to beat.
7).  Oh, he's in!  He's in!  Damn!

Erick All finally got his first career touchdown in a way that you likely could not have called before the drive started.  The replay review went Michigan's way, which was confusing in its own right, Moody was money on the extra point attempt and Michigan was up four with 3:29 to go.  An eternity, it would seem.

Sean Clifford was battered and bruised all game.  His offensive line left him out there to be feasted upon by Hutchinson and Ojabo like he was Anthony Morelli in 2006.  But he stood in and he battled and threw a reasonable sideline shot to Cam Sullivan-Brown that was just a tad too long but was reasonably well defended.  A small exhale.  No reason they cannot go back to that.  Clifford found Meiga for 8 to set up 3rd and 2 and keep the sticks moving.  Then, the playcalling went sideways for Penn State.  A pair of incompletions on third and fourth down that left the experienced observers scratching their heads and Michigan took over on downs on the Penn State 33.

If you, the Michigan fan, kept looking skyward for the other shoe, waiting for it to drop, Hassan Haskins plowed ahead for 4 and 5 yards respectively, followed by a Cade McNamara sneak that finally felt like the right call in the short-yardage situation, and Michigan had the first down they needed.  Haskins ran for three more yards, Penn State called their last time out, and then Haskins decided to get one more first down for good measure by running for 12 more up to the Penn State seven.  Three kneeldowns in succession and Michigan finally had its first win in 17 tries in the Harbaugh era after trailing in the fourth quarter to an AP ranked team.

On a day where Brad Robbins averaged more than 50 yards per punt on five beautiful kicks.  On a day where Michigan didn't need Moody to kick a field goal because they got enough in the end zone.  On a day where the defense made enough big, on point, correct plays, Michigan won.  Michigan won its ninth game in a season when seven wins felt like a better case scenario.  Michigan won three tough road games against Wisconsin, Nebraska, and Penn State.  There is a distinct possibility this team has more to say and more to do.  But for now, at least for one week, a specific narrative is dead.  All the goals remain possible.  We see what happens next.

A Murder of One

The turning point when lunch money receipts were collected and reimbursement demanded (Kirthmon F. Dozier/Freep)

"Well, I dreamt I saw you walking
Up a hillside in the snow
Casting shadows on the winter sky
As you stood there counting crows

One for sorrow, two for joy
Three for girls and four for boys
Five for silver, six for gold
Seven for a secret never to be told."

"A Murder of One", Counting Crows, from the 1993 album August and Everything After

For many years, I thought that the next line in "A Murder of One" (one of my favorite Counting Crows songs) was "There's a perfectness inside you" which not only made sense, it seemed like a nearly magical turn of phrase from Adam Duritz.  It turned out that it was "There's a bird that nests inside you." which is still pretty good, but not as good as I initially believed my false impression to be.  It makes more sense with the bird metaphor that continues afterward, but again, the notion of a perfectness inside you, sleeping underneath your skin always seemed like this wonderful notion of what can be achieved if we just pushed ourselves a little more.

What Michigan did to Penn State today was nigh on perfect.  It obviously did not finish as perfect as Penn State scored a garbage time touchdown, preventing the Don Brown shutout dreams from coming true, but still, it just felt amazing.  It was just brilliant.  Even though the script felt familiar, not enough points in the first half, potential missed opportunities, blood in the water being ignored, we also knew how that script flipped in the second halves of the last two games.

If I'm going to be honest, writing about these kinds of games are difficult because they're works of art.  They stand on their own.  Each of us stands before the artwork, taking it in, processing our own experiences, our own feelings, our own personal aesthetic and comes up with something.  If we're skilled in communication or in the history of the medium, we can usually articulate why this particular thing makes us feel this particular way, but sometimes the sheer joy or exhilaration of the piece robs us of our words.  We look at it and words fail us.  This was a pure, unadulterated cackle with glee moment.

Chase Winovich has said a lot of things.  He has said many many things that would be worrisome if he was not out there every play, backing it up, leading the posse like Kurt Russell's Wyatt Earp in the last hour of Tombstone, and riding herd like he knows the exact amount in his bank account so he can start writing checks all over the Big Ten.  I am sure that he annoys the hell out of the rest of the Big Ten and probably the country, but I don't care.  The guy who can destroy opposing quarterbacks but still take time to let the Drama Department know that he really enjoyed their performance of Sweet Charity, he's the Winovich, and we love him.

A trip to New Jersey next week awaits.  Onward.

Never Let Me Go

"Dad" Rudock.  It's like Dad Rock, but less Steely Dan, more Dan Fouts. (Matthew O'Haren-USA TODAY Sports)

I don't know that I would want the B1G to schedule like this forever, but the fun of the last two weeks of the B1G East have the Michigan/Ohio State/Michigan State/Penn State parallelogram of peril playing against each other (with the first leg having also been played on the same weekend back in October.  Now let us not speak of it again.)  As a fan, it was great knowing that I could watch a Michigan/Penn State road tilt at noon and then enjoy the Michigan State/Ohio State showdown at 3:30.  It felt fantastic to know I could watch both.  What ended up happening on Saturday became a tale of four coaches and their quarterbacks.

For Michigan, the progress that Jake Rudock has made since Week 1 has been nothing short of astonishing.  Rudock has gone from a liability to an asset, becoming one of the singular reasons that Michigan has won the last two games.  He is making good decisions (OK, the interception was suboptimal, he didn't look off his receiver and threw a laser right at the Nittany Lion defender.), he's making good use of the field position granted to him when the special teams unit breaks a return, and he has removed the sense of "waiting for the other shoe to drop" paranoia that has haunted Michigan's quarterbacks of recent vintage.  Coach Harbaugh has proven his quarterback whisperer bonafides yet again.  You hate to look ahead, especially with a season that has been so rewarding still in progress, but man, is it exciting.  So exciting.

For Penn State, the devastation wrought upon Christian Hackenberg yesterday by Michigan's defense, though not as statistically present as it was physically and emotionally (Michigan got pressure on 65% of Hackenberg's dropbacks according to PFF), with Wormley and Charlton doing most of the dirty work.  Hackenberg looks broken, and its understandable.  He came to Penn State when he could have changed his mind, got coached up by Bill O'Brien and looked like an absolute world beater his Freshman year, only to see BOB head to Houston and James Franklin come in to Happy Valley and go anchor down on his draft status.  Penn State is not a bad football team this year, all four of their losses are completely explicable, but I am sure that is cold comfort to the Nittany faithful.  Franklin's utterly bizarre coaching decisions, though grateful as I am for them as a Michigan fan, have to just make Penn State wonder what they did to deserve...oh, right.

For Michigan State, the chicanery and legerdemain of whether Connor Cook would play this weekend was a handy bit of subterfuge by Mark Dantonio, one for which I do not blame him in the least.  The only people who benefit from knowing injury information ahead of time are gamblers.  Why in the world would you tip your hand before you absolutely had to do so.  And this ignores the fact that Dantonio was hoping that things might get better before Saturday.  He might have suspected, but didn't know for sure until Cook got out to warm ups.  So you prepare like he can't go, but reserve hope that Cook might be able to pull a Willis Reed.  In the end, the supreme irony is that Dantonio didn't need Cook.  He took the chip on Michigan State's shoulder, drove it into the collective Trapezius of the Spartans and emerged from the Horseshoe with a win that put the Spartans in the driver's seat for the B1G East despite not having led for a single solitary second of either of their two most critical games, both played on the road.  That is impressive, even if it is your rival and you hate to admit it.

For Ohio State, the tyranny of too many choices finally came home to roost at the most inopportune of times.  It would be easy to say that Urban Meyer had the kind of problem you want to have, three excellent quarterbacks, all of whom had proven themselves in critical situations.  But it wasn't the quarterback or the choices that was going to be the issue.  It was the departure of Tom Herman to become Houston's head coach (true story: I had talked myself into Herman as my leading choice to replace Hoke if Harbaugh was not coming.  I am obviously thrilled beyond belief with how it turned out, but I don't think Herman would have been a bad consolation prize.  Well, you know, until he lost to UConn this week.  But I digress.)  that derailed Ohio State's machine.  The warning signs had been there, we knew it, the playoff committee even gave you a sense that they knew it, but we don't want to discredit the defending champions until they lose.  It's fair on some level, but completely different team, completely different circumstances, we should really start with a clean slate.  But we don't, essentially, defending champion until proven otherwise.  But now Michigan gets either an angry Ohio State team, or an unraveling Ohio State team.  Either one is a wounded animal, but at least, for Michigan, it's not a wounded animal defending its home turf.

In the end, the stakes seem pretty straight forward to me, and absolutely downright thrilling.  If Michigan wins, as every Michigan team has whose first year at Michigan coach has brought them into a season ending Ohio State game with a winning record has done in the past, then it is possible, verging on likely that a 10-2 Michigan gets picked to go to the Rose Bowl, potentially to face Stanford in what would be an easy and obvious storylines game for an NY6 bowl that wasn't a playoff game.  If Michigan wins and Penn State wins, Michigan heads to Indy for the first time ever to face an Iowa team where the obvious storylines would be overflowing.  It's been a strange college football season.  Almost anything that can happen has happened.  Michigan takes care of business at home, it puts the rest in the hands of other people.  Control your controlables, make your free throws, beat Ohio State.

Happy Thanksgiving. Go Blue.

The Nussmeter exhibits poor time management

We updated the Nussmeter to 3 after the Rutgers game, but failed to make a post announcing it. After numerous delays, we have now updated the Nussmeter post-Penn State. It's at 2, which is the bland and impossible-to-open Brazil nut.



We can only hope that Michigan doesn't join Brazil in finding out what it's like to be outscored at a ratio of 7:1. But, look, a glimpse of days long past: Denard highlights!

Pious men and dirty fiends

There are heroes and villains, and there are humans. We are not angels and demons, gods and monsters, zeroes and ones. We are fallen angels. We are brilliant beasts. We are between the gutter and the stars. Some of us are closer to the gutter, and others are closer to the stars.

So we are all part angel, part demon. We can imitate Grantland Rice's Great Scorer and tally up a person's good deeds and tally up a person's evil deeds and see which column adds up greater. Tallying up Joe Paterno will take a long time. He is not a hero, but the list of his good works goes on for pages. He is not a villain, but the magnitude of his bad deeds is so immense. How do we know what counts for more? I don't know. Maybe if you give me a hundred years of hindsight I can figure it out. Maybe the lesson is that a person's Great Score can't be calculated except by the Great Scorer. Maybe we don't need to know the final score.

I don't have any special insight that hasn't been said better elsewhere. The good people I know that attended Penn State have a problem. To many, the phrase "We Are Penn State" means, at least partially, "We Cover Up Child Rape." I'm just a particularly silly blogger, so I'm going to cite the best of my species as he cites First Thessalonians: "Test everything; hold fast to what is good."

Joe Paterno was not an angel. He was not a demon. I don't know if we should call him a good man or a bad man; all I can say from a distance is that he was a human. We should hold fast to the good he did. We must remember the tests he failed horrifically.

All of us, from Michigan to Pennsylvania to Maryland and beyond, can carry on the legacy of good works Paterno left. But we also have to make a promise. The community at PSU can promise "We are Penn State. We failed our children. We will not fail them again." All of us can promise "We will not fail our children." All of us can promise: we will not make the same mistake. We will not be silent. The most important thing wasn't Sandusky. The most important thing is to do everything we can to make sure there isn't another Sandusky.

Continue the good, put a stop to the bad, and every day we can make the world a little better.

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.

Unreality

I'm sorry, but this is almost certainly going to be a total mess. In all cases, assume "alleged" is inserted in front of anything that hasn't been proven in a court of law.

I've come to the conclusion that the worst part of college football is when it bumps up against reality. The world is often a brutal and horrible place. Football is supposed to be an escape for all of us, something that we can care about that doesn't really matter. And when that wall comes down, it's almost always uglier than the facade. It seems like it's usually an extra benefits case, which is disappointing enough, but this? The sexual abuse of minors? It's simply appalling.

I loathe what is alleged to have happened at Penn State. It's nightmarish in its scope, and at least half a dozen people could have stopped it, including the revered leader/spiritual godfather of one of the premiere programs in college football. How does this not make it to the real cops? How can anyone sit with this for nine years? Sexual predators exist, and that's sickening enough, but how can anyone let this guy operate after what Mike McQueary witnessed?

I guess the (admittedly trite) answer is that people are often terrible, and even good people make horrible choices. It sounds stupid and obvious, but it's a hard thing to accept. Anyone who knows someone who works as a homicide cop or a medical examiner knows for sure that this is true. They've probably seen a baby who was shaken to death by his parents, overdoses, drunks, crack murders*, a teen who didn't know the gun was loaded, and a woman who killed herself by driving off a freeway overpass with her dog in the car. All too often people are horrible or weak, and people in sports aren't exempt from that, no matter how respected they are.

Penn State should clean house, from the president on down. Anyone who knew about this and didn't go to the police should be gone. Maybe it'll crater the program, but so what? It couldn't protect ten-year-olds from a DC who'd been retired for four years, possibly as a result of NEARLY IDENTICAL allegations. Who cares whether it can protect its red zone from Nebraska?

*Pro tip: If you're dealing crack, don't let your penniless addict client live with you. And if you do, definitely don't leave a hatchet lying around.

Strange Days Indeed

It was a bit strange settling in for my first Michigan game of the season on television this year. It was equally strange to watch this game and pretty much know that Michigan was not going to win the game. Not even not going to win, but had no chance to win. Yes, I realize that every team has "a chance", but Michigan's seemed so small and insignificant as so not to get excited about it.

One of my friends who has been through seasons like this before, all you can really look for are signs of improvement and hope for the future. It may be a bit disappointing, but really, that's where we are in this year, what can we build upon going forward?

So, consider me pleasantly surprised, well, really, down right shocked first a quick three and out for Penn State and then at Michigan's execution on their first drive of the game, their longest of the season. Brandon Minor was running well, getting hard yards, including a really terrific pick up on fourth and one where he was blown up behind the line, rolled off the hit, and got the first down. When Michigan went up 7-0 early on a Minor touchdown and Lopata extra point, I was pleasantly surprised, but refused to get too excited. It was good, but would it hold up?

So when Michigan recovered a fumble on the next drive, I thought they needed a touchdown to really establish themselves as a threat in the game, especially with a shorter than not field. But Michigan only got as close as the Penn State 13 before McGuffie took a loss of two (which became even more maddening when the Nittany Lions took an illegal substitution penalty to make it 4th and 1 instead of a first down. But you know, it happens.) Now Michigan's up 10-0 after just a little more than 11 minutes of this game. Confusion reigns. I'm happy, but wary

Sure enough, it took just two plays for Michigan to get back to Michigan 2008, giving up a long touchdown run to Evan Royster to make it 10-7. It seems liked the portend, that Michigan playing over its head was just going to keep them close.

I now wonder if Michigan does well on opening and early drives this year (Illinois and Penn State) because they are, if not scripting plays, coming in with bread and butter plays that have been practiced all week and it accounts for what the opponent would have seen on film. Another Minor touchdown early in the second quarter and Michigan was back up by 10. It would also be the last time Michigan put points on the board during the game.

I don't want to recap most of the rest, because, well, it's kind of painful. It was almost the reverse of your usual college football blowout, the better team gets way out early and the downtrodden puts some points on the board to make it look respectable. The safety was just an absolute killer, and while I shouldn't hate on Nick Sheridan, it's very clear that it's not when you have two quarterbacks, you have none, it's when you have one injured quarterback and Nick Sheridan, you have none. But, you know, it's also where Michigan is.

I knew this could always happen, because I knew it had happened to so many other teams. So I can't say that nobody told me there would be days like these, because they clearly had. If I claim otherwise, it was probably because I was not listening. But we had to know, and now we must look at what we are, and hope that what is happening can build for the future.

So now we're 2-5 and looking at Michigan State this week at home. I don't know what to expect, in part because this team doesn't play consistently enough to hazard a guess. For as much as Michigan looked better early, they did not look good late. For as much as Brandon Minor looked good early, without the threat of Threet, Michigan looked helpless in the second half. For as much as Michigan has looked terrible, Michigan State did not exactly look good against Ohio State. For as much as I should be hyped for what is my favorite moveable feast of the college football season, Ohio State/Penn State next Saturday night almost is more intriguing to me.

Strange Days Indeed.