Bobby Bowden, Charlie Weis, and the Art of the Possible.

Yesterday, it became very clear that two "prestige" programs in Division I football were going to move in new directions with their head coach. Notre Dame said goodbye to Charlie Weis after five seasons, the last three of which all featured at least six losses. Whispers and leaks out of Tallahassee had Florida State backing Bobby Bowden into a corner and giving him two unpalatable options for the 2010 season, "ambassador" or "retired" and Bowden is likely to choose the latter. In both cases, as well as in the case of Michigan under Rich Rodriguez, all three fell victims to the art of the possible.

Bismarck's maxim that "politics is the art of the possible" is, way oversimplified" the idea that you look at what you have set before you and you find a way to make something work, not everybody wins, but the compromises don't make any one too angry, or if they do, the aggrieved party is so powerless to do anything about it that they need not be worried about. The art of the possible explains why it is so much easier to replicate a scientific accomplishment, rather than work in a theoretical field, because you know that it can be done and what the result looks like. The art of the possible is what gives TCU and other non-power conference schools hope. They look at what Utah did to Alabama last year in the Sugar Bowl or what Boise State did to Oklahoma in the Fiesta Bowl in 2007. They see it can be done and it buoys them. They conveniently ignore what Georgia did to Hawaii in the 2008 Sugar Bowl because while it's also possible, it doesn't fit their narrative game plan.

The problem with the art of the possible as it applies to history as opposed to science is that unlike science, where progress always points forward and knowledge learned cannot be unlearned, history evolves where we can define progress, at least we could hope to define it, as moving toward the greater benefit of the largest number of people. The art of the possible in college football means that the landscape of college football has changed, to the benefit of a larger number of teams. Scholarship limits mean that larger schools cannot just horde players for depth, creating a trickle-down effect for other schools. The democratization of television coverage, be it by court decision or by the existence of cable and now the internet, has been a boon for the college football fan as virtually every game in Division I FBS can now be found somewhere to be watched. A fan can know, easily, as much about any of the other 119 FBS schools as they would their own twenty years ago. While 2009 is not a meritocratic wonderland where every team has a fair chance to win the national championship in any given year, it is a much more level playing field than ever before. The problem with this is that while fans may appreciate this on one hand, fans of certain schools may not appreciate the fact that this change means that things can never go back to being the way they were.

Notre Dame had everything going for it in a bygone era. If they were not America's team, they were Catholic America's team, and that's not a little thing. They were the aspiration of every working class high school football player at a Catholic school, and if Notre Dame wanted you, it meant something. Notre Dame was so big it got its own television deal and could remain an independent; long after all of the prestige independents found homes in conferences. Notre Dame carried enough weight to get special rules for itself in the BCS, and even as it is a waning power, their coaching search is still the talk of the college football nation, despite a tantalizing SEC Championship Game on Saturday and a still unsettled Heisman race. Notre Dame means something today because Notre Dame meant something for a long time. The problem is, today's high school junior will not necessarily be swayed by the glories of Notre Dame's black and white past, when Rockne and Leahy and Parseghian are but specters looming over the program and Lou Holtz is the crazy old guy on ESPN who gives the fake pep talks and does the magic tricks. Notre Dame means something, but not what it used to mean. When all you have is tradition to point to, you cling to it hard and fast, because no one can take from you what happened. Notre Dame will need to evolve to remain relevant in the new college football landscape. I suspect it will, simply because there is too much at stake not to do so.

Florida State had everything going for it in a not too bygone era. For 14 straight years, Florida State finished the year in the Top 5 of the AP Poll. Say what you will about polls, no one else has ever done that, in any era. Florida State went 152-18-1 during that period and played for five national championships during that era, more than any other Division I-A school. Florida State had flash, a bit of an edge, great rivalries with two other in-state powers, and a derring-do that said "We'll become the best by playing the best and beating the best." That is Bobby Bowden's doing. He may not invented Florida State football, but he invented Florida State football as anyone outside of Tallahassee knows about it or cares about it. But it's a new era, and since 2000, Bowden's Florida State teams have lost 42 times. That's as just a shade under as many losses as Florida State had from 1980-2000. The standard that Bowden set for Florida State is so impossibly high that I would be happy to argue that no school in a BCS conference could replicate half of it, let alone all of it. But, because the success is so recent, it's hard to understand how the landscape has changed and how it would be difficult to be that successful again. The art of what is possible for Florida State has changed just as much for what happened for Notre Dame. It may be a much quicker change, but it did change. They will evolve and adjust, because they have to and because Florida State fans will accept nothing less.

Which brings us to Michigan. Michigan didn't fire its coach yesterday. It didn't announce a retirement of one of the all-time coaching legends in college football. It didn't make any noise yesterday because its season is over at a disappointing 5-7, no bowl for a second straight year, and other than the crumbs of the recruiting trail, nothing to tide over a frustrated fan base until April at the earliest, and August for most. We've seen the screeds against Coach Rodriguez, claiming he's the wrong guy, desperately wanting him to be gone, and someone more like Bo brought in, because someone more like Bo would make everything better. The thing is, Bo's era is the same bygone era of Notre Dame past, and the same changes in the landscape that have been made to Florida State. A Bo clone could not just come in tomorrow and win 10 games and get Michigan back to the Rose Bowl by virtue of being Bo and doing the things that Bo did, because it is no longer possible. Too much has changed and while we do not have to like it, we need to accept that a new definition of success may be in line for many schools, Michigan included. Michigan held fast against the tide for longer than any other school in the modern era of college football. It doesn't mean that Michigan fans shouldn't want to go to a bowl game every year, that Michigan fans shouldn't want to be playing Ohio State in November with the Big Ten title on the line, that Michigan fans should accept the bending of the rules. What it does mean for every school is that it's a different world, one in which we sail forward on a troubled sea, looking for a shore like the one we were on just two years ago.

We may get back there someday, but it won't be the place we left, because it never is again. We've stepped into a new and larger world, one colder, meaner, and angrier than the one we left, and even should we make it back to the safe harbor of success, we'll know that what is possible changes from decade to decade and from year to year. We'll see the visages of Yale, and Chicago, and Army sailing on the horizon, knowing that their day is safely ensconced in the past. We'll see sleek vessels like Florida, and Boise State, modern, swift, and not encumbered by history, just by the future. We'll see stately ships like Texas and Oklahoma and Alabama and USC, older models who found ways to bring themselves into the present. And we'll see ships like Notre Dame and Florida State sailing along side us, looking for any direction home and hoping that they make it. Know that we're sailing alongside them. We just need fair winds and following seas.

Catch 11

I wanted to open this by saying that Coach Rodriguez is in a no-win situation, but that not only sounds hopeless, but perhaps hits a little too close to the Vest right now. But I have been thinking about this as the usual "Rodriguez hasn't embraced the rivalry and it's going to cost him." floats around during Ohio State week. The problem for Rodriguez is, he can't embrace it like you want him to and he can't embrace it like you want him to for a reason that some people miss.
Adam Rittenberg put together some numbers on current Big Ten Coaches records in Rivalry Games, which leads me to my overall point: If Jim Tressel beats Michigan, his entire fanbase is relatively happy. We don't have empirical data on this, but if Ohio State went 1-11 and beat Michigan, I am pretty sure the good people of Ohio who call themselves Buckeye fans would be pretty happy.
If Mark Dantonio beats Michigan, his entire fanbase is ecstatic. Michigan State fans live to beat Michigan. It is their raison d'être. Sparty spends 364 days dreaming of hanging one on Michigan and a 365th hoping it goes their way.
If Tim Brewster beats Michigan (in years that Michigan and Minnesota play for the Jug), his entire fanbase will be largely satisfied. I am sure Gopher fans would love to see wins over Wisconsin and Iowa, but beating Michigan is pretty high on the to-do list for a season.
If Ron Zook beats Michigan, his fanbase will be oddly placated. Illinois considers Michigan a rival (which was true in, say, the 1920s), and Michigan looks around and says "you guys, too?" and laments that the Illini have taken Michigan behind the woodshed in consecutive years.
If Joe Paterno beats Michigan, his fanbase is relatively satisfied, particularly after nine straight losses to Michigan, it certainly helps. I don't know if Michigan/Penn State is a rivalry, but you have to get up for the game nonetheless. Plus, it's Joe Paterno, do you think he really worries about what his fanbase is thinking? He's freaking JoePa!
In order for Michigan fans to be happy, Rich Rodriguez has to, at a minimum, beat Michigan State, Penn State, Notre Dame, and Ohio State, or at least three of the four, and really it's all four. So if that's the case, why not just try to win all 12. You give every other team on your schedule your best shot and you see what happens.
If Rodriguez "embraces" the rivalry, what is the opportunity cost? If he does something in every practice to beat Ohio State, does that come at the opportunity to be at the best for Notre Dame, or Michigan State, or Penn State, or Minnesota, or Illinois, or any other team that wants to punch Michigan in the mouth every chance it gets?
Part of the problem with being at the top, being the powerhouse, is that everyone makes you the focal point of their year. "If we can just beat Michigan, well, things will be better." Who does Michigan get this with? This is not a complaint, mind you, it comes with the territory. But you cannot ask Coach Rodriguez to "embrace" this rivalry like Jim Tressel for a very simple reasons. Tressel's fans demand that the rivalry not only be embraced, but be lived in, worn as a second skin every waking moment of every day, and dreaming of beating Michigan in his sleep. Michigan fans want Rodriguez to never lose to anyone who considers us their rival.
It is impossible to be all things to all people. He's a football coach, not the great and powerful Oz. You start to fix things by winning one game. Maybe if he does that, people will say he's embraced the rivalry, simply because he won. Winning changes everything. Start changing things Saturday and see what the world looks like on Sunday.

Out of Time

"We didn't deserve to beat Michigan State. But this one, we played tough, we played hard, we played 60 minutes. We just lost." – David Moosman

I am convinced, if Michigan recovers the onside kick, they win that football game. If there's anything out there that puts two more minutes on the clock for Denard Robinson, Michigan wins. The offensive line was capably handling the Iowa DL, as they (mostly) had been all game. And the defense was doing a solid job of it's own. I mean, look at how Iowa scored.

How did Iowa score?

1. Kick return starts Iowa's second drive on their own 43. Huge coverage bust where Mike Williams bites on Moeaki's fake that he's staying in to block and blitzes Stanzi.

2. Tate Forcier INT. Iowa begins the drive on the Michigan 19. The defense holds them to 8 yards and a FG.

3. Tate Forcier fumble gives Iowa the ball at their own 46. Stanzi completed one big pass for 22 yards to McNutt and then got nothing. Iowa kicked a 41-yard FG.

4. Zoltan punt. Iowa starts on their own 21. Stanzi converts one 3rd and 6 with a perfectly-thrown 33-yard pass, then an absurd 3rd and 24 to Johnson-Koulianos, who's just barely got a step on Donovan Warren. Herbstreit blames this in part on Williams being slow to get back in coverage. Iowa covers the remaining 9 yards for the TD.

5. Zoltan punt. Iowa starts on their own 24, and begins gashing the Michigan rush defense. The defense then stops the run and forces two incompletions, holding Iowa to another FG.

6. Zoltan punt from the Michigan 1 is caught at the Iowa 38, but the coverage team allows a 20-yard return. Moeaki immediately gets loose on a similar bust (don't know who was victimized there) for a TD.

So what does that look like? Three of Iowa's scoring drives start due to Michigan turnovers. One is Zoltan punting from the 1, giving Iowa a short field. On drives that started behind their own 40, Iowa got 10 points, and they had to make a ridiculous 3rd and 24 to get 7 of them. 14 points came on epic coverage busts. OK, OK, Iowa did drive down to the 1 after starting on their own 33 once, but that relied on the Mathews fumble for 33 of those yards. Iowa had 15 drives. They started (on average) from their own 38 and went 25.5 yards per drive. The defense held them to 367 yards and 30 points and scored 7 points of their own. They crushed the Iowa rushing game (2.7 YPC), got burned on 4 big pass plays, and showed signs of actual competence.

So, uh, how did Michigan score?

I'm glad you asked, alternate me.

1. Donovan Warren 40-yard pick 6.

2. Iowa FG is answered with a 12-play, 72-yard TD drive.

3. Hemingway returns an Iowa punt 7 yards to the Michigan 43. Michigan embarks on a 10-play, 57-yard TD drive featuring 7 Brandon Minor rushes, including the TD, and only one (4-yard) pass.

4. Michigan gets an extra 15 on an Iowa personal foul, starting the drive at their own 40. Denard Robinson throws a couple of completions, but mostly keeps it on the ground during the 11-play TD drive.

Michigan's TD drives took a lot of plays to develop (12 plays, 10 plays, 11 plays). They had another 5-play, 51-yard drive halted by a Minor fumble. They were able to move the ball on the Iowa defense, but not in large chunks. I'm no expert, but that gives Iowa a lot of chances to stop you when you don't have good field position. There were only 2 (of 13) underachieving drives, for me. Michigan got the ball at their own 37 and 39 and punted away on both of those. Otherwise, Michigan started (on average) from their own 28. They were dominant in running the football. The big, overwhelming problem was giving the ball away. You can't overcome 5 turnovers, even if you get a pick 6, without being much, much better than the other team. And the thing that Michigan was doing well, running the ball, became a non-factor on the last drive due to the clock situation.

What people are going to remember most about this game is that last drive, with 1:30 on the clock and Tate Forcier on the bench, and that's a shame. It's not Forcier on the bench that killed Michigan, it's the five turnovers. Iowa had good starting field position all day, thanks to Michigan's generosity. They converted that into 30 points on 367 yards of offense. And while most of those turnovers came in the middle of the field, they stopped 4 Michigan drives.

And about that Forcier thing: Something happened out there that made Rodriguez keep him off the field. Even before the benching, there were several times where Rodriguez got in his face. After the fumble, after the three-and-out from the Michigan 1, after Tate's final series. Something was wrong out there. I'm assuming Forcier wasn't making his reads correctly or listening to Rodriguez's coaching. He tried to simply walk away after the fumble, which is a dumb idea (This goes for you too, JT Floyd). I don't know if this is a Hoosiers moment like Greg thinks it is, but I don't think it's the worst call in the history of sports to bench Forcier. Yeah, Robinson looked like a panicked freshman on the last pass. Yeah, I'd rather see Forcier out there. But if it means we're a better team in the long run, I'll take it. This team has too many weaknesses to be a Big Ten title contender, so I'll trade a loss today for another win next year.

Know Your Honorary Captains: Miami (OH), 2008-09-06

Far be it for me to duplicate the dedicated efforts of our SIDs, so here's a link to this week's release on the honorary captains (PDF).  In short:

• Pete Elliott, 1945-48 Bump Elliott's brother, a QB. Later head coach at Nebraska, Cal, and Illinois and a College Football Hall of Fame inductee in 1994.
• Ron Simpkins, 1976-79 A 1979 consensus All-American linebacker, Simpkins posted 150+ tackles in three consecutive seasons, including a mind-boggling 174 in '78 and another 168 the year after.
• Dick Caldarazzo, 1968-69 Caldarazzo only lettered two years, but he blocked for Ron Johnson (Original Recipe) as he broke most of Michigan's rushing records and helped Michigan to its first Big Ten title in five years.

It should be mentioned here that two of the first six honorary captains were members of the '48 national championship team and two (plus Dierdorf) were on the '69 team.  And all three of those are named by Rodriguez in a Detroit News article about learning from the 1969 players that Brian excerpts.  Dierdorf and Caldarazzo are also mentioned in this Antoine Pitts article citing their disappointment over the Les Miles fiasco.  As for the other two, Ron Simpkins was one of the prime movers behind the former players' rally to support Lloyd Carr at the tunnel prior to last year's Notre Dame game, and Ron Kramer has been deeply involved with the team for years.  I like this from Rodriguez, and his first sets of honorary captains have been very well-chosen from both historical and political perspectives.

Bookends

This past Sunday, I turned 30. My first Michigan football game of my twenties was a loss to Notre Dame at the start of the 1998 season. My first football game of my last year of my twenties was a loss of which I shall not speak. My point is, I am used to the idea that things bookend in a way that might not be what you script out, so Utah was not exactly the earth-shattering kaboom to me that it seems to be to some others.

Each of the two aforementioned losses taught me something about being a Michigan football fan. The latter was that anything can happen at any time. The former taught me that once a year is over, it's a part of history and has no immediate bearing on what is happening now. It doesn't mean I enjoyed the fact that Michigan lost yesterday, merely that instead of being angry about it well into the new week, I instead chose to look at the game in a more academic mean. Maybe I'm just getting older and the losses hurt a little less because you can see some of them coming.

So here we are. We know some things, but mostly, as last week, we know very little. We know that the offense needs some work, but it could get there. We learned that RichRod REALLY needs a quarterback to run his system at the highest level. We learned that somewhere, Mike Hart is probably thinking his Michigan career rushing record is safe for a while. We learned that Nick Sheridan made some poor decisions and Stephen Threet put a little too much mustard on the ball near the end of the game. We learned that the offensive line is still a work in progress, but they certainly possess discipline, as seen on the encroachment freezes.

We learned some things about the defense. We learned that they needed to come out more aggressively in the first half. We learned they need to contain the passing game better, especially against the spread. We learned that they will be the strength of this team for the foreseeable future. We learned that someone did not explain the new play clock to Zoltan. We learned that we have not just a competent kicker, but one whom can likely be relied on when it matters. We learned that we cannot rely on our opponent to take 15 penalties for 137 yards every week. We learned that we're severely lacking depth. We learned we're really going to need to hold on to the ball for more than 24 minutes if the game if we want the defense to have a chance to breathe. We learned that we need to covert on more than three of 14 third down opportunities.

But mostly what we learned is that this is not going to be as smooth a transition as we had perhaps dreamed or hoped. There are going to be some bumps, some bruises, and some major frustrations, but we will learn some things. But mostly I learned that some things never change, that those most likely to be calling for Coach Carr's resignation last season were the one's yelling down to him to put on the headset yesterday. Perhaps it was something else I learned, that you really don't appreciate something good until it is gone.

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.