Ozymandias

CW: Sexual abuse

The first game I remember was against Maryland. It was probably the one in '89. My dad and I were in the 85th row in the southeast corner of Michigan Stadium. My dad pointed at one of the dots on the field. "That's Bo!"

Ten years later, I was a freshman in the Michigan Marching Band. After two long weeks of drilling the basics of marching into our heads, we practiced our parade down to the stadium as the evening cooled us off. We filed down the tunnel and into our section. The directors praised us for our hard work, and then revealed a surprise: The Man Himself was here to speak to us. He spoke for maybe 10 minutes, dodging sprinklers on what was still natural turf. Bo was electric; I forget what he said, but not how he said it.

On the eve of The Game in 2006, he died, and I tried to hold it together in my cubicle. The next day, Michigan lost an intolerable third straight game against OSU.

Take down the statue. Rename the building. He knew. Either he didn't believe what he was told, or he didn't believe that it was abuse, or he didn't care. None of those are worth celebrating.

MGoMix 2018

I can't forget anymore. From about age 10 through my late twenties I could do that, and on Saturdays in the fall nothing would invade that space. The only thing that mattered was what happened between the end zones and the sidelines and it received my whole being. In hindsight, I realize the enormous kind of privilege that requires. I can't go back there, and while I can get nostalgic for it, I don't want to.

When I see people begging to keep politics out of sports, or any other space, I see a hunger for a place where it's acceptable to live with unearned, unchallenged, and unexamined privilege. I think it's the sort of desire that politicians and other authority figures exploit when they proffer endless bad-faith arguments and CYA statements. We want a world where we don't have to examine our failures and how we're complicit in the exploitation of others. It's easier to let someone with power say that everything we like is fine and we should all keep doing exactly what we want to do. Everything that's wrong is the fault of some outside person or group who must be punished.

The Big Ten East has been working overtime the last off-season to prove that institutions don't care about individuals as long as even larger institutions don't levy consequences.

Ohio State was never going to fire Urban Meyer. I entertained that possibility for about 5 minutes, and I hoped it would be true, but his enabling of Zach Smith's abuse and other bad behavior pales next to his 73-8 record. He will serve his 3-game suspension, learn absolutely nothing, and then win a bunch of football games while Very Serious People congratulate him for "rising above adversity." The lesson is clear: Lie, dissemble, and muddy the waters enough and you can survive, because one woman's abuse doesn't matter enough to threaten a winning team. Jimbo Fisher could've told you that. And because it wasn't abuse of a player or recruit, you'll still get the talent you need.

Michigan briefly looked like they were going to join the defaulters' list with a shoe scandal: A lot of player-exclusive Jordan brand gear was showing up for sale online, which is still a violation of NCAA rules. Fortunately for the team's season, the investigation ("investigation"?) didn't turn up any gear from current players. Which just points up how much money is washing through this program and that players see little to none of it. Modern amateurism is a fiction some Europeans came up with to make it easier for "gentlemen" (read: rich white guys) to get Olympic medals. It has no value in a revenue sport other than to keep players working at below-market wages.

And I don't think that means Michigan's clean. In an institution that large, something somewhere is festering, and I can only hope that it isn't too bad, and that we get lucky and have a few key people who do the right thing at the right time. It isn't Michigan's Simon-pure virtue that has let us escape this off-season without major scandal. Even having an administration that takes these matters seriously only gets you so far. When it bumps up against public scandal and threatens revenue, or touches a personal friend, even people who care will still bend on occasion.

Maryland literally worked a player to death. DJ Durkin and his staff made this kid so afraid of disappointing them that he ran until he dropped dead. This wasn't someone with an undiagnosed heart condition: Jordan McNair pushed himself beyond the breaking point because player safety came second to finishing a workout. Durkin may yet face consequences, mostly because he's unproven enough to be expendable, and if they can fire him for cause it would nullify his buyout. Jim Harbaugh's refusal to comment on DJ Durkin's coaching tactics is incredibly disappointing. I understand that coaching omerta is going to keep him from discussing what may or may not have happened at Maryland. What I want to know is what happened at Michigan. "DJ Durkin didn't do anything that made me worried about our players' health." "DJ was passionate about players getting the most out of their talent, and on a couple occasions I asked him to take it down a notch, but I was never worried about player safety." "We rely on our trained medical staff (who are the best in the world) to help us keep our players safe. DJ never questioned their judgment when they thought a player needed rest or water or anything." Those are all acceptable answers that don't mention Maryland at all. "No comment" isn't good enough.

Michigan State's actions to sweep under the rug anything remotely resembling accountability for the decades-long enabling of Larry Nasser is an affront to anything a public university should represent. From the beginning, they've been committed to token investigations designed solely to maintain plausible deniability and to look no further at the rot pervading the university's power structures. John Engler's instincts as a politician are at the forefront here: Instead of an issue of the alumni magazine that at least attempts some soul-searching, he had it replaced with the Everything's Fine Now (Nothing To See Here) issue. The playbook is Deny, Deny, Deny. The last two decades of Republic politics, from climate change to the Russia investigation, suggest that he will get away with it, and the bill will simply be passed on to Michigan taxpayers and MSU students. If enough people want to believe an idea, evidence to the contrary will be ignored. Mark Dantonio will still be their most celebrated coach since Biggie Munn no matter how many "unity councils" let racists back on the team or how many players are reinstated as soon as they walk out of jail, because winning cures everything. Michigan State only has to say enough of the right words in public and then rely on a critical mass of alumni and fans to keep their identities as Spartans ahead of the victims. The university's coffers won't suffer substantially in the long term and only a bare minimum number of egregiously bad actors will lose their titles, but they'll probably get to keep their pensions.

The best thing and the most damning thing about football is that it can make you forget all of this and live in that moments between the ball leaving the quarterback's hand and it landing; between the crease developing and what happens to the runner. Infinite possibilities live there and invite you to surrender your entire being to them, and from there to construct a larger narrative. It's exhilarating and exhausting, and football invites you to pour your whole being into it. But as a human whose conscience requires that I live in the world, I can't do that anymore. Being a functional adult who's worth a damn comes with that obligation.

I've been trying to end this post for four days now, and I can't get there. I don't know. Anyway, here's Wonderwall.

End Game

Khalid Hill has a great barber.  (Photo by Jonathan Daniel/Getty Images)

I loved the shutout streak.  Drew Hallett and I bonded on Twitter over tracking it.  It was the last thread that connected most of my life of Michigan football, from Bo to Mo to Lloyd to Rich Rod to Hoke.  Michigan may not always win, but dammit, they at least scored points.

When Wile missed the second field goal, I started to worry about the streak.  Slowly, but surely, other people on Twitter began to realize that the streak was in jeopardy!  So when Michigan went four it on fourth down and was stopped, that was it.  The streak, 365 games, nearly 30 years old, was over.  Notre Dame had just stomped Michigan 31-0 and all I could think about was the streak ending.  I was ready to be wistful about the end of the Michigan / Notre Dame series, about how I had hazy memories of Rocket Ismail ruining my day in 1989, about Desmond, about Remy, about the 97 defense, about 09-10-11 and the era of miracles, and Under the Lights.  But with the Streak ending, it's like the fall of a symbolic era, looking shambolic and lost when faced with a talented team.

Part of that was because today felt all too familiar.  As the storms began to pop up on radar Friday night, I thought about Devin Gardner.  I read John U. Bacon's Wall Street Journal piece about Gardner last night while waiting for pizza and my thought was "Man, I hope Devin Gardner doesn't become John Navarre 2.0"  But after last night's performance, it's going to be clear that Gardner will be a lightning rod for criticism of this team.  He probably deserves some of the criticism, but not all of it.  But he's the quarterback, he's wearing Tom Harmon's 98, he's going to get the scorching hot takes launched upon him.

I really don't have anything else here.  I'm tired, I'm sad, I'm frustrated, and I'm hoping against hope.  Maybe when you don't have anything else to say, you just stop talking.  So until next week, we'll just try to move forward together.  We fight for better days.

Valiant

Toledo Blade/Andy Morrison

from Latin valēre: to be strong

In the end, it was for them and we're just happy to have been a part of it.  This isn't about moral victories or taking solace in the margin being closer even if the result was what most of us expected at the beginning of the week.  It is for them.  If we doubt that, just look at Devin Gardner's face as he meets with the media after the game.  He doesn't look that way because he let us down, no, it is because he knows he let his teammates down, even if the reality of the day contradicts that feeling.  As much as any person on the field, he got his team in a position to go for that win when very few people outside of their locker room thought it was even possible.  Then they didn't get that win, and the feeling sucks, and you try telling him otherwise.

But perhaps the most telling reaction to Saturday is the seemingly overwhelming approbation, both local and national, for the decision to go for two.  Hoke said that he asked the seniors if they wanted to do it and they claim to a man, they said yes.  I respect the decision even more for one of the core principles of leadership, trust your people, believe in them.  The players, in the end, owned that choice as much as Hoke.  Win or lose, they all owned the decision.  Hoke gave his players agency in a world where all too often they are treated as interchangeable parts in a machine.  In the end, eleven moving parts couldn't make it happen because of eleven other moving parts with the directive to stop them.  In another reality, they did make it.  But neither set of players in these parallel realities will ever know how the other feels, but as I said yesterday, to once again draw on the wisdom of the War Doctor, "at worst, we failed doing the right thing, as opposed to succeeding in doing the wrong,"

We spend so much time obsessing over what it means to be a "Michigan man" to the point where we are readily parodied for it. But Saturday reminded me why we end up loving these teams and these players, win or lose.  We do get those occasional glimpses of just how much this means to them, how much they truly embrace the ethos of team, instead of it slowly becoming a marketing gimmick to repeated at halftime.  They're not perfect, but neither are we.  But I was reminded, as the Tom Brady speech to Team 134 was replayed on the video board during the game, the players in that room all chose Michigan, just like all of us did, alumnus, student, and supporter alike.  The circumstances of that choosing will vary from person to person, but like the decision to go for two, we own that choice.  We may get frustrated by any number of things, we may be upset by the outlook for the future, but it is only because we care so deeply about that choice.  It defines us in ways that we don't even always want to acknowledge because society frowns upon the level of devotion that we may grant to a secular entity.  But the things that define us, shape us, inform us, all serve to reflect to the world what we hope to see in ourselves.  So we can find a way to be angry with the result, but be proud of the effort, because we are gifted with a first-rate intelligence, one with is "the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function."

So to Team 134, that latest link in the Maize Chain of Being, we salute you.  We are reminded of the words of our University's co-founder in the wake of the fire that destroyed Detroit in 1805: Speramus meliora; resurget cineribus; or "We hope for better things; it will arise from the ashes."

In the end, perhaps this was an exercise in reminding us of the meaning of valiant and while it always feels better to be victorious and valiant, we can always try to be valiant nonetheless.

"Yet we were wrong, terribly wrong."

Yeah, so about that trial balloon. Consider that the optimist in me, and a naive one at best.

So, where does that leave us?

Brian has the roundup of everything you need to get caught up to speed on this matter (the Bucknuts piece is very much worth the read), but as I read, my mind wandered and I was struck by this (slightly modified) notion:

"We of the [Big Ten] administration who participated in the decisions on [divisional alignment] acted according to what we thought were the principles and traditions of this [conference]. We made our decisions in light of those values. Yet we were wrong, terribly wrong. We owe it to future generations to explain why."

That is a modified version of the opening of former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara's 1995 book In Retrospect where he examined the decision making that went on during the Vietnam War in the highest levels of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. What has always struck me about this (and McNamara's later comments in The Fog of War) is that rarely do people who are making decisions think "I am making a terrible decision, but I am going to continue to do so, because I love making terrible decisions." There are reasons, and people believe they are good reasons, and it is sometimes only when it is too late to see the folly.

I guess what makes me sad is that there's no good way to do this, when you think about it:

1). Michigan and Ohio State in the same division

Pro: They would still play at the end of the season. In 9 of the last 13 seasons, it is likely that the outcome of the Game would have decided the division winner.

Con: They would not still play for the right to go to the Rose Bowl/BCS/What have you.

2). Michigan and Ohio State in different divisions, play the last game of the regular season.

Pro: They would still play at the end of the season.

Con: The game might have little to no impact on who plays in the Championship game, and if it does, it sets up a potential rematch the next week, which diminishes the value of the product.

3). Michigan and Ohio State in different divisions, play at some other point in the season.

Pro: Makes a potential Big Ten championship game between Michigan and Ohio State more appealing to television. Con: Ends 75 years of tradition. Diminishes the meaning of "The Game".

So, they'll, of course, do #3, because they'll see the revenue projections and they'll say "We'd be stupid NOT to do this. Look at the money." Meanwhile, a little part of the soul of every Big Ten fan dies. They try to make it better by introducing new rivalries, or convincing you that it's better this way, but you're not stupid, you know better. You know that playing Michigan State on Thanksgiving weekend is not only wrong, but that it actually benefits Michigan State because they actually get their Michigan obsessed existence justified. Ohio State, meanwhile, is playing Penn State or Nebraska in the final game of the season, and it's a good game, and people are interested, but it's not the same. It's like Coca-Cola Classic. Because you no longer have the real thing, you now have to accept the imitation that's close to the original, but just doesn't taste the same.

In other places, there are people who don't get it, who don't understand why this matters, and why we're making such a big deal about it. The rest of college football has changed, the Big Ten should be no different. But please be understanding if some of us feel like something that matters to us is dying. And life will go on, and we'll get through, but we will miss it, and we will be sad when we look back on what once was and what went away because of decision makers who thought they were doing what was in the best interest of the conference. And perhaps down the line some say, Jim Delany, or someone of his ilk, will come back and say "We were wrong, terribly wrong" or something similar, and it won't make us feel better, because it won't bring back what we have lost.

There's still time, there's still a chance, there's still ways to make your voice heard. I encourage you to do what you need to do to make yourself feel like you have made a difference. Even if it doesn't end up making a difference in the end. You'll be like General Winfield Scott Hancock in Gods and Generals, reviewing General Burnside's plan for the assault on Mayre's Heights behind Fredricksburg in 1862 via pontoon boat.

"No, general, we'll meet them head on. And it will be a bloody mess. We'll march up to that hill there, and we'll eat their artillery fire all the way across this field. And when it's over, we'll be able to look at ourselves and say: "We're good soldiers. We did what we were told." If we're not successful, we can say it was a good plan, but there were contingencies. You can go back to your hometown and tell the families of your men they died doing their duty."

Go to Subway anyway

The Michigan hockey team plays Notre Dame at the Palace of Auburn Hills this weekend. As The Blog That Yost Built pointed out when the schedule was released, Notre Dame may be getting exposure in a new market, but it may not be worth it to give up their only home date against Michigan for what amounts to a road game less than an hour from Michigan's campus.

Well, it seems that they're trying to reclaim the environment. While it's naturally going to be a heavy Michigan crowd, one staple of weekends at Yost will be conspicuously absent: The Michigan hockey pep band will not be in attendance.

This is not due to conflicts or crowds. It is because Notre Dame is excluding them from attending. The hockey team liason explained to the band that "it is ND's home game and they did not want to allow [them] to travel." The band contacted the CCHA and learned that there is no official policy on home games played at neutral sites, but they would bring up this issue at league meetings this year. Red Berenson and the team told the MMB staff that the band's presence would "greatly improve the environment," and that their hands are tied.

Incredible that this is deliberate. But band-related conflicts are not without precedent between these schools. The Notre Dame marching band has twice made problems for themselves when traveling to Michigan in the past. Michigan's long-standing policy of capping opposing bands groups at 330 members somehow became an obstacle for Notre Dame who was unwilling to write drill for a smaller group in advance. Ultimately, they complained publicly but still came without incident. And I think they came to Michigan this year too, though I don't remember hearing their fight song when they scored.

I don't mean to suggest this is a retaliatory snub -- if they wanted to inconvenience the MMB they could've done so at the games in 2004 or 2006 -- just wanted to note that similar things have happened before.

The Victors and the Notre Dame Victory March are unanimously revered among the top fight songs in the country and almost always appear #1 and #2 in pundits' lists. It is unfortunate that this attempt at neutralizing the Michigan faithful comes at the expense of some of the greatest traditions in college athletics, and not by circumstance, but by choice.

Update: Notre Dame will indeed have its pep band there Saturday. The associate athletic director responded to an e-mail explicitly stating that since the Michigan band played at its home game on Friday, that "in turn, the Notre Dame band will perform at its home game on Saturday." He said that during CCHA play, visiting teams' pep bands do not perform at Yost Ice Arena, and we should not expect Notre Dame to host a visiting band, since that is not customary in college hockey.

He neglects to account for CCHA regular season games played at neutral sites, such as the annual Michigan-MSU hockey game at Joe Louis Arena, where both bands are present. And when LSSU played one of its home games at Joe Louis, rotating Michigan and Michigan State as opponents, both visiting teams' bands went. There's even a precedent for CCHA regular season games played at non-hockey venues: The Cold War.

To which Michigan sent a band.

More Baseball Than You Can Shake an Aluminum Stick At

Beavers Eliminate Wolverines:  The baseball team went down in two straight games Sunday and Monday. Putnam pitched the game of his life on Sunday for the Wolverines, taking a no-hitter down to the last out in the top of the 9th. A walk, a sac bunt, and a weak single were enough to get the only run across the plate, the only run of the whole game, and Oregon State won 1-0 (See Blue Cats and Red Sox for a much better recap). Even a perfect game isn't enough from your pitcher if you can't score your own runs. Monday's game wasn't close, as the Beavers advanced with a sound 8-2 victory, and the season is over. Thanks guys, it was a nice run to watch, and that Vandy series will be a classic for years to come.

Teh NCAA Is Stoopid  During Louisville's 20-2 demolition of [cannon fodder] at their Super Regional, a credentialed reporter from the Louisville Courier-Journal was ejected from the press box for live-blogging the game. The NCAA cited its exclusive relationship with ESPN and decided that live-blogging was a violation. I want to know what terrified pack of lemurs they have for a law firm that they'd decide live-blogging constituted a breach of their agreement, and I'm not alone. Jon Fleischaker, the Courier-Journal's attorney, talked to Rick Bozich for a story in today's paper, and delivered this quote that ended up on Deadspin.

Once a player hits a home run, that's a fact. It's on TV, everybody sees it. They (the NCAA) can't copyright that fact. The blog wasn't a simulcast or a recreation of the game. It was an analysis.

Guy has a point, I'd say. As Craig pointed out repeatedly last night, a live-blog isn't anything more than reporting with a much shorter lag. Even the fastest live-blogger can't keep up with the action as it happens, so it can hardly be labeled a broadcast. Another point that's been hit on is that the NCAA is only going after bloggers in the press box, that it's theoretically just fine to live-blog the ESPN feed. Myles, this is stupid stuff.

One other impact that Deadspin caught is that CSTV had been planning on live-blogging every College World Series game, and now can't. "This is an outstanding decision by the NCAA, because it denies coverage of a signature event to a fanbase that might want to read it."