Blow at High Dough

"Well, I can get behind anything."  Welcome back, Rod Moore (Michigan Athletics)

Well, sometimes the faster it gets

The less you need to know

But you got to remember the smarter it gets

The further it's going to go

--"Blow at High Dough" by The Tragically Hip from their 1989 debut album Up to Here 

Scripted drives, man.  Scripted drives.  Because Michigan won the toss and deferred, Wisconsin got the ball first and went on a 12-play, 75-yard, nearly seven-minute touchdown drive that felt like an absolute harbinger of doom.  Collectively, there was a sense that this was how Fickell planned to win and save his job: a methodical, run-heavy approach, similar to Wisconsin of old, which would bleed the clock, limit possessions, and make Michigan's defense sweat.  Michigan would answer with a tidy five-play 75-yard, two-minute drive to draw back to even on its own scripted drive, and the game settled into an equilibrium that made no one happy.

Several decades of watching not just Michigan football, but college football in general, have given me a false sense of knowing where the doom lurks.  I should know better, but I don't, because fandom is an emotional pursuit for many of us.  I am the person that makes his students mark every time they guess on a test question they had down to two options on the multiple choice because the tendency to believe that you missed all of your 50/50 questions comes from looking for where things go wrong, and forgetting to check for the ones you had down to 50/50 and got correct (it's a version of survivorship bias I would later realize.)

Here's what Wisconsin did in the drives after the scripted one:

• Punt - 6 plays, 22 yards, 2:57
• Punt - 3 plays, 5 yards, 1:45
• Punt - 5 plays, 19 yards, 3:33
• Punt - 3 plays, 8 yards, 2:16
• Punt - 4 plays, 23 yards, 1:35
• Punt - 3 plays, 1 yard, 1:05
• Punt - 3 plays, 5 yards, 1:36
• Interception - 3 plays, 31 yards, 1:37*
• Punt - 3 plays, 5 yards, 0:57
• Field Goal - 13 plays, 53 yards, 6:41

(*-Did I yell "ROD MOORE!" like six times in a row after the pick because it was just so good to see him back out there and balling again?  You bet!)

Sky McCulley (Michigan Athletics)

Wisconsin never actually threatened Michigan after the scripted drive.  Even the dead cat bounce field goal drive was a mirage, as it took almost seven minutes to complete when they were down 24-7 with 9:24 left in the fourth quarter. If Wisconsin had shown the horses to be able to move the ball well and with assertiveness, they would have done it before the fourth quarter.  So when Channing Goodwin recovered the onside kick attempt by the Badgers, Luke Fickell saw the hand writing on the wall, did not use his timeouts, and Michigan won its clunker, 24-10.

Because the scripted drive came first, and because Michigan could not capitalize on some of its drives, the whole game felt worse than it was —a game with a 99.8% Postgame win expectancy, according to SP+.  However, it's a win; Michigan remains undefeated in conference, Wisconsin continues to spiral toward the likely dismissal of Fickell, and Michigan's path to the playoff has opened up a little more because Penn State could not handle a cross-country trip to previously winless UCLA.  Michigan makes a similar sojourn to Southern California next week (thankfully, Willow Run's runways are more than adequate to handle a charter flight to LA [side eye at Frames]).  All things being equal, if Michigan can secure a win in the Coliseum, it will become a direct path to achieving its goals for the rest of the season.  

Tales from the Spreadsheet

• 24-10 IS NOT a Scorigami!  (Three previous occurrences: 1982 Indiana, 1989 Illinois, and 2001 Purdue (also homecoming))
  
• 111,070 were in attendance for the game, which is not the largest crowd at Michigan Stadium this year, but it is the largest crowd for a Michigan Stadium football event this year.
• Win 1,016
  
  
• Michigan moves to 53-17-1 all-time against the University of Wisconsin.
  
• Michigan moves to 12-5-2 all-time on October 4 (It is Michigan's first win on this date in the 21st century and ends a three-game losing streak of 2003 Iowa, 2008 Illinois, and 2014 Rutgers, the last two of which are among the most infuriating losses in Michigan history in their own way.)
  
  
• Michigan improves to 39-8-0 when scoring exactly 24 points.
• Michigan moves to 58-10-1 all-time when allowing 10 points to the opposition.
• Michigan has won 52 games all-time by precisely 14 points, the most recent example being a 21-7 victory over #24 Michigan State in East Lansing in 2018, which was notable for Devin Bush opening a lawn maintenance service, a rain delay, and DPJ hitting the Bunyan for the first time.

People Got a Lotta Nerve

Cornelius Johnson made a lot of people look good today.

You know they call them killer whales

But you seem surprised

When it pinned you down to the bottom of the tank

Where you can't turn around

It took half your leg and both your lungs

And I craved I ate hearts of sharks, I know you know it

I'm a man, man, man, man, man, man, man eater

But still you're surprised when I eat ya

--"People Got a Lotta Nerve" by Neko Case from her 2009 album Middle Cyclone

We are haunted by Michigan's football past in a way that the players are not.  We are conditioned by our experiences with Michigan football to see that quick strike drive by Wisconsin at the end of the first half to bring it back to a three-point game.  We blame the squib kick that nearly created another special teams turnover instead of being astonished by two pinpoint throws by a quarterback who had not shown much of a capacity to do so otherwise up to this point in the season.

“That was going to be our juice. We were going to steal their juice” — Dax Hill on the players enjoying “Jump Around”

— angelique (@chengelis) October 2, 2021

The energy is 🆙 #GoBlue pic.twitter.com/hHHVv6mWQD

— Michigan Football (@UMichFootball) October 2, 2021

Dax Hill stated that he remembered what it was like to see Camp Randall do "Jump Around" in 2019 when Michigan was down 35-8, and he determined that Michigan wanted to be in the lead to "Jump Around" without issue.  That this was in the middle of 25 straight points from Michigan after the half, in a half where Dax Hill set about atoning for being beat on the TD throw late in the first with a sack that knocked Graham Mertz out of the game, a couple of excellent coverages on third down, and then two plays into the fourth, Michigan's own Thane of Fife, David Ojabo, caused a Chase Wolf fumble and Christopher Hinton recovered in Wisconsin territory.  This drive stalled, leading to a Jake Moody field goal that looked as nice of a golf draw as you will see, and Wisconsin got back to work.

We are haunted by Michigan's football past because we know that win percentage probability can lie to you because it's a probability, not a guarantee. Still, it did indeed appear that Michigan had succeeded in stealing Wisconsin's juice.

We are haunted by Michigan's football past because we know the rhythms all too well.  This was the game that was supposed to screw Michigan's season up if it got past Washington.  Last week's second-half inspired little in the way of confidence.  Only getting three points out of the Wisconsin muffed punt inside their five in the first half felt like the harbingers of a past come round again.  You cannot blame Michigan fans for this.  You can also credit the Michigan players for not playing scared.  You can credit the Michigan coaches for coming into this game and playing aggressively, playing to win.  Not every every decision worked, but enough of them did. Michigan gets their first win at Camp Randall since 2001, ruining Barry Alvarez Day (which, admittedly, they did a lot during Alvarez's Wisconsin tenure, as they were 7-3 against the Badgers between 1990-2005.  Yes, we have weird gaps in the historical record against Wisconsin.)

We are haunted by Michigan's football past in a way that many of us spent the entire week expecting this game to go sideways.  I already had picked the Neko Case song that was likely going to represent the mood of the fanbase when this turned out to be a loss.  We expected horror because horror is so much of what we have known.  This was Jim Harbaugh's first win at Michigan as an underdog, but as was argued, Michigan was only an underdog because it keeps losing games like this under Harbaugh.  Not today.  The offense looked more whole, if imperfect, but also understood it was up against an outstanding Wisconsin run defense.  Cade made some mistakes, but he also kept escaping sacks in a way that made up for them.  Michigan didn't look amazing for every stretch of the game, and it still won by 21 points.  

We are haunted by Michigan's football past, but we do not have to be.  Oh sure, Michigan has never won in Lincoln, ever, but it's also a grand total of two games, one of which was the Denard night of the soul in 2012.  This team believes in itself.  This team trusts itself.  Let them lead us the way.  Spooky season may have started yesterday, but it does not mean we need to be spectrally enthralled for an entire month.

Good Time

"We didn't know it at the time, but this would be foreshadowing the rest of the evening." (David Guralnick/Detroit News)

"I want to have a good time
Just like everybody
And I don't want to fall apart"
"Good Time", Counting Crows from the 2002 album Hard Candy


There exists a fine line between "making a point" and "trolling".  Both were on display during the Michigan-Wisconsin game, Under the Lights VII at Michigan Stadium.  "Making a Point" is when you have 25 or so Michigan offensive line alumni who were captains, all-Big Ten, or played five years in the NFL as your honorary captain, reminding Wisconsin, the conference's current farm-to-NFL table for offensive linemen that Michigan knew how to do that once upon a time and would like to do that again, preferably sooner rather than later.  Trolling is when you play "Jump Around" late in the fourth quarter, leading some Wisconsin fans to laugh and shake their heads simultaneously.  Either Special K has been summarily dismissed from the press box and replaced with someone who has a better understanding of what will get a Michigan Stadium crowd hyped, or he took some continuing education classes in that realm.

For a change, Michigan didn't get off to a slow start (though there are those who would grouse about the missed Nordin field goal and worry that it was going to come back to bite Michigan later.  When it was 13-7 at halftime, it was entirely plausible to construct scenarios in one's head on how the destruction was going to come to the strains of the MMB version of the Turtles' "Happy Together".  I reminded myself, aloud, to the approbation of the good people of the upper levels of Section 7 that we got to halftime with a lead and Don Brown makes adjustments at halftime like whoa.)  The fear remained persistent.  Jonathan Thomas was being contained, but still getting 3, 4, 5, 7 yards despite multiple large men in navy blue shirts attempting to tackle him.  It was a tip your cap moment to both parties, Taylor's sheer power, and his shiftiness as a runner, the Michigan defense's assignment discipline (and overall discipline, just the one unsportsmanlike penalty after the game-sealing pick-six) that they were meeting Taylor where he was to prevent the chunk play.

But slowly, the fears began to dissipate, like a fog burning off in the morning sun.  The 75-yard drive, kept alive by the first roughing the snapper call I've ever seen in person (the Wisconsin fans near us were incredulous, they didn't even know it was a penalty.  The fan near him said "We did, it should have been called in the 2015 Michigan State game.") and capped off by Shea's bootleg right where he puts the ball down in the end zone like it's a rugby try and the two-point conversion where I did not see Nico Collins at all until he had the ball in his hands.  It began to feel like Michigan, with a two-score lead, on a team that had only mustered 25 passing yards on the night, might be on the way to changing the narrative about Michigan in big games.

Then the Lavert Hill goes pick-six for a 21-yard ramble*, and a new narrative began to emerge from the ashes of the old one.  It's not fully formed yet, it needs similar excellent performances in the next couple of games against Michigan State and Penn State to truly be a new argument, but this team is clicking.  The offensive line, the source of much hand-wringing, has opened holes to allow Karan Higdon to run for 100 yards in five consecutive games.  The much-maligned receiving corps has grown up, bracketed by tight ends who move the chains.  This is not the Michigan team that looked like it would frustrate the hell out of the fans once more after the Notre Dame game.  But this is college football, chaos can rear its head on any given weekend.  Michigan avoided it with a statement win, but next weekend's chaos can loom as large if a team is not prepared for it.

So the new week arrives.  Beat State.

(*Though Hill's touchdown was the dagger, it was McCaffery's touchdown that led me to say "Oh that's just egregious" like Puppet Michael Floyd from Stuffing the Passer.  Gratuitous would have been the better word in this spot, but that's where my head was at in that moment.)

Some Days Are Better Than Others

There were moments.  You wanted to believe.

"You wonder why. It occurs that at some point the Michigan program acquired the traits you hold dear -- loyalty, honesty, tradition, victory. And you wonder: if you were a different person who valued other things would you care so much? It occurs that at some point the Michigan program acquired other traits you share but do not hold particularly dear -- cantankerousness, stubbornness, an inability to suffer fools gladly. And you wonder: do I like Michigan because of the way I am, or am I the way I am because I like Michigan?"  -Brian Cook, "Eleven Swans", MGoBlog, November 18, 2006

Only speaking from my own experience, I cannot see much joy in defaulting to pessimism, other than life would rarely disappoint you.  If you expect the worst, it's hard to be disappointed when the world shows its true colors to you time and again.  Some might even call it realism, a life view based on experience.  But my experience with college football, and specifically, with being a Michigan fan, is that I choose to be optimistic until the exact moment where it just starts to feel impossible.

At 2:06 of the third quarter of the game against Wisconsin, sophomore quarterback Brandon Peters was left in the open as an unblocked Andrew Van Ginkel ran straight at him and proceeded to bury him in the Camp Randall turf moments after Peters released an incomplete throw in the direction of Chris Evans.  No penalty was called, but Peters would need a cart to be removed from the field and would later be transported to the UW hospital for tests.  Even the most optimistic Michigan fan would look at the situation and think Michigan might still be able to pull off an upset.

The sad part was, however, that ten minutes of real time before that moment, most Michigan fans were, if not believing in the upset, at least trying to plot a course to it.  Through the rocky shoals of defeating a highly ranked team on the road, something Michigan has...struggled with for, well, most of this millennium.

It would seem to me that you have to want to believe that things like this can happen, even if you academically know in your mind they are unlikely or improbable.  College football presents you with a veritable buffet of this kind of thing each year, and the math rarely, if ever, checks out on it.  But hope isn't about math, it's about the art of the possible, even if that potential seems like a faint glimmer of light on an endless field of blackness.

You come to realize that most things fade into that blackness of your mind because they are not memorable.  The replay challenges that go your way, the penalties that don't get called because they weren't there, they just recede into memory.  In fact, it's almost worse than that because fans tend to ascribe favorable breaks for their side as "skill" or "karma" or "justice" and ill fortune as "a vast, multinational conspiracy designed to destroy your team." So you worry if you wonder what the B1G schedule makers were thinking when Michigan had to face Wisconsin on the road before Ohio State while Ohio State got Illinois and whether you're just being paranoid or angry or lost because you honestly just don't know any longer.

You want to be optimistic heading into The Game, because what would be the point of getting excited about it otherwise.  Even if you know the numbers will tell a story that runs contrary to that optimism, you still want to believe otherwise because it is a part of who you are.  You aren't sure why you are that way, the conundrum presented to open our piece, so correctly stated 11 years ago today.  Like so many things when you get older, you find yourself less and less sure of the reasons why things happen, something that a younger you would be befuddled by because you expected the world to make more sense as you got older, not less.  It's why we long for the nostalgic past, the one cast in the gauzy haze that allows you to forget that things similar to this happened then too.  You've just had more time to process it, but more importantly, to come to terms with it.

Some days, a solid but unspectacular quarterback starts lacing ultraprecise laser passes into impossible spots.  Some days, the replay official can't see that a foot got down inbounds before the one went out of bounds.  Some days, your offensive line struggles with stunts and twists. 

Some days are better than others. 

Some days you feel ahead; 

You're making sense of what she said.  

Some days are better than others. 

Some days I hear a voice taking me to another place. 

Some days are better then others.

Tempo-Free Hate 2013-2014: Bo Ryan's Revenge!

Last year, between the Ohio and Wisconsin games, we spent the time wondering why do we all hate Aaron Craft so much? To answer this question, we proposed the Four Factors of Hate, and used these factors to find the Big Ten leaders in Tempo-Free Hate. This year, the question of why we all hate Aaron Craft was answered once and for all when Doug Gottlieb blamed this on the ball being too slippery:

GIF by Timothy Burke (@bubbaprog)

Even though unwarranted media attention and apologia are good reasons to be annoyed by a player, the Four Factors of Hate try to quantify just what makes a player so annoying using only the stats on the floor. The four factors are:

• Steals per personal foul (ST/PF). Also known as handchecking ability, or Craftiness.

• Ability to draw fouls (Free Throw Attempts/(Minutes Played * Usage %)).  Jordan Morgan is not as bad at this as you think.

• Three-Point Specialization (3FG/FG). The "Just A Shooter" Award.

• Free Throw Percentage (FT%). For those annoying players who just Win The Game. Since all players are supposed to be able to shoot free throws reasonably well FT% only counts half as much as the other three.

All stats come from Sports Reference College Basketball, except for team adjusted tempo, which is pulled from the front page at kenpom. Who is the most annoying player in the Big Ten? Find out after the jump!

The Curse of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf

This is the ad that the University of Wisconsin has been running during its football games.

On October 7, this ad became incorrect when Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Wisconsin alumna and President of Liberia, was awarded a share of the Nobel Peace Prize.

On October 7, Wisconsin was ranked #4 in the country with a 5-0 record. Since that date, they have gone 1-2 and given up a touchdown play of at least 40 yards in each of those three games, even to Indiana. They have fallen from national championship hopeful to third place in the Big Ten Southeast Division.

If I were a university running an ad boasting about how many Nobel Prize winners were associated with the school, not only would I hastily update the ad if an alumna received a Nobel Prize, I would make a big show of hastily updating the ad.

I believe that Wisconsin is doomed to disappointing results until they fix their ad. Sirleaf's other FBS alma mater, the University of Colorado, is 0-4 since she was awarded the prize. I do not think any curse is involved there. I think they are just bad at football.

UPDATE (11/5/11, 7:40 PM): Wisconsin defeats Purdue handily, but gives up a 30-yard TD pass. Perhaps the curse's power is diminishing slightly? Also, Colorado loses again.

More seal-based humor

West #1: Wisconsin

University of Wisconsin Badgers

1 seed vs. Vermont, West Regional (Xcel Energy Center, St. Paul, MN)
At-large bid from the WCHA
Record: 25-10-4
Coach: Mike Eaves

This year's Badgers are a high-flying crew. By the numbers, they're the second most potent offense in the country, at 3.97 goals per game. And they're doing it against the fourth-toughest schedule in the nation, whereas Yale (4.09 GPG) faces the 37th. Seven different Badgers are in double digits when it comes to goals, led by senior Hobey Baker finalist Blake Geoffrion (25-18--43), 13 of whose have come on the power play. Senior Michael Davies (18-32--50) leads the team in points, while sophomore Derek Stepan (10-38--48) is tops in assists. Five Badgers have at least 30 points. Junior Brendan Smith (15-30--45) is also a Hobey finalist and leads all defenseman nationally with his 15 goals. He's made the most of his power play time, having earned 11 of his goals that way. He also leads the team in penalty minutes with 70.

On the other end of the ice, Wisconsin is anchored by junior goalie Scott Gudmandson, with his .915 SV% and 2.31 GAA. He's split time with fellow junior Brett Bennett (.885/2.31), who's appeared in 14 games, but I'd expect that Gudmandson will be the goalie for the NCAA's. The top defensemen in +/- are junior Ryan McDonagh and sophomore Jake Gardiner, who lead the team with +21. McDonagh is also right behind Brendan Smith with 69 PIM.

The Badgers are a deep, scary team. A goalie having a good night can get them, as they've been shut out on a couple of nights, most recently in the WCHA tournament semifinal against St. Cloud State, but it doesn't happen often. They've only been held to one goal 3 times. One of those was also against the Huskies, which is about the closest anyone's been to having Wisconsin's number (The Badgers are 2-3 against them on the season). As luck would have it, St. Cloud State is also in the West regional. I'm sure Wisconsin would be happy to level the season series.