Week 12: WTF just happened?

Iowa State?!? Really?!? Seriously. Oklahoma State just blew it. An offense that had been putting up 50 points a game against even respectable defenses got held to 24 by an Iowa State defense that was 84th in the country in scoring. Okie State also blew a 17-point second-half lead by not scoring for the final 27 minutes, which is hard to believe even after having watched it. Efficiency was a problem: 511 regulation yards should not equal 24 points. Four turnovers (not including a turnover on downs and the overtime pick) will do that. It should also be noted that Oklahoma State's defense -- which has been pretty mediocre but always good enough this year -- gave up a ridiculous 518 yards in regulation to a team that had almost 100 fewer (and 13 points) last week against Kansas. It was a wholesale collapse no less bizarre than Oklahoma's WTF moment against Texas Tech last month. On the flip side, Iowa State has a weird knack for winning games against teams that rack up a billion yards and then turn it over like whoa at the worst possible times, which leads to Paul Rhoads doing awesome things ... like this:


I love it.

USC Y U NO BOWL ELIGIBLE: I'm so glad I spent the last week telling people Oregon is better than Alabama. Gack. I've never really felt like this year's Oregon offense has been quite as consistently dominant as last year's, but it hadn't mattered much until whatever that was. The "but but 35 points" thing is a little misleading; Oregon had two offensive touchdowns and about 300 total yards heading into the fourth quarter. LaMichael James, Darron Thomas and DeAnthony Thomas finished with a combined 32 carries for 86 yards. Monte Kiffin FTW. Ridiculous factoid of the week: This was Chip Kelly's first-ever loss against a team that played the week before. Absurd. Matt Barkley was also awesome, going 25 for 36 for 323 yards with four touchdowns and one pick. He'd be a legitimate Heisman candidate if anybody actually cared about USC this year. Speaking of which, USC is a pretty good team. It's crazy to think how close they are to being undefeated (basically a couple red-zone turnovers against ASU and one freakin' play against Stanford) and how many hilariously entertaining arguments we could be having about a hypothetically unbeaten USC right now given the state of the top five. As for Oregon, the national title hopes are officially gone since people overreact and do things like drop Oregon behind Stanford (way to look at the big picture, voters). Destination: Rose Bowl, where they'll beat a probably-not-that-good Big Ten champ by three touchdowns.

Baylor. Oklahoma. Wow: I don't even know what to say here. Game of the year? Maybe. Robert Griffin III is indisputably spectacular. Line: 21 of 34 for 479 yards with four touchdowns and no picks. He also had 18 carries for 72 yards, including a clutch 24-yard scramble with about 30 seconds left to get Baylor across midfield and set up this:


Ice water, veins, etcetera. Why can't this guy get some Heisman love? Landry Jones was pretty good too, finishing 36 of 51 for 447 yards but with no touchdowns. The reason: Oklahoma has discovered the modern-day Gator Heavy with Blake Bell ...


... and ran the crap out of it against Baylor. Bell finished with five carries and four touchdowns (lol). There were a combined 1,221 yards of total offense. The last minute was also ridiculously entertaining: Oklahoma scores to get within one, lines up to go for two with Bell at QB, gets a false start and then kicks the extra point. Baylor then tries to run out the clock; Oklahoma calls timeout. So Baylor sends everybody deep, at which point Griffin does his scrambly thing to do his throwy thing. Oklahoma then botches the kick return, which usually features somebody, like, picking up the ball instead of letting it lie on the field until the other team recovers. So ... the stakes have been lowered just a bit for the Bedlam game: Winner gets the Big 12 title, loser gets (probably) the Alamo Bowl. Commence the stupid opinion pieces about how Bob Stoops should be fired if he ever loses a game.

Most ridiculous play in the history of ever: This deserves its own heading purely for RGIII's reaction.


Hilarious.

Nice job, Clemson: I don't understand how Clemson got dominated by NC State. Like ... what???? NC State is 6-5 but just a notch above "bad" -- the record is a joke considering two of those wins were against FCS teams and one was against Central Michigan -- which explains this quote from Tom O'Brien:

"I really have no explanation for what just happened," O'Brien said with a smile.

Again, that's from the winning coach. Tajh Boyd threw no touchdown passes and two picks while Andre Ellington finished with a whopping nine carries for 28 yards, which resulted in Clemson not scoring a touchdown until the final 90 seconds of a game against a middle-of-the-ACC defense giving up about 25 PPG. It make-a no sense-a. Clemson is now a loss to South Carolina away from finishing 9-3 after an 8-0 start and a loss in the ACC title game away from finishing 9-4 overall. Has a coach ever started 8-0 and gotten fired? Dabo Swinney might give it a run. He also might get a 10-year contract extension if he actually wins an ACC championship, which is still very possible given that the title-game opponent will be either a decent Virginia team playing way over its head or a good Virginia Tech team that Clemson beat by 20 in Blacksburg about six weeks ago.

Penn State is slightly better than Ohio State: Remarkably, Ohio State could have won the Leaders East Division by beating Penn State and Michigan. That obviously can't happen now. As usual, 20 points against Ohio State = victory because the OSU offense is a tire fire that couldn't put up 100 yards passing if you spotted them 50 and played the entire game with goal-line personnel. Matt McGloin finished 10 for 21 for 88 yards and a pick and was still the better passer Saturday, which is both hilarious and pathetic. The Ohio State running game has definitely come around since Dan Herron came back and Jim Bollman realized that Braxton Miller just can't throw, but defenses aren't totally stupid (unless Greg Robinson is the coordinator) and will make OSU run the ball 50 times to get 200 yards. Tom Bradley definitely isn't stupid. That's the only possible explanation for a team that's 106th in scoring being 9-2. Speaking of which, Saturday's game at Wisconsin will decide the division. I'm pulling for Wisconsin solely because a Penn State-Michigan State title game would be the most unwatchable title game in the history of title games. Michigan State has already won the Legends West and is in line to either get killed by Oregon in the Rose Bowl or Arkansas in the Capital One Bowl.

Houston keeps winning: Houston is now 11-0 and hasn't even come close to cracking my top 10 this year. The reason: I don't think they're one of the 10 best (or even 20 best) teams in the country. But I will give 'em some credit for spanking SMU 37-7 and holding a legitimately dangerous offensive team to 263 yards. It was probably Houston's best all-around win of the year ... and therein lies the problem. The thing that Boise and TCU always had on everybody was this: They'd beat the few good teams they played and then destroy the mediocre teams in their conferences. Houston has barely beaten teams like Louisiana Tech and UTEP and hasn't played a legitimately good team yet (no, UCLA is not good). The passing game is flat-out dominant and would put up some yards on anybody, but everything else is very meh, especially the defense. I guess what I'm saying is that Houston looks more like 2007 Hawaii than a vintage Boise State. We'll probably get a chance to find out in the Sugar Bowl unless a pretty good Tulsa team ends the argument this week.

A banner week for the SEC: A schedule-related joke would be easy but unnecessary given the actual performances. Auburn led Samford (and Sons) by five at the start of the fourth quarter before pulling away, Florida fell behind Furman 22-7 and led 39-32 (nice defense) heading into the fourth quarter, South Carolina needed 21 second-half points to pull away from The Citadel (previously 3-7) and Alabama led Georgia Southern 31-21 late in the third quarter. If you're gonna play FCS teams, you might wanna actually, like, beat them by a lot. And no, Michigan has never played an FCS team. Never.

Kansas is so, so awful: You already know this. Texas A&M just confirmed it by going up 44-0 at halftime and strolling to a 61-7 win that could have been way worse since the starters were yanked with 12 minutes left in the third quarter. For all the cap I've been giving the Kansas defense, take a look at the offense's impressive performance against a fairly average A&M defense: punt, safety, punt, fumble, interception, fumble, punt, punt punt, missed field goal (woo!), turnover on downs, touchdown (!!!). Pathetic. Remember when everybody wanted Turner Gill?

Arizona State is in meltdown mode: Losing to UCLA was kinda understandable since UCLA isn't terrible and it was a close road game that came down to a last-second field goal. It happens. Losing to Washington State? Awful. Losing at home to an Arizona team with one real win this year? Awfuler. Arizona finally put a decent performance together for the first time since the UCLA game, but it shouldn't have mattered. What's really sad is that a win over Cal probably still sends ASU to the conference title game since UCLA is gonna lose to USC and fall into a three-way tie (with ASU and Utah) that ASU wins because of its divisional record. I can't see Dennis Erickson keeping his job; he's 21-26 over his last four years, and this is an upperclassman-heavy team that had an air-hockey-smooth path to the division title and 10 wins and is now sitting at 6-5 with a losable game left to play. If that's the best-case scenario under Erickson, some new scenarios need to be introduced. This program is better than annually irritating 6-6 finishes.

How exciting: Miami 6, South Florida 3. Oh yeah.

Totally bizarre ending of the week: I've got a separate post on Tennessee drifting around in my partially awake brain, but this game-ending play goes here for its weirdness value:


You might have noticed the play being blown dead when Eric Johnson stumbled at about his own 25-yard line. The officials reviewed it for about five minutes, realized they screwed up and came back with "whatever, let's call it a touchdown." That's a totally incorrect application of the rules -- the SEC even issued an apology -- but I'm OK with it in this case since the whistle had no effect on a play that was obviously gonna be a touchdown.

Game of the Week: Pick your favorite between Oregon-USC and Oklahoma-Baylor. I'm going with the latter for pure entertainment value and the craziness of the last minute. I'd also like to thank ESPN3 for allowing me to watch the complete versions of three games that happened at the exact same time. Jackpot.

Player of the Week: RGIII. The guy is ridiculous. If Baylor were Texas, the Heisman race would be over.

Post-Week 12 top 10: As much as I hate the idea of Gary Danielson hyperventilating for the next six weeks, there's no question about the top two anymore. LSU and Alabama should play for the national title. After that, I refuse to bump Arkansas and Virginia Tech ahead of teams like Oregon just because Oregon lost more recently. Call me stubborn if you want.

1. LSU
2. Alabama
3. Oregon
4. Oklahoma State
5. Oklahoma
6. Stanford
7. USC (as of right now, I'd pick USC to beat any of the lower-ranked teams on this list)
8. Boise
9. Arkansas
10. Virginia Tech

RichRod is back in the game

So much for the rumored Mike Bellotti-to-Arizona deal:

Arizona is close to announcing it has hired former West Virginia and Michigan coach Rich Rodriguez, a source told ESPN's Joe Schad.

Bruce Feldman confirms:

Rich Rodriguez will be the next head football coach at Arizona, according to several sources. He's expected to bring several of his assistants from Michigan and West Virginia with him to Tucson.

Wow. To say I have some thoughts on this would be an understatement, especially now that I'm just about finished with "Three and Out." There's a lot to the Rodriguez-at-Michigan story. But I'm awaiting official word before launching a 5,000-word essay with way more than you ever wanted to know. Probably won't be long if he's already working out deals with prospective assistants.

UPDATE: It's official. Epic breakdown coming tomorrow.

I've missed you so much

So ... that was fun. By the middle of the fourth quarter of a game against one of the few legitimately good teams in the Big Ten, the question was no longer whether Michigan would win or by how many but whether it was the best all-around performance since pre-apocalyptic 2006.

The answer: probably. The '08 Capital One Bowl win over Florida is the only thing that makes that a "probably" instead of a "that's not even a question."

The past three years were spent waiting/hoping for anything that would definitively say, "yup, this is Michigan football" (Notre Dame games notwithstanding since Notre Dame was never unquestionably good during that time). That had nothing to do with style and everything to do with Michigan football doing this ...


... and this ...


... and this:


Hey, domination. It's been a long time. You should stay awhile.

I'm a pretty critical person in general but have basically zero complaints about anything that happened in that game. I guess Michigan could have taken control earlier -- it was 17-10 at halftime despite the stats being way more lopsided -- but that's just picking nits because I'm a typically cranky Michigan fan and that's what we do. At some point, the degree of domination (somewhere between "thorough" and "total") isn't that important.

I don't even know what to say about Greg Mattison anymore. My man crush is approaching unhealthy levels. His spectacularly shiny noggin and oddly shaped body emit a warm-and-fuzzy defensive goodness that's like a drug for me. The satisfaction is so satisfying.

This is pretty much everything you need to know about the game Saturday: Taylor Martinez and Rex Burkhead had 26 carries for 87 yards (3.3 a pop). Do that to Nebraska and you'll win, especially when your secondary doesn't suck since that means Martinez will do things like go 9 of 23. Take out the one awful busted coverage in the first half (Nebraska's first touchdown) to get a better picture of the game as a whole and you get a picture of patheticness: 8 of 22 for 68 yards. Also, Nebraska didn't convert a third down until the final drive of the third quarter, at which point Michigan was winning by three touchdowns. At no point was Nebraska's offense doing anything consistently enough to make me seriously concerned.

Weekly mind-blowing statistical update: Michigan is now 14th in total defense and eighth in scoring defense. If the Western Michigan game had counted (stupid NCAA), those numbers would be 13th and sixth. And this is allegedly the same defense that finished 110th last year in yardage and 108th in scoring. Based on my highly scientific method of skimming the NCAA database, Michigan is gonna pretty easily make the biggest one-year jump* in either category in recent history. In other words: Mattison 1, GERG -78,943.


As for the equally bald and lumpy guy who's been slightly less of a magical unicorn dream this year, Al Borges gets no criticism from me this week. Without the benefit of charting formations, I'm guessing at least 80 percent of Michigan's non-garbage-time plays this week were out of the shotgun, and most of of the ones that weren't were either short-yardage blasty blasts or screens that were pretty obviously intended to take advantage of the dropback-specific pass rush off the edge. Denard had 23 carries, with roughly 20 of them designed (mostly either zone read, veer or speed option). He was actually contained reasonably well on most of those (the one stroll-into-the-endzone-while-enjoying-tea touchdown being the obvious exception), but the other side of the quarterback-containment coin is this (watch the four in-the-box defenders toward the top of the screen):


There's a hidden reason Fitzgerald Toussaint has been putting up 140 yards a game for the last month; that reason is the guy handing off and then doing nothing while five defenders freak out about the idea of him not doing nothing.

Speaking of Toussaint, stuff like this ...


... has nothing to do with Denard. The guy is legitimately good and is only a redshirt sophomore.

I kinda threw the baby out with the bathwater last week when I ranted for a while about Borges not doing so many of the things he should be doing and then added at the end, "I should also mention somewhere in this post that Fitzgerald Toussaint is averaging 140 yards and a touchdown in his last three games." That's not a Borges-independent development; a large part of it is Borges' discovery/remembrance that deploying Denard as a run threat out of the shotgun has some fantastically entertaining byproducts. This is a very good thing for the offense as a whole. FYI, I still hate his weird aversion to bubble screens but am greatly enjoying his never-ending screen package and use of crazy stacked-receiver sets that lead to guys running hilariously wide open underneath.

After the Minnesota game, I wrote this:

For the first time all year, the offense looked fully coherent, mostly because Borges has finally figured out what Denard can/can't do and what this offense is good/bad at. Hitch-corner combos and counters and tunnel screens and QB sweeps? Yes plz. I-form power and under-center play-action and jump balls to Roy Roundtree? Nay. Borges is finding his happy place.

I'm starting to feel that way again. I don't understand what happened in the Iowa game (the Michigan State game, IMO, had less to do with Borges being a lunatic than Denard being incapable of completing a forward pass), but I'm hoping it was an anomaly and that Good Borges will show up again next week and next year and forever and ever and ever. Although when Denard does this ...


... Borges becomes mostly irrelevant, because there's no chance Michigan's getting held under 30 points when Denard is hitting on the deep stuff. There's no way to stop the run game and put two safeties over the top; not possible. Hitting those slightly open guys 40 yards downfield is something Denard is never gonna do consistently, but doing so = victory.

And Brady Hoke ...

... yes, you. I heart you. Michigan led by 14 midway through the third quarter and had a fourth-and-1 at the Nebraska 5. The Les Miles in me said "mmmm, grass eff it, let's go," but the common sense said "take the field goal and go up three scores." The field-goal unit came out. Awesomeness ensued:


Yesssssssssss. Please keep being that guy instead of Kirk Ferentz kthx. Your game theory is schwingtastic and your ability to point at stuff is legendary; I will fight anybody who continues to complain about your hiring.

So (this sentence is going to be ridiculous) Michigan is 9-2 and heading into The Game as an 8.5-point favorite (!) on the verge of a BCS** berth. LOLOLOLOLOLOL wwwwhhheeeeeeeeee!!!!! I have a lot of thoughts about Ohio State but will save those for later in the week. I'll just repeat here what I've been saying and will continue saying for the next five days: This is the year it has to end. It's time.

Whether or not Michigan is a great team or even a very good one is irrelevant at this point. The wins keep coming, and even the hypothetically great teams are losing to Iowa State or Baylor or a good-but-not-vintage version of USC or whatever. I saw three bowl projections yesterday, and all three had Michigan playing in the Sugar Bowl.

Laissez les bons temps rouler, please. This is the good stuff.

. . . . .

*The defense has a whopping two or three senior starters (depending on your definition of "starters" -- Will Heininger nominally starts but really only plays in the base 4-3 under). Mike Martin should be an All-American and Ryan Van Bergen is pretty good, so the D-line is definitely gonna take a hit next year, but this is not a one-year anomaly based on a bunch of experienced guys finally putting it all together as seniors. The back seven will return entirely intact next year; there are currently three freshman starters. Yay future.

**The BCS insanity means the not-that-great Big Ten is almost definitely getting two bids this year. The only plausible at-large alternatives to a 10-win Michigan team would be the loser of the ACC championship game (either a three-loss Clemson or a two-loss Virginia Tech) and the loser of the Oklahoma-Oklahoma State game (either a three-loss Oklahoma or a two-loss Okie State). There's no way Michigan doesn't get that spot with a 10-2 record.

Catching up pays a hefty price

Gary Pinkel pleads guilty to DWI: No surprise here. What's interesting is that the legal punishment (two years of probation) is incredibly insignificant compared to the school's punishment:

Pinkel, who also will be suspended for this week's game against Texas Tech, will lose as much as $306,000 for the incident. Athletic director Mike Alden said the 11th-year coach won't get the $75,000 bonus his contract stipulates nor a $100,000 annual payment for meeting certain team academic and social goals. He also loses an automatic $50,000 raise at the end of the year, one week's worth of his base salary and guaranteed incentives and a $75,000 bonus should Missouri (5-5) earn a bowl bid.

Fair enough; money talks, right? Driving drunk is an incredibly stupid thing to do, but firing a guy with a squeaky-clean track record (both personally and within his program) for one not-that-unusual mistake would've been a little excessive, IMO, especially when he readily recognized the stupidity of what he did and seemed genuinely apologetic. Instead, he's getting docked about 15 percent of his projected income and essentially won't get paid for taking Mizzou to a bowl game, which is a certainty given that the season finale is against Kansas. Those "two glasses of wine" were pretty freakin' expensive.

It's been a bad month: Joe Paterno has lung cancer. The official statement from his son on Friday said the diagnosis was made last weekend, presumably the day after Penn State lost to Nebraska. To answer the obvious question, a Penn State spokesman said Paterno never smoked. Maybe that's why it's considered a "treatable" form; I'm not sure. No other prognosis was given. I really have nothing to add here. The guy is 84 and is having undoubtedly the worst month of his life, and while he obviously brought some of that upon himself, I don't think that applies to cancer.

The news isn't much better for Penn State: The wording of this letter is particularly relevant:

STATE COLLEGE, Pa. -- The NCAA will examine whether Penn State broke any rules with its handling of a child sex abuse scandal that has shocked the campus and cost the school's former president and coach Joe Paterno their jobs.

NCAA president Mark Emmert sent a letter to Penn State president Rod Erickson saying that the governing body for college sports will look at "Penn State's exercise of institutional control over its intercollegiate athletics programs" in the case of Jerry Sandusky, the former defensive coordinator accused of 40 counts of child sex abuse.

"We have to examine those facts and make a thoughtful determination of what is covered by our bylaws and what is not," Emmert told The Associated Press on Friday.

Emphasis on the bolded section: There's absolutely nothing worse at an NCAA level than a "lack of institutional control." The result is usually massive and devastating punishment. I'm really not clear how/why the NCAA thinks it has any jurisdiction over a molestation case that included no apparent NCAA violations, but maybe there's something I'm missing. I dunno. This quote from former NCAA Committee on Infractions chairman David Swank takes the words right out of my mouth:

"This isn't an NCAA matter — at all," he said. "This is a matter of criminal law. There are no moral turpitude rules in the NCAA manual. There are rules that deal with how much financial aid you can get but no rules dealing with criminal (activities). It would be really inappropriate under these circumstances to take any action."

On a related note, the Rose Bowl says it would "welcome" Penn State if it wins the Big Ten, which duh. The bowls have contractual tie-ins that aren't gonna get thrown out just because a bunch of overpaid bowl officials will be uncomfortable with all the uncomfortably uncomfortable Penn State storylines in the three weeks leading up to the game.

The Big Ten does the obvious: As you might have heard, the Big Ten is renaming one of its stupidly named trophies to something a little less stupid and a lot less controversial. I'd be happy if this were a voluntary decision, but Joe Paterno made it not so voluntary. The takeaway:

The Big Ten has taken Joe Paterno's name off the conference's football championship trophy.

Commissioner Jim Delany said Monday that it is "inappropriate" to keep Paterno's name on the trophy that will be awarded Dec. 3 after the first Big Ten title game.

Yeah, pretty much. So what was supposed to be the Stagg-Paterno Championship Trophy will instead just be the Stagg Championship Trophy, which sounds slightly less awkward anyway. FYI, I'm still on the Schembechler-Hayes Championship Trophy bandwagon.

New Mexico hires ... umm ... Bob Davie? Yes. I'm thoroughly puzzled. Davie was actually OK at Notre Dame -- he went 35-25 but was never super popular for a variety of other reasons --
but he's approaching 60 and hasn't been involved in coaching in any way in over a decade. He's also spent the relevant portion of his career at two places (Notre Dame and Texas A&M) that have almost nothing in common with New Mexico. What's the upside?

The only logical explanation: Davie was an outstanding defensive coordinator using (IIRC) an uber-pass-rush-happy 3-4 and has repeatedly said that he'd go back to the triple option if he ever got back into coaching. That sort of not-really-normal stuff is usually what allows successful lower-tier programs to be, like, successful. Just look at the service academies or that one school that had Rocky Long as head coach and was consistently good because of a wildly effective 3-3-5 that's now working out quite well at San Diego State.

Whether Davie can actually implement that stuff and build a program is an entirely different matter. If it takes him the typical three to four years to get everything in place, he'll be 61 and it'll have been seven or eight years since New Mexico even played in a bowl game. I'm a little skeptical that he can do more than make the job slightly more palatable for the next guy.

Also, read this. You'll laugh.

Syracuse suspends Phillip Thomas for a long time: Phillip Thomas is gonna end up as a first-team All-Big East safety this year (his junior year) since he leads Syracuse in tackles and leads the conference in interceptions. He's also probably done at Syracuse:

Syracuse safety Phillip Thomas has been suspended for one year for a violation of athletics department policy.

The university offered no further explanation in a one-sentence email.

The knowledgeable interwebz dudes are speculating about drug tests, which would make sense given the severity of the punishment (I'm guessing it wasn't a first offense either). And because of that, he's almost certainly done with the Syracuse football team; there's no point coming back for a senior year in which he could only play in two games. I defer to Troy Nunes is an Absolute Magician for the Syracuse-centric relevance:

It's a crushing blow to a defense already reeling and it's a massive loss for Syracuse football in general.

Ouch.

Mmmm, offensive coordinator brains: Quarterbacking is so easy, amirite?


My favorite part: "That's about as basic as I can give you." Alrighty then.

And so it begins

BREAKING NEWS from Eleven Warriors (but not Ohio State's sometimes-believable-but-always-homerific Scout affiliate, as has been reported):

Also, Les Miles and Jim Harbaugh are co-coaches at Michigan. Also also, Texas is part of both the SEC and the Pac-32. Back-channel, in-principle discussions = definitely happening. It's science.

I'm literally giddy with excitement for the daily FlightAware updates from Columbus in two weeks and the debates over whether (insert new coach here) will win every national championship or just every other national championship despite walking into massive scholarship cuts and whatnot. Realisticness: They don't have it.

Five years ago

Exactly five years ago today, I was driving home (and by "home" I mean "to my kinda-on-campus family-housing apartment") from a construction class in my excessively large crew-cab F-150 and flipped on Ann Arbor radio station WTKA, which was pretty much what I always listened to when I lived in Ann Arbor since it was almost totally dedicated to Michigan sports.

Anyway, I could tell right away that it wasn't the normal late-morning show. The guest was choking up and the host was obviously talking through tears, and it didn't take me long to figure out why. About two weeks earlier, there was a momentarily terrifying report that Bo Schembechler had collapsed on some local TV set; he had a pacemaker put in and seemed to be fine (by typical 77-year-old standards).

He wasn't fine on this day. He was gone. It got a little dusty on the drive home.

. . . . .

The worst part wasn't that he was gone. The worst part was when he was gone. There'd never been a week like the one leading up to The Game that year. I can't even describe the atmosphere on campus; I've never been good with stuff like that. All I can say is that I've never been more everything than I was for that game.

I've also never been more devastated after a loss. I didn't cry like I did when I was 10. I didn't throw anything like I did after the stupid Alamo Bowl the year before. I just sat there and wanted everything to be different, like maybe I would wake up all of a sudden and realize it was actually Friday morning and I'd just been stuck in some awful and disturbingly realistic nightmare. The loss just made his loss all the more painful, and vice versa.

It came out later that Bo talked to the team that Thursday night, which (as far as I understand it) was the norm. If Michigan was gonna lose anyway, I'm glad he wasn't around to see it. He went out with Michigan on top.

Nothing has been the same since then. In the span of a day, Michigan went from happy-times national-title contention and glory days to the beginning of the abyss. Michigan lost the next four games and has gone 32-28 in the past five years. Trying to establish a correlation seems ridiculous to anyone on the outside who doesn't realize how much of the stupidity during that time never would never have happened if Bo were still around. Bo was the dad, the guy who just told everybody what was happening and then made it happen and gave anybody who didn't like it a look that said "like it or GTFO." There were no questions, no controversies and no factions; just Bo.

I wish I'd never known the Bo-less Michigan and seen all the ugliness that came with it, but I'm glad I'm old enough to remember/understand the with-Bo Michigan. I have more appreciation for that now than ever before; I guess that counts for something.

And it's not insignificant that I hadn't even thought about the five-year thing recently -- until today, actually -- for the following reason: For the first time since that day in '06, I'm legitimately excited about the short-term and long-term future* of Michigan football. That's partially because people are actually, like, supporting the program (the preferable alternative to undermining it for stupid and petty reasons) and partially because of those "win" things. Those are fun.

Five years is a long time to stop a derailing. It's not that long, though. It can't be if I remember it like I do.


*I was dancing-in-my-living-room excited when RichRod was hired, but that was 100 percent long-term excitement. I had no short-term expectations because I had no idea what they were supposed to be. The in-hindsight answer: low.

Ron Zook is truly a man of his word

A little background: Ron Zook had no desire to talk about his job status at this week's presser (duh) and said so at the beginning while threatening to walk out. I'm not sure questions about the Michigan game and the losing streak and whatnot were really preferable, but whatever. He's the guy who has to stand up there and talk or try to figure out what the score was.

Commence Zook-itude:


Just to be clear, I don't blame the reporter for asking a question that had to be asked (hot-seat rabble is journalism gold) and I don't blame Zook for doing exactly what he said he'd do. So there's no blame here; just amusement.