Ohio State Links: Preview, The Podcast, FFFF Offense (chart), FFFF Defense (chart)

Something's been missing from Michigan gamedays since the free programs ceased being economically viable: scientific gameday predictions that are not at all preordained by the strictures of a column in which one writer takes a positive tack and the other a negative one… something like Punt-Counterpunt.

PUNT

By Bryan MacKenzie
@Bry_Mac

Pluto formed approximately 4.6 billion years ago from the same whirling cloud of gas and dust that created the sun, the Earth, and the rest of the solar system. Since then, it hasn’t changed much. It’s been the same small, cold, distant, rock ambling its way around a very, very distant sun. Low and slow, like a celestial brisket.

When Pluto was first discovered by Clyde Tombaugh in 1930, it was immediately named an the ninth planet. And from that moment on, school children learned about the nine planets. Science textbooks spoke authoritatively about the nine planets. There was no question that Pluto was part of the pantheon of grand orbs that graced our sky.

And then, one day, it wasn’t.

Pluto's reaction

People complained about the suddenness with which, in 2006, the International Astronomical Union changed Pluto’s status from “planet” to “generic space boulder.” But, if anything, it was the opposite. The scientific community had bent over backwards to protect Pluto’s planetness. They too grew up secure in the knowledge that My Very Energetic Mother Just Served Us Nine Pizzas. So they shrugged nervously when estimates of Pluto’s size were revised downward over and over again; while it was originally estimated at one Earth Mass in 1931, it is currently believed to be 1/459th of Earth’s size, or 20% of the mass of the Moon. They equivocated when more objects that were a lot like Pluto were discovered. No one wanted it to be true.

But eventually the evidence was too much to ignore. Pluto just wasn’t that special. Calling Pluto a planet was an exercise in nostalgia, not science. And so, “Nine Pizzas” became “Nachos.”

[After THE JUMP: Is there something wrong with anything?]

Michigan/Ohio State used to be Jupiter. It was the biggest and the brightest. It had the most gravity. The greatest, grandest rivalry in all of sports. But entering last year, it was starting to feel like it was drifting towards a Pluto situation. Michigan had won once since 2003. Even when Michigan entered The Game as a Top Ten team, or even as a Top Five team, a loss felt almost like a fait accompli. It’s dang hard to maintain the status of “greatest rivalry in sports” when only one team ever wins the thing. And I don’t know how far we were from The Game being relegated to the Little Brown Jug game or any number of other “oh, how quaint” matchups that only matter because nostalgic old men like me tell the youths to show some respect. But it can’t have been that far away.

Real ones remember

2021 was an astonishing result. It challenged⁠—very convincingly⁠—the notion that Michigan/Ohio State had dimmed or diminished or fallen out of orbit. But it was just one data point. And as with all science, if you can’t repeat an experiment, you can’t rely on the results.

In a way, this year’s game is more important. It will either validate or refute the 2021 result, and in doing to, it will inexorably lead us down the only two paths I can see from here. One leads back towards one-sided domination. Towards a perpetually diminishing irrelevance of The Game. Towards an irrevocable hierarchy with Michigan demoted to Minor Planet status. And if that happened, no one would be THAT shocked. Monumentally disappointed, but not wholly surprised.

The other path? I dare not speak that path, but it leads to a world of parity with Ohio State, enduring national relevance, and all the other good things that accompany being one of the largest celestial bodies in the firmament.

Last year in this column, I predicted a (rather unlikely) Michigan victory. But that was based on the idea that eventually, mathematically, Michigan HAD to win one of these things. It was a shout-out to hope and the idea that the cosmic roulette wheel owed us a favor, not a declaration that something had fundamentally changed. Predicting a Michigan win this year would be a statement that I believe something HAS changed. That Michigan really is what part of me still fears they’ve only been pretending to be. To silence those last vestiges of doubt deep in my souls that say, “yes, I know… but I also know how this ends.” And that’s a much bigger leap. And, knowing that:

Michigan is going to win this football game. Michigan 31, Ohio State 30

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COUNTERPUNT

By Internet Raj
@internetraj

In probability and statistics, the “law of large numbers” states that as a sample size increases, the mean value of a random variable gets closer and closer to its expected value. If you only flip a coin three times, you would not be shocked to get three “tails” in a row. But if you flip that same coin 30 times, it would be a near impossibility for you to get 30 tails--the proportion would be closer to 50%. And if you flip that coin 300 times, it will get even closer to 50%. Stated differently, the law of large numbers suggests that deviant outcomes become less common as sample size increases.

Over the last two decades of the rivalry, Ohio State has exerted a suffocating dominance over Michigan. Last year, the Buckeyes entered The Game having won 16 of the prior 17 matches. Even if you believed that the Buckeyes were 90% favorites to win each of those games, they still outperformed their expected value over that stretch of time. A rivalry bandied about as “the greatest in sports” had devolved into a tedious annual rubber-stamping of Buckeye superiority; what was once “must-see” was teetering on the edge of staid monotony. The Game was no longer a 50/50 coinflip affair–it was as if the Buckeyes owned both sides of the coin with the only chance of a Michigan victory being the freakish near-impossibility of the coin landing perfectly on its edge.

The Game if it was a coinflip

And then, last year happened.

The 2021 edition of The Game, viewed in isolation, felt like a larger-than-life turning point in the narrative of Ohio State’s supremacy. A staggering result that was equal parts a cathartic exorcism of history’s haunted spirits and a page flip to a new chapter of the rivalry. Relief, joy and optimism, all exuberantly unleashed in a surreal tempest of snow, “Pump It Up” and the jubilant chaos of a post-game field-rush decades in the making. But was last year’s contest truly the dawn of a new era? Or was it merely a mathematical artifact of predictable variance–after all, if you roll two dice enough times, you’re going to hit snake-eyes sooner or later.

In the long arc of history, today’s game is yet another infinitesimally small sample size–one coin flip of a hundred. Yet it’s difficult to not ascribe deeper meaning and draw grand conclusions from the 2022 edition of The Game. A loss today and Ohio State’s dominance is reasserted, with last year’s result relegated to a footnote–nothing more than an expected statistical deviation from the norm. Not a triumphant turning of the tide but rather the 79-year-old grandmother in Atlantic City winning a $10,000 jackpot on an Atlantic City slot machine after losing $70,000 pulling that same very lever for the prior month. A win today, though, would feel as though the balance of the coin itself has fundamentally transformed into something much closer to 50/50 than the current era’s hopelessly long odds. Michigan would move from that second tier of great-but-not-elite programs into the hallowed blue-chip grounds occupied by the likes of the Buckeyes, Crimson Tide, Tigers and Bulldogs. A win today is more than an aberration, outlier or any statistical noise: it could be the clear and deafening announcement of a new boss in town.

A win today is white smoke in the Vatican. The coronation of the new King. The changing of the guard. A loss today and illusions of grandeur are immediately shattered, the Wolverine fanbase left much like the prisoner being escorted back to his dark, grimy cell after the end of their one hour of “outside time”: desperately craning their neck backwards in hope for one last glance at that glorious sunshine before the hopeless abyss of the next 23 hours.

It seems like a gross overstatement and far too much weight to pin on one Saturday in November. After all, statistics and probability tell us that the more you flip a coin the more things work themselves out in the long run. And time may well prove me wrong, but today’s edition of The Game feels like more than just a single meaningless coin toss in an endless string of flips. Whatever the case may be, though, hold your breath and close your eyes because it’s spinning in the air right now. And history be damned, I like our luck.

Cheers to the new era.

Michigan 34 OSU 31