Rutgers 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

One of the things that makes College Football great is that it cannot, from a fandom standpoint, be “solved.” There are too many variables and not enough equations. The NFL has 32 teams and 17 regular season games among teams who perform generally the same from week to week and from one year to the next. College football has 133 teams and 12 regular season games, and the week-to-week and year-to-year performances vary WILDLY.

Oh, you beat the #17 team in the country last week? HAHA, you just lost to a MAC team playing a converted safety at quarterback and a converted quarterback at safety. Oh, you won 11 games last year? Okay yeah but you lost one key player so now you’re going to miss a bowl game and get fired from your $9.5 Million-per-year job.

There’s just too much data to be able to consume it all, and a lot of the data we DO consume is fundamentally inconsistent with the earlier data. Our brains try desperately to organize everything, but eventually they just slap a label on it and move on. It’s like packing your belongings when moving between houses, but when you get to the destination you realize you have a dozen boxes just labeled “stuff.” So at the end, every fan will have very different feelings about almost every team in college football.

[After THE JUMP: Remembering some canon fodder.]

Rememberin’ some guys [Barron]

Don’t believe me? Then try this. I’m going to list off a series of college football teams, and one at a time I want you to name the first thought that team evokes for you. Ready?

• Florida State
• Eastern Michigan
• Tennessee
• Pitt
• Oregon

There’s nothing special about those five teams. I just picked them at random. But I bet you had a feeling, or a memory, or a gut reaction to each of these teams. But because of the beauty of college football, they will all be different. It’s why we can argue forever about whether 1997 Michigan would have beaten 1997 Nebraska or what Bailey Zappe could have done in a Power 5 offense.

(For the record, mine were: That Kick Return From The Orange Bowl, Why Hasn’t Anyone Hired Chris Creighton, Joe Milton Can Throw The Ball Really Hard, Larry Fitzgerald Should Have Won A Heisman, and Oooooooh Shiny Objects.)

But there is one team for which this does not apply. One team that brooks no controversy or disagreement. One team for which everyone just nods and says, “ah, yes, I know exactly what you mean, and you are correct.”

Rutgers.

Everyone—and I mean EVERYONE—has approximately the same feelings about Rutgers. Because for as long as they have been a part of the Big Ten, Rutgers has been, give or take, the same thing. And no one remembers pre-Big Ten Rutgers, because unlike Nebraska or even Maryland, they never DID anything notable, and none of the conferences to which they previously belonged still exist. They entered our consciousness as a joke, and they’ve remained a joke.

Have they done some non-joke stuff? I mean, I guess? They won 3 conference games in 2017 and 2020. They won 5 games in 2021, somehow making a bowl game in the process. They beat Brady Hoke in 2014. But since 2015, they haven’t beaten a single mediocre team, let alone a good one. And some of their losses have been cataclysmically bad.

Rutgers has been SO bad that it is impossible to look at them in any other light. They’re the college football version of McGregor the Bridge Builder. We view everything they do, no matter how good or how promising, through the filter of the Rutgers we know. Whenever you see the word “Rutgers” in a news story, you may as well replace it with “Rutgers, Tragic Comedy Troupe With A Cannon, Dead Today At The Age of 154 After Being Impaled On A Beach Ball.”

This is not unfair, or even unreasonable. But the part we said before still applies: college football is random and stupid, and you never REALLY know from week to week or year to year.

To wit: Rutgers might actually be okay this year.

They have 3 wins of 17+ points, all against FBS teams, and two against Power 5 teams. They have only allowed 30 points. They’re third in the Big Ten in yards per play allowed, behind only Michigan and Ohio State (who have both played cupcake offenses thus far). They are top-3 in the Big Ten in both yards per carry allowed and yards per pass allowed. They lead the Big Ten at 221 rushing yards per game.

Are they GOOD? Probably not. Are they as good as Michigan? Almost certainly not. But they could sneak in under guise of “Just Rutgers.”

Sound farfetched? They’ve almost done it *three years in a row.* They took Zombie Michigan to double overtime in 2020, they had the ball with the chance to tie the 2021 game late in the fourth quarter, and they led Michigan at halftime in 2022. But what would be seen as a red flag against any other team or VOODOO MAGIC if Michigan State did it is disregarded as “Aw, that’s cute, baby found a chainsaw.” Because Rutgers.

Rutgers might still be ‘Rutgers.’ But they won’t always be ‘Rutgers.’ The only question is how long we have to wait. Hopefully at least one more year. Michigan 24, Rutgers 16

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COUNTERPUNT

By Internet Raj
@internetraj

I’m writing this to you from a crucible of intense physical pain. My body is delicately contorted into one of the few positions that does not elicit breathtaking shockwaves of agony. Yet here I am, typing these milquetoast takes for you, the Reader. I have plumbed the depths of my physical and mental fortitude to mine the very last remaining ounces of grit I have left to bless this .docx with 500 words on the Rutgers Scarlet Knights. Because if I don’t do it who will?^[1]

There is an established pantheon of “Gutsy Played Through Injuries” legends: Jordan’s Flu Game. Zeek’s Ankle. Willis Reed’s hobble. Curt Schilling’s bloody sock. The list is short, but there’s no doubt that it must be amended to include a new, worthy entrant:

Internet Raj’s Week 4 Counterpunt column for Rutgers.

You might be wondering what my injury is. Well, I bent over wrong. And now my lower back is a throbbing knot of dull, aching and relentlessly persistent pain. That sudden gust of wind you just felt? That was the thousands hundreds dozens of other late-30s-plus Dad’s reading this and nodding in animated, compassionate unison. Because once you hit a certain age, your lower back becomes a ticking time bomb waiting to unleash a torrent of suffering. It could be doing a two-plate squat. It could be pulling a three-plate deadlift. It could be bending over to tie your shoe. The most innocuous movement can tip over the first domino of destruction, whether it’s a twinged tendon, pulled muscle, torn ligament, busted joint or a bulging disc. And then, all you can do is wait.

Live look at an MRI of my back

Lower back pain is one of the most insidious injuries because it forces you to confront, in very real and painful terms, how important the back is in literally every single anatomical movement. Twisting to grab something. Getting in and out of a chair. Walking up and down stairs. The lower back is crucial to almost every single routine maneuver you can think of. So when it flares up, you are reminded of its wrath at literally every turn.

There’s almost nothing more annoying and debilitating than a nagging lower back. Almost nothing. Because there’s something just as relentlessly bad. Something that inflicts ocular pain on the same order of magnitude as an L3 herniation. Something you can beat 78-0 but will still rear its head again, year after year, like clockwork. Something that is brutally agonizing. Something unflinchingly tortuous. Something inexorable and inevitable. Something you can’t even fucking outrun if you move to SINGAPORE, like I have.

This evil has followed me 9,300 miles

Rutgers is as inescapable and merciless as bad lower back pain. Rutgers is the bulging disc of the Big Ten. Rutgers athletics sets a bar as such pure, unadulterated crap that it transcends fundamental rules of grammar: “Rutgers” is simultaneously a noun, verb an adjective.^[2] I hate to pile on because Rutgers does appear to come into this game with some semblance of quality. They’re 3-0, boast a competent defense and are guided by a head coach with at least one functioning hemisphere in his brain. Couple that with the fact that Michigan has spent its nonconference traipsing around with a lackadaisical lethargy, and you may just be tempted to think this will be a close game. In fact the past two years, Rutgers has infected the Wolverines with their patented viral strain of mid-assity, and those games were far more competitive than they should have been. But this year is different. Jim Harbaugh is back. And his personal Revenge Tour v2 begins today. The Wolverines will be come out amped, laser focused and ready to unleash a big old bottle of Ibuprofen on this scarlet menace.

Michigan 42, Rutgers 8

[1] Literally anyone else, actually.

[2] A “rutger” is when you have fewer yards in some aspect of the game than your opponent has points. (Source)