Indiana 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

Like most born-and-raised Michiganders, I grew up a Detroit Lions fan. Back there and back then, it was kind of like the idea of having a smoking section in a restaurant or putting CFCs in breakfast cereal. Maybe not GREAT for you, but certainly nothing that would cause serious long-term problems. I was nine in 1991 when the Lions made the NFC Championship Game, part of a stretch where the Lions made the playoffs six times in a nine year stretch. It seemed harmless.

Eventually the true physical and emotional toll of Lions fandom became clear, but by then I was hooked. But at some point in the late ‘aughts, when Michigan was adrift under either RichRod and Brady Hoke⁠—those years blend into a morass of ‘oh right that happened’⁠—I decided that enough was enough. I couldn’t put mental energy into Michigan on a Saturday AND the Lions on a Sunday. It wasn’t healthy, and I didn’t enjoy it. And I made an active decision to emotionally divest from the Lions.

Tell me about your childhood…

It was, and remains, a freeing feeling. Once the final whistle blows in the Michigan game, my emotional football load is lifted. But now, because I don’t have the kind of burning, seething, all-encompassing focus on what every snap of every game means for my favorite team, I’ve become the kind of casual generic fan that I can barely comprehend when I think of college football. In fact, I’ve become the worst kind of fan:

The Fantasy Football Fan.

[After THE JUMP: Snowmaglobin.]

Yes, that is me. The guy watching a game between two teams I don’t care about to see if they stall in the red zone so my kicker can score me three points. The guy fuming at the offensive coordinator for taking a knee at the end of the game instead of giving his running back a few extra carries (I mean, when has THAT ever come back to bite a team? I can’t think of a single game in which that has made a difference). The guy yelling at the quarterback “oh c’mon, he was open” when he passes up the opportunity to throw a ball to my bracketed tight end sitting at eight yards, and instead hits the wide open crossing route for a thirty-seven yard touchdown LIKE A COWARD.

The funny thing is, in the first six weeks of the season, I’ve recognized a lot of my detestable Fantasy Football Fandom traits when watching my beloved Michigan Wolverines.

It isn’t that I don’t care about the outcome the way I don’t care about, say, whether the Browns beat the Jags. It’s just that there hasn’t been a lot of doubt about the outcome. There hasn’t even been enough doubt to fuel the Lions-infused part of my brain into believing, “Rutgers could mount a comeback here.” No, instead, I find myself worrying about stupid superficial stuff, like the stats and the fancystats and how the score will look on SportsCenter. It’s basically been six weeks of KenPom Time.

Last week was a perfect example. Minnesota scored that late first-half touchdown that briefly caused the word “MOMENTUM!!!!!!!!!” to trend worldwide on The Platform Formerly Known As Twitter, and I was furious… at what that one pass was going to do to the box score. The Bowling Green game was enraging because of the superficial dent it was going to put into JJ McCarthy’s season stat line. I lamented the long touchdown against Nebraska—when the score was 45-0⁠, mind you—because of what it did to Michigan’s rushing defense stats (exclude that run and Michigan’s YPC against drops from 3.1 YPC down to 2.7 YPC, and improves from #23 nationally to #9).

Real ones remember

Apparently this is the nature of cheering for a Leviathan. It drains some of the emotion out of the average Saturday. It turns “Survive and Advance” into “WE HAVE TO BE THE PRETTIEST BELLE AT THE BALL OR BILL CONNELLY WILL DROP US TO #2.” I mean, “let’s break down every JJ McCarthy incompletion” has become a regular segment on the MGoPodcast, and it seems important to do so despite the fact that the sheer possibility of the segment tells you how well things are going.

And I’m starting wonder if some of the real fun lives in the messy middle of the bell curve. That was basically every Indiana game for a decade. 2009. 2010. 2013. 2015. 2016. 2017. 2018. All against mediocre Indiana teams, all exciting. We used to go into games with a mediocre-to-bad team like Indiana with the Child-On-Christmas joy of thinking anything can happen, even if ALL of the added uncertainty was in the wrong direction. But, alas, these First World Problems will haunt us for another week. Michigan will give up some stuff to Cam Camper and a long touchdown to Jaylin Lucas, and JJ McCarthy will throw a pick, and we will all bemoan that stuff and shrug at the final score.

Michigan 49, Indiana 10

----------------------------

COUNTERPUNT

By Internet Raj
@internetraj

Your day starts at 7 a.m. when you are startled out of your slumber by the default iPhone alarm. You make a mental note to change the sound from “Radar” to something more pleasant or at least isn’t a full out auditory assault on your eardrums. Groggily, you shuffle to your bathroom and brush your teeth. The flavor, Peach Mint, is revolting. You glance at your cabinet and see 9 more unsealed tubes of it. You make another mental note to stop buying things you’ve never tried before at Costco. One hand scratching your increasingly soft belly, the other hand doing a mediocre job of accurately guiding your bodily fluids into the porcelain bowl in front of you, you wince at the reddish brown hue backsplash on the rim. You make yet another mental note to drink more water. All of these mental notes will be mentally crumpled and mentally discarded into the back of a mental filing cabinet where they will never be acted upon again, but you still dutifully make them.

You thread your arms through your cream colored Calvin Klein dress shirt, which you don’t have to iron because the manufacturer soaked it in some chemical with a dubious safety profile that makes it “wrinkle-free.” You bend over to pull on your Lululemon khakis. They were a splurge, but they are really comfortable. They look like work pants but they feel like sweatpants. Yeah, they’re expensive, but they’re really worth it. The quality is great. They hold up to the washing machine. You’ve recited these depressing Big Athleisure talking points dozens of times to coworkers during to fill in agonizing gaps in small talk chat.

You take nondescript public transportation to the nondescript monolith of an office building in the nondescript area of your city that is nondescriptly referred to as “midtown.” You stop at the Starbucks in the lobby to treat yourself to a $9 iced latte that is an equal parts caffeine delivery mechanism and type-2 diabetes delivery mechanism. You stroll over to the elevator and press “up”. The button lights up but apparently that’s not enough for the much bigger, better dressed man that just arrived. He adds 4 emphatic presses on top your press. For the first time all morning, you feel an authentic emotion: rage at this clear act of egregious emasculation. You take a deep breath and try to recall some of the wisdom you hear from the meditation app you rarely listen to but pay $9.99 per month for.

You ride up to the 37th floor and make your way to your cubicle. One of your colleagues stops you on your way and jovially asks, “How ya doin’?” You respond, “Livin’ the dream.” He chortles with laughter but deep down wants to smash his head into the 17 year old office Keurig machine. You get to your desk and boot up your Dell computer. You open an Excel spreadsheet and move around some numbers. You open a PowerPoint deck and move around some text boxes. You open your email and move around some words. You’re doing work, but not accomplishing anything. You’re a pushing around a few 0s and 1s but adding no value. Your latte finally works its way through your digestive system and you excuse yourself to what should be 10 minutes of glorious, peaceful freedom.

Unfortunately, your boss sits right next to you the bathroom. He locks eyes with you as you go in. You wonder if he has a mental timer that just started in his head. You go in a stall and construct a careful toilet paper barrier to the hygienically-compromised seat. You sit down, let out a sigh, and pull out your phone to numb your brain with some mindless scrolling. Your brief respite is shattered when the door to the stall next to you swings open. You can immediately discern from the gusto with which your neighbor has collapsed onto his toilet, combined with the guttural noises, strained grunts and signature girths “plops” echoing across the bathroom, that it’s Gary. Fucking Gary. Your peaceful retreat has been shattered. You gag, finish your business and get the hell out of there. You lock eyes with your boss again as you exit. You’re not 100% sure, but you think his eyebrows furrowed slightly, as if he were trying to figure out what you ate last night.

The day goes by and as the clock approaches 5pm you allow yourself to feel bursts of excitement as you remind yourself it’s Friday. You attend a company happy hour, where you consume 3 beers and talk to 2 different colleagues about your shared enthusiasm of Lululemon pants. A VP picks up the tab, but not before joking that it’s on “Uncle ”. Everyone laughs.

You have dinner, prepare for bed, and dream of a busy day of college football the next morning. You wake up and dutifully put on your crimson and cream Indiana Football gear. Your Hoosiers are playing Michigan—you expect to lose but part of you holds out hope for a historic upset. You try not to think about the fact that Indiana has lost 21 straight in the Big House. You try not to think about the fact that the last time Indiana won in Ann Arbor, Tom Allen wasn’t even born. You try not to think about how your team, if they manage to come back from this, make a good hire, find some diamonds, build a culture, is doomed to being .500 in perpetuity. You try to think good thoughts, to remain optimistic. But then the game starts and JJ McCarthy throws a TD. And then another. And then another. Part of you, a small part that you’d never publicly admit, wanted this quick, sweet release. So you could just get on with your day. You get it. You turn off the game after the first quarter because it’s 24-0. You get back into bed and you take a nap. It’s the highlight of the week.

Michigan 24, Indiana 0, end of 1s quarter (final score unknown due to nap)