Ronald Bellamy's underachieving All-Stars

YOU ARE NOT A CARPENTER

2011-09-15T23:01:00.014-07:00

He speaks in gasps, if you can do that. In a language Patrick Omameh sometimes does not understand. Fragments of his sentences are amputated by insane joy. I just… I just… and then he is laughing and sighing incredulously. He speaks because if he did not he would probably explode. “I think we’ve kind of adapted to his … I guess, uh … method of speaking.” He is so permanently happy that he sometimes runs out of breath because of it. I think that in the center of Denard Robinson’s brain is a miniaturized version of himself launching off of a tire swing and into a giant ball pit. Only instead of plastic the balls are made of pure serotonin. He lands and they explode and shards are absorbed by Human Denard’s synapses. This sequence repeats like a .gif, over and over and over. It is what operates this dreadlocked instrument. And what we see on the outside is brilliant impulse, a quarterback throwing for 202 yards on four possessions.

Mike Martin said that when Gallon caught that pass that Ryan Van Bergen laid down on the ground and said, “This is crazy.” Denard does not have an explanation and he does not suspect that we do either. The game ends and he is still running around. He is hopping and dancing; one hundred and ninety pounds of supercharged energy ricocheting off of the ground and brick walls and Taylor Lewan’s arms. He leaves the field and it is quiet. He returns and they howl his name. He is sitting behind a desk next to Chris Fowler. Fowler looks like he wants emphatic, fist-clenched profundities; he is hunched over slightly and saying things in his Professional Voice. He tells Denard how many yards he finished with. Denard yelps and puts his head in his hands. He doesn’t believe him. He does not believe any of this, it seems. HOW IS THIS REAL? HOW DO WE EXIST? HOW DO WE AS RANDOM, INDEPENDENT PIECES WHO MAKE CARTOON VOICES AND TATTOO MUSTACHES ONTO OUR FINGERS ASSEMBLE TO CREATE SOMETHING THAT LEAVES A HUNDRED THOUSAND PEOPLE STANDING IN A GIANT CONCRETE CRATER STARING OFF INTO THE NOTHINGNESS? DO YOU REALIZE THAT? THAT THIS IS OUR LIVES? He processes everything like a child who was looking through a kaleidoscope for the first time. The world is made of shiny colors. I play football and they let me keep playing football.

He is flawed and yet defiantly indifferent to those flaws. He is not indignant, he just does not care. Restraint is for monks and carpenters and slow-playing a nut hand. He is not a carpenter. He is a blindfolded juggler of flaming chainsaws. Sometimes he completes two passes in an entire half and we run for our lives. But most of the time we watch him and we are cross-eyed buffoons, a stained glass scene in a church window of mortals witnessing the Resurrection.

He runs a bootleg 30 yards just to get to the opposite side of the field. He was running but now he has stopped. He prepares to throw. They know he has not been good at passing tonight and that he should probably be running. He is about to pass anyway. They are chasing you; don’t you see them, Denard? But he is just standing there, completely upright, looking around. Now he is running again. Within the width of five feet he cuts past three people. Left and then right and then left again, hard stomps into the ground. The goal line is right there and he crashes into everyone who is standing in front of it.

Al Borges says this: “He does a lot in there that I don’t draw on the board.” Borges does not because he could not. You would not have a job if you suggested the things that he does. He does things that are outrageous. And they are perfect. Denard Robinson does things that would be like trying to draw a sound.

He has sustained things that seem unconditionally absurd and unsustainable. He makes decisions that are objectively bad. Borges says that they are bad. I am okay with this. That is the exchange. There are passes to places no pass should ever go because there are also inexplicably precise, 20-yard, flatfooted throws while a 300-pound man tears at his clothing and grips his ankle. Tire Swing Denard is oblivious to context. Without him we would have a preprogramed platitude dispenser. We would have every National League baseball manager. We would have your local mayor. We would have Peyton Manning.

Instead, we get this:

We get a walking emoticon, someone who looks at all times like he is riding a Slip ‘n Slide down the neck of a brontosaurus. Who has turned the implausible into pure farce. He is so immune to self-doubt that it is almost literally unbelievable. Where did you come from, man? He pats Manti Te’o on the helmet twice after being tackled by him and then on third-and-two runs straight into his chest for a first down. He is tiny and he is fragile but he will not run around you. He does not adhere to the conventions of this game. He politely acknowledges them and then he sets them on fire and builds castles with the ash.

Football has a spectacular way of eating you alive limb by limb. In August of 2010 Troy Woolfolk snapped his ankle and most of the cartilage and ligaments that were attached to it. He spent the season using Twitter to give pithy relationship advice and brag about his UNO victories. He watched away games on a television screen in his sterile apartment. The defense was relentlessly bad and its players were reminded of his absence only when things went wrong and they needed him, or anyone, really, to fix it. They missed him but the game was still happening. It wags its finger at you. And they are playing it and he is watching it. Football is both an identity and a terminal illness. A rhythm and a chaos and an opiate for the mind all at once. He spent a lot of time talking to his dog.

But I have also seen football turn a man into a levitating deity. He would be this same person without the game’s existence, but there would be no vehicle, no delivery. He gives us total detachment from reality, from rigid expectations. Denard Robinson comes from places covered in hot gravel and choked, yellow grass. A somewhere that looks to us like nowhere. He comes from these places:

He lives here now.

ALL THE WINE

2010-09-14T08:05:00.012-07:00

Two Saturdays ago I woke up in Ann Arbor on an inflatable mattress on the floor of a friend’s apartment. You know how the rest goes.

If you type in Denard Robinson on Google the first suggestion is "Denard Robinson Heisman." He doesn't know what they say about him on television because he doesn’t have cable. Notre Dame let him in the interview room and it was the first time an opposing player has been allowed in there since 1997. Dick Vitale spent Saturday afternoon telling Jalen Rose over Twitter that Denard Robinson was awesome, baby. Lebron James said he was “a monster out there right now.” Denard Robinson is from a different dimension. We can only swarm to the crater where he crash landed and pick through the debris for souvenirs.

The external forces have an immediate need to formulate a narrative. But Denard has undergone no distillation. He is raw, unconscious, disappearing over the horizon with his arm dangling out the window. There is no calculation; no oratorical bravura nor is there gruff introversion. He is just alone in the middle of thousands of people who scream his name while he tries to get the hell out of there. The game ends and there are 25 people with wires dragging behind them who converge to ask him why and how and when he knew and really to just stand and stare and wait for him to say something profound. But he keeps walking. He says nothing and then runs off to follow someone who he recognizes into the tunnel.

Only once on Saturday did Denard look uncomfortable: when it was over, when he was wandering around looking for Nate Montana so that he could shake his hand, and Doug Karsch kept putting a microphone in front of his face.

He has done nothing personally to embellish the mythology. Tate didn’t remember his name on Signing Day. Recruiting sites thought he’d only make it as a corner back. The hair that hangs down his back, the teeth that glow like some kind of nuclear ooze seeping from a bio-hazard drum. It is just there. He doesn’t embrace it and he isn’t even ambivalent about it. “Who are you?” they seem to ask. And he replies, “Wait, so you guys were watching?" He laughs and stares at the ground. “Do I have to keep talking?” He crosses the goal line and immediately falls to one knee, as if God was up there tapping on his watch and Denard had to apologize for taking so long. He is as discreet as someone who has amassed eight-hundred-and-eighty-five yards in two games is capable of being. Which is to say he’s about as discreet as someone who walks into an orphanage with a keg of moonshine on his shoulder and a cigar in his mouth and tosses $26 worth of firecrackers into a toilet bowl.

Every sentence begins with an impulse, a spasm, and then they end with him smiling and looking somewhere else, trying to give you a phrase he’s heard before. He nearly said, “I played good” but corrected himself and proudly said, “I played well.”

In an interview after the UConn game, an old man asked Denard about his touchdown. And Denard said, “Oh man … I was just ready, I was just ready to run and ready to go. I knew I was gonna break one, at least. I had ran … I ran it, uh, I think I had ran it three times, and it was just like, ‘Alright, time to get it in the endzone.’”

The game amuses him. Football is a Herculean beast that crushes players in its fists into a bloody paste. There are fleeting moments of bliss but ultimately it will ruin you. To Denard it will not. It is something to be conquered, an equation written on a chalkboard. And he solves it by kicking a hole through the window and setting the entire school on fire. He defies even the most grandiose hyperbole. So we will say this: Denard Robinson has more rushing yards than any other person in the country. He has 41 more yards than the next guy. And that guy did it against Washington State and Troy.

Describing his speed is like explaining to a blind person what colors look like or how big a mountain is. Hold this rock in your hand, only imagine a rock that your hand or a bigger hand or a million bigger hands could not close around. That’s a mountain. Something like that. His first 10 runs against Notre Dame went: 4, 2, 3, 9, 36, 6, 14, 2, 7, 87. He is like trying to hold a beach ball submerged underwater. Eventually you just lose. You are working against one of the principle dynamics of the universe: Denard Robinson is fast. If you’re behind him it won’t end well.

This wasn’t Mike Hart frantically looking over each shoulder like he was being chased by a dinosaur holding the top seven stories of a building in its mouth. Denard’s runs are moments of extreme calm. A high-precision strike delivered by a government operative from 50,000 feet above. The mission was over as soon as they got the coordinates. And in the end there is just a tiny cloud of dirt and gravel on an infrared monitor.

He is a trail of gasoline swallowing a lit cigarette. My memories are not of a few furious, uninterrupted seconds of him running but fractured, euphoric images welded to my subconscious. It happens and I realize that this has happened before and that it’s going to keep happening. You are here and then you are there and in between is a narcotic haze. We are entranced. I apologize; it never takes very long and there were people jumping in front of me and at some point I was knocked between the rows by someone who had forgotten where he was and impulsively grabbed my shoulders to steady himself while he watched Denard disappear.

"I don't think he'll be taken by the storm," said Dave Molk.

There is no vanity, no self-preservation. He never slides or veers out of bounds. He is oblivious to the idea of something existing beyond this moment. Quarterbacks avoid contact as if it were a biological imperative and yet Denard leaps and is suspended almost perfectly horizontal while limbs covered in thin fabric are pulverized from all angles. He does it not for the distance itself but for an idea: to relinquish anything is a tragedy. The first down is right there, I can see it in front of my face. The future is an abstract concept that does not scare me. I am just here and I am lying in the grass telling you that I don’t tie my shoes because I never have, and when it’s time, I am running until I have to squint to see straight while they give me the play from the sideline. But then I am running again; I am running and they still can’t catch me. Sometimes he looks like he just ran headfirst into the Atlantic and kept running until he reversed the tides. And then he leans over to keep from falling down. “I don’t like being caught from behind,” he says. He’s not being coy. He’d just prefer that it doesn’t happen.

He says this: “I mean, uh, when they call my number, and the offensive line is blocking like that, and it’s God willing, and God engineering, I mean, I can do whatever.” You can thank God for the cab fare, I guess. You’ve been doing just fine on your own since you got here.

He is not tired. He is not hurt. He doesn’t know what storm you’re talking about.

She Might Be In Tangier

2009-11-19T01:20:00.018-08:00

Rich Rodriguez: “Minor unfortunately, doggone it for Brandon, his ankle is better but his shoulder isn’t. He wasn’t able to do anything (Tuesday), don’t know how much he’s going to be able to do (Wednesday), so unfortunately for Brandon he’s doubtful.”

On Saturday he will be there. Not on Thursday or on Friday, but you don't prepare for the deranged violence. He doesn't need to, doesn't bother. Ohio State ignores the solemn cautionary tales because they watch him on video with no sound, filmed from far away. I've tackled men like that before. But certain things are well beyond technique, well beyond calculation. You're more afraid of the tornado when it rattles your shutters than when you see it on a hazy recording.

They have been hit before but not by someone who craves it, who savors it. He hits you and you live in fear. He appears, departs, and you hope he does not return. But he will be there again, and again. It is Saturday. It is November. It is Ohio State. It would take a lobotomy and a coma and even then a hundred men to hold him down when he awakens on fourth and short and begs for the ball and for everyone to just step aside. If an asteroid smashed into the earth he would grab the ball and run through the smoldering crater.

Brandon Minor said these things after Iowa:

“I wanna come out and show that I’m real physical and tough, and I aint shying down from no defense.”

On pass blocking: “When I was a freshman I was going against Shawn Crable, Dave Harris, Prescott, LaMarr Woodley, Branch coming off the edge. I got beat up my share of days, you know, so it’s my turn to do the beating up.”

“I love contact. It really doesn’t hurt as much once you deliver the hit. If you sit there and take the contact it’ll hurt all day. I figure defensive players don’t like getting hit either, that’s why they not running the ball. So I might as well hit them.”

Mike used his cuts as a defense mechanism, out of desperation. But Minor commits to a destination immediately. He pivots once and purple storm clouds gather on the horizon and in the end there are mailboxes and tree trunks and chinstraps scattered across the lawn. Sometimes I have to pull myself from this carnage too but that’s ok because I can endure this. I have felt this before. He runs in a panic to find human contact, addicted to it, as if he’d lose his balance without it and stumble along lonely. It is a syndrome, a sacrifice. Lay me on an altar on the side of a mountain and cut out my organs and lift them to the sky.

It is a psychotic vendetta against every mind and body unfortunate enough to attend the wrong school. There’s nothing about them in particular, just that they are in his way. The end zone is there and he’s not going to run around you. He only knows of one way to do this. There might be tougher men, ones who wore robes made out of bison hides or worked in the hull of a steam ship. But at this moment, among those playing football, he is unparalleled.

There is no such thing as moderation or restraint. He is designed to eventually collapse because he doesn’t know how to slow down. He runs until he can’t stand up anymore and then he tries to limp back to the huddle. He is just a series of prolonged explosions, until there is no more of him. In two seasons he has had bruised ribs, a wrist that needed surgery, a bad shoulder, a sprained ankle, a bad heel, and a bad shoulder again. “Injury prone” is a convenient explanation for coincidence, but for some it is merely fate. You don’t get mad at a bomb for blowing up. It’s a bomb, that’s what it was designed to do.

Maybe he runs like that because he’s spent three years watching Mike do it better with less. Or maybe he’s always been that way, pent up, behind a few mistakes. After touchdowns he seems more relieved than excited, grateful for the chance to stand in front of this train that screams along the tracks toward us season after season. You can hand me the ball again if you want, really, it’s ok, I’m not that tired and it was a little cold and boring standing in someone else’s shadow for a couple years anyway.

Each week they tell us he’s injured but it means nothing. Sometimes he barely runs at all and then he’s there on 3rd and 9 to pass block with the type of insane passion that usually starts wars or Led Zeppelin concerts. It is routine. And afterward he shrugs his shoulders and can barely keep his eyes open. I’m 100%. Anything else? See you next weekend.

This isn’t a hobby; it is a way of life. It defines him. Mike was mischievous and slightly diabolical but it was mostly just a test to see what he could get away with. Minor’s frustrations have been too frequent, his conquests too scarce. He has no time for games or manipulation, just sheer brute force, calloused knuckles and someone twitching on the ground after. Is he vulnerable? Can he be vulnerable?

He said this after Notre Dame: “I’d rather just run somebody over you know, get them out they game, cuz they gonna be looking for that the whole game or they just gonna be…their whole scheme will be messed up. They just gonna be worried about me running them over rather than whether they gotta drop back or do whatever.”

When he speaks there is no angst or unhinged intensity, no dramatic inflection. This is who I am. This is a bank robber handing the teller a canvas bag and then asking her if she knows a decent place to eat while she’s filling it with cash. He speaks in a monotone despite the fact that he’s literally describing how he wants to hurt someone so they will be afraid of them.

To Michigan this game changes almost nothing. If they go to a bowl it will be forgotten and Ohio State is going to the Rose Bowl anyway. And yet it still means something. It is for proof that they’re capable of more than begrudgingly accepting our excuses for why they’re no good. The endless rationalizations they wish they didn’t need. They’re walk-ons to us because we have an obsessive need to categorize, to dissect, to compare them to the players on other teams who we don't care about. But to them, they know just that they can’t do what they’re supposed to. The reasons don’t matter.

Brandon Graham: "I haven't broke down yet. I always wait till I get home...I wait till I get home and let it all out."

They committed to this for what now must seem like odd and foolish reasons. They gave away their mornings and nights for a physical torture that outsiders and even all of us are simply amused by. The conditioning coach who growls. The men who vomit. “Through these doors walk….” And yet we still only maintain a very basic understanding. They did it for themselves, for each other. But there has been mostly failure. They resent those who abandoned them because they were lazy and afraid. Brandon Graham said this: “I’ve got a lot of words for a lot of people. Whoever’s in my way every play, I let them know, don’t come my way. Some people talk back, some people don’t. (Boren) is just somebody who shouldn’t have been here in the first place. That’s over and done with. Justin, we will see on Saturday.”

These are family values: wagons circled, debris, numb to the great outrage, taped ankles and a fuck you if you're not with us; look me in the eye and know that eventually this will all pass. They'll remember this day when they're old and sit on dusty sofas dozing in and out of consciousness. You lost a lot but not your dignity. And you realize that it wasn't just about winning but about patience and faith that it would get better.

This season hasn’t been bad in fragments. It was good, and then it became a throbbing, consistent agony we accepted and then repressed. But they are still here. They will cry when it is over and cringe just to get there but they are not afraid. They have already felt that pain.

The Fire Sermon

2009-11-02T01:37:00.013-08:00

You could be somewhere else instead. Somewhere far away and detached from all of this, the disaster that continues to blend into last year and become everything we swore this wasn’t. You could have been drafted. An apartment with barren white walls in some city you’ve never been to; clean and empty aside from a plasma television, a sectional sofa, a stack of sneaker boxes in a corner and a wireless router sitting on the living room floor. It’s not much but it’s better than this. You could be there.

And so you lug this defense’s incompetence around like an anvil chained to your ankle. Your shoulders are scrunched. You don’t say much and you don’t take your mouth guard out. Leadership as an art form is mostly foreign to you; to you it is transmitted involuntarily. It is impulse and fury. It reaches critical mass, and then you fake a smile on Monday afternoon. There are sporadic bursts of rage and then you pace the sidelines by yourself with your helmet in hand.

“Brandon was just telling everyone, 'Remember this feeling.’ Just yelling it.” Mike Martin told us about that after you lost to Michigan State.

When you are calm, leadership is all procedure. I have been here a while and I will say uplifting things; that is my job. Beyond that, it is up to them. They recognize your pain but they do not feel it as thoroughly as you do. How could they? No one else’s talent is as immense, as glaringly squandered on this.

“We said so much before every game, now it’s just all about what’s inside your heart, and what you believe you should do.” You said that two days ago.

You block punts. When you did it Saturday you hardly needed to run through anyone because the blockers had already begun to flee. You are frighteningly good. When you’re playing your eyes are wide, you stare like you’re in search of something. But afterward you squint, you’re exhausted. You’re constantly compartmentalizing the frustration and the ferocious anger, constantly redefining what this all means to you. To be undefeated … to be conference champions … to salvage this, whatever it is. Until all that’s left is you and the man in front of you and the need to win something, anything. There are only moments left.

And when they ask you about it afterward, outside of the stadium when it’s dark and you just want to go home, you shake your head and stammer before you figure out what to say next. You close your eyes for a moment and then open them to stare at the ground in awe and disbelief, as if you’ve spent the past three hours climbing a mountain only to arrive at the top and realize that you are looking upon a sprawling canyon. There was a vast chunk of earth that once existed but doesn’t anymore. Something is gone and you don’t know how or why, just that there is nothing where something once was. It is colossal; it is beyond all reason or comprehension. What can I do? This is bigger than one man.

“It hurts…we’re just trying to get to a bowl. I’m gonna go in there and make sure that we don’t lose focus, you know…we just gotta make sure it don’t happen again. It just hurts to keep saying it.”

It has come to irrelevant bowls, places deserted and and ignored -- a reminder of all that you could have, but don't. It has come to this:

We want to believe that this will eventually give way to something better. That in two years we will accept that it happened and smile because of how far we came – a jagged scar on our knee from when we first learned to ride a bicycle on just two wheels. In the distance, where we came from, there is rubble and smoke, but here now things are clear, things are good. Look at all that we have endured. That is what we want. But now a fear, however slight, envelops our subconscious with every loss. Maybe things won’t get better. They probably will, but they might not. And in two years we will instead realize that the signs were there and we should have known all along. This was just a part of a thick, interminable haze. It can be that way.

Everything you wanted was right here. You didn't lose for an entire month. You held this season in your hands. But now it feels like every time you step on the field it continues to erode. We know there are others to blame. We know you know. But it haunts you anyway because this is your identity. You close your eyes. You’re surrounded. There are bright lights from cameras and people asking questions; they keep asking but you can’t answer. Are you disappointed, exactly? “It’s just … ,” and again you drift away. They want to know, but you don’t know. You’ve tried, you have. There is just this canyon.

Love vs. Porn

2009-10-07T05:34:00.011-07:00

I wanted to believe otherwise but despite finding an heir to the throne, this team is not ready yet. It is still young, still an infant. Sometimes it makes a building out of little wooden blocks without knocking it over, or says “I love you” for no reason at all while sitting in the back seat during a long drive home from your grandparents’ house, but most of the time it just stumbles around drooling on itself. It keeps falling over until it can stand. And then it does. Darryl Stonum fumbles twice and then runs 65 yards across the field for a touchdown.

Most of the time it takes a little while to turn a program around, no matter how hypnotic four wins, zero losses, and a freshman who seems oblivious to the fact that he’s 19 years-old can be. For more than a decade Michigan was just formidable enough to keep believing in, even when that meant having a season crushed by the stark reality of how mediocre it was becoming, and that we were at least a little aware of it all along. This is what starting over feels like, I guess. It’s perplexing and exhausting but with the evolution comes satisfaction. Like Martavious Odoms spending a year fumbling punts to become someone who can disappear for quarters at a time only to emerge with the ball in his hands and Michigan in second and manageable.

Eventually they will worry about different things. What a decent signing bonus should look like or how in four years they went from a High School All-American to someone standing on the sidelines with a jersey that might as well still have the tags still on it. Eventually, everything comes to an end. But in the beginning there is only the frenetic assault on every man, idea and perception all at once.

On Saturday after it ended, they were resigned but optimistic. Last year Brandon Graham said that Michigan would beat Michigan State, and when Michigan lost, he said this: “As you can see, we stuck with them all the way through the whole game. What are they 6-2? Whatever their record is. That don't mean nothing. They got a lot more to do, try to beat us and try to get on top. I still feel you know, they won, but ... I still have no respect.”

But this Saturday he said, “I wish we could get it back, but you know, my hat’s off to Michigan State. They came out there and played. We went out there and played hard, but they started early.”

It was still light out and he had a pair of headphones around his neck. He twisted his hips and looked off into the distance, a little distracted. He had things to worry about other than pretending Michigan was still a member of the elite. He spent last season in denial but now he was willing to accept the fact that Michigan could be bad and that he could be a part of it. I think I felt a little bit that way, too. This hurts but we were lucky to even make it this far, and anyway, we’ve felt worse before.

And so he walked up the sidelines during the Notre Dame game, alone, reciting “can’t nobody fuck with me,” because when you’ve lost just about every meaningful game you’ve ever played in, you have to remind yourself, every now and then, that you are, in fact, not one who can be fucked with.

This is why some men work at a kiosk in the mall or at Verizon call centers and why others commission clandestine projects to create an atomic bomb and thwart a fascist regime hell-bent on world domination. And why some are handed the ball with 92 yards to go while a stadium and me and you and probably a coach look on with veiled despair and no hope besides “Well, you've done it before. Let’s see how this turns out.”

This team does what Tate wants in ways Ryan Mallett could never dream of. Mallett was a carnival freak uncomfortably implanted in an offense where everyone already had a defined role. Some players recognized that he was quite obviously The Future, like it or not, but he seemed completely indifferent to the concept of solidarity. He was good in brief intervals but it soon deteriorated into arguments with wide receivers, many tales of his drunken exploits, and a coach who told him directly how little he liked him.

Since Western, the defense can charitably be described as erratic; the offensive line has crumbled since Molk got injured and sometimes can’t even snap the ball properly; and on Saturday two running backs ran into each other. But there is progress, there is a quarterback, there are the occasional reminders of last season’s craterous impact with our hopes and dreams, and the thought that this is something different. Brandon Minor can’t find anywhere to run so he stands by Tate’s side like a bodyguard instead.

“I don't really know where it comes from, but it helps the entire offense when you see him playing like that. You want to push a little extra,” Mark Ortmann said.

Things were bad for most of the day, and then they weren’t. Tate ran into things stronger and angrier than he was and at the end of a 92-yard drive, when he could barely breathe and needed to hold onto something just to stand, he reached down to grab a fumbled snap and found Roy Roundtree running somewhere out there in the rain.

Where The Wagons Stopped

2009-09-16T06:00:00.007-07:00

I wasn’t quite sure how they did it but it was over, or over enough. A small young man wearing several white sweatbands occasionally turned in a circle as he looked up at all of us from the inside of a chaotic mass. His mouth was open but he didn’t say much. He didn’t have to; he waved his arm and we knew what he meant. “Yeah it looked a little grim but I already told you, we’re going to be alright.” There were still 11 seconds left but we’d been waiting a while for this. Don’t mind if we start a little early.

About a minute later Michigan had won, and most of the players stumbled into Rodriguez and patted his shoulder as they ran along to be apart of the steady demolition of the idea that Michigan was nothing but a bronzed relic left to remind us all of what once was. Lately it involves climbing onto a brick wall to sing a song with a hundred thousand people as they reach to grab someone’s hand, or jersey, or any proof that this is really happening right now and that we are here to see it. We’re trying to remember how this goes.

Eventually, Tate found Rodriguez and the coach hugged him like he’d spent the last two days at sea floating on half of a shattered wooden plank. Rodriguez told him something, probably that he was proud and to hell with those sons of bitches. But I think he wanted to say thank you for rescuing me when I was drowning; it was starting to look bleak for a minute and, oh yeah, that touchdown to Greg was nice, too.

“In the middle of a storm, they're calm,” Rodriguez would say later.

In the beginning, I wished Tate Forcier was on a different team. I hoped that his confidence was just a way of overcompensating for deep feelings of inadequacy (that he wasn’t tall enough, wasn’t strong enough, wasn’t Clausen enough or maybe just because his ears were too big) and that he would consider transferring as soon as Michigan recruited someone else. I thought he was scared or at least wanted him to be.

From a young age he was privileged in a way most people never are. There were private quarterback instructors, a frighteningly narcissistic website, aggressively-involved parents and his smug disregard for anyone who dare challenge him. Maybe I envied him but most of all I think I just resented that he had everything a 17 year-old could want and had to tell us all about it. When there was a chance this spring that Greg Paulus might play for Michigan, Tate wrote on Facebook, “I can give a damn what Paulus does. If he wants to ruin his career and come here its fine with me cuz hes about to be my backup.” I didn’t want to have to root for someone who would quickly become universally reviled if he played for Ohio State or Notre Dame.

He was confident in an absolute way; as if he was preordained long ago and knew he only had to wait for his day to come. Well, after Saturday I guess I shouldn't say that he isn't. His day has come. There will be many more that will be his, some pried from the grasp of teams that were better in every way except that they didn’t have him. He is barely six feet tall and built like someone who delivers newspapers on a bicycle. But he is not scared.

It was 34-31 and it looked like this:

It’s a little difficult to completely embrace Tate, considering we have all known guys like him before. Ones that were “totally sick at beer pong, bro” and have probably spent hours calculating the most obnoxious angle to position their backwards baseball caps. But when he got here he vowed to revive Michigan’s downtrodden program and so far he has. He has expertly combined cavalier impulse with restraint and a wizardly understanding of the offense. His mechanics have been constantly refined since his whole journey began and he identified a cover zero like the blind read Braille. But some things are innate, like a five year old prodigy who can complete rubix cube in 18 seconds or play “Come Sail Away” on the piano by ear. And after it’s over, he shrugs his shoulders as he struggles to explain it all to us. I do it because I do it. I never learned how.

If there is anything the pleated-pant, vinyl-record waltz of the Lloyd Carr era taught me, it’s that there are few truly valuable things in this world, but you honor them with a devotion bordering on religious fundamentalism – a good mentor, a good cigar, and someone who gets shit done when he says he’s going to. Tate said he was going to do some things and he has. For now, that’s enough.

Degüello

2009-09-12T18:51:00.001-07:00

Made Another Masterpiece While I Was Dreaming

2009-09-07T03:05:00.015-07:00

This is where we are. This is the pervasive bliss wrought from a once sacrosanct football team torn down to its knees, scarred, scabbed, audaciously wiping the blood from its lip with a dirty shirtsleeve while it looks you in the eye and asks if that’s all you’ve got. My lawn desperately needs to be mowed and I sit here eating a bag of stale tortilla chips, a jar of Newman’s Own salsa, and some Gordon’s vodka pulled from a dusty cabinet I only recently discovered. I’m not sure where my life is going or how it got here but I know for a day I am content. I’d almost forgotten this feeling and so did you. But I remember it now.

They are consumed by the prospect of proving everyone wrong; the masses are impulsive and scared and entrenched in a lifestyle that drinks old wines, groans when you stand, and sees football as a rite of passage and not a galvanizing triumph in the face of everyone who thought Michigan had lost its soul. I guess I'm included in that last part. But it can be all of that. It has been before. These players are playing in part to protect someone who many never thought too highly of to begin with. They know of no limits, no expectations, just that it takes a while to forget 3-9 and the infinite pain of a season that was over before it began.

This season was supposed to be a bunch of brooding young men with nothing to lose drawing up plays on the fattest lineman's stomach in the huddle, a little disoriented but scorned and eager. Things may not always end well but at least we know we're going in the right direction. Denard's run was that. But for a half they were competent and polished in a way we were willing to wait another year for. They were more than a gimmick, more than just an inspired moment. There is a revival, and I am not afraid to believe in it.

In a year the offense has gone from maddeningly ill-equipped to something organic, often daring and complex. Last year they grasped it as an ideal but performed it as a habit. There are four wide receivers and you’re in shotgun, stomp your foot and halfheartedly fake a draw to the chest of someone faster than you are. I don’t want to be here but it is Michigan so I’ll give it a try. It was like trying to teach a bunch of kindergarteners to ride a unicycle or tap-dance or juggle torches and it did not go well. They stumbled and burned themselves alive.

Even Carlos Brown, the wistful and frequently injured running back who runs conservatively despite his speed seemed more uninhibbited than usual. Tate is inventive and resourceful; he's confident enough to let plays develop, and if something goes wrong he knows how to salvage it. For now his arm is just good enough and he seems too boastful for a team that’s only now realizing it never needs to cower before anyone, but we’ll deal with that later. Michigan is undefeated for the first time since 2006. It was late November and Bo had died and there is a planet out there where other teams exist, I’m sure of it, but it’s hard to tell when you're in orbit by yourself. They were 11-0 and I wasn’t afraid of Ohio State.

And for now, there is a defense. We had been told their tackling was improved but during training camp that means little. It is true because you say it is and because I want it to be so. But on Saturday it was fact. You are Western Michigan and you will be ignored after today, but tomorrow you will know who we are. You will see Michigan on your elbows and your shins and eating your linemen alive in the corner of your eyes. You should throw the ball, really…throw it now, Tim Hiller. Brandon Graham is right there.

Saturday was small and possibly irrelevant but that doesn’t matter. Last year gave us little but Wisconsin, Steven Threet’s commendable march to oblivion and Brandon Minor’s martyrdom. The team we once knew vanished and went to a place somewhere high and far away and left us with nothing but the hope that this will end before it gets any worse. I know that, and I know what this isn’t. I know that this is familiar.

This Tornado Loves You

2009-09-04T03:40:00.009-07:00

Donovan Warren: "That's one of the main things we've talked about. We want to bring back the fire to Michigan - make opponents be scared to play us, like they were back in the old days.”

Warren: "People talk, and they don't really know what we went through last year, and some of the things that happened. Everybody in this building knows the things that went on. This is a family here.”

Richard Retyi: Do you have any hidden talents?
Nick Sheridan: I write left handed. I don’t know if that’s interesting.

Tate Forcier: “At Fan Day, one guy asked me to sign his chest”

Doug Karsch: In your entire football career, how many times have you been chased down from behind?
Denard Robinson: *deep in thought* I don’t recall.

Nick Sheridan: “Denard, he’s his own specimen…I don’t have any of that in me.”

Tony Gibson: “I think they’re excited to go out there and take some live bullets”

Justin Boren: "Michigan football was a family, built on mutual respect and support for each other from Coach Carr on down. We knew it took the entire family, a team effort, and we all worked together. I have great trouble accepting that those family values have eroded in just a few months."

Jason Olesnavage, after dinner at Offensive Coordinator Calvin Magee's house: “Coach McGee forced us to eat some ice cream and brownies for dessert.”

BABY WE'LL BE FINE

2009-09-02T02:11:00.014-07:00

He told us he doesn’t usually do this and then he looked down to shuffle some papers and clearly had no idea where this whole thing was headed. I think part of him wanted to crawl into a hole where darkness and silence stretched infinitely in every direction, or climb out of a window and run to a little place somewhere far away and stare at the inside of his hands pondering the human existence and we’re all still waiting, Rich. Can’t you hear the cameras?

Then Rich Rodriguez said some things. None of it was terribly profound but, it didn't really need to be. For this moment he wasn’t trying to impress us. No practiced grin or calculated body language or casual, vaguely endearing down-south aloofness. Those days were over, or at least gone for right now. I’m broken, I’m tired, now listen to what I’m saying and believe that this is the truth. I can’t force you to but this is all I have left.

My mom cries at trailers for Aaron Eckhart movies and those little Dove chocolates wrapped in tinfoil that have things like “love is a heart whispering to the soul” written on them. But I only remember my dad crying twice in my entire life: The time he found out my next-door neighbor had lung cancer and after he told me he and my mom were splitting up. I was five.

I know that men can cry. But when they spend the last of their teenage years trying to tackle 11 other human beings when it’s so cold it hurts even to open your eyes, they ignore it. They’ve forgotten the fact that they're capable of it. It's not that they can't, it's that they won't. Sure it all hurts but step aside, this season’s not going to rescue itself.

Before I watched Rich Rodriguez’s press conference Monday afternoon I knew only that he had cried, or that he came close to it. His eyes had tears in them and his lower jaw was trembling. And I approached it with the same slight skepticism I approach anyone with who’s close to me who cries when they’re defending themselves. Like on some level it was premeditated and we're being manipulated, because he knows he’s dealing with an immensely passionate group of people who are already inclined to believe him anyway.

I was completely wrong. “When I have two young freshmen....” This was as far as he made it. He put his right hand on his hip and stared down at the ground, then scratched the back of his head and breathed coarsely through his nose. “That come into my office yesterday. Upset. And say coach, what…what…what’d I do, what’d we do. We just said we worked hard.”

For the first time this man was overwhelmed, in complete disarray and possibly unsure of everything but the fact that he loves these guys, and that that should be enough. But even when he walks away from that podium his problems do not disappear. He carries them for us on his back like a box of grenades.

He sits at home trying to remember if Western likes to go for the knockout with a play-action pass on third and short. Four-star cornerback prospect Cullen Christian calls back and you want to ask him how his parents are doing but you can’t remember if it’s his or Dior Mathis’s mother whose name is Alice. Your son’s asking to pick up the Monopoly game where you left off last week but no one can remember how many houses he had on St. James place. The four million dollar lawsuit against you makes the news. And the entire time, you just can’t shake the sight of Je’Ron Stokes and Brandin Hawthorne creeping into your office, ashamed, like a pair of maintenance workers who’d walked into a vast ballroom on the Titanic to tell everyone, “we might have bumped into something.” And it’s breaking your heart.

Football is a gruesome game but it is not only that. It tests how much pain you can endure but not only that. It defines you among other men. Men who don’t cry much and grip a podium with both hands just to keep it from getting that far. Last season Brandon Minor dealt with every physical ailment short of Polio and blindness and was still the best thing Michigan had to offer. My nose has been bleeding since noon and my wrist is held together with tape and pride but if we collide, you will go down first and rise last. That is the way he played. And there has not been a more vehement, unequivocal defender of Rodriguez on this team.

He didn’t pine for an empty Sunday to watch Room Raiders repeats or complain that all this running was too much and he couldn’t take it anymore. He stomped through Ohio State’s linebackers with enough force to rip apart Pangaea even if it didn’t mean much to anyone but me, you, him, and the poor soul who thought he could stop him. But why? And for what? I think he did it because he needed you to know you could believe in him. That he was going to stick around for a while. That when everyone’s covering their eyes and asking you to tell them when it’s over he’ll be standing in the back of the endzone wondering how else you thought it was going to end. I think some people just aren’t afraid of much.

I’ve spent the better part of two years ambivalent and bitter, relentlessly checking Colts message boards with the desperate hope that Mike Hart will secure the team’s third running back spot. I refused to let go and I don’t entirely know why. Lloyd sits in a booth high above the field and says almost nothing while Mike and Steve and Chad try to find their way in a new world mostly indifferent to Michigan's strife.

There are others now, though. Ones with the courage to face these miserable times while I deify the flawed characters who are never coming back. Ones who played for us even when we weren’t ready for them yet. Ones who play with a broken wrist and flip through a stack of papers to keep from crying. I’m sorry it took me so long. I know you’ve already been here a while.

Little Wing

2008-11-23T03:54:00.009-08:00

His sentences came abruptly to an end and he bit the inside of his cheek every now and then. There was no anger or inextinguishable rage, just a bluntness he was probably too weary to avoid. There was no attempt to placate anyone. Here is your quote, now let me get the hell out of here.

“I spoke when I played with bruised ribs, a bruised shoulder, and a wrist that needed surgery. That told you I was tired of living beside the memory of someone who no longer exists. And that I knew there was a cause bigger than my own, no matter how impossible you think it is to find when you’ve lost nine games. I spoke when I carried the ball six times in a row and tore my limbs away from tacklers like someone was trying kidnap me and I just wanted to survive. That told you I was stubborn and brave and probably a little insane. And I speak when you see me on the sidelines, sitting on the backrest of the bench rather than the bench itself. That told you there are some of these men that I am above, and that I know what belongs to me. I know what I have earned.”

Brandon Minor didn’t really say that. He didn’t have to. There are other ways to tell us that you have arrived.

His cuts are rough and imprecise, and he throws his body around with a selfless, uncommon audacity. “I wish I could be more graceful, but I’m running behind a center Notre Dame didn’t want, a guy with a dislocated elbow, a former defensive lineman, and a rotation of others. It’s second and forever and no one believes we’d pass right now anyway. I don’t have time for precise. Maybe I can handle it myself.” That’s what he tells me. And I love him for it.

This is what he really said after the game: “It’s like some people don’t even believe in themselves when they step on the field. You know it’s just…when you step on the field you gotta’ believe that you the best player on the field, like can’t nobody mess with you. That’s how I take the approach on the field, you know I don’t care who I’m going up against.”

Michigan didn’t beat Ohio State, but most of us already knew they weren’t going to a few weeks ago. There was only the blind faith that “something had to go right,” the same way there was the day after Bo died. But sports show no mercy. Ohio State is radically better than Michigan is, and at least for now, there are more important matters. It’s alright to admit that; it’s part of what makes the revival so satisfying. But I can’t be angry. Peasants don’t challenge the king to a duel, they can only stand and throw rotten fruit at his throne.

I’m not sad or even discouraged. In a season spent agonizing over the loss of the players who meant the most to me, I see vague traces of new ones. I see it in Minor, Feagin, Fitzgerald Touissaint, Shavodrick Beaver’s loyalty, Darryl Stonum’s repentance, and maybe I’m forcing this all because I can’t handle another season I feel so excruciatingly indifferent about, but watching Minor Saturday made me believe that some of it is real. Five consecutive losses to Ohio State might seem paralyzing, but for better or worse, we are Michigan fans. Our hearts are calloused and immune to this. Michigan hasn’t been good for a while; I am used to the losses. I try to tell myself that.

In 2003, I watched Michigan lose to Iowa 30-27 in the basement of some house I’d never been to before. The house was cluttered but quaint and rustic in a way a cabin in Vermont might be -- it had a lot of mahogany furniture, and I think there was a coffee table made out of an old tree trunk. I watched the game on a large and absurdly out of place flat screen T.V, and when Michigan was leading by enough, I went outside to play football. When I was done, I came inside and saw that Michigan had already lost.

When they lost to Northwestern 54-51 in 2000 I was at a restaurant for my grandma’s birthday. Next to the kitchen there was a payphone inside a small alcove in the wall, and there was a wooden door on it like a saloon from the 1860's. I remember I kept having to ask my mom for change so I could call home and ask my dad what the score was. Anthony Thomas ran for 200 yards that day, and both David Terrell and Marquise Walker had 100 yards receiving. But Michigan still lost.

Earlier that year they lost to Purdue 32-31, after they’d led by 18 points on two different occasions. I was watching it in a pizza parlor on a 14 inch T.V. that was on top of a refrigerator, surrounded by cardboard boxes and empty soda cans. I had slept over a friend’s house the night before, and he didn’t have cable. I remember Anthony Thomas ran for a long touchdown and the game seemed secure enough that we could walk back to his house. I know Michigan better now; things are rarely secure enough.

You want me to write that Michigan will be back, defiantly, and to forget how truly bad they were this season. It would be poetic, and nothing is going to happen over the next nine months to prove that they won’t be. I rely on Michigan for more than is probably healthy or wise, and on some level, I need them to come back. I don’t know if they will, if they’ll stop losing and constantly pounding our hopes into dust -- whether it's with Lloyd, or Rodriguez. But I do know that I can wait.

I’ve been here before.

Burn yourself alive and join the monster squad

2008-11-21T03:13:00.007-08:00

Nevermind that Stu Douglass looks like the kid who would show up to your birthday party wearing a turtle neck and a pair of those Bugle Boy jeans that had the elastic in the waist. John Beilein told him to "play with some swagger", and he did this:

I guess you could call it that. Or playing without a conscience, which seems more menacing anyway.

The offense occasionally seems a little disoriented, and there's this pervading fear that the 1-3-1 will get eaten alive against someone who can shoot from the perimeter, but this is a good, competent team that looks like it will win most of the games it should, and probably take one or two it shouldn't just by hanging around long enough.

There Is Thunder In Our Hearts

2008-11-18T02:26:00.005-08:00

This is in response to Dex’s post at Wolverine Liberation Army; the comments left on my post yesterday; and, indirectly, Brian’s post, which was exceptional, but clashes in some places with what I wrote below.

I was 11 years-old when Michigan last won a national championship, and since then they haven’t been very good. At least, not as good as everyone thought they had a right to be. They lost five games in 2005. They lost to Appalachian State last year when they were ranked third in the country, and I’d said before the season that their offense was better than anyone else’s. They lost to Toledo, Northwestern, and haven’t beaten Ohio State in four years. Read what I’ve written over that span, and you’ll see that despite the frustration, there’s nothing but unwavering devotion. You tell me I only love Michigan less intensely because they’re bad, or unfulfilling, and I’ll tell you you’re a liar.

I wrote in September on this blog, “I’d rather lose and have a lifetime of players I love than win with a bunch of faceless cogs I don’t like or even feel indifferently about.” Losing does not matter to me nearly as much as it does to most people. It hurts, but more than anything it hurts because I know that the players I love had to endure that pain. I care about the players themselves, and I know winning matters to them. Chad Henne tried to play with a partially torn MCL and a right shoulder that basically wasn’t there; Mike Hart carried the ball 282 times when he was 18 years old and weighed only 194 pounds. Adrian Arrington woke up at five in the morning to run stairs for an hour, and I wake up 15 minutes before noon games and watch most of the first quarter in my bed. I’m sure the tattoo of the winged helmet on your shoulder looks fantastic, and it really is amazing that your daughter’s first word was Braylon. But those players committed far more to this than we have; pardon me for holding onto them a little too long.

People have this bizarre, ridiculously obsessive need to not only root for their favorite team exactly the same way regardless of the circumstances, but also to castigate anyone who roots somewhat differently than they do. It doesn’t give you more privileges if you can recite which high school every player went to, or if you watched every second of every game in person. It’s admirable, but it’s just a feat of strength. People say they love this Michigan team as much as they’ve loved any other, like it makes them an illegitimate fan if they don’t. Well that’s bullshit. You’re not telling the truth. And if you are, there’s something frighteningly wrong with that fact that you can like a player who you’ve known for 11 games as much as you could Jake Long. There’s no justice in that.

You like watching this Michigan team try to catch a kick (not return, simply catch) as much as you liked watching Steve Breaston do it? Maybe you’ve survived it, but you haven’t liked it. It has been miserable. And if admitting that fact and others like it make me less of a fan, if it means I should go fuck myself, or that I don’t deserve to celebrate a victory over Ohio State, then so be it.

I am a Michigan fan; I root for Michigan to defeat other teams. But ultimately, we are all rooting for the players on that team. For about 50 games, we rooted for a team that was led by Chad Henne and Mike Hart. We relied on them, and aside from the defense in 2006, we relied mostly on them alone. They were iconic. They defined Michigan for four years as much as this mystical “Tradition” that seems to transcend everything. But in the first game of this season, Michigan started Nick Sheridan, Sam McGuffie, Darryl Stonum, and Martavious Odoms. None of these players had ever played a down for Michigan before in their lives. I never counted on them for anything. How is it at all possible, or even reasonable, for me to care about them as much as Mike Hart. If it seems like there's less emotional investment, it's because on some level there is. It's not intentional.

The coaches don’t talk the same way, the offense lines up in formations I’m not used to, and I don’t know who most of these players are. I’m sorry that I don’t. I’m not predisposed to disliking them, or the spread, or Rich Rodriguez, just because they are different. But it does take more than a season to know how I feel.

Addressing some specific points of yesterday’s post:

When I wrote bitterly about Sam McGuffie pulling himself out of Saturday’s game, I was unaware that someone in his family had died. Had I known that, I certainly wouldn’t have written it. His own position coach reported that he decided not to play because he was too hurt, so I had no reason to think otherwise. Even so, it was insensitive, and I apologize for saying it. However, my criticism of his running still stands. In high school, his blocks on defensive ends and blitzing linebackers were glorified summersaults at their legs. I heard there was something wrong with his shoulder that game, but he’s been blocking that way since he got to Michigan. He seems less hesitant to unleash his speed on those wheel plays, and I think he’s been the most instinctual kick returner besides Odoms, but he’s overmatched at running back.

In his post, Dex wrote: “It's likely, extremely likely, that these seniors will leave with another loss to Ohio State. So those of you… who launch mis-guided, pretentious, faux-literary, never bothered to lace up a cleat in your life, whiny, overly-romantic, over-rated diatribes about the present not being the same as the past; you can all feel free to watch something else. Maybe you can put in your 100th game DVD and masturbate through the tears until you feel good again.”

I think most of this is dead-on, and I actually really like their blog. But considering WLA cites Fire Joe Morgan as an inspiration, it’s strange that he would call my credibility into question simply because he thinks I’ve “never bothered to lace up a cleat in my life.”

Oh, and in case any ladies would be retroactively attracted to a timid backup quarterback, my career rushing totals for the Danbury Trojans were two carries for 16 yards and one touchdown. I also successfully handed the ball off several times in practice.

ShockFX’s second comment is pretty flawless, and in the body of this post I’ve responded to most of the concerns he mentions. I just wanted to acknowledge that I read it. Also, I want to mention that I have only written good things about, Greg Matthews, Brandon Graham and obviously Grady. I am most impressed with Graham’s versatility, or the fact that he doesn’t rely simply on his speed and is comfortable playing on the interior. His guarantee against Michigan State was charming, in the sense that he knew something had to be done, and thought of the most compelling thing he could. It lost some of its clout though because Mike had just done it the year before, and he basically conceded that the whole thing had been premeditated. Plus, the defense didn’t seem unified enough to grasp the urgency of what he was saying. Don’t forget, up until the Minnesota game they were still trying to convince the coaching staff to let them play with a four-man defensive line.

After The Gold Rush

2008-11-17T01:53:00.004-08:00

On Saturday, Michigan threw 36 passes and only completed 12 of them. There is nothing discreet about how this team loses. There is no drama or climax; there would be something thrilling in that, at least. This is like rubbing sandpaper on your scalp until you hit brain. There is nothing but snow, and rain, and a numbing, overwhelming, and undeniably hopeless decay of something I once loved, and still do, but much less intensely.

It’s like trying to love a wife who lost her leg in a train accident, or got third degree burns on her face from a grease fire, and now she smokes cigarettes and drinks cheap whiskey from a sleeve of leftover paper cups you bought for some barbecue about a year back. This is not the same woman, and you know it’s not. You see things in her that you remember, things that used to make you happy. But now more than anything they make you sad, because you realize most of the time they don’t exist.

Steve Threet and Nick Sheridan have alternated everywhere between dreadful and fleetingly adequate. Sam McGuffie was hailed as some kind of messiah, but we found out his moves are nothing but extravagant head jerks; that if you coughed on him he’d probably fall to the ground; that he pass blocks with less enthusiasm than most people mow their lawns with; and that his spin moves seem tentative and halfhearted, like they’re more out of fear than deception. On Saturday he decided he wasn’t going to play, because he said he was too hurt.

Donovan Warren and Morgan Trent frantically look over their shoulders after every incompletion to make sure there’s no penalty flag, then shake their head at the wide receiver as if they had anything to do with the incompletion in the first place. At this point, that's probably all they have.

The players I do love appear inconsistently and without warning; increasingly neurotic and damaged.

Brandon Minor runs furiously and at times unnecessarily aggressive, as if he’s spent two years struggling with depression and regret, and he’s trying to make up for lost time all at once. He always seems more relieved than excited when he scores, and when he speaks, he sounds disinterested and slightly aggravated. He tries to laugh every now and then, but then his eyes dart anxiously to the side, like he’s waiting for someone to tell him he doesn’t have to pretend that everything’s going to turn out alright.

Terrance Taylor, more subdued than he’s ever been, has tried to find new reasons to make this season matter to us, even as those reasons eroded from admirably naïve to outright pathetic. After they lost to Notre Dame they played for the Big Ten championship. When that was gone, they played to beat Penn State, then Michigan State, then for a bowl. What they play for now, I doubt they’re quite sure, though there’s still Ohio State, and I guess revenge is as good a reason as any.

Back in the middle of February all I knew about Justin Feagin was that he either ran impatiently or was just incredibly decisive, I wasn’t sure which, and he had essentially said, “Terrelle Pryor, I am not afraid of you” before he even got to college. He sat in a chair after the Minnesota game, his hair matted erratically on one side, like he’d fallen asleep in the backseat of car with his head resting against a balled up t-shirt. He blinked slowly and spoke without hesitation. Sometimes he picked the wrong word and found a different one in the middle of his sentence once he realized it, but he was excessively calm, and already seemed accustomed to the whole idea of people wanting to talk to him.

In high school, Justin told Rodriguez he wanted to play early in his career, but it wasn’t the same robotic insistence most freshmen have. We knew he wasn’t lying when he suggested he burn a year of eligibility just to play sparingly in Michigan’s final four games. On a team going nowhere, after he’d declared that he could compete with the best high school player in the country, he volunteered to play special teams.

“I can’t really explain it for the fans that are listening,” he said on Signing Day. “I just play football, and I’m good at it.” It wasn’t a prepared quip; it was the only way he knew how to describe himself after a career of defying or ignoring reputations. If Mike thrived because he had been eternally doubted, Justin did so because he lived in a world oblivious to expectations and pressure. I wanted him to be Michigan's quarterback for the next three years, and at that position, he ran seven times for 49 yards against Minnesota. Afterwards, Rodriguez confirmed that his permanent position would be receiver.

These days, the coach's once-hypnotic charisma feels hollow and trite. At press conferences he seems embarrassed, like he’s still a little detached from it all and doesn’t have to cry with, or for a team he just met. Maybe it seems like he’s fighting for them when he’s being irascible and short-tempered, but this team is a reflection of who he is as a coach. He’s defending himself as much as he’s defending them.

For the seniors, he can only say, over and over again, that they deserve a hug. He did say that. At first I thought he was only using that line in press conferences, because it seemed affectionate enough, and a horde of obsequious reporters might pretend it had a vague humor to it. I was wrong. I saw a video of the locker room after the Minnesota game, and he said that to their faces.

Terrance never beat Ohio State, played for three different defensive coordinators, and vomited and bled for Rich Rodriguez after he considered giving it all up. He’s spent the better part of his adult life outnumbered two to one, and as a defensive tackle gets maybe three chances a game to remind everyone that he’s even there. He’s six feet tall and squatted 680 pounds in high school. A hug? I’d tell him to keep it.

This was once Michigan:

They used to exist.

LORDS OF THE JUNGLE

2008-10-02T05:46:00.013-07:00

He walked around the corner and turned his head to each side, somewhat aloof and not too concerned that he was meeting someone he’d never seen before in his life. His steps were deliberate and incredibly slow, the way they might be if he was walking through water, or a snow storm, or a dream, and his arms were at his sides. He seemed much taller than he did on television, though in those instances he was usually exhausted, hunched over, and had often just spent the previous four hours of a Saturday afternoon watching a game, or a season, or a piece of a career vanish, and was being asked why that happened, or what that felt like.

It was 8:30 last Friday morning, and I was meeting Lloyd Carr for breakfast. I wanted to ask him about things like Mike Hart and the Spread Offense, because these are important matters, and this is Lloyd Carr, and I see him right there drinking his coffee. But mostly, I just wanted to sit across from him, peacefully, when I didn’t care that Michigan ran the ball on second and long, maybe see what kind of toast he ordered, or if he’d laugh at my jokes even if they weren’t funny, because I seemed like a nice enough kid who loved something irrationally, and he respected that, because it was Michigan football, and he loved it irrationally, too. Then I’d stand up when he said it was time for him to go, shake his hand, and watch him walk away.

I got there about a half hour ahead of time and was oddly calm, though I drank three glasses of ice water before he even arrived and had a burgeoning fear that he’d make a sarcastic remark about my shirt being entirely pink. But once we started talking it was comfortable, relaxed and didn’t feel nearly as monumental as I thought it might be. It just felt like I’d met him before, only it had been a while since I saw him last. We were just two people talking about football, only he happened to know a little more about it than I did.

When he said it was time for him to go to work, I initially nodded my head in accordance, then made a few desperate attempts to ask him something he might perceive to be important with the hope that he’d indulge me. He leaned back in his chair, held the sides of his jacket and stayed for about 10 more minutes. We talked about the culture of blogs and their legitimacy as a medium, and he smiled genuinely for most of it. Not incredulously, or because he was perplexed that people would waste so much of their time on the internet and he didn’t want me to feel offended. But because he was impressed, grateful, and, I hope, because he realized that football meant this much to some people, for better or worse, and that he once reigned over not just The Greatest Team of All Time, but a secret society, too.

I like idealistic Westerns where the good guys win, pictures of Marilyn Monroe, Cheers re-runs and sharp cheddar cheese. I have a deranged, ridiculous obsession with a football team, and I cherish it. Lloyd didn’t condemn me for (inconsistently) blogging, or for caring too much. He admired it, and he understood that it took a certain person to be capable of that.

I think the waitress smiled slightly and briefly when she first saw Lloyd, though maybe I’m making that up just because I thought he deserved it. Later on she called him Coach, but I didn’t notice anyone staring at him or even looking at him because they recognized that this man is, at least ostensibly, important, even if they didn’t care about football, and here he was, sitting in the same room. It was early, and it was during a meal, and I suppose the kind of people who have to be up before noon are the kind who know well enough to leave a grown man alone, but I never saw anyone drift from their conversation because they were trying to hear what he was saying, or stop in the middle of a sentence to nod discretely at him and hope he made eye contact. I was conscious of this; I looked around the room when he walked in, after he sat down, and occasionally when he spoke, in case someone only noticed his voice.

People respect Lloyd because they feel obligated to, because “he was a good, honest man.” He was boring and he didn’t win enough, they say, and he was alright football coach. But I don’t agree. Braylon Edwards, Shawn Crable, Adrian Arrington, and Chris Perry were stubborn rebels, and he turned them into something better. And he gave Mike Hart a chance. I didn’t want a coronation, but a handshake from a father with good morals who would have liked his son to play for Lloyd would have been appreciated. It was silent, aside from utensils scraping against the plates, and when he walked out of the restaurant I didn’t see anyone stop to watch.

This was in direct contrast to what happened late the night before. I was at a place called Rick’s with my friend Danny, and a girl he brought along. Becoming increasingly aware that Bud Light-induced charisma and a pair of black Chuck Taylor’s are no guarantee to get you laid, I walked away and sat at a quiet table. I pretended to look at my cell phone -- out of habit, not because I was ashamed and needed an excuse to be alone -- and watched Oregon State’s 5 foot 6 running back, Jacquizz Rodgers, slowly dismantle Southern Cal.

A little later, while Danny was in the bathroom, I pretended to dance with the girl he brought so the average guy who attends Rick’s (see: people who wear shirts that say “Define Girlfriend” or “I Pull Out” non-ironically) wouldn’t think she was available. After three or four minutes of apathetically rocking back and forth, Danny came back and told me that he saw Mike Hart. It is impossible to write that sentence, under the premise that This Was A Big Deal, without seeming outrageously pathetic. But Mike Hart was there, and this was obviously a big deal. I don’t know any other way to say it.

I saw him sitting at the bar with Will Paul and who I’m almost positive was Anton Campbell. Maybe Mike won’t ever start in the NFL, and maybe he never beat Ohio State. But people bought him drinks, and the girls smiled and put their arms around him even if he didn’t ask them to. On this night, he wasn’t standing on the sidelines holding the collar of his shoulder pads all game while some guy named Dominic Rhodes stole his carries, and he didn’t need to get excited because he “almost made a tackle on special teams.” People followed him through the dark and tried to pat him on the back.

He was like an astronaut who’d pulled off his helmet for the first time in a long time and stepped onto earth from outer space. And we were all just happy to be there to see it. He laughed a lot and didn’t seem to have any particular objective, outside of being the hero one more time, surrounded by cardboard beer signs, loud music, and a persistent murmur which was more than likely about the fact that he was Mike Hart, and he existed.

I walked up to him and told him the next round of whatever he and his friends were drinking was on me. It wasn’t exactly four years and an eternity of moments that should be carved in the tombs of a pyramid, or painted on the wall of a cave some place far from here, but for now we’ll call it even. One of his friends put his hand on my shoulder and shouted “Cristal” and while I helplessly looked at Mike, for a fleeting moment I tried to justify buying a bottle, economic crisis be damned. Mike chuckled and said Jager Bombs were fine, and I handed the bartender 60 dollars and told him to give me whatever I could get for it. The bartender shook his head, grinned out of the corner of his mouth and kept pouring. He either envied me or thought I was incredibly foolish, not that I cared either way. Mike waived a bunch of his friends over so we could have the drink, and that was the end of it. I walked away and called a few people, but I don’t think they understood what I was saying anyway. It was loud, and I was probably crying.

The next day I saw Mike was on the sidelines wearing a visor turned sideways and a pair of exceptionally large, black, and presumably expensive sunglasses, which didn’t really seem to correspond with his plain white t-shirt, but would no doubt earn some kind of wry comment from close friend and noted fashionista, Steve Breaston. I could see him from where my seat was, and before realizing that he was waiting to do an interview with ESPN, I remember being disappointed that he wasn’t paying attention to the game.

I have experienced few things as predictably, miserably boring as Michigan’s offensive performance through the first two and a half quarters against Wisconsin. An episode of “Yes, Dear,” an NPR segment on endangered species of sorghum, jury duty, and not much else. Michigan was trailing 19-0, and there was no conceivable reason why it shouldn’t have gotten worse. It didn’t, at all. In the second half, Michigan scored 27 points in 13 minutes and 38 seconds, and only the Michigan State game in 2004 and Penn State game in 2005 rival it in terms of shock and moments of sheer exhilaration.

I’ve complained about a lack of familiarity with these players, or an ability to empathize with them or be intensely devoted to their narratives. I’ve even tried to tell myself that losing isn’t so bad, because this season was sacrificed the moment the Florida game was over, and everyone that meant something to me retired or graduated or packed their bags because getting 3 receptions for 41 yards every game didn’t exactly enhance their draft status. Well, that’s a lie. Watching Michigan lose – lose like that – is vicious, no matter if Mike Hart is on the team or not.

Maybe Terrance won’t become Warren Sapp, but for a halftime speech he was vigilant and enraged, and for a post game interview he was so bewildered he looked like if he didn’t shake his head and exhale deeply every few seconds, he would start to cry. In a year, he’ll be somewhere and remember the time he tried to rescue his team in all of 20 minutes, and it actually worked. He’s spent a career being a comedian who was just bordering on unruly, who always had someone more important to defer to. This wasn't the same person anymore.

In the second quarter Morgan Trent fumbled a kickoff on Michigan’s 27 yard line, after the defense had just been on the field for almost eight minutes the previous drive. I saw Terrance walk onto the field in front of everyone else immediately after, swinging his arms and probably shouting something so recklessly that the spit flew from his mouth and hung down his facemask. As if to say “Is this really the best you’ve got?” He was obviously frustrated with the offense’s incompetence, as we’d find out after the game, but he craved any chance to keep playing. He was undaunted, undeterred; the voice on a cold night telling you everything was going to be alright, even if deep inside the voice didn't believe so itself. You tell me sports are insignificant, and I’ll tell you how I watched them turn a boy into a man before my own eyes.

When it was over I screamed and sang and kept standing, and didn’t care that my shoes were covered in half-used mustard packets, because they’re only shoes, in the same way that they’re only lungs, or only a larynx. Beyond a blur of heads and hands and elbows, Terrance sat on a brick wall and looked out upon all that was his, while Mike pumped a clenched fist alongside someone else's team.

In the press box up high and far away, where no one could see him, Lloyd sat and watched. It was probably quiet, and I doubt anyone noticed when he walked away.

You move like a dream I had, woke up sweating in my room

2008-09-03T02:06:00.008-07:00

Morgan Trent was holding an orange Gatorade and playing with his ear, and he rubbed the back of his head and wiped his face with a white towel even though he wasn’t sweating. He was mature and calm and only sporadically successful at convincing us he wasn’t at least a little overwhelmed.

Before the season began, he called himself the grandfather of the team and joked that he’s been here forever. It’s been five years; it might as well be.

After Utah he was purposely monotone and said all the kinds of things that will look inconspicuous in a newspaper. He knows he’s been on better teams, and he’s fighting against the crippling thought that everyone else’s perception is a reality. Maybe the defense – as reckless and undaunted as it was supposed to be – isn’t good enough. It needed to be, and it wasn’t.

It seemed like they over-pursued and played tentative, but what do I know? I’m the kind of guy who likes to see tackles for loss and batted balls on a 3^rd and 11 when the other team runs a 12 yard out pattern. I tell my little brother to catch balls with his hands, not his chest, and tackle at the thighs, not the ankles. I couldn’t tell you much else, and the second part of that is probably wrong anyway. But the defense gave up 313 yards in the first half, and if this season is going to be anything more than a glorified sacrifice for the advancement of Rich Rodriguez’s ideals, 313 yards is too many.

Donovan Warren wore two diamond earrings that looked like snowflakes and swayed back and forth while he held the zippers of his jacket. He chewed his gum and nodded with his jaw clenched between questions, and though he is only a sophomore, and once just a prodigy from Long Beach that spoke a little too fast and said “you know?” all the time, he tried to defend the rest of his team. It was admirable, but also naïve. We’re not entirely ready for him yet – at least, to have our fears and doubts erased by a couple of poignant one-liners.

Mike Hart was never the kind of guy who threw thunder bolts from above the clouds. He turned water in to wine and make the blind see again. When he told us Michigan would beat Notre Dame last year we believed him, and it was because we knew he’d probably lied awake in the dark on more than one occasion and wondered how the last four years had become just blood and scars and dreams so fragile it’s like they never existed. Or stayed home on a Saturday night, too numb to change the channels between commercials, holding his hands in his lap and saying very little because the outside is malicious and haunting.

Donovan is still too young, too unfamiliar to believe. He said things like, “We just kept our heads high and I’m proud of the way we fought in the second half,” and that the reason he rarely fair caught a punt was because “the team was in need of a big play, and I was just trying to make that big play.” He’s an amateur superhero whose cape is still way too big for him, and most of the time he closes the door of the phone booth on it as he’s about to try and rescue somebody.

Michigan isn’t very good this year and, at least for now, he can’t change that. But he either ignores it, or has never known of something he couldn’t save on his own. Whether he’s stubborn or oblivious, I can tolerate a loss if that man is on my team.

Terrance Taylor stared at the ground and spoke as rhythmically as he always does, but he was interrupted mid-sentence by a few security guards who had to move a metal gate that Terrance was standing in the way of. He was quiet and had no jokes to tell, but he was mostly unfazed. He inched forward slowly and kept talking. This is the same man who used to warm up before practice by having a catch with Alan Branch, flexes his muscles whenever there’s a camera around, and still eats pepperoni rolls despite a hellacious strength and conditioning program. Terrance abides by his own rules. I don’t worry about him, because he’s been through worse than this before. I’m only depressed that his personality had to be so muted after a summer in which he’d learned to believe in himself again.

Rich Rodriguez was as stern as he’s been throughout the summer, but more subdued and impatient. Earlier this week, there was a sense that maybe he knew something we didn’t. Though he certainly wasn’t overflowing with praise, there was an odd, reserved confidence. He never mentioned that the running backs would, collectively, have 15 carries for 34 yards, or that the quarterbacks would average 4.4 yards an attempt. They would “learn as the game progressed,” and the now-ubiquitous speed backs and slot receivers would struggle with inconsistency, but would ultimately provide a new and wholly dangerous dynamic. He'd start to smile and he'd point at you like you were the only man in the room. But they didn’t. And they didn’t. The loss was surprising, even though I guess it shouldn’t have been.

I get made fun of because I tell people I’d rather lose and have a lifetime of players I love than win with a bunch of faceless cogs I don’t like or even feel indifferently about. On Saturday, the entire offense was foreign to me. They wore the right jerseys, I guess. But in early February Michael Shaw was going to Penn State, and on Signing Day, Sam McGuffie wasn’t entirely sure he wanted to play for Michigan.

The offense was awful, but they’re all strangers. If I said I was sad, it’d be pretend. Better luck next time; you all seem like fine gentlemen. What else do you say? It’s as if we’re walking past a homeless person on the street, and he’s asking us for change. I’m conscious of your plight, but who the hell are you, anyway? I’ve got to catch this train.

There will always be wins, but it takes longer to forget the losses. And without a defiant post-game soliloquy, or something like this along the way, the losses stay just as cold and crushing. You need someone to give you hope, or at least a 54 yard touchdown to hold on to. I’ve been to the last three Rose Bowls Michigan has played in. Maybe I just need reasons to believe everything is going to be alright.

Let me steal this moment from you

2008-08-29T01:09:00.007-07:00

I used to go to summer camp with a kid named Kevin who was three years older than I was, and when everyone was drying off after swimming the girls used to hang around his towel. His favorite sports team was the University of Michigan football team, so mine was, too.

I remember one time he had an ingrown toe nail, and one day I hit a home run in kick ball and he didn’t. He wasn’t invincible – more of a prankster than a rebel – but he was cool and independent enough that liking the team he liked seemed to be a wise decision socially. I was eight years old, and aside from some fleeting success as a little league shortstop, my most notable life achievement was kissing my next door neighbor on the cheek during truth or dare. It’s not like I had much to lose. One afternoon, he stood on a table and used a broom as a guitar and lip-synched “All Along the Watchtower,” and none of the counselors even got mad at him. That’s the reason why I like Jimi Hendrix.

About a year ago I found out Kevin has a beard, lives in Oregon, and reads a lot of Gabriella Garcia Marquez. He wears flannel, goes for long rides on his bicycle, and sometimes he’ll end up in the middle of nowhere in particular, taking pictures of his dog lying under a shady tree. When I asked his sister if he still liked them, she said she wasn't sure. If he still cared at all, she’d have known; he used to like them that much.

I know one of the kids at camp liked Alabama but in my memory, when we all argued about college football, the rest of us either liked Michigan or Notre Dame. The arguments usually ended when one half walked one place and one half walked another, and about 17 minutes later we were all friends again. We were eight or 11 or 13 years-old, and at the time, this seemed incredibly important. Some people are prone to self-loathing, nostalgia, and hopeless, mythic romanticism. Some people like Notre Dame. This is still incredibly important to me.

I find myself listening to The Chromatics’ cover of Kate Bush’s “Running up That Hill” a lot lately, thinking about Michigan. Not ambivalent, but definitely melancholy and a little detached. You want to trust sports, to know that they’re honest, that – at least cosmically – there is a little chivalry. But it's not that way at all. I still feel scorned, so forgive me if I don’t seem as excited as I should be.

Last November I sat and watched Ryan Mallet throw incomplete passes against Ohio State in the rain. I put my hands up to my face and my middle fingers in the corners of my eyes, so that my dad wouldn’t notice, and I didn’t stop crying. Michigan was 8-3 and was about to be 8-4. I shouldn’t have cared so much, but I did, because this was all Mike Hart and Chad Henne had left.

That’s why one day before the renaissance, or The New Era, or whatever you’d like to call it, it’s a struggle to not be conflicted or sad, or to believe that the world is fair and that sometimes, even if it seems completely insignificant, people like Mike get what they deserve.

I watch him on the Colts now. He still runs like a cartoon character – his legs a whirlwind of dust and chaos and he doesn’t really end up getting anywhere. He finished one run without a shoe on his left foot, and another without his helmet. To him, strength still seems to be defined as half desperation, half vengeance.

But he’s more mechanical now; he doesn't smile like he used to, he isn’t as self-indulgent. His cuts aren’t as risky – more just graceful, cautious lunges. He’s a professional now, measured and stoic and less eccentric. He looks stronger, and too focused. It used to just be a playful resentment for the institution, but now he seems like he respects it. It’s like the NFL has tranquilized him.

Maybe I’m making this all up, and this is the same way he was before he learned to spin the world on his finger the first time. But maybe I’m right, and when he was real, when he was at Michigan, he never got much besides the adoration of a bunch of nostalgic kids like me who can’t let go.

Mike, Jake and Chad risked their dignity and only left with a little of it, but they came back in the first place by choice, because of something bigger. As for the guys that are still here, Trent and Jamison are mostly quiet and patient and had no place else to go. And no matter how jubilant and grateful Terrance might seem, he knew how much money could be made by coming back. I don’t hesitate to say that wins this year won’t be as satisfying as wins last year were. Not enough of these players have suffered yet.

Donovan Warren and Brandon Graham already have the surging yet tempered egos that superstars come from, and Greg Matthews possesses a Steve Breaston-esque humility. These are players I am thrilled to root for, but for now, it feels like I’m being unfaithful. I want Michigan to win, but I wanted them to win more last year, or even in 2006. Maybe that makes me sound strange and disillusioned, but it’s the way I feel.

I guess it’s the reason some widowers keep their dead wives’ old bathrobes around the house. It's sentimentality and blind, ignorant hope that you can love the same thing the same way forever. Some people never move to Oregon.

And they burned up the diner where I always used to find her

2008-08-08T00:55:00.005-07:00

CHARLIE: "It's all bullshit except the pain. The pain of hell. The burn from a lighted match increased a million times. Infinite. Now, ya don't fuck around with the infinite. There's no way you do that. The pain in hell has two sides. The kind you can touch with your hand; the kind you can feel in your heart... your soul, the spiritual side. And ya know... the worst of the two is the spiritual."

TERRANCE: "I sat down and I talked to Mike (Barwis). I was on the bike, and he told me, 'Look at you. You're the only person who is not able to finish a workout. You don't want to be that guy.' I thought about it all that night. I told myself I didn't want to be that guy. I started eating right. I started getting my sleep. I started drinking a lot of water...It was all mental, to be honest with you. We've been doing it all summer – breaking our bodies down to see what we could do in the end. He broke me down mentally. Then he built me back up. Now I'm mentally tough like I've never been before in my life."

DOUG KARSCH: What happened to the rest of you, where did you go?"

TERRANCE: "It’s somewhere out here in the ground, from the sweat."

Terrance Taylor threw up after the team’s first practice, lost 22 pounds, and needed a night of intense reflection to keep him from quitting football. Will Johnson is bald, can reputedly bench press a sedan as many as three times, but approaches his final season quite aware – almost annoyed – that Michigan’s offense is far from good, not close to adequate, and at quarterback could just as likely feature a naïve true-freshman that asks a lot of questions and throws more out of obligation than instinct as it could a transfer from Georgia Tech that’s never taken a college snap.

Kevin Grady tries to erase a career of anguish while a viral YouTube phenomenon front flips over defenders on command. Tim Jamison doesn’t wear a knee brace anymore, looks – on the exterior – like he did in high school, and at least now capable of becoming the player we used to pretend he was. He’s conscious of how inadequate everyone expects Michigan to be, but has always seemed too docile to carry out the vendetta he’s alluded to.

Not that it really matters. Michigan’s defense has the potential to be fearsome in that deranged and unrelenting sort of way. But the offense is almost a complete uncertainty, and helmed by a coach not very prone to conservatism. These seniors will graduate as martyrs. They’ll be 7-6 this year, or 8-5 if they’re lucky, and unlike Mike Hart, none of their legacies will transcend that. (Well, for me, Terrance’s will, but that’s because of my own sentimentality and appreciation for neurotic, ingenuous players.)

They will be forgotten and they must know this, even if they don’t care. That isn’t really the point, though. The past six months have been about survival and that alone. The Ann Arbor News continues a crusade to sabotage as many elements of the university as it can, Sports Illustrated doesn’t think Michigan will win six games, and Rich Rodrguez is portrayed as just about the most vindictive and immoral coach in the country. Meanwhile, their conditioning coach – who “doesn’t need much sleep,” and is either addicted to methamphetamines, a robot, or the best in the world at what he does – made Brandon Graham lose 40 pounds in almost five months just so he could help put 20 pounds of real weight back on him. They run until they vomit, and there is no remorse.

I always thought Rich Rodriguez was kind of a rube who told bad jokes he’d probably told several times before, tried much harder than Lloyd to tell them, and compensated for a lack of grace with persistent eye contact, a smile he wielded like a sword, and a bunch of West Virginian bluster which never had much substance, but that’s OK, because he's a coal miner’s son who made it big, and you’re lying if you don’t find his candor at least a little endearing.

Maybe those feelings are tempered a little, now that I’ve realized Lloyd is gone, and that Rich is never going to be Lloyd, or that anyone is. But I guess I still feel that way about him. The difference, though, is that those aren’t necessarily flaws anymore, it’s just who he is. The same way Lloyd was purposely dull, or Mike was unrestrained. He’s familiar enough now that his idiosyncrasies are somewhat ours, and I have sympathy for a man who’s not nearly as despicable as people try and tell you he is.

I know that perceptions don’t matter. I know that Michigan is still here.

GODRIGUEZ: “I’m kind of a simple guy, I live a simple life.”

GODRIGUEZ: “Some of the people I probably respect the most, both in the profession and guys that are successful in their profession, business, whatever, said 'Coach whatever you do you gotta be yourself.' And that’s what I’ve always done, so that’s what you gotta do. If you’re not, you’re being fake. And I know one thing we’re not gonna do is be fake.”

GODRIGUEZ: “I’ve not changed who I am, I never have. It just seems what was portrayed was changed. And that was probably the most disappointing part. I mean what I have I done wrong, image-wise?”

GODRIGUEZ (About the defense): "It's always easier to say 'whoa' than 'sic 'em,' and so we're saying 'sic 'em,' " Rodriguez said. "And if we have to say whoa later, we'll say whoa later."

GODRIGUEZ (About Shafer’s aggressive mentality): "If it wasn't mine, he wouldn't have gotten hired. You want to hire a coach that has a like philosophy or you'll always be battling. Scott's personality and philosophy is something anybody would want, I'd hope."

GODRIGUEZ: "All of them got tested at times. I think they know now why we're doing that. We're trying to test them. I've seen it. Sometimes when you're out of shape and getting tired, and getting pushed to a new limit, it's easy to be surly."

JAMISON: “Lot of guys played a lot last year, lot of guys know what it feels like to be down and keep their poise.”

WILL JOHNSON: "We practice every day like we’re gonna run the show."

DOUG KARSCH: Are you a quicker player, stronger player, how would you describe yourself now?
GRAHAM: "I'm a freak now. We all are freaks."

Hell's Angels

2008-07-09T13:25:00.009-07:00

I was only 11 years-old in 1997, which means that unless it was Charles Woodson, Brian Griese, Anthony Thomas, or Tai Streets, all I knew was vaguely what role a player had, or a few notable achievements. For example, Marcus Ray was the guy who I never really heard of, but famously laid out David “If I’m Incapacitated When The Cops Arrive, Hide the Winstrol; My Lawyer’s On Speed Dial” Boston. Dhani Jones was a thin linebacker who was fast, which was exactly what I thought Ian Gold was. At the time I was pretty sure Gold and Jones were the same person, although now I think Dhani has an extensive bow tie collection, likes Charlie Parker, and probably doesn’t own many undershirts.

I mention this because I recently read something on Kissing Suzy Kolber about Ian Gold, written in this book “A Few Seconds of Panic”. The author, Stefan Fatsis, was a writer who spent training camp as a kicker for the Broncos, and then detailed his experiences in the book. In it were two incredible Ian Gold quotes which, after becoming more familiar with him through Google, aren’t even that surprising:

Ian Gold: “This is a business. When I’m here on this field, it is absolutely business. When I’m in the meeting rooms, it is business. Don’t hug me, don’t touch me, don’t call me your buddy, don’t tell me you love me, because I know you’ll motherfuck me as soon as I leave the room.”

Ian Gold: “The hard part for me is dealing with a lack of loyalty, dealing with people who have such a lack of integrity that it’s just sickening… You have coaches that will smile in your face and they’ll shit on you the next second.”

I find his overall paranoia and vehemence fascinating, and the use of “motherfuck” as a verb is rare but always appreciated. (Would that be more of a sensual or an aggressive fucking? If it’s your dad doing the motherfucking with the lights off just because “It’s a Saturday and all that's on are CSI re-runs”, mom could probably sleep right through it. But getting prisonfucked, or “I’m drunk and wearing a condom, so I’m not going to feel anything unless I do it like this” fucked would probably be uncomfortable. I guess this really boils down to what kind of tact Jake Plummer had.)

All of this makes the fact that he was cut by the Broncos, and still hasn’t been signed by anybody, even more disheartening. Gold is almost too small; made the Pro Bowl in 2001 mostly because he was ruthless on special teams; and once negotiated his own 27 million-dollar contract while representing himself. (“The one message it should send to other guys around the league is that we are intelligent human beings. We don't just play football. We have the intellectual capacity to negotiate contracts,” he said.) He doesn't trust agents, plays chess frequently, and he does not hesitate in saying that NFL owners are conniving, soulless moguls.

I like him because he’s an underdog who it seems has always felt a little scorned and neglected. He plays recklessly and instinctively, motivated by emotion and desire; it's like he's consumed by something more transcendent and primal than the vast intellect that he has. On the field it disappears and, as Carr once said, "his intensity is so high, he runs right through blockers." He’s also blunt, uninhibited and prone to hyperbole. He said that Michigan’s win against Alabama in 2000 was “the best ending to a football game ever,” and in 2004 he said, “Around the league everybody knows, and I'm aware of it as well, that I'm the best outside linebacker out there in the free-agent market right now.”

Back in elementary school, when a teacher would ask her class what they did over the summer, I picture Ian giving the most vivid – possibly exaggerated – responses. Maybe sometimes he’s not as graceful as he could be, but like Mike Hart and Lloyd Carr, he’s hardly concerned with his acceptance anyway. He’s just as combative as Mike, but he’s not as easily provoked; when Gold says something, it’s on his own terms.

There are few characters as complex as him, and even fewer who are as willing to reveal it. I was reading about this impromptu interview session a few days before the game against Alabama, and in it Gold took the microphone and tried to interview Lloyd. It encapsulated the Shawn Crable-esque spontaneity he’s capable of, and it featured a brilliant Lloyd Carr moment.

Gold: “We have Mr. Lloyd Carr here… Let me ask you a few questions. . . . What kind of year did Ian Gold have this year?''
Carr: “Who?”
Carr: “Are you interviewing for a job?''
Gold: “I'm interviewing you right now! You're messing up the interview.”
Carr: “That happens a lot”

When that happened, I was 13. Too bad all I knew then was that one was fast and the other was old.

I saw tail lights last night in a dream about my first wife

2008-07-09T02:22:00.007-07:00

I have three videos of Kevin Grady playing football for East Grand Rapids that I’m pretty sure I stole from Scout.com a few years ago. He was too heavy and ran with short strides, almost clumsy but more so just impulsive and unrestrained, and there was an anxious struggle to reach top speed and an inconsistent flailing of his arms to keep balance. Sometimes it looked peculiar and not terribly imposing, but I always found something charmingly juvenile about it, like a math savant who still had to count on his fingers.

He usually sounded shy but decisive and polite in his interviews, and I saw this picture of him once where he was showing the camera how his bicep was as thick as his lady friend’s thigh. I thought it was pretty amusing. Grady has either been a colossal disappointment, or extremely unlucky, depending on what kind of person you are. Out of high school he was rated higher than both Rashard Mendenhall and Darren McFadden, and committed to Michigan on September 7, 2003 – a time at which their future running back situation could be gently described as “a desolate abyss.” The Messiah emerged about a year later, and that was, for the most part, the last we heard of Kevin Grady. Well, he fumbled often and ran timidly when he did play, and he tore his ACL last April and didn’t play a down all season.

Needless to say, Grady was always one of my favorite players – even before he became a hardened, jaded soul in search of redemption. He’d earned his chance, and with Mike gone and Rodriguez praising his work ethic, it seemed like he was going to get it. Instead, he was arrested one week ago for driving drunk, and has been suspended indefinitely. If Grady isn’t a ghost already, he’s dangerously close to becoming one; the other running backs empathize with him, but they have the same ambiguous, fleeting legacies that he has.

Brandon Minor runs too upright but is ferocious, borderline psychotic and faster than he’s ever been; I once heard a story where Carlos Brown was wandering around a residence hall on move-in day and just started helping a stranger carry bottled water to her son’s dorm; Sam McGuffie is a cybernetic organism obsessed with fitness and responded to a Myspace heckler with a bible passage; Michael Shaw speaks his mind, and on the field is playfully unhinged without any trace of self-doubt. These are more than tolerable alternatives -- they're replacements.

Outside of our hearts, everyone is expendable.

"We all dream of being a child again, even the worst of us. Perhaps the worst most of all."

2008-06-29T01:41:00.007-07:00

"I haven't read the magazines, but it doesn't matter. They're not here, they're not seeing what we're going through. I can guarantee you we're working harder than anyone in the country, I can guarantee you that. ... Whatever they're writing in the magazines, we're not hearing it."

- Terrance Taylor

Until Justin Feagin proves otherwise, Terrance Taylor is my favorite player on the University of Michigan football team. By now, he is exhausted, audacious, impatient, and, quite frankly, tired of all the bullshit. He's rambunctious and impulsive, yet direct and powerful, and his half-opened eyes and placid tone of voice convey a kind of deeper anguish.

Rumors of grade problems have followed him his entire career, and he struggled more than most of the team adapting to the new conditioning program. At one point after his junior year he seriously considered entering the draft, only to return and be relegated to the second-team for most of the spring. He has been a reminder that no one is preordained anymore. Terrance, Charles Stewart, Kevin Grady, and Morgan Trent are the last remnants of a Team, a Style, and a way of life that have become a distant memory. At least for now, these are not displaced superstars searching for where they belong, where they came from, but mortals the world might briefly stand and cheer for.

They were waiting to be anointed, almost icons. But for the holdovers of the Carr Era, there is only a brutal struggle for survival, and an orchestra there to play indifferently even before they've had a chance to begin their acceptance speech.

Let it be a rainy day when brave men cry

2008-06-17T23:24:00.005-07:00

When you hear a familiar voice in the middle of nowhere, it takes you by surprise before it puts your heart at ease. It was dark and there were only stop lights and high beams, and Lloyd Carr was calling to apologize for taking so long to call me back. I’d like to tell you that this was a fairly insignificant moment in my life, that I’m a journalist and objective and immune to brazen sentimentality. But that wouldn’t be right. That would be a lie. Last night I rented My Best Friend’s Wedding and ate reheated empanadas and cherry Sprite, and fell asleep on the couch listening to Curtis Mayfield. This was a very significant moment in my life.

I think about it while I’m covering a high school baseball game in some Connecticut suburb carved out of grass and hills and astonishing blandness. I think about it when it's windy and it’s cold even in the sunlight, and the five dimes in my car’s ash tray stuck to cough drops and dried up Dr. Pepper gets me a bag of Fritos between innings.

I think about it when Rich Rodriguez is forthcoming and speaking loudly and I remember how Lloyd’s sentences wandered in three different directions and sometimes in no place at all. His voice sounds like a man’s conscience, in both tone and content, and in private, away from the podium, he sounded as defiant as ever, if a little more comfortable being philosophical.

I wrote a profile on Lloyd for this year’s edition of Hail to the Victors, and by the grace of God and the help a certain beat writer I was able to interview him over the phone. Of course, these instances are inherently dangerous: If Lloyd turned out to be a bad or even mediocre person, the last 13 years of my life would mostly be a lie. But none of that came even remotely close to happening.

On a Sunday night two months ago, he called me and he said the next Wednesday at 7:30 would work for an interview. I called him then and there was no answer, and at 9:30 I still hadn’t heard from him. Then the phone rings; it’s him. “So John, I’m watching this debate…Clinton and Obama.” Those were the first words out of his mouth; he sounded pensive and was entirely serious. I hesitated, and before I could respond he said, “You mean you’re not watching it?!” I told him I’d been sitting around for two hours waiting for our interview. I tried to sound sarcastic and jokingly make him feel irresponsible, but in the end I think I just came across as needy and politically uninformed. He chuckled and told me to call him back when it was over.

When we spoke again, I asked him what he thought of the debate. “I thought it was the best of the debates that I’ve watched,” he said. “I haven’t watched them all but I’ve watched a lot of them. I thought Hillary put Obama on the defensive. But I thought he handled himself well. But I thought she, you know, she was aggressive. You know I think they’ve both improved dramatically over the course of this campaign. And it’s been, ha, as tough a campaign as I remember.”

This all sounded so familiar. The players were different, but this was very much still a coach doing what he did best. Lloyd didn’t comment on how each of the two candidates vowed to handle threat of a recession, oil prices, or Iraq. He talked about their tactics, their progression, how they responded to adversity, and where this small debate stood in the vast overall narrative of the season. Sorry, make that “campaign”. He asked me if I liked politics, and I told him that I admired Obama’s skills as an orator and thought that a man who could quote Kipling off the top of his head might have felt the same way.

“Well I think he’s a great story in terms of his birth and his adolescence and where he’s come from,” he said. “And he is…he has an ability I think to inspire people. And you know, I don’t think there’s been an American politician since JFK where young people have really been this big part of the campaign. All over the country there’s more interest by the young people, and percentage wise a great majority of them are for Obama. And I think that speaks to his ability to inspire. And the question will be, what kind of leader he is, and how tough he is. I think those are the questions that he’s going to have to deal with in this campaign if he gets nominated.”

Here are the parts of our interview which weren’t published in the Hail to the Victors piece:

On how closely he has been following the progress of the team:

LC: I been busy, I spent a lot of my time with my staff, I’m really delighted with the jobs that they’ve come up with. That took a while, and then primarily I’ve been trying to get organized…I’ve given a few speeches, had some discussions about teaching a class next year. And I’m going to go to China here at the end of may with a group that president Clinton has put together. We’re going to go visit Hong Kong, Shanghai, Beijing, and I think that’s going be a very exciting trip because of the Olympics and all the issues…with the global economy and the role that China has played in it.

On developing the kids as players vs. developing them as human beings:

LC: Well john this is my concept of our job: as the head coach at Michigan- number one we're going to have a team that consistently plays championship football. Secondly a program that was run with absolute integrity. Third to have a program that at the end of the day the players when they left and when they were done felt like they had an experience that would be beneficial to them after they had finished their careers. And experiences that were worthwhile as far as some of the values that they developed because of the competition they had while they performed here.. and last to have a program that people who loved this university could be proud of. Those are the guide marks, the guide posts that I always kept in mind as I tried to do things in terms of building this program. So I think the answer to your specific question- you have to win as a coach, because if you want to stay you got to win. If you don’t win you’re not going to get to stay, and we all know that as coaches. And that’s fair. But I think along with that, I just always believed that there were a lot of things that you could learn in sport and athletics that you could learn in very few other things. And I think those things are important. So that’s what I tried to do.

On his players’ availability to the media, and how some critics felt they weren’t available enough:

LC: Yeah I didn’t care about that. There’s no body that got more exposure than Michigan football players. I think what I always tried to keep in mind was that our players, first and foremost, were trying to get a college education. And one of my jobs was to make sure that they had every single minute that we could get them outside of practice, that we didn’t waste their time, and we didn’t put demands on them like those that are put on professional athletes. And that’s the thing that a lot of writers didn’t understand. They don’t differentiate between college and professional athletes. I never listened to it, because I knew what I wanted to do, and I knew what my job was, so that never impacted me.

Why he didn’t campaign for the title game in ‘06 after the loss to Ohio State:

LC: Well, because I don’t think that what’s the system is supposed to be. It’s what you did on the field. And I just felt that was something that a Michigan coach shouldn’t do, and I wasn’t willing to do it, and I’m glad I didn’t do it.

Another part of the interview, which was absolutely vintage Carr: I asked him about this comment that he made during his retirement press conference: “What it takes is an all-consuming enthusiasm, energy and passion. I had all those things, but, by the same token, I knew there were things I didn't want to do anymore.” Specifically, I asked him if he had gradually lost that enthusiasm, or if the ’07 season did most of the damage. He said, and did not elaborate, “I think it’s exactly what I said that day, John.”

When it was over, when Michigan beat Florida, the tone wasn't maudlin or even nostalgic. It was really just one sigh of relief. Yes, as far as farewells go, a win in the Citrus Bowl is the equivalent of an elevator music rendition of a love ballad, but it was all I needed to survive. Lloyd won the last game he will ever coach, and then he left; there was no more. That liberated, maniacal offense wasn’t the way we knew Michigan, and it wasn’t the way we will remember them.

But on dark nights, when you’re in the middle of nowhere and the only familiar voice is the one in your head, you’ll tell yourself that those moments are all you need. You’ll tell yourself that you met a few good men and loved them enough to cry when you had to see them go. And maybe the voice will sound a little bit like Lloyd’s.

Eulogy

2007-11-16T01:52:00.005-08:00

The sky was mostly dark, aside from the flashbulbs and the lingering smoke and the giant lights that stood there as if they were comets that had come soaring past and decided to stop and watch it all with everyone else. The seats were still as full as they’d been since probably a little before two, and no one sitting in them had much to say. They didn’t chant, they didn’t sing; more just a steady roar, synchronized screams of relief. Michigan hadn’t won a National Championship in 50 years; I guess you could say they’d been waiting a while for this.

An old man with glasses and a white suit jacket said a few words to Lynn Swann, then leaned toward the Rose Bowl trophy and helped Lloyd lift it up. The two of them stood there for a few awkward seconds, each of them unsure when to put it down. Then Lloyd looked across at the old man. “Do I have to say anything?” He pretended to laugh and then answered his own question. “I don’t need to.” After a few seconds passed he did say something, not that any of it mattered, though. The 1997 Michigan Wolverines had already explained plenty. Lloyd could have just stood there if he wanted.

And then, a few minutes later, there was superhero Charles Woodson, with a National Champions hat tilted comfortably to the right – as if he was so sure he’d get a chance to wear it that he decided to try it on before the game to see how it fit. How in a brief moment of mortality, he put away the grimace and the swagger, and looked down at the ground and couldn’t stop smiling.

Two days later, I sat on my dad’s bed and listened to the release of the AP Poll on the radio. I was 11 years old, and I loved Michigan more than snow days; ice cream; my bike, the girl I slow danced with three times at winter formal; and if you had asked me on a day when she made me go to bed early, I’d probably tell you I loved them more than mom, too. It was January 1^st, 1998, and it was getting late. But really, it had all just begun.

I will remember when Lloyd talked to Jim Brandstatter after he won his 100^th game. The two of them had just watched a video of him walking through the pink visitor’s locker room at Iowa as the entire team kept screaming his name. He walked in and patted them on the shoulder pads, then someone knocked his hat off to rub his head. Chad was near the entrance and bounced up and down when Lloyd walked past him. Mike and Leon Hall danced side to side at the front of the room. No matter how bad the team looked in 2005, Lloyd was a legend that day – and, you know, if you ask any of them, they’ll tell you that’s what he’s been on all the other ones, too. When he got to the center of the room, he stood on a stool and waved his arms for them to quiet down. None of them did.

The video cut off and the camera showed him sitting there. His face didn’t move; he just kept staring at the screen. Brandstatter knew he’d have to speak first. “Lloyd Carr, one hundred victories, in a pink locker room!” There was nothing Lloyd tried to hide, or knew how to hide if he wanted to, he was vulnerable, his soul exposed under the bright studio lights. So he stalled, he repeated Brandstatter and said “pink locker room.” He stopped and nodded his head slightly, knowing if he blinked too soon he’d have a tear down his cheek while he said his last words. “That was…fun”. It was fun. He didn't know anything else to say anyway.

I will remember the time someone asked Lloyd after last year’s Ohio State game how difficult the last 24 hours had been, and he spent a whole minute talking about the previous Sunday – six days earlier – just so he could work up the strength to talk about what it felt like when Bo died.

“Throughout the course of the week, we talked about all the distractions that are a part of a week like this,” he said. “I told them on Wednesday that nothing was going to distract us from this game, because I didn’t know what would happen once we got down here. And, you know, it’s all part of the rivalry, and you have to be able to deal with whatever comes. But, um…”

And that was when he stopped, when everything went silent and the cameras stopped clicking in the background, when he realized what he had to say next. He grunted once and tried with all his might to continue. “And, um, I told the team on Friday…” He exhaled deeply, almost started to cry, and then his voice began to stagger like he’d been hit in the stomach with a tire iron. “I tried to tell ‘em that he, he would not have wanted to be a distraction. I told our team we weren’t gonna use Bo and his passing away as a motivational deal.”

I will remember how often he walked with his hands in his back pockets, and how when he chased a referee down the sidelines, no matter how fast he ran, he always did it carefully, cautiously, like he was running across the dry wooden planks of a rope bridge suspended over a canyon. How he always wore a hat when he coached; how he seemed like he had the same amount of hair his entire life. I’ll always remember how numbingly bland he seemed, and yet in rare and perfectly timed moments of self-consciousness, he would acknowledge that it was all just a part of his act. And how he would laugh and shake his head when you both realized that he was never going to change.

The people who matter to him know he's much more than that, though. He’s a man who reads Churchill and quoted Kipling at Bo’s memorial; who wore a Halloween mask to a team meeting one October; who makes his players recite the definition of a word from the dictionary before they can enter his office. It’s not that a real man doesn’t exist, it’s just not important enough to him that we know otherwise. He doesn't care whether you're proud of what he's become.

“First of all, I have a choice that I can do what I want to do with my life,” he said. “So that's where I begin. I'm going to do what I want to do. The hell with anybody else, what they think. So that's where it all begins with me. I love the game. I love the competition. I love the relationship with the players and the ability to have some kind of positive impact as they try to pursue a degree and play this game.”

Most of us have spent the last six years negotiating with the universe to get Lloyd out of here. Only now, with one game left to coach, there is no rejoicing, there’s no relief, nor is there any immense sadness. In our heads, we know it is time for him to walk away. The heir to Bo’s throne is an old man now. But this game has never existed in places of reason; in our chest, none of this feels right.

Tomorrow, it is over for them all, it is over for this era, this dynasty, however plagued by the ability to let us down it might have been. The dynasty that won our hearts and little else, it is over for them.

It is over for Chad, the quarterback who told us this didn’t feel like the same team from last year, and then came back from a torn knee ligament to remind us what it looked like. The one who separated his shoulder against Illinois, left for a half, then came back a little later and won the game for us. And afterward, he described his shoulder constantly clicking in and out, with an ambivalent face and tone of voice, as if it were a canker sore his front teeth kept accidentally rubbing up against, and not every reason we know he exists. We had never felt the pain he felt, we knew only that it was more than we could handle, and that it was best left to be endured by men like him.

He tripped over a goal post after defeating Michigan State (when he went 10-13, and threw for 129 yards and 2TD in his final two drives), and consciously fell flat on his face because he knew his shoulder had to be saved for answering our prayers. It is over for him.

Mario, the cold blooded phantom who knows only of expectations which he has already exceeded. The man who once said “I don't rah, rah, rah and all that, but when we get out here everybody knows I'm going to get my yards,” and now has someone escort him off the field so he doesn’t have to waste his time pretending he cares at all what we think. He has no desire to talk, because he’s already spent his Saturday afternoons telling us everything we need to know. He is simply the assassin blowing the silver smoke away from his pistol at the end of some dark alley.

The game has always been entirely instinctual to him; it is a way of life, what he was born to do. After scoring his first touchdown against Notre Dame last year, put his finger to his mouth and told the fans to be quiet. Then he caught another and fell into the Michigan band and waved his hands for them to play louder. He did the worm after Mallett took a knee for the final time against Notre Dame this year. And after he caught the game winner against Michigan State two weeks ago, he pointed to his wrist, where he has the names of his brother and sister are tattooed. It is over for him.

It is over for Jake Long, the man who throws defensive ends and linebackers around like he was King Kong snapping the antennas off of tall buildings, who hasn’t been called for a single penalty all season, and gave up being the first offensive lineman taken in last year’s draft because he didn’t want to leave Michigan behind yet.

And it is over for Mike. He walked up and down the sidelines against Illinois wearing a sweat suit, sneakers, and the same face I’ve had on the last 10 years of my life. Like no matter how much you love something, no matter how hard you clenched your fists or closed your eyes and whispered to yourself, you couldn’t change the the way a game was going to end. The man who might as well tell every linebacker he sees to bring another defender when they see him in their nightmares, because one will never stop him alone. It is over for him.

He pounded the ball on the ground after scoring a touchdown against Purdue, only to go put his arm around the referee afterward, when he realized he was above all celebrations no matter how discreet. The man who was asked in August if there was any extra pressure on him as the only proven running back, and replied “Not at all…I carry the load anyway.” Whose position coach once said, “To keep him off the field you almost have to shoot him." Tomorrow, it is over.

There is a bowl game still, but what does it mean? No victory could compensate for a loss to Ohio State, and no bowl loss could take away from making Lloyd a winner in his last game against the team he was raised by Bo to defeat.

So then, you realize, there remains one game to define them all. There is no need for momentum, no future chance at redemption. There is only tomorrow, a game – one game – to salvage everything that is wrong and must be made right. So I will wait for the moment tomorrow when Mike limps to the podium, a single rose in his hand, and sits down with nothing left to do but speak. "I am here, you are safe, now close your eyes and listen to the sound of my voice." It is all over; I know of no way else.

Worship

2007-10-17T08:32:00.000-07:00

Operate On Me

2007-10-11T21:23:00.002-07:00

He stood there on a Monday two weeks ago and looked like he just wanted to close his eyes and go lie down somewhere quiet. Lloyd moved a cough drop back and forth in his mouth and tucked it against his lip when he had to answer their questions. His voice croaked in and out like John Wayne’s in Rio Bravo but without the faint exuberance, or anything you might call hope. Lloyd was sick, his tie looked like the one lying at the bottom of my closet underneath an old almanac and a broken alarm clock, and two days earlier he needed the one good knee of his quarterback to rescue him from Northwestern. It all looked quite familiar.

He didn’t say more than he had to; nothing strictly on impulse or really worth saying at all – maybe it hurt too much to talk. But the second someone questioned Chad’s “fire” –simply wondered enough about it to ask – Lloyd didn’t bother saving his voice anymore. He leaned his neck back a bit and squinted, as if to verify that a person this audacious actually stood before him

“He's always got fire. If you know him – and that's the problem, a lot of people are judging him that don't know him, and those perceptions, it's easy to understand because you think you see something, you think you know something, and you really don't. But you know, he’s alwa—Hey look, you don't come in here and do what he's done and not have a fire.”

Lloyd never talked fast enough to finish each of his thoughts before wandering into the next one.

“I mean, the guy, first of all, he started 39 consecutive games. He's played hurt down through his career that nobody ever knew. He came back from this injury a lot faster than you would expect. Why? Because he was in that training room all day and all night. His will to play, his will to compete is unquestioned.”

The room was silent. His eyes shifted from side to side behind his glasses, beneath the four lines that might as well have been cut into his forehead with an axe. Someone asked about Michigan Stadium turning 80. Lloyd looked straight at him and barely moved to breathe. I like to think he was still thinking about Chad.

In so many ways, this was a microcosm of everything this program has become. Every reason Lloyd needs to leave interspersed with every reason he needs to stay. A team bound together by a few beleaguered heroes so conscious of the chaos and disarray: Chad playing with torn ligaments in his knee; Jake leaping face first to knock pass rushers off the edge because he knows that; Mike playing with leg pads the size of VCRs because he’s had a deep thigh bruise and a season on his shoulders since week one; Adrian waking up at 6 a.m. every morning for 60 days to run up and down stairs because he wanted to come back for this.

Maybe you think at this point these players are playing for no one but themselves. “This is no army; just a bunch of soldiers with guns,” you might say. But you would be wrong. A team still stands.

“When he comes back, he's gonna be ready,” Mike said about Chad after Penn State. “I’m gonna be happy when he does…A lot of people don't know how good he really is and the things he does for this team.”

And after Chad was 14-21 for 145 yards and two touchdowns in the second half against Northwestern, Jake said this: It just felt good to hear him back out there.”

They defended him when no one else would. They knew better. They knew why defending him mattered. In Mallett, Chad had watched a boy walk from the woods and sit in his throne. He clapped when Mallett threw for a touchdown, but he knew it was supposed to be him out there; he clapped because he had to. It was like watching the guy who stole your girlfriend cure cancer – Mallett didn’t even have the decency to give Chad a reason to hate him. So while Chad limped somewhere, alone, with his hat backwards and the crutches he didn’t like using, the reporters, the students – all of you – laughed at Mallett’s bad jokes and didn’t seem to care if Chad ever came back.

That night I pictured Chad walking freely through a mass of kids. In the vision, none of them asked him for anything; they stood on their toes and looked around him for someone else. As he stepped on the bus a hand tugged on his shirt sleeve. He sighed and smiled as much as he knew how; someone had recognized him, even now, after all this. But when he turned around, it was just a boy who asked him if he could borrow a pen. He needed Mallett to sign something.

“After the second half, there's no doubt I should be playing quarterback, there's no doubt I should be playing (as a full-time starter) the rest of the season,” Chad said afterward. “Ryan is a great person, and I have a lot of respect for him, but it's my team, it's my senior year. I'm going to go out and play my best football these next couple of games.”

He has seven games left to prove us wrong, and after that he’s gone. His legacy can only be salvaged now, not raised to some distant height; no one will ever let him. All of the traitors who booed him even though he came back to give them what they wanted, they’ll never let him. You want to tell me he's selfish? I'll tell you I'm proud that he is.

“Only people who don't know much about quarterback play question him, Lloyd said. “Because the people who know him know what he is.”

On the outside, we see everything that has gone wrong. That Lloyd has managed to lose complete control. That the star wide receiver that spent most of last season turning cornerback’s knees into wet spaghetti hasn’t looked right since November. That the defense against the spread might as well be trying to tackle a rabbit. That Ohio State flexes its muscles while Michigan picks the scabs off its elbows.

This season has given us so little of what we’ve asked. Mike Hart and just enough brief moments of immorality to remind us what we’ve been missing all along. There is no use left in waiting for last year’s team to arrive; it left with Steve Breaston. Winning the next six games however they have to will do just fine.

So cherish the way Mike makes every run feel like you’ve been driving with the windows down and haven’t seen a stop sign since sunset. Or when they ask him, after he has just carried the ball 44 times, “Do you think it was Penn State’s goal to wear you out?” and he replies “I hope not, ‘cause that’s not gonna happen, I could have had 52 carries, 55 carries.” Hold on to times like those. Watch how he hits a hole like he’s running through a tornado, dodging tacklers like they were the tops of mailboxes and pieces of broken barn doors.

This is the commencement. This is all we have left.

Survival in the city

2007-09-23T10:31:00.000-07:00

merchant of dreams

2007-09-20T22:09:00.001-07:00

Where were you three weeks ago when I finished my burger and handed the waitress a $20 as I left the bar? (Because when you realize your year’s over four months early, it doesn’t make much sense asking for change.) Where were you two weeks ago when I started to do my laundry during commercials and wished there wasn’t a game to watch when I came back?

Maybe you’re still gone. But 38-0 will keep me from looking for you for a couple more days.

For a few hours on Saturday, I forgot about everything else. Everything that went wrong, everything that might still be wrong, everything that we thought disappeared last year but still grins and wags its mangled finger at us. There is still no championship to speak of, nothing significant worth proclaiming. But for a day, for one afternoon, not a single thing went wrong. If they are to salvage anything, if they are to turn this apocalypse into a kingdom of rubble, they’ve certainly given us a worthy beginning.

I watched Brandon Graham destroy an offensive line like a bully smashing a kindergartner’s Lego castle to pieces. I watched as Shawn Crable taught us to never stop holding out hope for vindication, and listened to him talk about preserving shutouts afterwards. I watched Johnny Thompson tackle like a shopkeeper throwing the broom down in front of his deli and tackling a thief trying to make a run for it with an old lady’s purse. Both passion and desperation at the same time. I saw the coach we wished we still had any reasons left to defend stand at the podium with a movie star he’d smoke cigars with later that night. And for a third straight week, Mike had not only transcended the pantheon of great men, but he didn’t even acknowledge that he had. He still had work to do. It was simply his job to save us.

After he lost to Oregon he said this:

“I wouldn’t rather be a part of any other team right now. I wouldn’t want to be on a USC national championship team. I wouldn’t want to be on a West Virginia national championship team. I’d rather be on this team right now that’s 0-2.” WHY? “Because I’ve never been a part of something like this. In my life. It’s gonna test me, it’s gonna test the seniors on this team…it’s gonna make me a better person. And I know we can turn this around….I don’t regret anything at all. I’m glad I’m on this team. This is my team. I’m the leader of this team. It’s something …I’m honestly glad I’m here right now. It’s crazy to say, but deep down, the whole time at the end of that game, I was thinking to myself I wouldn’t rather be on any other team right now. I wouldn’t rather be getting paid. I wanna be here. HAS THE NFL THING CROSSED YOUR MIND? Not at all. It’s crazy, like, not at all. I’m glad to be here. This my team. I wanna lead team to victory. At the end of year when everyone says ‘wow, they really turned that around,’ it’s gonna be my team. Just like it’s my team now.”

And yet again we saw someone who didn’t just play for us, but someone who thought like us. This was his mess – our mess. And in some absurd, freakishly soothing way, we both held onto it tighter even as it gave us so many reasons to let go. Right now this team belongs to no one but those it matters most to. A hundred reasons to hate it, and yet we don’t. Sometimes, if you can manage to get beneath the pain, it feels pretty incredible to realize you love something that much.

Sometime during the game on Saturday they showed an interview with Mike that ABC filmed a couple days earlier. They asked him what his biggest flaw was, and he told them that maybe he talks too much. It was the first time I had ever heard him say that – at least, as if it were a shameful character flaw, rather than as a harmless, almost endearing act of self-aggrandizement. He looked sad and exhausted, and he had just questioned who he was, even though “who he is” has made us question for the last four years everything we know to be true about the game.

But after the game was over, he smiled the same way he always did. More restrained, no sweat on his forehead, a t-shirt instead of a suit and tie, but a smile all the same. I recognized that man.

“I was just telling the team, I lost the taste of winning for a while. We got that victory, I got that taste back in my mouth, and we wanna keep winning.”

There was focus, there was composure, there was relief. For the first time, there was a season.

I WISH IT WOULD RAIN

2007-09-08T17:21:00.000-07:00

I don't want to say goodbye to you, so I'll just say goodnight

2007-09-07T00:46:00.001-07:00

It was a while after my hands went numb, after Mario stumbled and caught that plummeting 46-yarder like it was clothing an angry girlfriend had dropped from a bedroom window eight stories up. After I drove home with the radio off and sat in the driveway for half an hour, I watched a bunch of people interview Mike.

When they turned the camera on he was leaning so far away from the podium they had to reposition the lens just to get him completely on screen. The same people he stood in front of now had asked him this question a few weeks earlier:

“When did you first meet Chad?”

“Chad actually came to my hometown for a camp...we met briefly, it was like a hi/bye kind of thing. He was a big shot, I was a big shot.”

Now he was just a kid standing in the corner of a funeral parlor while his best friend lay in a casket across the room. It was Michigan that was dead. It didn’t seem to make sense talking to anyone, because not a soul in that room had an idea what he just lost. No one did. It wasn’t just a championship, or the nine months he spent waiting for this, or the next three months, which don’t mean much now. He lost his last chance to make something of a career he’s been begging us to pay attention to.

But he showed up anyway and he listened to a bunch of people pretend to care what he was going through. Never before had he spoken as if what happened on the field intimidated him, or revealed something that made him question himself. But he didn’t even try to argue this time. Not that anyone would have listened, or believed him even if he did. The story had already been written, and there was no place in it for sympathy. There was an underdog tale Mike was no longer the protagonist of.

He’d spent the last three years both motivated by the hope of vengeance and a culminating triumph, and confident that it one day he’d get both. Now he just stood awkwardly and stared around the room while intermittently wiping the sweat off of his forehead.

At times he was almost consciously somber; not that he wasn’t as devastated as he seemed, but that it was too much to grasp at that moment. He knew how bad it felt about an hour before he got to the podium and how bad it'd make the hours of his life that followed. But for now he still smiled every once in a while. It was as if inside him was the consciousness of what just happened, the impulse to fight back, and the frustration that for the first time in his life he didn’t know how to.

Jake kept grabbing at his collar and looked as if he could crush bricks into dust with his clenched fists. Chad never showed up to the post game, or the press conference on Monday. Lloyd, he stood there like a man lost on a lonely island – too tired to even grab a piece of driftwood and carve “save me” into the sand on the shore. As if all he could do now is wait for the natives to eat him alive.

You can blame Lloyd for retiring a year too late, or Ron English for being everything Jim Herrmann was and we swore Ron wasn’t; you could blame Chad for losing control and never figuring out how to get it back. But next year, when there’s a new head coach, new running back, new pair of wide receivers, new left side of the offensive line, two new defensive backs, and the only thing familiar to you is the feeling that you’ve been defeated before the game has even begun, just try to remember how much this season should have meant to us. It's gone, and that's what we'll remember. It doesn't matter whose fault it was.

A few seconds after Minor fumbled they showed Mike walking up the sideline with his helmet in his hand. Like he’d done it before and he almost wanted to laugh because he was about to do it again. Maybe he was hurt, maybe he wasn’t. But he ran for 115 yards in the fourth quarter and had the guts to talk to us after it was all over.

This is a kid who calls himself H20, because “he can run like water,” and in every one of his last 12 games he’ll be fighting for a consolation prize. So if you want to know what hurts me most about the game, what burns holes in my heart, it’s not that I watched Michigan lose. It’s that there are no more seasons left for Mike to save.

EVERYONE I KNOW GOES AWAY IN THE END

2007-09-05T20:24:00.000-07:00

You're scared and you're thinking that maybe we aint that young anymore

2007-08-16T23:08:00.000-07:00

Mike shook his head for six seconds consecutively and I started to think maybe he’d become someone else. “If Jake didn’t come back I wouldn’t be here right now.” The reporter stared at him and didn’t blink. “Not at all?” he asked. “Nah…not at all.”

Mike was still shaking his head. I guess we should have known better. He said it with an almost inflated conviction, as if perhaps his tone of voice was a misrepresentation of what he felt in his heart. But he said it anyway; I realized later that he had his reasons. The reporter looked at his notepad and pretended to write down something important enough that he didn’t have to look Mike in the eye. I guess when you leave the ring after boxing with God, it’s best to do it with a towel over your head.

For a little while I wondered if he had finally outgrown this place, if he didn’t want to be here as bad as I wanted him to. He’ll never lose his exuberance or his swagger, yet talking about leaving Michigan the way he did he sounded coldly detached. The spotlight has always been his domain, and now he looked tired and distracted.

But then I started thinking about how it’s August 17 and I’ve heard that he’s in the best shape of his life, that he’s faster than he’s ever been. He says things like “If it's a close game, I’m not coming out.” When they ask when the coaching staff first put that that much faith in him, he says “Probably halfway through my freshman year.” He says that this team has the best chemistry it’s had since he’s been here. And when he talked about how close he came to leaving, he fought to keep the smile off his face the same way he did after he said Michigan would beat Ohio State in a rematch, like he was too deep in a tall tale to get out of it. Maybe even he doesn’t take himself seriously all the time. Maybe it's possible to grow without leaving us. Maybe I just don’t want to believe in a world that he’s not in.

I like to tell myself most of what Mike said about staying was calculated. No matter how we pretend otherwise, we had finally found something we didn’t think he could overcome – playing in the NFL. To everyone, Jake made a monumental sacrifice to come back, and Chad has been destined for the Pros for so long no one seems to care when he actually gets there. Mike, he was left stranded while everyone essentially implied that he wasn’t good enough to have aspirations like they did. This was Mike responding to that, this was him telling us he’s every bit as good as all those players who leave with no remorse because they thought they were too talented for college all along.

I doubt he went to Chicago with a plot to make our hearts beat harder. I don’t think he cares as much about what we think of him as he does trying to prove us wrong. When he answered the question, he spoke in extremes, as he has a tendency to do. What comes out of his mouth is what he finds when he lets his mind wander, and he has no problem preaching it as if it were fact. But where I do believe he was conscious of what he was saying and the impact it had was in the defiance and frustration in his voice. Once he realized he said what he had, he dramatized it to exagerate the way he felt. He knew there was no turning back. He was telling us “You need me more than I need you. Savor this.”

“Me, Jake and Chad, we met kinda before we went in (to discuss with coach Carr who was staying and who was going). I told them I’m doing whatever they do. Chad kinda said the same thing, Jake kinda had the same mentality, but you knew Jake, like, he was thinking about leaving.” Then Mike instantly realized he had put Jake on a higher playing field. With his eyes wide open he clarified as fast as he could. He probably lied. “I HAD TO THINK ABOUT LEAVING. But Chad was the first one – the strong link. He said I’m coming back, which made me pressure Jake. I don’t want to say pressure, but...then Jake had to decide what he wanted to do.”

When Mike first got here the crown slumped off the front of his head and hid his eyes. He was King but he still knew himself as Prince – just a little boy sitting in a throne who took the job because we didn't have anyone else to give it to. But now he pops grapes into his mouth one at a time, slowly, nodding to the executioner to drop the guillotine while peasants like us applaud wildly. We’d do it no matter who he was, but we smile without regret or hesitation because he came from us. He is us, a man of the people. Still the same posture, juvenile, courageous, indignant. Not impolite, just that there’s no one he’s trying to be, no one to impress; this is who he is.

Killing Harbaugh wasn't impressive, or really a surprise. He’s always had the confidence, the who-cares-about-death, heaven’s-had-their-eye-on-me-for-years mentality. Because deep down it doesn’t really matter what General Studies means. This was about fighting for Michigan. Someone had to defend it, and who better than Mike? He’s been sticking up for himself for a lifetime, why not stick up for an entire university? Mike used to be a sideshow, a cult hero, an interlude until we found someone better. Now he's on the face of the dollar bill, kissing your first born on the forehead, standing in a hurricane of confetti and smiling back at your daughters and sisters.

This is his last year of sitting in fancy hotels to talk about why he’s so good at football. He showed up late in Chicago and we make a story about that. He knows we’ll wait for him. Lloyd never seemed like he was worried Mike would leave, and I can’t say I ever really was either. I just get the feeling Mike loves what he's become enough to know it's worth hanging onto for one more year. At least, it’s easier to sleep at night thinking that way. Maybe he doesn’t believe in the specific Michigan virtues as much as it seems. Maybe he does. But if you asked me, I’d tell you I think deep down Mike just knows whatever he’s a part of is in good hands and worth protecting.

He’s grown to understand how much he's worshiped, how much leverage he has on our hearts. I think it's his way of making sure we don’t stop appreciating him. He taunts us with what we might have lost. And so he leaned forward in his chair with his right arm resting flat on the table, anxious, bored, almost too good for this, like Stymie from the Little Rascals sitting in detention just waiting to be dismissed. He had a neighborhood to run.

“People know me; they know what I can do. They know what pick I’m gonna be, from this year to last year.... I’m a consistent guy, they know that...I’m not a 4.3 guy, you know, they know exactly what I do, what I bring to the table.”

There’s no attempt to dispute who he is or what he does. “I’m a faster guy than I think people realize, I have a lot of skills I might be able to showcase at some point in time.” He doesn't say things like that. Saying it would concede that there's something to be ashamed of, that there's some person he’s been trying to become for all these years. And what is so rare, so empowering about the way Mike defines himself is not that he's small, or slow, but that that’s the only person he'd ever want to be. He’s satisfied with being human. He cracks his bloodied knuckles. Come and get it. And there’s a look in his eyes when he talks to you about it, this “give me a Coke with crushed ice and whatever is in your wallet for what I’m about to tell you - I know it's not much for three years worth of moments you'll remember till you're buried in a hole in the ground, but I guess you can owe me one” look.

Do the coaches ever try to rein you in on the field when you start talking? “They try, but you're not gonna calm me down. I’m probably the cockiest guy ever on the field, that's just how I am.”

And you just sit there, you laugh a devious laugh because he's ours and no one else’s, and you're the only one who knows why that means so much. You think about what you have, and what you want, and how for one more year they'll be the same thing.

I'm superman but I'm looking like another villain

2007-08-13T02:08:00.000-07:00

He showed up with his head shaved and the kind of distinct stubble on his face that every good guy with a gun has in the last 20 minutes of an action movie. Chad was in Chicago with Lloyd and Jake and Mike and his interview was about as exhilarating as a sixth grade Social Studies lecture. I watched it for one minute and 57 seconds and turned it off to watch Mike’s.

I was bored and yet content because I realized that his composure in front of the microphone was as consistent as it had always been. He still mumbled sometimes and made answers up on the fly, and talked as vague as possible when he didn’t feel like, or couldn’t do that. He praised and condemned himself as he saw appropriate; not boastful or self depreciative, just a man who’s put in enough work to know what he deserves.

“Chad got the swag a little bit last year,” Mike said that same day, sitting at the table behind him.

Maybe he shaved his head because he was tired of everyone always talking about how bad his hair looked. But maybe he did it because he told us he has “unfinished business” to take care of and he’s too busy to look in the mirror every morning. Too busy wondering how he’s going to move 64 yards with a minute, a timeout and a career left when he’s down five somewhere in late-November and his mouth’s too dry to lick his finger tips. So he sat down with a buzz cut and a suit that screamed I’VE ONLY JUST BEGUN TO FIGHT and silently begged every man with a notepad to make it quick. Sometimes it’s the little things that matter.

At the Elite 11 Camp this summer he won the Golden Gun accuracy award. His forearms looked like he’d spent the last four years making origami projects out of old encyclopedias, or bending crowbars into circus animals the way clowns do at birthday parties. And everywhere he goes, he’ll tell you that you have to listen, that sometimes you have to shut your mouth and understand that there are people who know more than you do, and that there's nothing wrong with it as long as you embrace it.

“(Mallett’s) toned (the cockiness) down,” Chad said. “We’ve tried to get him off that high, but that's how every player is. They come in and they're All-American this, All-American that, then they find out everyone is an All-American. I think he finally realized that and stepped back. His attention span was very short at the beginning … I'd be like hey, pay attention, and when [quarterbacks coach Scot Loeffler] talks to you, make sure you look him in the eye and pay attention at all times, because what he's telling you is very valuable. He picked up on it.”

You can tell Chad almost envies Mallett. Not jealous; never vindictive or bitter, but sensitive to the fact that he’s been anointed so prematurely. He never dealt with what Chad has, never watched a Rose Bowl vanish into 7-5 when he was only 20 years old and had to listen to everyone tell him it was his fault. It was Braylon’s team three years ago, then Mike’s when we handed it to him. But it’s never been Chad’s; it’s never even been offered to him.

He’s just been kindly asked to prevent it from collapsing. Practice started about a week ago, and since then someone who knows these things told me Chad has been the best player on the team. “Nobody is even close.” This is the quarterback of the team I root for.

When Chad won the accuracy award they threw him a yellow shirt and told him to give a speech. Toward the end of it he was swinging his arms a little bit because he wasn’t quite sure how to gracefully stop talking. “What these coaches tell you, take it in, practice it, study it, be perfect at it.” At that moment he had stumbled his way to a conclusion. “We always say hey, uh…”

He almost forgets what we always say, then rubs is mouth in embarrassment even though he’s in the presence of 11 kids who’d probably make a call back home just to tell their mom Chad liked their footwork on a five-step drop. When the camp director was reciting the names of Michigan quarterbacks in the NFL, one of the kids shouted “Chad Henne" before the director could. Another one helped Chad put his yellow shirt on with an eagerness you don’t see unless it involves taking off wrapping paper or bra straps. These are the types that carry around folded 8x12s and a black sharpie in their back pocket so he can sign his name on it when the day is over, and yet he’s not comfortable looking down at them. He constantly proves that he’s mortal, but it’s always after he's so aggressively convinced us on the field he might not be.

Off the field he tries so hard to exude no emotion, to be robotic. But he’s never flawless, and each time it becomes so vividly clear that he’s one of us.

Eventually, he remembered what we always say: “Excellence is good, but, uh, we love perfect... being better.”

Lying out there like a killer in the sun

2007-08-07T00:39:00.001-07:00

I remember parking the car under this bridge in Pasadena and walking with my uncle to the Rose Bowl from there. We were sharing a salami and pepperoni sandwich with lettuce and peppers, and when we stopped on a stone wall to eat it a black Rolls Royce drove by with its windows down. There was a breeze, and when I looked down to wipe the crumbs off my chest I could feel the sun on the back of my neck. It was one of the rare moments when my life was better than the guy’s who was driving the car.

There was this time during my senior year of high school when I left the house and didn’t stop riding my bike until I got to a gas station on the other side of town. It was hot, I still didn’t know where I was going to college, and I was pretty sure I was in love with a girl who was taking too long to realize she loved me too. I went inside and bought two cans of orange soda. I remember drinking them like they were going to evaporate in 9 seconds, like you do when you drink from the garden hose and don’t stop until you run out of breath and the water spills out and gets the collar of your shirt wet. But sitting down with my uncle, Michigan hadn’t lost yet. The sandwich tasted significantly better than the orange soda.

I remember when they showed this video montage of Bo Schembechler before the game. And how the guy standing in front of me didn't bother wiping the tears off his cheeks because he knew there would be more of them. I remember I was relieved because my uncle went to get a beer and didn't see me cry when Steve Breaston walked to midfield.

I wish the endings were ever as good as the beginnings...

Lloyd: "It all starts with a guy that is going to make good decisions on whether to field the ball or not, where to fair catch it. Experience is something we don't have. When you lose a guy like Steve Breaston, it's like losing a great kicker like Garrett Rivas. You take all those kicks for granted. You take all those plays Breaston made for granted."

Marques Slocum: "I like to hit people. I think I'm very physical"

Johnny Thompson: "Playing the run, that's just all instinct. I'm good at that."

Lloyd: "He's part of who I am, so I don't sit around and think about him being gone every day."

Lloyd: "I don't believe in shootouts, unless we're doing the shooting."

Lloyd: "I know this: I think most people, the older you get, the more you realize the people in your life are important. All the other stuff, it really comes down to relationships you have. I think you have a greater sense of what's important."

Mike: "(4 years ago) I was a little pup and no one wanted to talk to me cause I was this little guy from New york."

Mike: "I dont know, probably, I probably would (take Harbaugh's phone call). Yeah, of course I would take his call. If a man calls me I'm gonna answer the phone."

Mike: "I love Jake, you know, Jake's one of my favorite people on this team. Even off the field he's one of my favorite players on this team. On the field, obviously I'm his number one fan."

Chad: "I know what coverage every team can give you."

Chad: "We're not going to be sitting back relaxing eating a bag of chips, but we're going to be confident and comfortable with what we're doing because we've been here and we've experienced it."

Rio:“I love playing with Chad, Mike and Jake. They're probably my favorite people in the world because being in the huddle with them you know you have their back and they have yours, especially with Mike. Everybody knows how Mike is -- he doesn't take any crap because he wants to win harder than we all do.”

Rio: "I don't rah, rah, rah and all that, but when we get out here everybody knows I'm going to get my yards"

Crable: "They want us to get to know each other, hang out with each other, become brothers and really understand each other."

Terrance: “It makes you feel good that your coach is excited -- truly excited. Sometimes you get that fake hype, but Coach E is always excited in whatever he does.”

Adrian: "I feel like my head is in a different place right now. I've had talks with a lot of people, a lot of time to think … a lot of 6:00 A.M.s sitting in an empty stadium thinking about how I could have done things differently. I'm at another level."

It Couldn't Have Happened to a Better Man

2007-07-17T01:10:00.002-07:00

To Whom It May Concern--

I remember back in April me, Steve and Morgan were at this thing talking. I turned to Steve and said “Ashley Banks or Lisa Turtle.” He rubbed his chin a second before he answered. I remember thinking his turquoise Lacoste polo was crisp but I couldn’t say anything because shit like that doesn’t exactly jive with the fact that I haven’t fumbled in 38 years. I’m the Bogart of this bitch; I got a rep to keep.

Morgan took the moment of silence to interject: “QUIT PLAYIN – YOU KNOW YOU’D GIVE IT TO THAT ANGELIQUE CHICK FROM THE DETROIT NEWS”, and when we just sat staring at him lifeless yet simultaneously wondering whether we actually would, he continued: “….BUT MAYBE IT’S JUST THE BACARDI TALKING. I SHOULDN’T HAVE POURED OUT THAT LAST SHOT FOR KELLY BARAKA.”

Then Zoltan Mesko taps me on the shoulder because he wanted to know if Crable's first name was with an EA or an AW. He had some photos he wanted to tag him in on Facebook. And I started to wonder how I got here.

I remember when me and Steve saw this pic of Leinart rolling up in a Maserati and Kristin Cavallari stumbling out of the passenger side in a jean skirt . Matt was wearing sunglasses and he looked like he was chewing gum. She looked a little bowlegged and had a twinkle in her eye. She was probably on the way upstairs to text Hayden Panettiere about it or change her MySpace layout or some shit. But I remember Steve sitting there, and he looks at me and he says “I woulda opened the door up for her”. I told him I knew he would. I patted him on the back and he sighed a little bit. We play for Michigan, we can lick a motherfucking wound or two.

There was this one time I was in a foul mood and Chad started getting on my nerves. This lil' number from sigma kappa wasn’t returning my calls, some sharpshooter spilled ketchup on my Reeboks, and I remember they were all out of the Little Debbie’s honey buns because I ended up having to get the Hostess ones with all that white frosting that falls off in little pieces instead. I think I just gave em to Terrance.

It was sophomore year and Chad was kinda fucking up a lot those days. When things got real bad he used to bite on his knuckle like Sonny did when he found out Carlo was beating on Connie and then he’d walk over to the bench and sit by himself. It made my heart ache. See Chad’s always been a strong dude. This wasn’t like him.

But I had my own shit to handle. We were losing to fucking Minnesota; my ankles were worthless. I was on Amazon peeping “Getting Your Life Back: The Complete Guide to Recovery from Depression” with the Look Inside feature because I was too embarrassed to buy the whole thing. One thing led to another, I called Chad a poor man’s Steve Beuerlein, he called me Braylon’s sidekick and said Mel Kiper never heard of me (I whispered to myself 'neither did Tom Lemming,' but who’s keeping track?).

A couple days later we went to Ben and Jerry’s on State Street and laughed about it. He treated; I picked up the edge rusher on third and long. We'll call it even.

I remembered the day Bo died. There was this secretary in the academic office standing behind her desk and her eyes were looking pretty raw. They were like a combination of my mom’s when she told me her and my dad were getting a divorce and Carson Butler’s the time he smoked that third blunt one night last October. I asked her if she was ok and she told me she was fine. I saw her holding a crumpled tissue in her fist and I knew that she wasn’t. I just nodded and tried to smile. She looked up at me for a couple seconds then told me she had to go make copies of something and walked away. I carried the ball 280 times when I was 18 years old and it took less out of me than that.

See they like to tell you what happened to Bo toughens the soul. That it’s gonna be like the end of fucking Braveheart when they threw William Wallace’s sword into the field and suddenly everyone learns how to do some real legendary shit. I wish I could tell you Coach has some new sense of motivation, that he’s in the gym every day jogging three miles on treadmill with Journey on his iPod just trying to handle business so he can retire a champion. But no one ever considers that maybe it ruins the man for good. Like there's no real revival, you just wake up every morning after that with a hole in your heart. I think when Bo died a little piece of Coach died too.

For the rest of his life he'll be trying to survive without it. The next day we lost to Ohio State.

In Pasadena me, Steve and Morgan ate at this place Roscoe’s Chicken-n-Waffles. We were talking to the waitress about this and that and she brings her nephew over. He was excited to see us. She must have told him we were famous, and at the time, I guess we were. A couple of gunslingers who didn’t think USC was all that yet. I think about when we were on top. I think about how the past always seems to be nothing but good shit we took for granted.

Signed,

H2O

Wasteland

2007-01-31T13:55:00.000-08:00

I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow?

Out of this stony rubbish?

Son of man, you cannot say, or guess, for you know only

A heap of broken images, where the sun beats....

Only there is shadow under this red rock

Of gods and Ghosts

2007-01-14T00:14:00.001-08:00

In this erratically satisfying endeavor known to us as sports fandom, the gamble for retribution and the hope of a better tomorrow so often also has a mighty hand in our undoing. The risks are quite understood, but they’re the reason loyalty to a given team comes to mean so much in the representation of our being. We rejoice in the fact that, effectively, our lives’ welfare rests in the fate of a band of honed athletic specimens; it comforts us to know that no matter our own destination, faith in something so entirely separate from our own lives will always exist as an escape. It’s a confirmation that if nothing else, we have at least this to give us an identity, to provide solace when nothing else might. Billions would consider it blasphemous to proclaim, but sports – its characters blessed with these mythical abilities – are very much a religion.

To rely on some supreme entity above to provide a beacon of guidance hardly seems much different than kneeling before a television set on a Saturday afternoon and relying on Steve Breaston to return a kick 50 yards and restore faith that the world as we know it is a kind and honest place. This is not to anoint a man who has most certainly done more to inspire confidence and eviscerate peril in my own life than any force in a religious dwelling has. But if a religion is merely the chosen manner to live your life, if it is to embody a suitable set of ideals, to provide hope, is that not the same as a chosen football team that might happen to symbolize the same?

If a portion of religion is a collection of tales to be wary of, or to assuage fears and doubts, was the Miracle on Ice not just a modern-day David and Goliath story? Was Rockne’s “win one for the gipper” speech not told to pay homage to a fallen comrade? Eighty years later has it not become a symbol of inspiration, of honoring someone dear to us? Does Mike Hart’s ascension from the lowly dregs of upstate New York to the zenith of our hearts not show us the power of an indomitable will? Is Lloyd not a man whose existence preaches morality before success at all costs? Is Daydrian Taylor’s hit itself not a story of self sacrifice? Does Braylon’s tumultuous transition from Michigan to the NFL not teach us to savor the present? Has Maurice Clarett not led a life like Icarus, forever damned by yielding to temptation? Is Bo Schembechler not a man of whom we are all disciples?

I had never taken much time to consider something like this before. Too many communion wafers, too much Sunday school, too many prayers, maybe. But something happened after the Title Game that made me wonder. The game had been over for a few hours, and someone on an Ohio State fan forum had written, “please god, let Ginn and Gonzalez come back.” That is precisely the way it was written – the names of the two players appropriately capitalized, while the man who he pleaded with was irreverently lumped together with other gods, gods as if by profession, whose duty it is to right the wrongs in our sacred pastime. In this case, in the case of college football, it was Ginn and Gonzalez who were divine; the anonymous god was simply the man handing out rosary beads from a kiosk.

Certainly life itself can’t be reduced to things so trivial as winning and losing, but in the simple lives we lead, this is what seems to matter. “Living and dying” with a given team has grown to be a cliché, but there is, of course, reason the saying exists at all. It is the rising and falling to those two ends which parallel religion as well. Sports are nothing if not an unmediated forum to champion one’s beliefs. Like the doctrines of a religion, so much of sport is the thrill of fighting for their honor, of defending yourself, and defending these men who you’ve convinced yourself are worth such a lifelong dedication to. Without fighting for them, fighting for your religion, you call your reasons for living into question.

To say the very least, I haven’t handled the culmination of Michigan’s season too well. Three months of unquestioned perfection are worth nothing now. With the events of January 8^thas traumatic as they were – for the Big 10, and for Ohio State, whose caliber is always a reflection of the Michigan team they defeated, and vice versa – many soon pondered whether the entire season was just a foolish waste of time. And when Ohio State lost to Florida, there was Michigan, not even good enough to be regarded as the most prominent fraud in the nation. But yet, I still gaze into the bright lights of next season undeterred, and to every single one that follows. Things will change, I imagine; one day they will thrive when we need them to as much as they fail to do so these days. If it’s to be believed that “religion is the opiate of the masses,” I cannot imagine a more glorious high than the University of Michigan’s football team.

It's a never-ending battle for a peace that's always torn

2007-01-05T03:20:00.001-08:00

And so the year, blissful as it were, becomes not fond memory, but moments of temporary, jubilant detachment from one’s doomed fate. Obliterating Notre Dame from the collegiate landscape did not foreshadow victories over future despised and envied foes, but rather, in a clash of similarly antiquated football institutions each stalked by different ghosts, it was an unfamiliar high carried through late November on the wings of unbridled optimism – that something so definitive must have confirmed the transition from Old Michigan to the invigorating pastures of this New Era. I say this with unwavering confidence: Michigan will return; there will be justice among the cosmos once again. But from this season all that shall remain is the reminder of just how quickly hope and ecstasy will vanish.

Pasadena has become a land perfect for all but watching the team I love. ’04 was a realization of how distant fulfillment was from Michigan’s program; ’05 was a hundred rusty knives to the heart, even after all its brutal flaws had been forgotten in the hope that one man might miss a field goal and save us all. And last Monday was the destruction of all that we needed to believe was true – about how far Michigan had come, and how they’d done it. It was the harrowing reality that even its best was not good enough. It’s baffling. Either this team was never as good as I thought it was, or the same men I’d put my faith in for four months had failed when I needed them most.

English’s defense was exploited in the exact same manner against Southern Cal as it was Ohio State; Lloyd and DeBord stood stubbornly by the maxims that have hurt this team so severely in the past. It was all so obvious, and yet entirely meaningless because there was nothing we could do to stop it from happening. And this builds, this feeling, it feasts on itself, it becomes expected; it surrounds our lowered heads and lifeless shoulders until you’re there climbing the concrete steps of gate 17, staring back at the confetti and the grass and the silhouette of the hills at dusk, and how much better it would look if once, just once, you had a reason to stick around and watch your guys, instead of painfully turning and walking away from those that had beaten them.

On this day, it was as if all of Southern California held the top of Michigan’s head with one hand, shining the knuckles of the other on its chest while Michigan flailed its own fists helplessly. Michigan was an overwhelmed bunch dominated by an opponent that seemed embarrassed to have to play them in the first place. It’s the mentality Pete Carroll has ingrained in the psyches of his players, and yet it’s no less painful to hear the words “predictable” and “overrated” and “slow” and “typical Big 10 team” come from the mouths of Lawrence Jackson, Brian Cushing and, as the day concluded, more or less the entire country. Lloyd Carr – the same man once innocent and revitalized, and praised for what he represented – was again considered deadweight, no good, a burden to this program; lampooned as an oblivious moron with nothing but big bags under his eyes and a face that never seemed to move. It didn’t matter how different I knew this team, this coach, was than that. Michigan had lost the nation's respect far quicker than it had taken to regain it from a decade of underachievement.

This loss to Southern Cal was more numbingly disappointing and crippling to Michigan’s national image than any in the last five years. And yet, I can seem to find no real ability to remember anything other than Steve walking to midfield with LaMarr and Jake for the coin toss, even though Steve isn’t a captain like the two of them are. These past two years it feels like everyone just forgot about Steve, only recognized what the man was giving you and not who the man really was to begin with. Maybe Mario’s just been too good, maybe last year the team was just too bad, maybe just about everything Mike does makes you smile too much to ever forget it. But see, I had been sitting on a small stone wall a little way from the stadium eating a sandwich before I walked in, and when your favorite player won’t ever be playing again, the only thing that feels right is wondering what it’s going to feel like. Three and a half hours later, 95,000 people found out that Michigan wasn’t as good a football team as Southern Cal was. But before that, before anyone knew any better, there was just Steve, standing in front of them all as one of the three most important players on the third best football team in the country.

ALL HAIL ANDY FOR THE PICTURE

Witnessing a sporting event in which your emotions are squarely invested is standing at the gallows with a noose around your neck and a black hood over your face. The strength of the stool and the kindness of the executioner are determined by the caliber of the players we watch. We can do nothing to fix the outcome, only to wait for some dusty hero to ride from the shadows and shoot us down from the rope, or somehow stop Dwayne Jarrett from brazenly wagging his finger in their face. Either that, or we hang. I will never remember Steve as a savior in that regard, not the way Mike or Mario are. But for one moment, against Penn State, in what remains the greatest game this team has ever given me, he was. He returned a kick 40 yards with 43 seconds left in the fourth quarter. Later that night, someone asked Joe Paterno about it. “We should've just power-kicked it to the other side. He hurt us.” If you saw the game you know that lots of guys could have caught the pass that Mario caught, the one that won the game. But there’s not a soul on the earth I’d want returning that kick more than Steve.

The return was a microcosm of Steve’s entire being. Breathtaking - but only to an extent - then restrained, only to go to the opposite end of the atmosphere to preserve immortality just a little longer, and finally, when he's been run down and his fate is sprawled before him, one last, desperate thrust into the unknown to appease, sacrificing himself for a greater good. Mike Hart once said, “As long as we win, Steve could have zero catches, zero yards and eight fumbles, and he'd be happy. All Steve wants to do is win. That's why I love him so much.”

Braylon's strides were always absolutely perfect; he was a refined physical device almost obligated by the universe to conquer the wills of men. And Mario possesses instinctual abilities he's almost unaware of, like a cheetah that simply runs as fast as it needs to catch its prey. But Steve, he always holds the ball too loose in his right arm, his left arm flails a bit, long strides, body closer to the ground, full of expression; he runs as if he's conscious of the reasons that he's running, conscious of the impact of everything he does. It's a captivating fusion of the desire to satisfy an audience and the fear that he might not be able to. Monday was the last time I will ever see you, Stevie. But if you knew who I was, you’d never have had anything to be afraid of.

Roses

2007-01-01T00:56:00.001-08:00

We recognize this place, we cherish it, but mostly it haunts us.

The executioner.

The wiseman now forgotten.

The spurned hero lost in a new world.

The besieged emperor.

The transandentalist.

The prophet.

The cavalier.

The rogue assassin.

The stealth bandit.

BROTHERS IN ARMS

Is it better to have loved and lost than to have never loved at all?

There is nothing left to do but win.

PROJECT EFFICIENCY: Part 1, Offense

2006-12-31T11:25:00.001-08:00

OFFENSE
School	Total Posessions	Total Points	Points/Poss	P/Poss vs. >.500	TOP*	AOTDR*	TDR*
Michigan 2006 (12 G)	120	331	2.76	2.67	33:44	65.83	7
Michigan 2005 (12 G)	133	306	2.30	1.75	31:23	66.75	36
Southern Cal (12 G)	120	328	2.73	2.62	30:54	62.16	20
Florida (12 G)	122	285	2.34	2.14	30:24	46	10

AOTDR* = average Opponent Total Defense rank
TDR* = Total Defense rank
TOP* = Time of Possesion, per game
TPA*= Total Points Allowed

More shortly, but first - ALL HAIL THIS MAN?!?

Well, and the two archangels, of course.

THE COME BACK

2006-12-30T00:39:00.001-08:00

"Look at the last couple of years. USC and Michigan (2004 Rose Bowl), it was a huge game, and USC won, and look at where they were the next year. They were a top 10 team in the nation and went on to win a championship. “Look at Texas, they came in, and were a top 10 in the country the next year after that."

And he will return, Mike Hart, the man who subtly alludes to the notion that if Michigan beats Southern Cal it will win the National Championship the following season.

There are the hopelessly optimistic, the cautiously confident, the cocksure, the arrogant, and the brazen. And there are the purely lion-hearted, a strata in which Mike has most certainly resided his entire life. Were his vague declaration more vehement than that, one could consider it merely the pervading bitterness of a man victimized by the Napoleon Complex. But Mike knew exactly what he was saying in those sentences, and yet he didn’t speak frantically, as if he cared that the audience of journalists knew, or believed, what he was saying; this was the condition of the man, this was something he considered fact, this was a man who fought not as a defense mechanism, not to promote himself and his team – because for so long no one else had ever done it for him – but because he believed in no soul more than he did himself, and in this life he has never been afraid to.

It was President Ford that had given him the moniker “Little Mike,” and had told him so. It was Bo who used to tell him “You’re too small to play here.” Mike reminisces willingly about these vignettes; his size is not a curse, but rather an identity, something to be embraced. He’s not a small boy standing on his tiptoes so that a nation will notice him. “How can you be so short and still look down on so many people”; that’s not what he’s about. Because you realize whether he’s 5-8 or 5-9, or if he’s 5-7 and we’ve just been naïve, it doesn’t matter how tall he is. He is just much larger than us.

BlogPoll Awards: Part 2

2006-12-21T21:56:00.001-08:00

Info Here, Nominate Here (open to readers)

The Keith Jackson Circa 1995 Award

FOR: The blog with the most consistently expressive and excellent writing.

CRITERIA: Mechanical competency, yes, but the ability to turn a devastatingly funny phrase or write something compelling is probably more important. This isn't an award for copy editing; it's an award for kickin' prose.

- MGoBlog- On either Sunday or Monday during the season, before Brian is tempted to write with specific analytical objectives in mind, before writes with charts and numbers, before he writes with his head, he writes with his heart. A few creations of Brian’s come to mind who have not had their quality replicated anywhere else – the BlogPoll itself, the UFR template, Third Down Efficiency project, Recruiting Board – and yet it is constantly his writing, when he puts his hands on the keys and unleashes, that I am most humbled. After Michigan defeated Notre Dame:

“They are constant, something that has been more curse than blessing over the past few years, but now Michigan says: I am here. I have been here. I will be here. I have proven that much.”

And then there was “The New Math”, and “Eleven Swans,” and just about all of what Brian does.

- DawgSports- Blessed with an attorney’s diligence and a father’s warm heart, Kyle has a scholar’s grasp of history, and a reverence for it that makes him a great storyteller. His Lewis Grizzard tribute was part eulogy, part biography, and a lecture in southern culture. To me, Georgia has always just been a perfect place for .400 baseball players and a good brand of cola, but Kyle’s able to depict his home state and its idiosyncrasies as a mesmerizing foreign land.

- EDSBS- The Oscar winner who insists on doing standup instead. In some ways it’s frustrating to see Orson so consistently view things with a broader, nationwide scope, satisfying the demands of such a diverse readership, considering when it comes to his own team he puts forth things such as this, which are remarkable examples of his depth as a writer.

The Brady Quinn Award

FOR: The prettiest blog, the best layout and design.

CRITERIA: An aesthetic appeal, whether from a stylish banner, a pleasing layout, or an eye-catching incorporation of blog technology.

Bevo Sports- The consolidated “recent comments” gizmo on the side is perfect; the whole thing’s neat as hell, and allow me to be the nine thousandth person to say that using a football field as the background was a nice touch.

Rocky Top Talk- A full range of features and amenities; almost like the Maybach of blogs.

Men of the Scarlet and Gray- It’s almost impossible to say something looks elegant without sounding like a bitch, but there you go. I really like the simplicity of it.

Michigan Sports Center- Best banner going.

The New Blog on the Block Award

FOR: The best new college football blog.

CRITERIA: Must have launched sometime after last year's national championship game. Transitioning to a new blog or affiliating with a network mid-stream doesn't count.

Conquest Chronicles- Funny, and evidently not prone to those multi-day leaves of absence new bloggers seem prone to.

Black Shoe Diaries- Representative of the Penn State fan base in its devotion, but also coherent and logical, which isn’t.

Maize n Brew- Dave’s writing is often profound, often funny, always insightful; conveys all of the emotional investment a fan needs to make sports worthwhile.

The LOL, MSM Award

FOR: The blog best keeping tabs on the man and calling out all of the injustices in the college football world.

CRITERIA: Consistently ahead-of-the-curve on controversial issues in college football.

EDSBS, MGoBlog, Sunday Morning Quarterback, The Wizzard of Odds, Fire Mark May.

The Best Community Interaction Award

FOR: The blog with the best community interaction.

CRITERIA: A regular solicitation of input from readers and utilization of reader-produced content.

EDSBS, Bruins Nation, Burnt Orange Nation, MGoBlog

The Tyrone Prothro And His Amazing Catch Award

FOR: The finest individual post of the college football year.

CRITERIA: Best post for whatever reason.

Brian’s “Eleven Swans.” Probably fighting an unfair advantage in that it was written the day before the most anticipated football game of my life, hours after Bo died, but that’s kind of like saying Jordan had an unfair advantage because he got all the calls. Either way, the best.

The Chris Berman Antimatter Award

FOR: The best contribution to the lingo of our little interniche, be it a nickname, neologism, or catchy phrase used with frequency.

CRITERIA: Spread is important. The ideal candidate has been universally adopted by anyone with cause to use the term.

The Fulmer Cup, by EDSBS.

The Old Faithful Award

FOR: The best recurring feature of the year.

CRITERIA: The feature should be posted weekly and be generally good and stuff.

LD’s Gameday Recap on Gunslingers. I can’t remember the last time I’ve been up before 1:30 p.m. on a Saturday, unless of course Michigan was playing at noon (and in that case it’s still like 11:56 or something), which means that at this point, Gameday is all but a two-hour validation that my beloved sport is relevant enough to warrant a preview show. And yet over the past year and a half I haven’t missed one of LD’s recaps. Whether it’s critiquing the media biases through a distillation of each segment’s focus, the nature of the media itself through the tone of player features; examining the flaws in the manner the college football mosaic is depicted; or simply calling Lee Corso out for resembling a Neanderthal blowhard at times, LD is incredibly on point, in a fashion the Fire Joe Morgan boys could envy.

The That's Not Really Real Award

FOR: The best photoshop or other counterfeit gag of the year.

CRITERIA: Could be a photoshop, a Motivational Poster, an On Notice Board, or something similar, as long as it elicited more than a mere smile.

From EDSBS:

The You Talkin' To Me Award

FOR: The best back and forth between rival blogs the week before a rivalry game.

CRITERIA: Must be bi-directional, and both blogs must score points against each other. A unilateral beat-down will not suffice. Should be more in the spirit of fun than wildly abusive.

EDSBS and Warren St. John

The I'm Just Like You But I Have a Podcast Award

FOR: The best podcast or podcaster of the year.

CRITERIA: Uh, must be audio. And about college football, you know. Note that this is "podcast" in a really broad sense. Parody songs, incoherent ravings about Tyrone Willingham, and whatever else you've got are nominate-able. One restriction: it has to be self-generated.

Without question, Orson’s Michael Lewis interview (Part One, Part Two), which, when I think about it, was truly one of the most impressive pieces of the year, of any kind.

The I Wanna Talk About Me Free for All :My three favorite pieces were: Tony Boles, Steve Breaston, Why I write.

The Blogger Championship Series

ACC- Eagle in Atlanta

Big 10- MGoBlog

Big 12- Burnt Orange Nation

Big East- Blue Gray Sky

SEC- EDSBS

Pac 10- Bruins Nation

Non-BCS- Pitch Right

Generalist- Sunday Morning Quarterback

Best Blog

Really, this came down to a few that even stood a chance. There were five that came to mind: EDSBS, MGoBlog, SMQ, Burnt Orange Nation, and Dawg Sports. Blue Gray Sky and Bruins Nation were in the photo. Anyway, Brian’s my pick, which might be a bad idea, lest he get any motivation to go find a job that pays better.

BlogPoll Awards: Part 1

2006-12-20T21:48:00.001-08:00

Info Here. Nominate Here (open to readers).

The Dr. Z Award

FOR: Cogent, interesting analysis.

CRITERIA: Emphasis placed on statistical manipulation, well researched pieces that reveal something new, and/or solid argumentative pieces that function as the authoritative last word on a subject.

MGoBlog- It should be noted that had I not been sent a link to one of Brian’s Upon Further Review entries during the 2005 season, I probably would not have a blog. His Third Down Efficiency expedition could blow dandruff off a man’s scalp.

iBlog For Cookies- Vijay’s highlight recaps alone, which unfortunately seem to have slowly disappeared with the advent of YouTube, were one of the most satisfying recurring features to be found – used both as an analysis resource and means to savor the dying embers of Steve Breaston’s career. Admirable composure regardless of content or the oblivious Notre Dame douche bags that set Vijay out to prove them wrong in the first place.

Burnt Orange Nation- Under the Hood feature is as enviably thorough as anything you’d see in a media guide, and his weekly position reviews are written better than much of what I see in print journalism. Peter saw the Brantley de-commit miles before any of us, which was simply the most recent example of his perceptiveness.

Blue Gray Sky- Scholars of the game, eternally loyal, and fans of all that math and science stuff their school’s Catholic overlords shake fingers at; worth the hype their painfully overrated football team isn’t.

Sunday Morning Quarterback- If as much time was taken collecting praise from various internets as is evidently put into daily entries, the testimonial sidebar has all the potential to read like an Ayn Rand chapter.

The Trev Alberts Quits To Do Construction Award

FOR: comic relief; overall hilarity.

CRITERIA: The funniest college football blog.

Every Day Should Be Saturday: In response to Bill Simmons’ live blog of last year’s Rose Bowl:

We (care about it), Bill. It doesn’t make sense, but neither does caring about the NBA or watching 90210. It’s the vestiges of something called “being regional,” which you may understand if we put it this way–it’s paying attention to events occurring outside of the Boston metropolitan area and watching a few new shows, reading a few new books, and dropping the horrifically clumsy hip-hop references thrown in to ward off the creaking obsolescence of your writing, even though you live in L.A. now and should be picking up some new material.

Here’s a comb, Bill – you just got your mother fucking wig rocked.

Tressel’s World- Just about as baffling as anything you’ll ever read, but impossible to omit when its produced things like “I’ll knock freckles off Lindsay Lohan’s tits.” A passage from the inaugural post:

The other day I was at Cost-Co with the misses, we had to find a new remote because, her dog, Waffles, chewed the fuck out of it. I hate that dog, Man, what I wouldn't give for a sack of bricks and a bridge. So yeah, I'm looking for a new remote control for the TV, and I buy one, but have you ever tried to tried program one of those muther fuckers. I'll tell you, it's like Chinese Algebra, I was so stressed by the time I was done, I had to go pop a few beebees into my neighbors retarded kid. It's cool with him, cause I hook him up with free tickets.

The site description, which reads “I'm not all football. I got things to say. I write poetry about things, alot of things that aren't about football. This site is about those things,” perfectly represents the irony of Tressel’s persona: Tressel’s a guy who, with endless ambiguities and the wardrobe of a Social Studies teacher, paints himself as a character so simple and harmless he’s actually corny, yet in all actuality he’s the malevolent mastermind of one of the dirtiest programs in college athletics. The description of the blog satisfies similar objectives, albeit satirically.

Fire Mark May- Frequently drops bombs on ESPN, which is usually a recipe for success; “Jim Rome is constantly on left coast time. He is still really into Pogs.” I’m sure one on a career path similar to mine would benefit more from reading things like FMM, but the core curriculum for most English departments mandates we discuss how Kate Chopin’s writing was influenced by the fact that she clearly didn’t get fucked enough instead. A travesty.

Hey Jenny Slater- An excellent writer with a firm grip on popular culture, often evident when his football posts evolve into political and social critiques – as seen here.

The Sports Fans Don't Cry Award

FOR: The blog that has suffered through its chosen team's dismal season with the most dignity.

CRITERIA: Continued engagement in the face of crippling, misery-inducing defeat. A stiff-upper lip and sane reaction to everything crumbling to dust.

Bruins Nation- One of the most vindicating moments of the 2006 season was witnessing UCLA defeat Southern Cal, and watching the celebration commence on Nestor’s blog in the ensuing days. There is not a YouTube highlight in existence from that game that has not been published over there – and I have no basis for that but there’s at least a 90% chance that I’m right. Karl Dorrell spent the season with a tormented look on his face that made his inner anguish incredibly evident; it wasn’t just because he knew thousands didn’t like him, but as if he was slowly starting to dislike himself as well. And when UCLA had actually won, Dorrell’s soul mended – if only until the next game – Bruins Nation forgave him. Or rather, they were willing to ignore the past, because in this painful game we worship, the present always has the possibility for redemption. It’s in a fan’s true nature to forgive, to want to forgive, and watching them find solace in one game despite 11 others brought me great joy. Without a doubt the best a team other than Michigan has ever made me feel.

Ian at the FanHouse, Orange 44, The Bemusement Park

Requiem

2006-11-26T19:49:00.002-08:00

His face was a heap of creased cardboard, pale and lifeless; his voice wavering and troubled, like he was calling from a phone booth in the middle of a rainstorm. Lloyd breathed into the microphone with brisk exhales, as if his mouth was too close to it and he didn’t really give a shit that it was. It was like he’d never done it before; he was in a different place that night. I saw the video recording hours after it happened, long after the rest of my family had gone to sleep. But Bo was dead and Michigan had lost a football game, and the coach we’ve all turned to for answers had no one to turn to himself. I guess you could say I was in a different place that night, too.

Most of his press conference wasn’t much of a press conference at all. It was as if Lloyd was leaving one last message on Bo’s answering machine. And in knowing Bo would never hear it, and the futile hope that if he pleaded Bo would be able to, Lloyd spoke faster and with less control. You could tell it hurt him too much to swallow, so he talked as if he could escape the pain, rambling and never swallowing. It was as if once he stopped, he knew he’d have to hang up the phone forever.

With the Friday he had, you could say that November 18th, 2006 was one of the worst days of Lloyd Carr’s life and no one would call you a liar. But in some strange way, this kind of mess is everything we asked for. Not the score, or the way it happened, but this was the cruel, ruthless, steel-eyed nature of sports; we build our lives around this – willingly. And in our perpetual quest for redemption – for Bo; for the last Michigan team that lost to Ohio State, and the one before that, and all the others – we walked up to its face undaunted by our potential fate. We risk new pain for the thought that we can erase the old; that’s how this works. And when your year has been pulverized and you’re only left to wonder, it seems like such a foolish waste.

It was an unfortunate game in that there was nothing to blame the loss on but those who we’ve excused for failure the entire season. There were bad calls, but none that hurt Michigan. There were turnovers, but none that Michigan committed. In the end, Michigan was simply beaten by a team I had convinced myself didn’t exist – a better one. And I was reminded of something Keith Jackson once said, after Kordell Stewart completed a fairly significant touchdown pass to Michael Westbrook with zero seconds left in the game. He said, “There are no flags on the field. Only despair for the Maize and Blue.” That was just it – Ty Law was helpless on that day; just as I was helpless eleven days ago, just as Leon Hall was, and Lloyd Carr, too, bewildered, exhausted, answering someone’s questions.

I’ve heard that Ohio journalists call Troy Smith “Robo-Troy” when he’s behind a microphone; he’s programmed to exude almost no emotion. He’s known only as he is with a jersey on. He’s the nemesis that slays his enemies as a routine, and then licks the blood from his sword. But Mike Hart, he’ the knight in peasant’s clothing who never seems comfortable at the roundtable. He resents the super strata of football players he’s begrudgingly a part of, because that’s not really who he is. The robotic Goliath of the football world and the little kid that won’t let anyone push him around. And yet fate lets the robot become the hero. It wasn't the way these stories were supposed to end.

But these sports inflict pain with no remorse. The nightmares don’t always give way to a gentler reality, because sometimes the nightmares are reality. Michigan should have won 24-12. Bo’s death should have been one of the most honorable acts of martyrdom of our time and not just a somber coincidence. Steve shouldn't still have a haunted soul. LaMarr’s eyes shouldn’t still be so tormented. Prescott shouldn’t have to exemplify only the agonizing portion of the human experience. Mike shouldn’t have to fight for a second chance when he’s spent a lifetime fighting to be given a first chance. Michigan had a thousand reasons why it deserved to get what it wanted, and yet it didn’t; Lloyd didn’t. Those guys would all be forgotten, fighting to be remembered. And so I cried, because when you realize history has been made at your expense, you can only root for the headlines to be kind.

A few days before the game, Bo was talking about Lloyd. You could tell that he liked talking about him, liked defending him. “He's done a marvelous job. Here we are 11-0. Our team from this year to last year is night and day.” Bo had protected Lloyd until everyone had forgiven him, and then he decided to let Lloyd handle things by himself. A few days later they were 11-1, and in perhaps the most fortunate moment of Michigan’s season, no one forced Lloyd to stand during his press conference.

The Tie

2006-11-17T19:00:00.001-08:00

Jim Tressel showed up for his Monday press conference as a sly mafioso of sorts, his glasses perched midway down his nose, his jacket crisp, his red tie shining in the spotlights – an ironic (a devil hidden beneath a Biff Loman’s clothing) and yet all too inevitable wardrobe. “We’ve got to be spotless,” he said. “But that’s not a concern; that’s just something you always know. I don’t think there’s anything that concerns me about this game.” Of course, he made sure to tell us that it wasn’t a concern; that Ohio State had no flaws, so Michigan might as well not bother looking for them. He looked professional, he looked prepared; he was detestable, for the very fact that he was, as he always is when a camera is on, the flawlessly arranged alter-ego of the devious Jim Tressel we know exists.

Lloyd was flustered and disoriented, his shoulders hunched to the right; the bags under his eyes only slightly concealed by his glasses (nowhere near as debonairly positioned as Tressel’s); and he was wearing the kind of tie you might pull out of the bottom of a closet to wear to your younger brother’s communion. He rocked back and forth, as he always does, as if his Monday press conference was merely a stop on the way to Barnes & Noble. “It’s not a game of perfect; there’s going to be some mistakes,” Lloyd said. “You just have to keep playing, play from the whistle… to the time the ball snaps to the time the whistle blows…to the, uh, time the clock reads zero.” It was vintage Lloyd; a bouquet of sports clichés (none of which making much sense at all) and a somewhat endearing carelessness – as if he was so disinterested in the whole process that it must have been on purpose, part of some premeditated display of self deprecation to lull the opponents into a false sense of security.

The point in all this is that making sense, that doing things the way you’re supposed to, isn’t the only way to win 11 games and lose zero. There was Tressel, a whore to the media, postured perfectly with all the right answers, and maddeningly polite. And there Lloyd was, confused (and never really giving a shit that he was), bored, grouchy, and shortly after his conference had concluded, chewing the face off of some poor interviewer for (reportedly) asking him how close he came to retiring last year. How strange that two men so completely different stand before each other today, the Day of days, identical in the only place that matters?

So if you're curious what I think will happen today, don't bother. I could tell you that Mike Hart’s never let any of us down; that when he sways side to side in the huddle, as if the play Chad was calling was some voice coming from a jukebox in a rundown diner, I’ve never felt more at ease.

I could tell you that bamboo shoots are no match for elephants and rhinos, and offensive guards are no match for Alan Branch.

I could tell you that the seniors on Michigan’s defense who’ve never beaten Ohio State in their prime will stomp the piss out of the glamour boys on Ohio State’s offense.

I could tell you that, goddam it, if Bo was so worried about them he would have stuck around for another day.

I could tell you that English has inspired barbarians like William Wallace while DeBord has crafted strategies like Cornwallis.

I could tell you that when they tell tales of vengeance with karmic conclusions, they do it with Steve Breaston in mind.

I could tell you that while Braylon was always the vile of water from the Styx River, Mario is the scotch that hits you bluntly and sits in your stomach, until you can do nothing but sit motionless on the sofa, letting him do his work.

I could tell you that at some point all these tears have to be wept for different reasons; “ ‘I’ve never in all my years played against a team like that one,” said Troy Smith after the loss’ ” reasons.

But what matters is that Michigan has had every reason to not go 11-0 this year, and yet they have. And I’m not one to bet against a man who doesn’t mind looking foolish in a bad tie; that much I will tell you.

Marvel

2006-11-13T15:57:00.000-08:00

And so they find themselves with everything to play for and nothing to lose, on borrowed time, with house money, in God’s hands – rugged riders on a trite voyage so familiar to us all: hopes gone long ago, souls worn to dust through a half-decade of ridicule and scattered in Autumn’s afternoon gusts by the collective, jaded, sigh of a loyalist nation, only so it could all to be captured after everyone swore it couldn’t be. After we’d given up; “Michigan’s not the same Michigan anymore,” after we’d accepted that. But here they are, the first guys you’d want to be there for you, in the last place you thought they’d be. Somewhere, years from now, I may wake from sleep as a brunette’s blue eyes take the air from my lungs; I may lay shirtless on warm beaches and watch fuchsia sunsets with foreign booze on my lips; I may leave footprints in Mars’ red dirt, but give me a Michigan win on Saturday and you can save your inquiries as to which moment I’ll favor.

I’m done caging my optimism. I’m done suppressing my hopes. This is the team I’ve waited for since 1997, when I was just a naive adolescent unfamiliar with the idea that championships don’t happen every year. In high school I used to create flaws in the girls that were too pretty for me; that way it was easier to convince myself I never wanted them in the first place. Well this is sort of the same thing, only I’m with the girl, and she doesn’t have any flaws. I suppose there aren’t any playmakers among the safeties, and DeBord does seem overly reliant on Mario and Mike, but that’s sort of like saying this girl of ours isn’t perfect because her cuticles are fraying.

One year ago – September it was – we listened to Lloyd, with whatever might the old man had left, try to distract us from the simple fact that another season had come and vanished before we had any chance, any reason to give a shit. “We lost a game, but we found a defense,” he said after Michigan had lost to Notre Dame. He lied to us; it was the season that was lost, not just a game. Months later, we realized Lloyd probably knew it back in September, too. But those days have passed, and were it not for how efficiently underwhelming most of the last decade has been there would be no hesitancy in falling for this team. Somewhere halfway through Wisconsin two forces met: the temptation to believe in this team - this dominant, satisfying team - and the memory of last year’s scorn. Weeks have passed since then; Michigan has not lost a single game this season. So the only question left to be answered, then, is when you realized this was a team worth remembering.

You can almost picture football players as emotionless characters, perspiring between the columns of a pantheon, catching lightning bolts between their teeth and tying them in knots with their tongues – immortals that just live in a mortal man’s world for three hours at a time. Football has always been a cold game; violently physical yet mostly devoid of intimacy. They’re the kind of people that fight for you but never really represent you; hired hands to take care of matters none of us are capable of. But this Michigan team is different than that; it’s a compilation of the kind of people we know, people we like for more reasons than just because they play for our team.

There’s a 5-8 running back who sat in a barbershop chair four years ago declaring to anyone who would listen – no doubt with a vehemence that mandated the barber stop cutting altogether and wait for Mike to finish what he was saying – he’d be starting at Michigan by his fourth game. There’s a secondary that plays chess in its spare time, its victors proud to win even such a quintessentially intellectual game; a quarterback that mumbles and sweats on the podium every now and then, perhaps as daunted by where he’s taken his team as we all know we would be. There’s the star wide receiver that has nothing resembling a post-game persona. It wasn’t until he almost single handedly outscored Notre Dame that the media could do nothing but drag him to the podium and ask him what the hell he just did. When someone asked him how he kept such a low profile on campus, Mario replied, with an unconvincing smile, “I wear a hat." One defensive end used to wake up in the middle of the night just to help his injured roommate walk to the bathroom; the other has a tattoo of Woody Woodpecker on his left bicep.

Two linebackers have mohawks; one of which supposedly lost his girlfriend to Maurice Clarett; the third was a one-star recruit from Grand Rapids, currently the best linebacker in the country, who so nervously shrugs his shoulders during post game interviews you’d think he never heard a reassuring word in his life.

And then there’s Steve Breaston, the wide receiver who never says much and always says it softly; once quick enough to catch falling raindrops between his fingertips, now an underappreciated talent vilified by the ignorant; engulfed by his own shadow, the one cast by an epic freshman season when there was quite possibly no one in the country as good as he was. Who cares that Steve has 31 combined touchdowns and first downs this year, while Ted Ginn has only 28? He’s just a day-dreamer who writes poetry and collected comic books growing up; he wants to be a teacher after college, because, as his brother says, he gets along well with kids. He’s a goofball who happens to have some of the rarest football talents of all, and it’s impossible to read anything about him or listen to anything he says without feeling like he often wonders if he’d be better off without football. I’ll never forget after Mario had caught The Touchdown last year against Penn State, on a play that Chad said was designed for Breaston. Mario got the glory, but Steve didn’t care; he was the first one chasing Mario once the game was over.

Steve caught his first touchdown pass of the year Saturday, it was on a deep route he’s never really been very good at. But as he caught it his body almost slowed to a walk; the ball held carelessly in his right hand. He jogged to the end zone as if something had been lifted from his conscience. I watched the replay again today, and I couldn’t help but think everyone else that saw it felt the same thing. It gave me goose bumps, like listening to a concert audience chant the chorus to a song in unison.

“Sometimes I sit back and think I’m someone else when I write, not a student-athlete but just a normal person," he said. “What would he be going through? I think about what is going on back home.” And then things happen, like when Kirk Herbstreit calls Steve a worthless player, only to have Steve sit silent and motionless when the reporters asked him about it days later, moments after Steve had proved Kirk wrong by scoring two touchdowns. “I've heard far worse in my life,” Steve said, when pressed in a follow-up question. “I'm not mad about it. I'm not. Because I know what kind of player I am and what I contribute to this team. I don't need that as my motivation.” Maybe it’s because when you find a player who seems to care so little about himself that you’re inclined to compensate for him and care a little extra, but I’ve never identified with anyone – not Braylon, not even Charles – never wanted to identify with anyone, the way I have Steve.

History has shown us that Ohio State defines these players. There was Charles, beckoning an anonymous cameraman to follow him – where, no one was quite sure, but with Charles, you knew that it was somewhere special – after intercepting Stanley Jackson’s pass in the back of the endzone. And there was Braylon, standing in a sea of worshipers with a single red rose clenched in his mouth – not gently, as if with any regard for thorns that may have existed, but deliberately, possessively, because it was his rose, dammit. And after all, isn’t beating Ohio State about enduring pain for the sake of tasting sweet triumphs anyway?

I think Steve’s endured enough for a few moments of his own on Saturday.

Saints and Sinners

2006-11-11T16:54:00.000-08:00

stop your sobbing

2006-11-06T17:32:00.000-08:00

Standing at the podium afterward, LaMarr was asked “Did this feel at all like last year, with losing the lead at the end?” And involuntarily his puffy eyes – no doubt dried and bloodshot from the anguish we want each of our idols to feel when something goes wrong – glared down at him, as if appalled that a flawless season, cobbled together only with the team’s own unflinching confidence and the sullen loyalists’ rectified optimism, could be reduced to “last year”, when Michigan slowly amputated all that we love about this game with a dull razor blade and a sheet of sandpaper. Then in an instant the notion that this team had earned immunity was scorched to ash by the flames that had inspired them to win 10 games in the first place.

Had he grumbled something close to “no,” the entourage of adoring journalists before him would have lauded the defense just the same a day later – his defense had earned it, of course, and coaches will always be vilified before the players; he was innocent if he wanted to be. But in a brief moment of introspection, LaMarr realized that sitting in the shadows only made the Truth more lethal later on; like, perhaps, November 18^th, when there’s never anywhere left to hide. “A little bit…A little bit,” he said, with each syllable cleansing his team of last season’s sins – the courage to be honest brings progress. Last year he saw that his team had become the same one every Michigan team since ‘97 thought they had a right to be. Memories of the mythical Charles Woodson were smeared across Michigan’s legacy like lingering cave paintings of an indomitable prehistoric tribe, immortalized by a transcendent king.

Michigan has always had a reputation of vast significance, leaned on like an oak walking stick; leaned on for so long it rotted into a splinter and gorged the hand of this program, only to go untended and finally become infected somewhere in downtown San Antonio late last December. No more than a second and a half passed between the reporter’s question and LaMarr’s answer, but he had to be thinking about that. Or maybe, in the most satisfying solution of all, he had already been thinking about it; for hours, for weeks, for months – because deep down, our greatest fear is that the athletes we root for do not care about the game as much as we do. I’ve seen this team play, I’ve seen it win, and I can’t say I feel like it’d lie to me.

For four three years LaMarr played for a Michigan team that never brought him anywhere but just short of where he wanted to be – a championship; the elite; the only place we’d ever settle for. And so LaMarr spoke not like a man who was content surviving in spite of Michigan’s errors, but one that would be motivated to change because of them. Michigan is 10-0 now – peculiar to see, but Michigan has been playing every Saturday since September 2^nd and they have not lost a single game – and LaMarr’s left with just three more games. No, not in the sense that he needs to savor them, but that he has just three more games he needs to win. “But, you know,” he said gratefully. “Last year we lost the game…this year we won.”

And I’ll be damned if I let anything but those last four words change how I feel about this team. I live an ordinary life; I have simple pleasures. I like girls in my bed, milk with my cookies, and Michigan to win every single game it plays. It’s a bit of a shame to say that my life revolves around four months a year, the anticipation before them, and the mourning after them, but I couldn’t tell a lie so blatant as to say Michigan’s football team isn’t what really makes an ordinary guy want to wake up in the morning. I’ve read the words of hundreds who can find nothing but trifling flaws in this team – “disaster looms,” they say. And then Michigan wins another game. There’s no harm in objectivity, but by now what good does pessimism do? At a certain point you just stop worrying about the meteor in the sky, sit quietly, and hope you’re still alive after it crashes into the earth. It seems to me as if the pessimists keep waiting for this team to be exposed, almost angry that it hasn’t happened – because it will happen, they think, and the longer it takes, the more their desire swells to fucking believe in it. I’ve spent years waiting for a team that could continually inspire faith week after week, a team that could stand in front of the same podium so many failed heroes have stood in front of, and convince me that a winning is all I had to fucking care about – the hows and whys were unimportant, and they’d make sure they remained so. I guess I stopped waiting two months ago; I was positive I had it at Notre Dame.

On the shoulders of small men

2006-10-07T23:56:00.000-07:00

"Mike Hart is going to lead you," Carr added. "At least that's what he's done since he's been here."

He had 22 carries and rushed for at least 5 yards on nine of them. Michigan had 20 first downs; Mike Hart had nine of them. Six of his 13 carries on first down either went for first downs or put Michigan in second and less than 5. Basically, 50% of the time Mike touched the ball on first down he either gave Michigan a new set of downs or put them in second and short. You should realize that Mike also has the most carries in America. He said his left ankle’s fine, and he said it candidly, with an eagerness that implied he wasn’t hiding anything. But he is human, no matter how close he comes to proving otherwise. Chad and his marauding triumvirate will breathe fear onto the necks of any secondary in the land, but it’s Mike whose six-yard jabs can patiently bleed confidence from an entire defense. Without a passing game, Michigan loses a dimension. Without Mike, Michigan loses an offense. Michigan is perfect through a half-season for the first time in nine years, and yet in an instant, a limp to the sideline and an ace bandage made us forget all of that. For right now, that’s far more daunting than a secondary that lets us down too often.

"Being adrift in a meaningless universe"

2006-06-20T00:29:00.000-07:00

When I was eight-years-old I played shortstop on my little league team, even caught the final out in the championship game off a kid who years later would have more sex with prettier girls than I would. My coach at the time owned a roofing company; he was the kind of guy who wore short sleeve polo shirts with no t-shirt underneath and a gold chain that hung down to wear his chest hair started. He wore sunglasses and sometimes a windbreaker when it got cold, and he had too much money to care that it probably wasn’t the right attire for a guy who was built like a U-Haul. He’d give these demonstrative handshakes; your fingers would just vanish into a ball of calluses and knuckles, and you'd lurch forward a little bit, always as if by surprise - like the last dollar bill in your wallet getting sucked into a soda machine. But you’d get your hand back, and when you did you felt sort of like a real baseball player, like you actually deserved a handshake for fitting half a pack of Big League Chew in your mouth at once. I remember he came running at me after I caught that last out, slammed his two cupped palms on my shoulders like a harness for one of those roller coasters I always worried I wouldn’t be tall enough to ride. And he looked at me, leaning over enough so that I’d know to listen properly, and he said, “You take this ball and you keep it.” And the “forever” was implied. I still have the baseball, and the eight-inch Mizzuno is the one I used to catch it.

We wore red jerseys then – the default-red they give you in little league, like the way a blob of ketchup looks on a white paper plate – and I made sure to get number 8 (since that was Albert Belle’s number, and in 1995 I was naiive enough to figure the game of baseball was lucky to have him.) I didn’t exactly see professional sports as a legitimate career path, but as an eight-year-old you never rule it out. When you’re that young, guys as good as Albert are always destinations, someone you can become, just further along than you are. Eventually that changes. They’ll always be icons to you, of course, but at a certain point you stop trying to follow them and learn to just pin all your emotions to them instead – like I do the 12 Saturdays a year Michigan plays.

I scored 16 points in an intramural basketball game in the fifth grade; ran for a seven-yard touchdown as the backup quarterback for my Pop Warner team; and once, when my brother was catcher, I struck out 10 batters and only walked one in a fall-league playoff game. In warm-ups before my next start the assistant coach had me do some kind of special arm stretches, like I was this big-shot who had any idea how to pitch to begin with. My start went the way you might expect, with me throwing enough wild pitches that my brother yelled at me from behind the plate the way we always have at the dinner table. A week or so later the playoffs ended. That was the last team I was ever on.

I’d hate to think the reason I write about sports is because I was never very good at playing them, but unfortunately it’s probably at least partly true. When you can’t play anymore you reach for anything you can, even when there’s never much to grab. So in high school my sophomore English teacher gave me an A for my paper on A Catcher in the Rye and I decided writing about sports was what I had to do instead. It was like getting dumped by your girlfriend, only convincing yourself the two of you can remain friends. Years later, nothing’s changed. The love’s still there (because it never disappears from your first); maybe it’s just aged with time. It sits on a dusty book shelf now - that ball I caught years ago and all the hope that went with it. But now it's just a memory, like the old bottle of her perfume you never got rid of. With all those drops no less potent than they were on your shirt collars.

I think the saying goes “a face made for radio”, but in my time writing at the newspaper, I’ve realized that the ugliness that’s supposed to capture exists more among low-level journalists than anythwhere else. The kind of guy driving his Hyundai with 200 thousand miles on it, drinking discount coffee from gas stations where the ATMs never work, and getting no closer to pussy than a 900 number will take him. I’d fit an alligator for a retainer before I traded my nights at the paper and the hours at the bar after, but I meet people like that. It’s a harrowing thought by itself, magnified for sports journalists because of all the athletic valiance they once envisioned for themselves; how quickly it left them and how concrete the fact is that they’ll never experience it again.

It seems like such a soul-slaying concept: monitoring a bunch of guys you wish you could trade places with and turning it into something people want to read about – we’re the king’s butlers, really, never far from a glimpse of the world so much more enchanting than our own. It’s a job, but the thrill comes from nestling into the orbit of their world. The sidelines are the best we’ve got.

I write for synergy, my passion linked to the players’ through literature. But as a writer I'm nothing without being able to explain someone else’s emotions to them. With that there’s a sense of obligation, but also the knowledge of how much I'm responsible for. Perhaps it’s because me and the people who watch on television are so similar: if they were any better they’d be playing themselves, creating memories instead of savoring those created by the guys they watch on television. Instead they scream when I do and much louder than they should. Sometimes you don’t know why it happens (I still don’t know exactly why the Penn State game meant as much to me as it did) but it does anyway. It’s like taking all that incoherence and numbness that accompanies every dream and meshing it perfectly with reality for the person who dreamt it. They’ll just sit there, close their eyes and listen to you explain everything that happened to them. And they’ll feel exactly the way they did when they were asleep. How amazing it’d be to help people remember their dreams.

A few weeks ago I sat down with the USBA Welterweight Champion three days after he’d taken the title in El Paso, Texas. We talked for 30 minutes – some about his fight, some about his career, and some about his girlfriend. And when I left from the basement of his community gym and walked to my car through the sticky spring rain, I felt like my life had improved over the previous half-hour. His name was Delvin Rodriguez, a 26-year-old theologian from the Dominican Republic who also happened to box for a living. He moved to my home town as a young boy; he became a boxer and never had to stop boxing because he wasn’t good enough. When he was little he never had the money to buy new sneakers, when he got to middle school he protected all the pretty little girls; and when he met the man I will always know as “the professor”, he turned into the Welterweight Champion with an artist’s hands and a butchers' fists.

I asked Delvin how much different he would have turned out if he hadn’t dealt with such a struggle when he was younger. He told me, “If you’re given everything you want when you’re a child, you’ll never learn to appreciate things, how to work for yourself. If you take a little bird when it’s born and you keep it with you in your home, you just can’t hope for that bird to grow up and go out into the world. It won’t survive.”

He was talking about himself, but he was thinking about everyone - how all the baby birds learn to survive. I’ve covered more girl’s basketball games than I’d want to in 10 lifetimes (which is to say, I’ve covered more than zero) and yet when I hear things like that, I can’t help but think the world envies me. His trainer Lou Fusco – The Professor – told me over the phone “I’m more proud of the things I’ve taught him about being a man than being a boxer. His father isn’t here, so it was time to take him across the bridge from a kid to a man. I know that it’s a lot better when you have a man walk across with you.” Lou’s father used to take him to the fights when he was a kid, and he’s essentially been watching boxers and telling them what he thinks ever since. In a way, his life hasn’t changed since he was an eight-year-old. Lucky him.

“Boxing is more a disease than a sport,” he said. “Fortunately Delvin has the wherewithal to do it. Lots of kids come through my gyms and I have to say ‘look son, get a job, this isn’t for you.’ You have to have passion, ability; you can’t make it by yourself.”

I never worried about the part of me that loved sports decaying – It’d take an ocean of acid and all the wrath of an Armageddon just to dent that part. I worried about finding a way to replace the feeling I used to get striking out 10 batters with my brother calling signs even though I couldn’t harness my curveball if I tried; the kind of thing that makes the hairs on your arm stand up like they were running from a flame.

One of the greatest moments of my life was when my brother and I were playing a pickup football game against a few punks from the school team. They were having a bad year, so they thought they’d compensate by beating us instead. My brother – an Ohio State fan, who rooted for Michigan with me against Penn State – was playing quarterback. I was receiver. No one had plays designed (not even him and I), you just sort of went to the line and got open. He looked at me before the snap; put the ball up to his mouth, whispered “Manningham.” We had never discussed plays before, not even once, but I didn’t need him to clarify. I ran the same pattern Mario did against Penn State, the one that brought tears to my eyes and saved - even if for just that one night - everything I wanted Michigan's season to be. I caught the pass, just like Mario did. Me and my brother, for the second time.

I write about sports because somewhere inside me I remember exactly what things like that felt like. And they just felt so damn good I can’t stop looking for them. I don’t feel like I’m settling anymore – writing about sports instead of playing them. I just know to look for the feeling in different places now. I still get the flames on my arms; these days I tend to feel them when I’m walking through the rain.

Days go by too slowly, and the years go by too fast

2006-05-24T01:25:00.000-07:00

The mitt was an 8-inch Mizzuno; once brown but bleached yellow by more summer suns than it should have – when I should have found a bigger one but didn’t have the hands to break in another pocket. It was an infielder’s mitt, I was told. And for the first year I used it I played as good a shortstop as any eight-year-old I’ve seen since then. It didn’t have as much padding as the kind I see these days, just the tar stain on the heel from fielding balls in the street too soon after it was paved. I guess I was about my little brother’s age when that happened. When you’re in single digits, baseball comes even before the Good Humor bells. Tar might as well have been hot lava.

But on this day, the mitt wasn’t mine anymore. It was my little brother’s; I’d retired it and he’d made it his, all eight inches perfectly creased the way an eight-year-old would like it. And he did like it. He didn’t use his own mitts for a while, all the new ones my mother had bought for him. All of that shiny leather never felt right, I guess. He was letting me use it, you see. I once asked my father to autograph Albert Belle’s name in the palm, and if I looked long enough and lied a little bit to myself I could still see it. Where it used to be. Albert Belle shouldn’t have been my favorite player; he never did anything to deserve it besides make lots of people angry and hit home runs with a batting stance I could mimic to perfection. But I liked him, and my dad wrote the name in my mitt. Years after, I found out what Albert’s real signature looked like. Round, lazy, juvenile. The one my dad wrote looked nothing like it. He did it the same way he did his own, just with different letters. I see things like that when I look at my old mitt.

That day using the Mizzuno I was in the front yard of my mom’s house. I’m throwing Wiffleballs to my little brother. There were probably a few ghost runners on; it always seems like there are a few ghost runners on with him. But then I start my wind up, and he gets up on his tip-toes like there was a fire running under his heels; bending his arms all over the place like he was an origami project. Said he’d seen a ballplayer posing in the batters box like that on television. So I got to thinking about all the players I wished I’d seen.

Like Mantle, how he learned to trot when he couldn’t run anymore. How I always thought I’d like him better that way. Ted Williams rubbing the wooden handle like a blind man reading brail. How he’d probably hit at least .280 even if he was. How Rose always finished his triples like he should have had a cape blowing behind him. How Mays turned the centerfield prairie of the polo grounds into a putting green. How they’d say the same in the Bronx about DiMaggio, who always looked like he combed his hair between innings. Aaron always grinning; Brock always moving, and how much my father loved him. And Koufax with a face straight as rail road tracks, throwing that curveball past batters like they were swinging 30 inches of dental floss. Juan Marichal with a leg kick like he was asking the clouds to shine his cleats. How the baseball cards back then were about as thick as the tops of pizza boxes, and how the players on them always made kids like me feel like we were missing out on something.

I like the way Jim Brown looks on videotape, running through a secondary like one of those kids in Pop Warner who always end up getting moved up a division the next week. And maybe I wish I’d appreciated Barry Sanders stoic brilliance a little more. But when I miss the things I’ve never even seen I’m usually missing a baseball player. I don’t blame that on When It Was A Game, or the stuff Ken Burns made, or Bums, or playing Strat-o-Matic baseball with my brother, or my love for baseball caps, or centerfield being one of the few things I’ve ever felt good at. I don't even blame it on the last 3 minutes of Field of Dreams, or the way my dad winked at me when we saw those three on a television in the Baseball Hall of Fame. Those are nice things, some of them perfect things. But I’ve never known football to be as tragic as baseball. And tragedy has a way of sticking with you. I guess I never held onto all of that NFL Films-Steve-Sabol-Montana-In-Slow-Motion stuff because I never felt I was one of those guys. Football players were bigger than me, stronger than me, cooler than me; too many girls wearing their varsity jackets. And when they departed from the sidelines and shoulder pads it always seemed natural, it was all part of the way the game went. Their faces always hidden, even; cold and muddy. But baseball, well, that was just an extension of playing catch. And catch was something I did.

Baseball players leave and you lose something that felt a part of you. I never saw any of those players I’d wished I’d seen – not before they became famous for being famously good at baseball, that is. But I knew enough about them to know they disappeared. From from Vin Scully’s voice, from AM radio. From someone’s heart. They disappeared from something, I just wanted to experience exactly what it was. I was pretty sure I knew all the good stuff that there was to remember, but I just wanted the reason to. Baseball makes me feel like that.

I don’t know a lot about Michigan football - nothing before Charles Woodson, at least. I remember things happening after the time when I’d declared my love, and all the people that asked me what I thought of them. But that was all. “Can you believe what that Westbrook kid from Colorado did to you?” I can remember hearing that a few times. Something happened that I wasn’t supposed to like – and if Michigan lost, I’m sure I didn’t – but I’m pretty sure all sports passions are acquired gradually. Maybe not gradually (I cried when T.J. Duckett caught that pass, after all), but at least not all at once.

What I mean, though, is that I can’t entirely remember a desire to feel for the Michigan players I never saw. Not tsame way I feel for these Michigan players. The ones I’ve cried for. I’ve seen Kordell Stewart throw that Hail Mary enough times to know that hoping it goes incomplete never works, but watching it is more a rite of passage. I know it happened, I know somewhere, to some kid, that it was his Dusty Mangum field goal.

But a few weeks ago I saw something about a player named Tony Boles. He was one of those tragic kinds of players. He was from Michigan. I watched the small bit of video I could find; I read the words people had written. And for the first time I wished I’d actually seen him before he was famous for being famously good at football. That picture up top is the only picture I could find of him, just something from an old team photo so blurred that all the emotion has vanished.

I searched for more time than I realized, in places where I expected no pictures to exist, in image databases and game recaps. But that was all there was, just that from a career that was supposed to be so much more than it turned out to be. I found a football jersey someone claims he wore; they were selling it for a penny less than a thousand dollars. And for a brief moment – not as brief as it should have been – I tried to justify ever spending that much. Because this was Tony Boles, the man I never got to see.

I watched his video again today, and I tried not to picture the man he’s become. How badly he failed, where the drugs have taken him and how far he is from where Tony Boles – # 42 – should be. That video is the way you want to know him. Just like the story your grandpa told you of the freckled girl who worked at the soda shop near the beach; the one with green eyes and brown hair, pretty legs and a short skirt. It’s always best to just look at the old pictures of her he has in a shoebox than to visit the old lady she is now. Everyone always tells me how much I need to get out of the past, how crippling and worthless it can be. But I've realized that sometimes the past is the best place to stay. I miss that past with Tony Boles, I miss him because I’ve never seen him.

How i'd like to know Vince Young

2006-02-28T00:17:00.000-08:00

Two years ago I went to Pasadena to watch Michigan play Texas, and unfortunately I learned there isn’t a player more consistently defiant of 93 thousand people’s conception of reality than Vince Young. It wasn’t how I wanted it to go – Dusty Mangum kicking the game-winning field goal through the uprights I was sitting behind and all– but it was difficult to hate someone who was just so damn good at proving you wrong. Vince would do something superhuman, I’d smash my bag of kettle corn and kick my empty cup of soda, and each time it happened I thought it would be the last time. I’d never seen the kind of stuff Vince was doing – the kind that made Houdini look like one of those street-acts whose best trick always involved asking you to cut a deck of cards in half – but I never though it would keep happening.

In a way, the more he did it the more confident I became, because the latest disabling of my hopes only meant Michigan was that much closer to finally figuring him out. I thought to myself, you roll a die with nine sides that say “yes” and one that says “no,” every yes just meant a no was that much more imminent. He was supposed to be denied, solved, tackled, Vince was supposed to roll a no against Michigan. I knew probability, but the problem was I didn’t know Vince Young. It turned out the only side he rolled was “yes”, and it was the kind of yes that’s about 101% certain to rip your guts through your chest and probably break a few ribs in the process. He never did anything discretely, never defeated you with a surgeon’s care or premeditated diagram, and no one ever seemed to expect otherwise. But Michigan, Southern Cal – my damn ten-sided theoretical die – they still couldn’t stop him. My uncle was there with me in Pasadena, and every time Vince would make a play he’d lean over to me, “Un-friggin-believable; how does he keep doing it?” he’d say. And I think that’s really the best way to measure how good someone is at something, how often they redefine what you thought was impossible.

But in recent days Vince’s football talents haven’t really meant anything; a few numbers (a 6 and a 1 to be exact, the 1 just recently made relevant) and a plummeting draft-stock the only elements of a gaudy resume anyone seems to care about highlighting. It’s not that I don’t care that his score even at 16 is still pretty low, it’s that as the player I only know to be a peerless and unprecedented one-man domination, I just don’t want to recognize it, not yet at least.

I don’t know what kind of playbook Texas drew up for Vince and how well he handled the material cognitively, but his game was never based on throwing the ball and making coverage-reads anyway. Yes, he did it well when he needed to, but there's not a person who's drafting him in the top 3 because of how well he throws a button-hook or a square-out. He can run the ball, and god damnit he can do it as good as anyone; that’s what Vince Young is, and that’s the only thing I want to know him as. I like that he can’t throw a football the right way, that he knows how to stand in falling confetti as good as anyone (which is to say, he deserves to stand in falling confetti as much as anyone). I like that he didn’t win the Heisman Trophy too, because the only ballots that mattered were the two he submitted in Pasadena, and those had to mean more than some figurine anyway.

Vince's childhood is the kind that’s supposed to have more of an impact on his game than it has, and it’s as if everything else about him was just as impermeable. But how he handled the NFL’s complex schemes and linebackers who were about as fast as some of the DBs he played against in college, that was always going to be the issue with him, six, 16, or not. John Clayton and Mel Kiper and all the people who make their living talking about everything you think is too unimportant to, they were going to analyze that to death regardless. But I could deal with that, because eventually the blather of people who have nothing to blather about becomes a faint drone that I can ignore before it eventually disappears. Vince would resume being the guy who finally beat the team everyone hated.

Now I have some serious doubts about how good Vince can be in the NFL, but this is the guy solely responsible for ending Team Hollywood’s three-year sun-tanning in the media-spotlight, and anyone who isn’t at least proud of him for that should probably stop watching college football. So that’s why when I hear how this Wonderlic test is changing the way people think of Vince I get a bit nervous, nervous that it might change the way I think of him too. Because you see, there’s only one way I want to know Vince: Crushed kettle corn beneath my feet, uncle shouting incredulously in my ear, and not one in 93 thousand who have any idea if “impossible” even exists.

Reasons to scream on Tuesday nights

2006-02-22T23:27:00.000-08:00

It turned out Tuesday night was worth at least 50 cents, and that much I can guarantee. But more than that it was the kind of night where the radio never seems to play a bad song on the drive home, where red lights don’t exist, where there’s an unopened box of Mallomars and a half-gallon of milk waiting in the kitchen, and the roads are lonely enough that you can scream as loud as you want without someone looking at you strange. It was the kind where Michigan defeats Illinois by eight points while Daniel Horton spends the second half just praying no one had stashed a piece of kryptonite in their pockets.

You see, I was covering a girls basketball game in Weston Tuesday night, and though I’d put a blank cassette in the VCR it still meant I’d really only know the game as it was transcribed numerically, detailed in some six-column box-score back at the office. So somewhere around 7:30 I called my mom at home and asked her if she could make sure to text message me with an update every now and then. “I won’t message you unless something good happens,” she said. It was 34-28 when I spoke to her on the phone, and at 10 cents a text message I assumed it wouldn’t cost her very much to tell me they’d lost.

Then this happened:

LittleBrother123: johnny it’s cj michigan is winning 45-43! Feb 21, 8:13 pm
LittleBrother123: now its 47-45 , i wont bother you anymore unless they do really good. Feb 21, 8:20
LittleBrother123: 62-58 michigan 3:30 left Feb 21, 8:48 pm
LittleBrother123: 72-64 michigan has won!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Feb 21, 9:03 pm
LittleBrother123: this win was michigan’s coaches first career win vs. illonios Feb 21, 9:05 pm

Now I’ve eaten oreos with my brother, I’ve watched him play baseball with the same glove I broke in 10 years ago, I’ve seen the look on his face when I’ve picked him up from school when he wasn’t expecting it, I’ve had him fall asleep on my chest, thought about getting up to carry him to his bed, then just gone to sleep right there with him, but picturing his little golf-pencil sized fingers dashing across the keyboard to tell me they’d won was about as serious a limp as I think he’ll put in my legs for quite a while. There was that game I was covering, but damn it all, the boy went and told me the score even after he said he wasn’t going to anymore, he used exclamation points, he completely destroyed the spelling of Illinois; he even gave me an anecdote about Amaker for Christ’s sake.

Once I got around to watching the game yesterday, I still had no better an idea how it happened than I did reading how it happened on the 1 inch screen a day earlier. Sims still operates in the post like someone had told him to rather than actually wanting to; half the time Petway takes jump-shots he seems like he forgot the reason he jumped so high in the first place; Jerrett Smith – at least once a game – will make you wish you were doubted as much as he was just so you’d know what it’s like to prove everyone wrong, and Graham Brown is the type of guy who probably laid his varsity jacket over a puddle or two in high school so girls much prettier than he was didn’t have to get their ankles dirty stepping over it. We knew that. And with Horton, well, I’d always kind of hoped someone would put together a highlight reel of him, but after Tuesday I just hope they make sure I can play it in slow motion.

When you were growing up there was always that one stud guy who you knew could pretty much walk up to any girl in school and have his way with her. And that was a lot like what Horton was in the second half, only he was the stud, the girls were the baskets, and instead of writing her number on the back of his hand or giving him of those I-bet-you-want-to-know-what-color-panties-I’m-wearing glances, it was mid-lane floaters and 15 footers. You never knew how Horton was going to score, and you never cared, mainly because it never stopped happening. And as I pushed open the door to leave work, I was finally allowed to wonder things like whether my uncle in Los Angeles wouldn’t mind taking a drive with me down to San Diego if Michigan’s placed in that bracket, and not how many games of the NIT ESPN will broadcast.

But on the way home Tuesday night I didn’t know enough to realize all of that. My brother had told me all I wanted to hear; the most perfectly-spent half-dollar in the history of mankind. That night I drove through green lights with good songs to Mallomars and milk; Michigan had won, and I could scream when I wanted.

Achievement Awards Part 2 (the mostly not so good)

2006-01-21T03:51:00.000-08:00

mediocre latex salesman aswell

*Awards Part 1*

“The Julia Louis-Dreyfus/Jason Alexander/Michael Richards” Award for greatest decline away from former supporting cast: Chad Henne.

I’m not proposing some groundbreaking social theorem here by saying that once departed from Seinfeld that the triumvirate was pretty terrible. Save your “well, situational comedies thrive on the group dynamic and singular character traits that are really only conducive to success in a perfectly controlled environment” arguments for someone else, I think Taxi and Cheers sort of survived. That is, if you consider Kelsey Grammer, Danny DeVito, Ted Danson, Woody Harrelson, Christopher Lloyd and Jud Hirsch to have “survived”.

Henne’s inability to complete a 13 yard slant really has nothing to do with Michael Richards’ most notable performance since Kramer coming on a made-for-TV-movie, but it’s still the same kind of demise. No one thought Henne was going to do any better than he did with Braylon, and especially not without a healthy Breaston, Hart and most of his offensive line, but did it really seem like losing them had anything to do with it? And what’s disappointing is that maybe only two or three of you will say it did. Over the bye-week and into Indiana and Ohio State there was talk that Henne went from a read-and-react passing scheme to more pre-designed routes, but if that was the case – that his problem was so easily confined to the playbook – why was he so bad against Nebraska? It was like Jason Alexander having an episode of Listen Up that was just “not as abominable as the others,” then returning to its hackneyed routine after that, which was sort of what happened in the Alamo Bowl.

If you ever watched “Bob Patterson” or “Watching Ellie”, they might as well have just sat around telling knock-knock jokes, knowing how hard the audience was going to try and laugh at whatever labored punch line they came at you with. And that’s what it was like every time Henne completed a seven yard out-pattern with even the slightest bit of precision. We all pumped our fists and pretended it was the beginning of this strident march back towards stardom, when really it wasn’t much different than trying to be amused when someone like Newman guest starred on “Listen Up” and Jason Alexander tried to act like he’d never met him before. At this point, Henne has about as good a chance leading a successful sitcom as any of the three do, but if for no other reason than to prevent further exhausting my techniques in criticizing him, can’t he just get his shit together next year?

It's like I walk around with a glock with no ammo

“Friends Series Finale” Award for most disproportionate ratio of hype to actual utility: Prescott Burgess.

Let’s try and figure out how this is possible: Burgess comes to Michigan as a five-star safety prospect from Ohio, is moved to linebacker with the idea that he’ll grow naturally into his 6-5 frame. Playing with the strength of a linebacker and the speed of a defensive back, he'd be able to become a hybrid defenseman better than Lawrence Taylor and Mike Singletary combined, almost as good as God, and much better than the yeast sliced bread was baked with; the greatest physical creature of the last 5-6 million years. So it seemed. Three years after the initial estimate, we realize that Burgess is now too slow to even play linebacker. I’ll let that sit for a little while.

Looking at his recruit profile on Scout.com, he ran a 4.55 40 out of high school, which for a player his size makes that “third best linebacker in the country” ranking of yesteryear look plenty justified. I guess my biggest problem is his weight, which went from 215 pounds as high school senior to almost 250 as a college junior. Because let’s be honest, the only time Prescott’s ever going to run a 4.55 40 again is if “40 yards” suddenly means “23 yards”, and I don’t think the fact that he’s on the Mike Gittleson Diet For Aspiring Quadruple Bypassees is helping.

Everything you’d want in a linebacker Prescott had: the near boastful swagger, a really slick haircut, probably a posse, and that smirk when he pulled his Michigan cap from a duffle bag during the High School All American game that basically proclaimed “I’m really a good guy, but if I pulled a weapon from here too you shouldn’t be surprised.” He was a cowboy, a desperado, a vigilante who was going to knock your face through the back of your skull the moment you touched the ball going across the middle of the field. Now? Well now he’s just a pretty athletic bouncer.

I dipped in my stash, splurged on a chain/ Now I'm Titanic, Iceberg's the name

“Michael Olowokandi” Award for longest residency in dog-house and most anticipated “breakout” that never actually happened: Gabe Watson.

If you’re something close to 6 feet and a half, a little over 3 bills and a half, running the forty in less than five and a half, odds are your future as an NFL player is between “First rounder with a Bentley and a palace” and “Vacationing every year in Cabo ‘cause you can’t afford a summer place there yet”. But even still, I’ve spent more time saying things like “Oh, don’t worry, the only reason Gabe couldn’t make the play is because he was double-teamed” than I ever did about him destroying the inner two thirds of an offensive line.

Once they slapped that “agile for a player his size” tag on Gabe, there was nothing he was going to do to lose it, which pretty much eliminated any incentive to get better or angrier or skinnier. Guys like Gabe and Kandi will never have to perform even remotely close to their expectations to get paid; that’s just what happens when you’re a physical anomaly who likes sports. They used to put those people on Ripley’s and in the circus, now they just pay them a lot of money and hope they become the next Shaquille O’Neal or Warren Sapp.

Gabe was easily one of the most exciting prospects Michigan’s had since I started following recruiting, but unless he tore a ligament or got arrested, he was going to move his mom into a new place, get his brother a new car, and his girl a new wardrobe. No matter how uninspiring his collegiate resume was. If you were in college with a few million in a safety deposit box you’d be handed the key to in a few years, what’s going to be your mindset? That’s why I really can’t blame him for probably spending more time being big and getting girls than working out. Every year you knew Carr was going to keep him out of the starting lineup for a few games, but you also knew Gabe was really a warmhearted guy and most likely hadn’t done anything wrong so much as not done anything at all. In the end, he was just a formidable name who translated well to video game ratings and paper-matchups, but that was about it. He didn’t do any more or suck any less than a guy like Prescott; I guess his motives were just more permissible.

It's because I'm not invincible everyday

“Emeril Lagasse” Award for most pre-season (meal) “Bang!”s and “Oh yeah, babe!”s relative to on the field (plate) performance (food): Steve Breaston.

Unless cooking’s your thing, I doubt you can name two chefs other than Emeril or maybe Mario Batalli. The same thing goes for dangerous punt returners, where Steve Breaston, Ted Ginn, and Devin Hester are about all you can muster in a “guy you’d most want to get your team to midfield for one last drive” argument. It doesn’t mean Emeril or Breaston are any good (though when he’s healthy, I’ll fight to death for the latter), it’s more that they have a few catchphrases or a really awesome highlight reel.

It’s sort of the same thing that goes for Gabe (and Prescott, and Woodley, and Henne, and Tabb, and…you get the idea, this wasn’t a good year for Michigan); Breaston will always be a “good” player so long as he can mix a few neck-breaking touchdown plays in with the fact that he can’t catch a deep ball or break tackles very well, and Emeril will still be hailed as a culinary wizard as long as he cooks on TV and says a lot of things that sound like they’re accentuating a confidence he has in his recipes.

Here’s the difference though: I’ve watched Emeril make food before, and it’s just a guy wearing a fancy white uniform and a cloth slung over his shoulder, overusing ingredients, probably saying to himself “well seasonings are sort of like toppings, toppings are great on ice cream sundaes, Bam! Let’s give it a try!” But with Breaston, you know there’s reason for hope, that you do feel like you know what you’re talking about when you bring him up in conversation, and that deep down he’s easily the most dangerous player on the team. You can consistently say that, even if he doesn’t consistently prove it.

I’ve had a thing for the number 15, but I think there’s more to it than that, that maybe we didn’t put him on a pedestal in some predisposed, over biased exalting simply because he happened to be the closest thing Michigan fans had to Reggie Bush. There’s this feeling you get when you know a player’s worth something, where you sense the eye’s of the world and every loose molecule in the atmosphere gravitating toward them. And then before you can catch your breath Michigan’s trailing Penn State by a touchdown, the kick off’s fallen into his hands, he’s at midfield, your lungs deflate, and the camera pans out and you see an image like the one at the end of “Field of Dreams” where miles of headlights are being pulled to that one player everyone can’t stop watching.

More tomorrow

Achievement Awards Part 1 (The Good)

2006-01-18T23:07:00.000-08:00

Rise up—for you the flag is flung—for you the bugle trills

Player of the Year: Jason Avant

“In the Michael Irvin mold,” is the earliest bit of hyperbole I can remember being thrown at Jason, back when Tom Lemming’s Tuesday recruiting chats on ESPN.com were all I had. Lemming – the same self-absorbed, over-exposed thirty-something with too much time on his hands and a too liberal administer of the“guru” tag – also rated David Underwood a better running back than Cedric Benson out of high school, and compared current safety Anton Campbell (who?) to Gale Sayers. So while Lemming’s credibility should have dissolved to the point where anything but “catches the ball similarly to past receivers, in that he uses his hands” was observed with skepticism, my adolescence and the 28.8 modem it was equipped with really didn’t know that. I just assumed that for the next four years or so Michigan would be at least good enough to make the Divisional’s of the NFL playoffs.

In the end, Underwood was overshadowed by a pouty kid from North Carolina, and a year later by a kid who couldn’t have been much bigger than Underwood was in elementary school; Campbell, meanwhile, has served only as perhaps the most notable case for why Michigan’s coaches aren’t any good, or how high school-professional player parallels can go wrong, probably both. But while Jason’s charisma, second gear, elusiveness and potential for an entrepreneurial venture with Nate Newton are certainly not equal to Eight-Eight’s, the comparison hasn’t been that far off.

If you want to call Jason a “poor man’s Irvin”, go ahead, you’d probably be right. But knowing what you know now about the two of them, could you say you’d rather have Irvin on your football team? Unless your last name is “Escobar” or “Montana”, probably not. It’s the same reason no one talks about how his fumble in the Alamo Bowl was the most critical play of the game. We all know that, but because it’s Jason, we don’t really care.

Yeah, so a quintessential offensive cog like Jason winning an award like this really can’t happen unless the season does end in 7-5 territory, but it was always the little things he did. Getting seven yards out of a wide receiver screen against press-coverage when Breaston would have been grabbed for a two yard loss, the way he gave Henne that “shake it off” head nod when Chad had just thrown the ball somewhere he shouldn’t have, and the unmistakable feeling you got where any time you saw the ball and Jason in the same screen that he had a chance.

Jason was like that girl you were best friends with in high school but never considered dating, even though you probably should have. When Braylon was around, the only time you heard Jason’s name was “Alright, it’s 3^rd and 7. Just stay calm, Jason’ll be open.” And you always knew that was ok with him. When Braylon graduated and Breaston was hailed as the second coming, Jason stood as a blurred image in the background of Michigan’s offensive portrait, but still, he never seemed to mind. Then Adrian Arrington got injured, Breaston stalled, and Jason quietly (almost silently) had a thousand-yard season without even an “I got it guys, don’t worry.” You just knew he’d be there, and that was how it always was.

“Milk and Eggs” Award for Player You Can’t Do Without: Mike Hart

There’s a scene that takes place at least once a game involving Mike Hart, and it goes something like this:

Hart rushes for 13 yards and in the process avoids a defensive tackle and a linebacker in the backfield, hurdles one of his own lineman, cuts to his left, slips past another linebacker, barrels himself into the knees of the strong safety, carries him for 4 yards before getting pulled down by the other safety. Stands up and smiles as he flips the ball to the referee.

Brent Musburger: Boy oh boy is he a good one, folks. The little guy! From Syracuse, New York! He is such a deceptive runner for a kid his size, and, let’s remember, Gary, he’s just a sophomore. Just remarkable what he’s been able to do for the Michigan Wolverines.

Gary Danielson: You got it, Brent. I don’t even know if these defenders can see him when he comes through the line! They chuckle. The thing about Michael Hart is not only the way he uses his body, but his feet.

Cuts to obligatory replay of previous run, showing Mike from his knees down. Danielson comes in as they pan up after he’s tackled for close-up shot of him smiling.

Musburger: Now, partner, I know Mr. Peterson in Oklahoma is the Sophomore with the big name, but this one’s not so bad either.

Danielson: Very true, Brent, and…Ha, look at the face on that guy! That’s what you love to see. What a smile, such a good sight to see.

You get the idea. Aside from forcing each announcer to come within six or seven words of calling him “adorable,” every game, he was also the biggest part of Michigan’s offense. I was critical early in the season of the theory that Michigan would be 5-0 if Mike Hart was healthy, but his absence was probably responsible for the Notre Dame and Wisconsin losses. Would they have needed Henne to try a goal line-sneak against Notre Dame if Hart’s hamstring was ok? Would he have fumbled where Max Martin did against Wisconsin, or been stopped on fourth and goal as Grady was? No. But my answer to that doesn’t say much, considering I’d probably elect Mike for president, or at least vote for him in the primaries. Honestly, though, what would you say Michigan finishes if they have ’04 Hart?

When Hart's in the game, a part of me almost roots for a few defenders to break through the line. You know, sort of like playing the first couple levels of Galaga, where there was no real threat of losing and you just wanted to blow (break) a lot of shit (tackles) up. That's how it felt in games like Michigan State, where 15 yard runs started to get boring and you just wanted a challenge. I mean, you know he’s going to take care of whoever gets to him, and it’s really pretty entertaining to watch mountainous defensive linemen spin in circles to try and grab a player who could probably run through their legs if he crouched an inch or two.

But then Hart got injured, chaos ensued, and no one knew how to fix it, nevermind root for it. The problem was that with guys like Grady and Jackson in the backfield, it was like Gallaga had suddenly fast-forwarded to the boss of the last level who had the double-shield, lasers, shrink ray, and napalm. I know Grady was playing a few pounds too heavy with a busted line and getting more carries than he should have, but he isn’t, nor will he ever be a Hart-type. Jackson was a serviceable “running back”, but more in the same way Taco Bell is a serviceable “restaurant” when you’re hungry. I know everyone liked to blame Henne’s failings on Hart for getting injured, but I think that was just the lazy solution to killing two birds with one stone. Henne won games without Hart, just like he lost some with him. I think the bigger problem was accounting for the incompetence of Michigan’s line, and Hart was really the only one who could do that.

(Something a little like this- One of the best runs you'll ever see)

More tomorrow.