Gameday photos

It's pretty much impossible to get a decent game photo from the stands, especially if you're more interested in watching the game than photographing it. Here are a few from the Cap One Bowl. I'll leave it to others to discuss the game itself. It was the first time I've cried in public since my age was in low single digits.

Warmups! I'm happy to have a photo with Hart and Henne in one shot, even if it's not great. Astute observers will note Fred Jackson on the far right. At this point I turned to my friend and said, "I don't care that we're going to lose. I'm really glad I came."

Gators and Wolverines line up. My perception of SEC fans is a pack of screaming Jim Beam-fueled rednecks sodomizing deep-fried turkeys in front of their RVs. I found the Florida fans civil, well mannered and friendly before and after the game. In the hotel, in restaurants and at the game, I heard nothing but good wishes and congratulations. Strangely, about 10 minutes before kick-off a middle-aged in full Buckeyes regalia took a seat next to us. I wondered what it would be like to get ejected from a game for fighting (they sell beer at the Citrus Bowl, and I took advantage) but he cheered loudly for the Wolverines. At halftime I shared my hopes to see Ohio State crush LSU. In our row, their was love among the Big 10.

Halftime! The other side of his sign read, "Win one 4 Lloyd."

We sat right behind the band. I love watching games with the band.

The game was over. Lighting was terrible by then, so sadly this was the best shot of the field that I managed to get. Long, Hart and Henne are on the podium at this point.


Florida fans left quickly. After the loss to Ohio State in November, I stood in the rain after most Michigan fans left. I watched the Buckeyes run to the sliver of OSU fans in a mostly empty Michigan Stadium and watched their post-game celebrations through Carmen Ohio. As miserable and lonely as that felt, I felt its opposite as Henne took his final (healthy!) knee, the band began playing, and a contingent of the team ran to our corner of the field to celebrate.

I've never seen a Michigan crowd so involved in a game, from kickoff through conclusion. At the Rose Bowl, at Ohio State games: the intensity of the Michigan fans on Tuesday was unprecedented in my experience. It was like being in a students' section for the entire game. Everyone stood, and everyone screamed. Once the post-game ceremonies wrapped, the chants carried down to the men's room, and for a bizarre ten-second interval, there was a sort of tunnel of fans lined up waiting their turn and cheering on everyone walking out.

"What a happy day you've given me to remember the rest of my life."

Now, for a cheer, they are here triumphant ...

After Michigan had done it, after the seniors had finally won a bowl game, after they'd beaten the defending national champions on what might as well have been their own field, the players went to Lloyd Carr, and lifted him up on their shoulders. It was long overdue.

How perfect was that? Seeing Lloyd, beaming, hoisted into the air. And because he's Lloyd, after a few seconds, he started banging on their shoulder pads, telling them to let him down because he had to go shake the opposing coach's hand.

Urban Meyer, defeated in a bowl game for the first time at Florida clasped Lloyd's hand and then listened to what the now-retired coach had to say.

"Someday you're going to retire and your guys are going to play as hard as my guys played," Carr told him.

Maybe. It's hard to imagine players who love their coach more than Michigan's do Lloyd. As Shawn Crable, who could have been buried for some technically dunderheaded plays that may have cost Michigan important games at Ohio State last year and against Appalachian State this year said:

"He made me into a man ... I was 18 when I came here. I had just turned 18 and I thought I knew everything. He was more than just a coach. He understood was coaching was, but he also understood what turning out men took. I know a lot more. I can handle myself in different situations."He took a lot of boys who thought they were men and turned them into real men."

And that he did so with compassion, dignity, and yes, even that oft-misused term, class, is why even those who never played a down for the man love him so. Under his leadership, Michigan has been as close to the ideal of collegiate athletics as you can get while still kicking ass at the highest level of the game. We love that. We really, really do, and not everyone gets it.

It's easy to think that Michigan is some weird little arrogant enclave, cut off from the rest of the college football world by spread offenses, multimillion-dollar coaches and a new brand of focused, NFL-style coaches. If you thought that, and you're not a Michigan fan, then you can be forgiven. Because it can certainly look that way at times if you don't slow down to take a longer look.

What makes Michigan special, what makes me proud to be represented by Lloyd Carr, Shawn Crable, Mike Hart, Chad Henne and others, is that Michigan seems to be one of the few remaining fanbases that realizes college football is just that. It's college football.

Although it's easy to forget, what with a national worldview formed by ESPN chatters, blogospheric one-upsmanship and columnists who parachute into our world to provide a Brooksian take before returning to their nests lined with old clippings of articles about Bill Parcells. But this is an amateur sport, played by mostly teenagers, for the enjoyment of students, alums and fans. Winning is NOT everything. Although playing hard to do just that most certainly is.

In the NFL, coaches call time outs a fraction of a second before the ball is snapped for a winning field goal. In the NFL, coaches cut nonperformers in a heartbeat. In the NFL, winning really is everything, and those who can't win are shown the door. Because lovable losers just don't exist at that level, and seats will get empty fast. At any given time in the pros, there's a handful of teams who are just cycling coaches in and out the door until they get a spark. My own pro team did that for a while, and it really, really sucks ass. If the Browns hadn't broken out the way they did this, year, the media and fans would have been clamoring for Romeo Crennel's handsomely mustachioed head on a platter (presumably surrounded by a stadium-mustard reduction). There's a few college programs that do that, too, and some of their fans even seem to revel in it. Maybe purgatory can be a blast, but that sounds like hell to me.

I don't want my university's team to be like a pro team. It's tough to talk about ideals and stuff like that without wandering over on to the preachy side of things, but, yes, I really do want Michigan to represent ideals like sportsmanship, fair play, hard work, education and, yes, seriously good football. Considering them the equal of any other team in one's fan portfolio is missing the point.

Pro teams are assemblages of people who came to their team for a reason beyond their control. They were either drafted, and had no say in it, or the whims of the market brought them there.

Michigan's football players came there of their own free will. They looked at the other possibilities and made a decision, just like all the rest of us who went to school there. Sure, when I sent in my housing deposit, I wasn't thinking of my NFL draft prospects, but I was thinking about my future just the same. I came to Ann Arbor, I looked around and said: Yes, this could be home.

And so did everyone on that roster. It's fundamentally different from the pros, where there's a payroll to be met, seats to fill, scoreboard graphics to design, beer prices to set, T-shirt guns to buy, naming rights to be sold and all that other nonsense.

College football really is different. No matter how much ESPN, the BCS, Fox Sports and a good deal of fans are dragging the game toward the other trappings of professionaldom. Just win, baby is not the lowest common denominator. At least, not at Michigan.

Lloyd Carr got that, and then some. And that, more than the Big Ten titles, national championship and sustained success, is why he will be missed.

* * *

"So gentlemen, what a happy day you have given me to remember the rest of my life.” -- Lloyd Carr, concluding the final postgame speech of his career after Michigan beat Florida 41-35 in the Capital One Bowl, Jan. 1, 2008.

Us too, Lloyd. Us too.

Sayonara, 2007

You started with a shitty Rose Bowl loss. Which, as bowl games go, is better than a lot of bowl game wins. But still.

You ended with the Browns completing their best season since I was in high school doing what they do best: kicking me in the kidneys.

In between: The Cavs' amazing and somewhat surprising run, including a game that I still can't talk about without having my neurons short out. The Indians' amazing and actually not all that surprising run, which I still can't talk about without feeling pangs of regret: I honestly thought that team was going to win the World Series. I've never thought that about a Cleveland team before.

Oh, and this Michigan season.

What to say? I think I've never been more and less proud of my university than I have at various times this year. We all knew Mike Hart was the kind of player we'd all want to be if we had the talent and the drive for it. This year, he just kept reminding us again and again.

And then there was that fucking Purdue game. I know, of all the games to hate from this year, it seems our biggest blowout is a dumb one to pick, but I'll always remember watching it, from California, where a bunch of us had gathered for a classmate's wedding.

We all went together to watch Michigan, which kicked off at 9 a.m. We were sitting -- outside -- on a shaded patio, watching Michigan play Purdue on TV. The sun was burning off the cloud cover, I had a bloody mary in front of me, and good friends all around. Occasionally, I would turn around to marvel at the bizarre landscape of palm trees, parking lots and distant mountains. I had my university on TV and good friends all around. At a TV in front of us, a fat Ohio State fan in sweatpants sat smoking and yelling at the TV immediately above his head, which he had turned up to maximum volume.

After one of the typically incredible runs Mike Hart will always be known for, a friend said: "I could watch him run all day."

I agreed, and then my brain flooded with endorphins as I considered doing just that. Shortly after, I looked up at the TV. Hart was hopping and limping. He was done, and he hasn't been himself since. And now, after one more game, he'll be gone for good. And Michigan football will go to a whole new place.

After the Purude, we drove around Los Angeles, to see the sights. We paused on Mulholland to view the valley, left clear from the previous night's rains. We marveled at the eternally pleasant weather, and mansions clinging to hills. We drove through Hollywood and went to the beach. I silently compared the landscape and architecture against my Midwestern and East Coast understandings of these things.

Occasionally someone made a comment that indicated they were thinking about what it would be like to live there. I know I was. It's tempting. The weather's great all the time. Stuff is just there for the taking. But there's drawbacks -- you have to drive everywhere, sometimes long distances, because nothing is close. There's traffic, but you just have to put up with it. But there's beaches and sunsets and sometimes just incredible natural beauty. If you're far enough out in the hills, the sun sets all pink and purple and the wind smells like sage and mesquite. It's what everyone dreams of.

But I'm not sure it's what I dream of. I want the snow and the slush and the pride that comes from doing things the right way, and wishing for not warmth and sunsets, but Mike Hart, running all day.

Everything changes on New Year's Day

Tomorrow I will fly out of Newark airport and travel to a city I don't want to visit in order to watch a team that won't exist this time next week.

I flew to Ann Arbor in September and watched Michigan lose 39-7 to Oregon. I flew to Ann Arbor in November and watched Michigan lose 14-3 to Ohio State.

Physically, the Ohio State game was one of my most miserable experiences as an adult. This was my own fault. Before we left for the game, I could have opted, like everyone else, to wear a jacket or buy a poncho. No. If it was going to be an afternoon of cold rain, I wanted to feel cold rain. I wanted to hurt. Win or lose, the pain would heighten my experience. And it did.

Now I'll go to Orlando. Fuck knows what the score is going to be on Tuesday afternoon. I don't expect Michigan to win. It could happen, I guess. For the appalling, unjustified, infuriating contempt that this program endured in 2007, New Year's Day promises to be the first time that Mike Hart and Chad Henne will actually be healthy for an entire game. This is a cause for joy and sadness.

I've wanted to write about Mike Hart all season, but I still don't know how to do it. Even now, I'm at risk of falling into a mess of hyperbole. At some point in his career, Mike Hart became Michigan. The New York Times ran a lengthy profile on him this fall. Friends and I traded some astonished e-mails about this guy, who we already loved so much. He'd done enough on the field to embody everything that we hold dear about the program -- its stubborn pride, its consistency, its scrap and resilience -- and then late in his career we realized that there was this fully formed person behind it all. Mike Hart is a guy who embraced the university and ingratiated himself to everything from the Indian Students Association to the school's Dance Marathon. He invested himself in the life of the school in ways that had nothing to do with football. The guy wasn't just a football player anymore, but one of us.

Hart talks about Michigan with the kind of intensity and ferocity that's familiar: It's the kind of bizarre enthusiasm that Michigan spurs in some people. Not all of its students and alumni, but a wonderfully wound-up minority. A couple years ago I went to Stuyvesant High School to recruit Michigan applicants and could not shut up about the school. (This is not unique to Michigan. I know Duke grads and Dartmouth grads who act the same way about their schools, which is why if through a horrible accident I someday procreate, the kid can only go to Dartmouth, Duke or Michigan.) Hart tapped into this weird collective unconscious of the University of Michigan.

An Auburn fan who visited Michigan Stadium this fall observed the following:

I spent the first part of last Saturday at the Big House watching Michigan blast hapless Purdue, and one of the things you can't help but notice is just how much Wolverine fans care about Mike Hart. Whether it's the endless stream of "20" jerseys, Hart t-shirts, the cries of joy when he spun off the back of a defender and scored on what appeared to be a lost play, the cries of anguish when he left the game with a limp and appeared on the JumboTron grimacing as his ankle got the once-over.

. . . I know as an SEC fan I'm supposed to never admit envying anything about a Big 10 program under any circumstances, but yeah, I was jealous.

It seems like Hart and Henne have been there forever. Before them there were John Navarre and Chris Perry. Perhaps unfairly, Navarre was never loved. Five years ago, if you asked me to name my favorite Michigan player, I immediately would have responded with Perry, but then came Hart, and Perry was just a memory. Someday Hart will just be a memory, too. Sunday Morning Quarterback described Hart and Henne's rise at Michigan thusly:

... I can't say I necessarily remember any of those players as freshmen, not very well, not like Henne and Hart, who were almost instantly ubiquitous; none of them so quickly became the face(s) of one of the most high profile programs in the country, and none of them succeeded so spectacularly out of the gate: behind the freshman stars, the 2004 Wolverines won the Big Ten and came within a few seconds and one point of outduelling Vince Young in the Rose Bowl, where Henne threw for four touchdowns.

Michigan has played that well since (virtually the entirety of 2006) and returned to the Rose Bowl - consider: Henne has thrown a school record 84 touchdown passes, and since his first start against San Diego State, Hart has topped 90 yards in 31 of 35 games in which he's logged at least 15 carries, including every single game he's played over the last two regular seasons; he is so so slow in the open field, but there is no contemporary parallel for that level of consistency from a running back. Michigan is 36-13 in games at least one of them starts and has scored at least 17 in 45 of those games, etc. Imagine Michigan fans, following these two faces more than any others on a weekly basis for three months over four years, in the end spending the better part of a full cumulative year of their lives watching Henne and Hart grow, praying to false gods and any powerful entity who might conceivably hold vigil over their injuries, and finishing each season more and more disappointed.

Elsewhere SMQB observed that " I'm not allowed to love Mike Hart the way Michigan fans love Mike Hart, the kind of love that isn't possible ..."

And then next Wednesday morning I'll wake up in a hotel room in Orlando and get ready to leave for the airport. Win or (much more likely) lose, it will not be a good morning. Hart will be gone. Chad Henne will be gone. Henne, like Lloyd Carr, has been the target of anger that he never deserved. During the Oregon game he went out with one of the many injuries sent from Zeus' lightningbolts. Freshman Ryan Mallett was his substitute. I don't know if I've hated Michigan fans any more than I did on that day, when the crowd booed Henne and cheered as Mallett took the field.

Henne does not speak out like Hart; he is not a cinderblock like Jake Long. He was not elected a captain of this team. He has merely been consistent and quiet, performing Herculean tasks when called upon, achieving things as a freshman that no Big Ten quarterback aside from Troy Smith has done during his tenure. Then he got hurt; for this, he is regarded in some circles as a disappointment. He deserved better from us. As eloquently observed in November:

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.

The man who 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 that man.

On January 2, Lloyd Carr will be gone. I'm not at a point where I'm going to write his coda. If K.C. Lopata had played on September 1, 2007 instead of Jason Gingell, and maybe even if Sean Crable and his overeager helmet weren't penalized in November 2006, the first draft of history regarding his tenure would be different. And that's fine. Like Hyman Roth, this is the life he has chosen. Like Mike Gundy, he's a grown man -- he can take it. The small margins aren't an excuse. A loss is a loss, teams lose close games, and that's sports.

As disappointing as this season has been, and as unpleasant as I expect the team's performance against Florida to be, in a weird way 2007 has been a testament. Michigan was humiliated in its first two games, but the team never fell apart. Starting out that way, other teams would become defunct. If you told us on September 8 that Michigan would finish the year 8-4 and play Florida on New Year's Day, despite Hart and Henne spending the season defined by terms like "high ankle sprain," "dislocation" and "torn ligament," we would have been overjoyed. The knee-jerk line of ignorant Michigan fan -- that the program does so little with so much talent -- was flat off this year. With its plague of injuries and green defense, this team may have actually outperformed. It might have become South Carolina; it might have become Notre Dame. People sit around with bottles of beer and flatscreens and bitch like these games are about X's and O's and can be won just like on PS2, when there are matters of motivation, training and cohesion that those of us on the outside know literally nothing about. Charlie Weis proved that.

Still, it's been a miserable season. When I've written about football this fall, it really hasn't been about football, just excerpts from Dante or ee cummings and the occasional written purge of pure pain. If I were doing that poetry shit tonight, this post would've started with Dante Gabriel Rosetti. This bowl trip is not joyful, and I care about the result less than other Michigan games. I'm going to Orlando because I want to be there for the last time that Carr, Hart and Henne are on the field, while the program still means something more to the school and its fans than a jerry-rigged offensive scheme and the arbitrary zeitgeist dictated by ESPN and half-wits with blogs.

Really, I don't dislike Rich Rodriguez, but amid the excitement of his announcement, I don't think many of us have thought about what it's going to be like when we walk into Michigan Stadium next fall and see the previous 40 years discarded. A house that needed a fresh coat of paint and a new roof is going to be absolutely gutted. It might turn out just fine, but I think the premise is hard to dispute. Some people have been screaming for that; maybe they're right. These people would have given us a program that never would have recruited Hart and Henne.

Thursday Night Massacre

Here's what Michigan's new head coach Rich Rodriguez has done since he woke up on Sunday morning:

• Announced his resignation to West Virginia via letter delivered by graduate assistant.
• Before informing WVU of this decision, called a recruit to try to poach him to Michigan.
• Not only called the Michigan Man meme a "hyperbole," but pronounced it "hyper bowl."
• Announced an intention to contest the buyout clause of his West Virginia contract. The governor of the fucking state is now involved.
  
• In response to a question as to why the Michigan job is special, responded with a discussion of its recruiting advantages.
• Fired the entire coaching staff en masse, apparently without interviewing anyone or considering the possibility of retention. No Fred Jackson; no Erik Campbell. Apparently, no sit-down to see if anyone from the old staff (which actually understands the program and the university and all of that tradition shit that gets our rocks off) was worthy of retention.
  

This is putting aside various culture-clash criticisms from friends, which I've found petty and nasty -- stuff about his wife's hair and the fact that their kids' names all start with the letter "R." This is also putting aside the general unease some feel with ditching a successful system for a style of offense that has been classified as junk and gimmickry.

Good-bye, future Tom Brady; hello, future Michael Vick.

We've gone from guarded optimism, to actual enthusiasm, to trepidation and dread in the course of 96 hours. Draw Sharp might actually have been right, which is the most disturbing part of all of this. And Les Miles actually may have been the lesser evil.

One thing's for fucking sure: If Michigan goes 3-9 next year, at least we won't hear claptrap about tradition.

From this point forward, Michigan is just any other program.

Other observations: The Dolphins job will open soon, and some view Miami as a special place; Tom Osborne would make a fine interim Athletic Director at schools other than Nebraska; and in a few years, Ron English will probably have the resume to take over as Michigan's head coach.

It's also possible that this is an overreaction, which would be unusual. I'm usually not much into hyperbole.

Update: This afternoon I read the following from Mike Hart, and became even angrier:

Senior tailback Mike Hart said he was disappointed to hear about the staff changes, but said he knows the coaches "are all going to get jobs." Hart said he hopes Rodriguez and his incoming staff "learn Michigan tradition."

"Obviously, when I come back (to visit), there's going to be no one here for me," Hart said. "That's 128 years of history gone, with no one (on the new staff) with any recollection of that and the tradition. If these guys get to know the history and tradition, they will learn that Michigan is a lot different than any other place. I just hope they learn Michigan and what it's all about."

I wished that he'd pegged Rich Rodriguez as Lloyd Carr's little brother.

And then great relief came with this news:

New Michigan coach Rich Rodriguez has plans to rehire at least one member of the current staff -- longtime assistant Fred Jackson.
***
"I'm looking forward to working with him and learning that offense," Jackson said, referring to Rodriguez's spread offense. "I'm looking forward to keeping the Michigan tradition alive."

Rodriguez appeared on "The Mike Tirico Show" on Friday afternoon and reiterated there's a potential for other rehires.

"I sat last night and met with all the staff members, not just the position coaches, but the support staff and talked to them," Rodriguez said on the show. "I don't call it retain, but I'm rehiring a lot of these support staffs. I've already rehired one of the position coaches in Fred Jackson. Not all the position coaches are leaving. I'm rehiring Fred and most of the administrative staff will be rehired or already have been rehired.

Jackson is a very well liked guy, apparently an excellent recruiter, and one of the assistants widely expected to be retained through any transition. This goes a long way toward calming my fears.

This post isn't the opening salvo of a running effort to bitch about Rodriguez. I don't hate him. The circumstances of his departure from West Virginia are concerning. Reports of an immediate and universal firing looked like evidence of a similar institutional disrespect. His presser on Monday was brilliant and it's been less than a week, but yeah -- there's enough here to warrant tough scrutiny. Concern and harsh judgment aren't the same as vendetta.

I told you being tough was important

Faceful of snow: Fun!

Especially when you play a bunch of soft, warm-weather pansies like the Buffalo Bills, who wouldn't know cold if it worked its icy finger around their puka-shell necklaces and down their chicken-wing themed Hawaiian shirts.

This is what we've been waiting for in Cleveland. For a long time. The Browns played an important game in December for the first time since 2002. And even then, that was kind of a fluky year in which a lot of things came together. To some extent, the same could be said of this one.

But these Browns have real talent and ability. Braylon Edwards would start for any team in the league. Ditto Joe Thomas and Kellen Winslow most likely. Derek Anderson has been a revelation at quarterback, and there's even some good players on a defense that is, well, it's not all that impressive. But between the defense that plays better than it's league-worst ranking and near blizzard on the lakefront, the Browns held the Bills scoreless and won 8-0.

If that score looks like one from another era, it's because the NFL hasn't seen a final like that since 1929. And it happened not on a TD and a two-pointer, but on a pair of a highly improbable field goals by Phil Dawson, who should get some sort of medal or something for making kicks in that snow -- especially the one from almost 50 fucking yards.

Playoff implications aside, this is a highly satisfying win.

Whose lake? Our lake, bitches.

I can't believe I'm actually defending Bill Martin

It seems like I've bitched about him virtually from the beginning. My dislike peaked with the quickly-withdrawn sponsorship offer to give SBC naming rights for the Michigan-Ohio State game, but really had momentum with his shepherding of the Michigan Stadium renovations. The anger there wasn't so much toward luxury boxes themselves -- they're a necessary evil -- but because he showed as much respect for dissent and process as Robert Moses at his worst.

The agendas of regents' meetings were manipulated to limit the speaking time of those who disagreed with him. Most egregiously, he used the memorial service for Bo Schembechler as an opportunity to pimp his stadium plans. I've searched for transcripts of his remarks, but I can't find them. Essentially, he recalled that one of his final conversations with Schembechler involved overhauling the stadium. He claimed that Bo supported the plans, which was evidence that until his dying day Bo wanted what was best for Michigan. Putting aside that such conversation can never be verified, Martin essentially used the funeral for a beloved coach to rally support for his pet project, and implied that people who disagreed with him were anti-Bo, and hence, anti-Michigan.

I think Martin's a manipulator and a dick.

Still, Martin's list of accomplishments is incredibly impressive, even if they don't all track my own agenda. A short recap from the top of my head includes the following:

• Push through the aforementioned stadium renovation plans, despite dissent from regents and most of the faculty. He played dirty, but he got what he wanted.
• Plans for a reconstituted baseball facility.
• Retained a very popular and successful baseball coach right at the moment when it looked like he'd be poached.
• Hired John Beilein. (I don't know about basketball or give a damn, but everyone seems to think this was a great hire.)
• Hired a women's basketball coach.
• Most importantly, fixed an Athletic Department that was in a financial mess following Tom Goss's tenure.
  

There's more that I'm forgetting. He's abrasive and manipulative, largely unlovable, but his job isn't to be loved, it's to keep finances strong and get shit done. Half-wits can give him grief for scheduling Appalachian State, but in his list of responsibilities and priorities, that falls somewhere around No. 63.

The problem isn't that he's fucked anything up, it's that most people literally have no understanding of what his job is. He could completely blow this coaching search. It would be a black mark on his record, but would only land somewhere in the top five flashpoints of his tenure. It certainly wouldn't be a firing offense. Taking the athletic department into the red, accounting irregularities, an NCAA investigation, hideous cost overruns: those would be firing offenses. Those are the things that his job is about. Not to serve as a figurehead or comforter-in-chief.

So far as I can tell, Bill Martin's sins in the Michigan coaching search are the following:

• He sails. So did Don Canham.
• He didn't land Les Miles. As stated in previous posts, I hate Les Miles, so I don't view this as a bad thing. If you think this non-hire is the product of sailing-related negligence, you're dreaming. Anyone with a position of even marginal responsibility in this world -- including yours truly -- is reachable at any time. Blackberrys are Satan's curse. If Michigan wanted to hire Les Miles, Martin would have been available. Michigan did not want to hire Les Miles. This angers people. That is a policy disagreement, which is not the same thing as incompetence.
• He didn't land Greg Schiano. Greg Schiano has his own reasons for staying put. It's highly possible that no offer from any school other than Penn State would attract him. This wasn't a product of Michigan getting snubbed by lowly Rutgers. Look, I don't know how much experience people have in being recruited for jobs, or trying to recruit other people for jobs, but these decisions are made for about a dozen different reasons. Money and prestige are not always the determining factors, even for high achievers. By this rationale, Bo should've left for A&M when they dangled a fat paycheck his way. People don't always operate this way, and we're better off for it.
• He didn't hire a search firm. Maybe this would have smoothed the process a little, but as we learned in the stadium project, Martin seems less concerned about process than getting the results that he wants. If he's got some kind of decision tree or list of candidates that he knows he wants, a search firm might have made things marginally easier but I don't see how it would have affected the end result. This leads to the following criticism:
• This is happening too slowly. Bullshit. You're hiring somebody who's going to be there long term. This isn't a race. The goal isn't to hire the flashiest name as quickly as possible. It's a long-term investment, not day trading. Do your fucking diligence and take into consideration the dozen or so factors that you want in the next head coach. Nothing would be worse than a knee-jerk decision to hire the flashiest new thing (e.g., Pinkel) and bask in accolades, only to find out three years down the line that you've brought in a horrible mismatch. That's program suicide.
  
• He had advance notice that Lloyd was likely leaving, and didn't do enough advance planning. Brilliant call. If there's been any actual problem with this goddamn search, it's that every time someone sneezes there's a leak and the latest turn is all over blogs and newspapers. If I were Martin, I'd have a Nixonian level of paranoia about leaks at this point. Say he uses intermediaries and starts putting out feelers to prospective coaches over the summer and fall: At this point, there's no doubt that such shit would've hit the press within five minutes. For all the people who seem to give a shit about nothing but recruiting, official rumors of the head coach's imminent departure sure wouldn't have been good for that, right? There would've been no season, only obsessive speculation about who was coming next, when that issue wasn't even ripe.

There are plenty of reasons why a person shouldn't like Bill Martin. I don't like him. But I have to acknowledge that for the length of his tenure, he's done an extremely difficult job really, really well. He singlehandedly righted the athletic department's finances, went on a building spree reminiscent of Robert Moses, handled the final stages of the fallout from the Ed Martin/Steve Fisher scandal, and generally gotten everything that he's wanted. He's nothing if not an extremely smart and capable of son of a bitch. He's not responsible for micromanaging the fucking basketball team, it's not his job to handicap Appalachian State, and the fact that he didn't hire a dream candidate that you've fetishized for months does not equate to a firing offense.

Why Les Miles will never be my coach

I can't stand the guy.

It's not just that I'm a Lloyd "apologist" or "loyalist," whatever those things are. There's a real possibility that Les Miles wooed teenage athletes by telling them that Michigan's head coach (beloved in my circle though not everywhere) suffered from a chronic neurodegenerative disease. If I'm the Marques of Queensbury because that makes me hate him, so be it. I'm loyal to my school, not a prospective head coach to be named later.

The qualities that seem to draw Joe Michigan to Miles are the same things that make my stomach roil. "Excitement" and "aggression" make sense when they're value-added. Miles is Steve Fossett in a ballcap. Cool shit to watch from a distance, but not so cool when you're scraped across the desert because adventure ballooning sounded fun. At LSU, he's had talent but still only won by razor-thin margins. To call his on-field playcalling "risky" would be an understatement. In The Deer Hunter, Christopher Walken did well for a long time playing Russian Roulette. He made plenty of money, and then it came to an end.

But it's more than all of this.

The University of Michigan is not a football school. It's a vast, great academic institution that happens to have a football program.

Michigan losing to Appalachian State didn't change my life. It ruined a three-day weekend and briefly prompted ideations of suicide, but a week later life was back to normal, even after Oregon's ass-kicking.

The team can lose on the field, and I'll be pissed and traumatized. I have nightmares about losses, condemn my lifestyle choice, scream to my friends that I wish I'd gone to Middlebury or Amherst or some other liberal arts school where kids spend Saturdays high, reading Keats in the woods somewhere. But that, I can divorce from my overall feelings about Michigan as an institution. When I walk into work and a millionaire in his sixties gently mocks me about losing to Appalachian State, I can laugh uncomfortably and concoct a rationalization.

What I could not rationalize is having a head coach whose public behavior is a consistent embarrassment. It's why Gary Moeller managed to get himself fired. Unfortunately, Michigan's head football coach is linked to how the public at large views the school. Lloyd was terse, close-mouthed, careful -- he might have been abrasive with sideline reporters and he might have been a dull interview, but you never feared that he'd utter words to embarrass you as an alumnus.

Michigan's unofficial spokesperson cannot be someone who would say, "We have a new rival in fucking Michigan State." He can't get choked up in press conferences. He can't rationalize a two-loss record as tantamount to being undefeated in regulation. He can't storm in front of television cameras and deliver a UFC-style rant.

That shit's fine at Oklahoma State or LSU. Alabama coaches can call people "coon-asses" and compare losing a football game to September 11. At some places, football plays a role in the hiring of college presidents and is a principal fundraising motivator. I did not go to one of those schools. Mary Sue Coleman, Lee Bollinger and a $7 billion endowment have nothing to do with a team.

I can handle losing to the Appalachian States of the world. I could even handle the program decaying into a Northwestern-style mediocrity -- that would surely suck and require years of pain and adjustment, but it would not make me renounce my degree or tarnish my feelings about the school.

I wouldn't feel the same way if the school's highest-profile employee were perpetually uncorked and verbally reckless. Michigan has always kept sports in its place, and that's no easy achievement. You can spend four years at the school, ignore its athletics, and not feel like you're missing anything. You can be on faculty without giving a damn about football. If you're a major donor wanting to give $20 million for cancer research, your decision of whether to donate to the hospitals at Duke, Michigan or Columbia will not incorporate coaching behavior.

This is why big-time athletics at Michigan have always been risky. By and large, they're good public relations and enhance the undergraduate experience. They also open up the school to forces that have nothing to do with its institutional mission, which, if kept unchecked, risk overshadowing everything else.

And then one day there's a clip repeated ad nauseum of some dumb-ass head coach popping off in a press conference, or in headlines because he said something dumb about the Pac-10, and Michigan starts to look like a football school. As an alumnus, you have a hard time explaining the person away. As a prof, maybe you feel embarrassed to be affiliated with a circus. And as a donor, the football program still doesn't mean jack shit to your decision, but if you're looking to do something serious with your legacy, quite possibly there's an itch somewhere about not wanting a new rival in fucking: Michigan State.

This is how it happened

Last Saturday was a fiasco for Michigan athletic director Bill Martin. He was apparently totally unreachable down at his club in Key Largo, Florida, when Les Miles' agent called him, frantically hoping to get an offer for his client now that LSU had upped the ante. When he got back to Michigan, reporters were calling wanting to know why he spent the day sailing. Even the bloggers were mocking him, making it sound as if he'd been enjoying himself when really everything had gone horribly, horribly wrong.

First, Mrs. Martin snapped the bowsprit off their new sloop when she tried to christen it. Then Miles roared past in the new cabin cruiser LSU bought him and the wake nearly knocked everyone off the dock. Then, after Miles was done terrorizing jet-skiers and quintets, he flew up to Atlanta, called a press conference and announced: "I just got head from Amelia Earhart!"

Sources say any counteroffer would have to involve Pancho Barnes.

Champagne wishes

When the Ravens scored in the third fourth quarter to take a touchdown lead, Tony Kornheiser pointed out that Shula had grabbed his back in excitement. Shula pretended like he wasn't rooting against anybody ... but we knew. -- Deadspin, Dec. 4, 2007.

It would certainly be nice to have once been part of some band of brothers that achieved something singular and unique. And it would be nice, if, once a year, all of us having gone our separate ways, we paused our lives at the same moment to celebrate and remember all that we accomplished.

If, however, that cause for commemoration was that someone else had failed, leaving the glory alone to us, I would have to wonder how people had lived with me all this time. What an ugly spectacle the 1972 Miami Dolphins now seem to be making of themselves, with the New England Patriots aiming at an undefeated season that would not just match the Dolphins' achievement, but surpass it by two wins at 19-0-0.

Yes, the Patriots have cheated. Yes, I too am tired of hearing each of them held up for adulation as if the men who don that uniform are somehow jewels the rest of the league, never mind us mere mortals, can never hope to equal. Yes, I have my own team's interests in mind, too.

But man, how narcissistic must you be to celebrate someone falling short of your own achievements? I wonder who else is this awful? Do you think Max Planck put his fist through his hat when Einstein won the Nobel Prize three years later? Do you think Sebastian Coe kicks his Corgi every time someone says the name "Hicham El Guerrouj"?

I mean, not to indulge in metaphor here, but the behavior of the 1972 Dolphins is something like if Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay busted out the Piper-Heidsieck every time the Nepalese Air Force had to helicopter a corpse off of Everest.

Crisis averted

Depending on the ultimate explanation, I'd like to thank Mary Sue Coleman, the University of Michigan Board of Regents and/or Les Miles's avarice for sparing my university years of pain and embarrassment.

I look forward to sleeping the sleep of the just and discontinuing vitriolic e-mails.

My soul is bruised

ANN ARBOR -- I just lived The Road.

And we have nowhere to go but down.

On Lloyd

Lloyd Carr has been the coach of Michigan for as long as I've been an invested fan. There will come a day when he's not, possibly soon.

Saturday could be his final Ohio State game. For idiots, this would be cause for jubilation. For me, it would begin a long period of unease.

Lloyd has been successful by any measure, with a national title and five of Michigan's 42 Big Ten titles to his name. His winning percentage is behind only those of Schembechler and Yost among Michigan coaches, and under his watch, Michigan became the national leader in all-time wins and winning percentage. His personal winning percentage is higher than the school's all-time win percentage. Not shabby.

National media types and fans like to make coaches into godheads. When comparing the best football coaches in the country, it sounds as if they're discussing the seven wonders of the world: The Great Lighthouse of Norman; The Colossus of the Coliseum; The Hanging Gardens of Gainesville; The Great Pyramid of Happy Valley.

Lloyd doesn't get that treatment. He doesn't have the flash to engender slack-jawed awe. He's just a coach whose players uniformly love him and would run through walls for him, who is in charge of a scandal-free program that, despite bumps in the road, never collapses. And more often, wins. A lot. From what anecdotal evidence I can gather, he treats his players well, demands their best, and gets it. They love him. Before September's Notre Dame game, at a time when Michigan was 0-2 and looked on the brink of disaster, former Michigan tight end Aaron Shea called Carr "the best coach I've ever had in my whole career. I wish him luck, and I truly love that man."

Some fans find it harder. Lloyd does not inspire mindless worship. He doesn't take stupid gambles that earn the praise of the national media and chin-stroking pre-season puff pieces. His demeanor, like his playcalling, is restrained. He doesn't have any personal-appearance trademarks. He doesn't tell reporters how late he stays up watching film and working on game plans. And he sure as hell doesn't court their attention. The only way you'll see him on a magazine cover is on his players' shoulders.

Lloyd is just a man who has made Michigan football his life's work. He has a life outside of football coaching, and appears to be intelligent, at least enough to understand that football is not the end-all, be-all that some make it.

In an interview with scholastic.com, the book publisher, Carr dropped a reference to Ralph Waldo Emerson. (Imagine your school's coach sitting for an interview with Scholastic Books, let alone throwing around Emerson references.) His 1997 team was famous for reading Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air and using it as inspiration on its climb to the top of the college football world.

In a perfect world, Lloyd would coach into his 80s, improving the lives of generations of football players, as well as students like myself who find themselves respecting and admiring the man.

Lloyd embodies Michigan ideals. He does not run up the score. He does not believe in winning at all costs; he treats sportsmanship and dignity as tangible goals. He insists his players leave Michigan as better people. Many of them do, and go on to become teachers, airline pilots and entrepreneurs.

And his teams win. We should all be so successful in our life's work.

Someone wrote earlier this week that tomorrow's game is the rubber match for Lloyd's legacy. That statement couldn't be more wrong.

Whenever he begins life as an ex-coach, Lloyd Carr will deliver our team into the hands of someone who will not seem worthy. This is fine. Any assessment of Lloyd at the moment he took over Michigan would have been the same. The program was poised at a touchy moment. But Lloyd took over, never once lobbied for the job, and simply proved himself. He overcame a highly embarrassing loss to Northwestern, his team played hard all season, and delivered a 31-23 upset of undefeated Ohio State. Should he bookend his career with likely upsets of the hated Buckeyes, it would be a sweet finish indeed for a man who deserves it.

And if not, we'll all get over the disappointment. I wouldn't trade the past 13 seasons of Michigan football for anything. And whenever it is a new coach takes over, he'll probably seem at least as unworthy as Lloyd might once have. I'm optimistic that Michigan's next coach will do just fine. But I can't shake the feeling it won't be the same.

People like Lloyd are called once in a lifetime for a reason.

BREAKING: World's most important tournament underway

Activist blog commenter J. Businger has begun a tournament to crown the 2007 NCAA football champion. It is real. Very real. Here's a taste:

The television package is split between ESPN/ABC and CBS, both of which devote significant regular season airtime to college football. Fox, which doesn’t carry regular season games at the network level and which has contributed to the current BCS mess by offering globs of money to extend and televise the status quo, was barred from negotiations. (Plus, we strongly suspected that Fox suits would insist on renaming the national championship game “The Rudy Giuliani Bowl.”)

Enjoy history in the making.

The age of turbulence

Christ, I can't wait for this season to end. Not just because of my Michigan-related psychological issues, but because of the entire freakshow. I'm sick of Lou Holtz, Pat Forde, Charlie Weis's smug fucking face, Bill Callahan and his imminent standoff with the ATF, the many fucking retards who attended my university, and anything remotely affiliated with Les Miles. I'm sick of Kansas rising, Hawaii being discussed as if it's legitimate (Michigan deserves to be in the national title game as much as Hawaii deserves to be in a New Year's Day bowl, let alone a BCS bowl), the words "Darren McFadden," shitty Big 12 teams, shitty Big 10 teams, hollow SEC teams being discussed as if they're worth of respect, and Les Miles. I'm sick of Holly Rowe, ESPN's list of 100 greatest college football players, Paul McGuire, Brady Quinn hawking Gillette (boycott Gillette), Perry Farrell's glitterpants, that footage of Matt Ryan puking on the sidelines, and Les Miles.

People once thought Ken Lay was a genius. Recklessness catches up with everyone eventually.

ESPN needs to stop. Lou Holtz's pep talks are amusing only in the way that it would be amusing to put an Alzheimer's patient onstage at a comedy club and let 'er rip. That is, they're painful and sadistic. You forget that this sputtering punchline was once a leader of men, a great coach, now willingly dropped before a camera in order to make an ass of himself in service of our entertainment. Lawyers and court-appointed guardians must inject themselves. Someone who loves him must intervene. Old people should be allowed to live their golden years in dignity, not turned into the announcing equivalent of a snuff film. This is what Howard Beale would have been like if he had no rage.

Dear Pat Forde: Suck my fat one, you cheap dimestore hood.

Ninety-five percent of the people coaching, announcing and analyzing this sport fall into the category of hypocrite, half-wit or liar.

Also, this is my own fault, but I know more about Houston Nutt and the Arkansas booster-and-recruiting follies than should ever, ever be expected of a native Midwesterner who's spent his last eight years in the Northeast. I would like to wire my brain to a magic robot/computer and let it remove massive quantities of memory, including everything about Houston Nutt and Mitch Mustain. Why the fuck do I know what Houston fucking Nutt told a guy when he was in high school and what Razorbacks' parents think? Did I ever even care? Not by a long shot. But I know anyway. Fuck, I'm surprised that I didn't go through the FOIA requests and the documents that were produced and assimilate them all into massive spreadsheets just for shits and giggles. I should be put down.

While we're at it, let's also void every memory of Dennis Franchione and his stupid-assed secret newsletters. Why do I know? Why did I read those things? I cannot tell you. Something to do with a USC ballcap and the word "guff." I want all of that shit wiped clean.

Speaking of wiping shit clean, I'm not listening to anyone trying to make sense of what's happening in college football, because all we're doing is standing around with massive fistfuls of shit, trying to shape wet, dirty feces into nice little sculptures that resemble something explicable. That's not a sculpture of a lizard -- it's shit, dude, seeping out between your fingers. Otherwise metaphorized (That's not a word? Fuck off.) a Great Dane pukes on Mom's kitchen floor after it lapped a two-liter of Diet Coke, and the Thanksgiving guests stand around the mess, declaring that they see an image of the Virgin Mary somewhere in the puke. And then they start praying and call the local media, and the next thing you know the Great Dane's mess of Diet Coke puke is being consecrated as holy. And then you're thinking, "Fuck, all that's there is dog vomit. Devotion will not change that. Why pretend?"

Buffalo Bill's defunct

and what I want to know is
how do you like your blueeyed boy
Mister Death

Metaphysics of presence

Michigan started the 2007 season ranked No. 5 in both the Associated Press poll and the USA Today coaches' poll. Set aside that many of us considered that position exceedingly generous, even before the inglorious losses to Appalachian State and Oregon -- there they were at Number 5, the most overhyped team since 2006 Notre Dame.

But those inglorious losses happened, Michigan clawed back, and as of today, the team is ranked No. 14 in the USA Today poll (one spot ahead of USC) and No. 15 in the Associated Press poll.

As someone who loves the program, the team, the coach, and is deeply impressed by this season's recovery, it's still difficult to reconcile the No. 15 ranking with life as we know it, except that you glance up the ladder and see Hawaii, Virginia Tech and Texas teams ranked ahead of Michigan, and are reminded that this is the year Derrida and Foucault have made their way to big-time college football. There is no longer such thing as truth. Glance through the polls, and there are fine arguments on behalf of ranking Michigan at 11, or placing them in the low 20s.

Now consider this: instead of I-AA Appalachian State, Michigan might have scheduled I-A Buffalo. Instead of scheduling Oregon, they might have scheduled Florida State. (Keep in mind that the Oregon game was scheduled early in the century; Florida State would have been a more respectable, even fearsome, pick back then.) Michigan would have won those games. The exact same team, with its flaws and paradoxes, would be undefeated and ranked No. 1 in the nation. Ohio State would be No. 2. That No. 1 team would literally be no different than the present No. 14/15 team, except that Mike Hart would be consensus Heisman frontrunner and the hordes of breast-biting banshees calling for Carr's head would be forced to be more creative in their bloodlust.

I've been adamant in my opposition to installing a playoff. It's more trickery disguised as science, with a selection process no less arbitrary than the BCS. Worse, the media hype, money and distortion coming from a playoff would be unbearable.

Yet with scheduling tweaks, Michigan would be the consensus No. 1 team in the country. That's an excellent argument for a playoff.

Ozymandias

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
`My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away."

To our Iowa friends

I know it's been a tough season and that in the larger scheme of things, Tom Arnold playing your "celebrity" spokesman on ESPN is a small matter.

Still, talk about adding insult to injury. Thanks to the same people that brought us Big 'N Rich and Perry Ferrell singing about football while dressed in glitter pants, we just watched an entire quarter of football subsumed by an analysis of Tom Arnold's career, including praise for True Lies.

I guess Jane Smiley was unavailable.

Sleepy rappers at the pajama party

Just click through and watch the video.