The Agony Of the Band

On Saturday Michigan lost to Ohio State 42-7. The outcome and final score were foregone conclusions, the playing of the game a brutal formality.

This time of year the college football world is consumed with the teams at the top. Should Texas or Oklahoma ride out to the Big 12 championship game? Will Oregon State falter in the Civil War? Or can they make it to a Rose Bowl date with Penn State? Will Florida or Alabama prevail in the SEC championship game?

But before we move onto crowns and tournaments of flowers and fruit, let's pause over a program in deep trouble facing an unprecedented identity crisis on the heels of an unprecedented losing season.

Namely, let's dissect what it means to be a Michigan Wolverines fan right now.

Michigan's season is over, a lame loss to rival Ohio State signaled an end to even the most modest redemption narratives. This Michigan team lost more games - nine - than any other Michigan team. The losing season was the first in four decades. And they missed a bowl game for the first time since the mid 70s.

What this means for new coach Rich Rodriguez is unclear. The last few weeks, the graceless hunkering down of harsh reality, have been difficult. Rodriguez has been punchy with reporters, urging fans to keep football in perspective while quipping that they want might to "get a life."

In a sense the season's complete disaster might give Rodriguez the slightest bit of breathing room. Predecessor Lloyd Carr was done under by the slow decay of the program. Had Rodriguez continued on that path, mediocrity and diminishing returns, the boosters and fans might have seen little difference between the two tenures.

That's not to say, the disastrous season is a boon for Rodriguez, but it's an intake of breath before something possibly new, something radically different.

And it's that prospect of change, staring at the abyss of the unknown, that Wolverines fans have been coming to grips with in the last couple of weeks.

College football is something I enjoy, something I love in a way... but it's not something I truly understand. I have no football alma mater. No family ties to programs. And growing up the regional gravity of Wisconsin-Madison was a weak force from my tiny northern Wisconsin town in the upper part of the state.

But there are ways in which I relate to fervent love. While discussing Packers tackle Chad Clifton, a former Tennessee Vol, with blogger Holly from Snarkastic and EDSBS, she coos that he's a "sweetie" and admits to choking upon his selection to the Pro Bowl.

Furthermore one of my favorite writers is a Michigan blogger: Johnny at Ron Bellamy's Underachieving All-Stars. And it's Johnny's words from last week, in the build up to the Ohio State game, that inspired this little postmortem for Michigan... That or the extreme reactions Johnny's words engendered among fellow faithful.

Last Monday, Johnny wrote in a post title After the Gold Rush:

On Saturday, Michigan threw 36 passes and only completed 12 of them. There is nothing discrete in 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.

Some readers didn't take kindly to Johnny's analogy, reasoning it an underhanded slight to Rodriguez's West Virginia background. More found unease at the admittance of a crisis about this team at all.

Either way it hit a chord.

Dex at the Wolverine Liberation Army fired back, eloquently so:

I've spent all year yelling, apparently into space, that this is your team. They are not great, they are not "familiar" to you, and they make your testicles smaller when they are beaten by teams we used to slaughter.

Tough. Shit.

It's the last game of the season. There is no bowl. There is no scenic trip to some backwater in the south to play for a tire company exhibition game. There will be no Michigan at Christmas, no Michigan during the Festival of Lights, no Michigan during ESPN CapitalOne MasterCard AutoZone Bowl Week presented by IBM. There will be no Michigan on New Year's Eve. There will be no Michigan to nurse your inevitable hangover on the first, and there will be no Michigan while Chris Rose tries to hold together the worst college football TV crew in existence during the biggest games of the year.

More specifically, the gauntlet was laid down:

It's likely, extremely likely, that these seniors will leave with another loss to Ohio State. So those of you who are disappointed, those who find the performance "unacceptable", those 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. You don't need to share in John Thompson's melancholy, pretend to care about Dough Dutch's future while lamenting his past, or wonder if KC Lopata can get a job in AFL2. You don't deserve to watch the last hurrah of Jamison and Taylor. And you certainly don't deserve to hope for one last shot of Morgan Trent's mom.

For the rest of us - it's time to get up. Get your ass off the mat, wipe the blood out of your eyes, pop your shoulder back into place, and go out to get hit in the mouth once again. There's no shame in getting your ass kicked. Only in letting your ass get kicked.

Interesting I found Johnny's response:

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.

People talk about victory as a magic cure-all, but I don't know if this issue at had is symptomatic of losing. Rather, at the moment of great change our reasons, sundry and particular, for loving come to the fore with our fears.

My favorite Packers blogger Robert Lalasz let his wonderful Nietszche Or Nitschke? blog slide into oblivion of rarely updated until he finally pulled the archives from the web. It was a process that started with last of the Brett Favre years. I can only guess at his specific reasons, but there's little doubt the heavy toll of obsession and attachment simply flickered out, or to something much less intense.

It's sometimes so easy to care about sports, a sports team... it's sometimes so very difficult. A few times in the past year, I've considered chucking this whole writing gig and return to simply catching the game when a fictitious life allows and catching up on the hours and hours of sleep I've left behind.

But I can't stop, watching, writing, thinking... and in this I'm certainly not alone.

There's a truth to writing. There's an honesty in claiming one's team in enemy or unfamiliar territory. These two realities don't always fit neatly together. In fact at times like the one Michigan fans are facing, there's a distinct discomfort between the two.

One thing about being a sports fan, it helps develop a rather grim sense of humor. Us fans have to be marathon runners with our focus constantly diverted, with no real end in sight.

Brian and MGoBlog approaches that idea in a post entitled the Perverse Joy of Abject Stupidity:

At halftime I momentarily thought I had found a forgotten pair of hand warmers in the recesses of my jacket, only to pull out an empty packet of trail mix and other assorted detritus. This was worse than having no hope of hand warmers at all.

I then examined the various and diverse pockets of my jacket, coming across nothing useful. I did strike upon my ticket from last April's Frozen Four, which now commemorates the gut-punch loss suffered because of Nickelback and Creed. Thanks for leaving it there, Brian Of Christmas Past. I hope your football team goes 3-9, douchebag.

I spent halftime with my hands on the glass of the pretzel oven. Contraption. Vendor thing. Thing with flames and heat that contains pretzels. Whatever the hell it is. It didn't help much.

This is how weird it's been of late: as I huddled near a pretzel contraption at halftime of a game between 3-7 Michigan and Northwestern, soaked, frozen, pondering the grim futility of all things, I discovered that I was sort of enjoying this. Yeah, sure, you had to peel back layer upon layer of misery to get to the morbidly sunny core. But it was there.

People lucky enough to not be afflicted with sports obsession often marvel at how nasty thing can get between rival fans, rival teams... hell even rival cross country coaches.

But we fans all know that we're harder on ourselves, and the ones we take as being like us, than we can ever be on the others.