MGOBLOG.COM, and that is capitalized for a reason, today announced that it is still perfect.

"Hey, don't you get it yet?  We are perfect, you are not, and move on, nothing to see here, and I get better unsourced emails than you do.  Do you have your own home, and what is that like, not living in your parents' basement?" said [NAME REDACTED], proprietor of MGOBLOG.COM (and that is capitalized FOR A REASON), author of THIS WEEK IN SCHADENFREUDE (I spelled that without looking it up, btw), who four hours ago predicted that Les Miles would be the next head coach of the (formerly legendary) University of Michigan football club.  

"Schadenfreude: that's something that will roll back on you, perhaps," said Lloyd Carr, in an unguarded moment.

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Wow, that was close.  Our hidebound devotion to such ridiculous conventions as "tackling", "blocking", "running to daylight", "backside contain", "keeping the QB in one piece", and the like, almost cost us.  

Forthwith, a transcript of This Week with Bo Schembechler, with guests Rich Rodriguez, Bill Parcells, Kirk Ferentz, and Matt Roth.

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[Bumped.--AJ]

I.  Review of the Numbers.

If we examine yesterday's box score of Michigan-Michigan State we learn three things:

a.  Michigan State could not have dreamed themselves to a better offensive balance, running for 249, passing for 287, totaling 536.  What else could you possibly ask for?

b.  Football is not about rolling up gaudy statistics, other than the endgame numbers on the scoreboard and turnover-takeaways, because by that measure, Kirk Cousins did not improve his standing v. Denard Robinson.  Query: which quarterback do you want running your offense if you fall behind, today?

c.  If your primary offensive weapon runs for 80 and throws three picks, are you in good shape against one of the top five defenses in the country?

II.  The Qualitatives.  

Now, continuing, if we review the live action:

a.  MSU was, apparently, a half-step faster and playing with a half-step better leverage, than Michigan's prior five opponents.  Denard was repeatedly tackled from behind, at the second level, at ankle level.  The man is dangerous, but if you can get your hands on him he will go down.  He remains a very, very dangerous man with the ball.  MSU won because he didn't penetrate the second level.  But he almost did, repeatedly.  Nota bene.  MSU had way too many ankle tackles of Denard.

b.  Michigan failed to tackle anyone in the broken field with any authority, even when MSU backs were carrying the arms and torsos of Michigan defenders.  To paraphrase Tyler Sash, earlier this week, they "guard", they don't tackle.  I suspect that is because they "guard" all spring and summer, when they are playing their own.  It is the inverse of our O-Line having to compete with our D-Line in camp.  Surviving against those monsters means that you have prepared against the best in the country.  Surviving against Denard means that you never learn to hit, control the LOS, tackle, or intimidate.  Basically, Michigan doesn't play defense.  They are playing some other game that I haven't seen before.  I don't know what it is.  But it isn't major college football.

c.  Michigan, in its "guarding", has exactly one DB who plays with leverage and tackles like the Michiganders of old, and he is their slowest:  former walk-on Jordan Kovacs.

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Cruising the Stats Sheets.

Current national Iowa ranking in rushing defense:  2.

Alabama ranking in rushing defense:  19.

Score of intergalactic mega-game, Alabama v. PSU:  24-3.

Score of overlooked Big Ten tilt, Iowa v. PSU: 24-3.

Increase in game experience of stud PSU freshman QB, mega-game v. overlooked game:  400%.

Difference it made in outcome:  0%.

(Value of comparative scores: also 0%, but still.)

Number of rushing touchdowns yielded by Iowa, 2010:  0.

Number of other FBS schools yielding 0 rushing touchdowns in first five games:  0.

Number of other FBS schools yielding 0 rushing touchdowns in first four games (i.e., they already had their bye):  1.

Name of the other one:  Arizona, I think it's pronounced.  (But I gnash my teeth at the sound, and may be wrong.)

Ranking, in regard to national rushing defense, of Arizona:  21.

Ranking, in regard to national rushing defense (reminder), of Iowa:  2.

Number of Arizona offensive drives resulting in a touchdown: 1.

Total points scored by Arizona:  34.

Number of missed game opportunities for historically important Iowa team to achieve righteous prominence:  1.

Number of Iowa rushing touchdowns yielded, period 2007-2010 (present date):  27.

Number of games played by Iowa, period 2007-2010 (present date):  43.

Probability of Iowa yielding a single rushing touchdown, irrespective of turnovers or special teams debacle, per game:  63%.

Average points per game yielded by Iowa on the ground, period 2007 to present:  4.4.  [Figure assumes a TD=7, not 6.]

Probability you are going to beat Iowa scoring 4.4 points per game on the ground: not so hot.

Game success achieved by the preeminent run game Evil Genius of the past 30 years, by name Paul Johnson, v. Iowa:  [null set].

Probability that Kirk Ferentz and Norm Parker think football is not so complicated, and you can't win if you can't run, control the LOS, and generally frighten people:  99.9999999%.

Probability that KF and NP think we lost to OSU last year because they ran for three (3) TDs and 229 yards: are you serious?

The number of touchdowns a team can score cruising up and down the field throwing quick passes between the 20's:  0.

The reason the second half of the 2010 PSU-Iowa game was dull and alarming to Hawkeye enthusiasts who want to beat PSU by 40 and score brownie points with sportswriters in the SEC and Pac-10:  see prior notes.

Reason, in a 6-2 game, Iowa walked out of the end zone and handed PSU 2 points:  see prior notes.

Final score of that game:  6-4.

Number of FBS scholarship offers dangled before Mike Daniels: 0.

Number of teams who will attempt to block Adrian Clayborn with one man, 2010: 0, not even Carimi will be left alone with Clayborn.

Number of 300-lb defensive ends who ran the 4x100 spring relay in high school and won a state championship:  I don't know, but it's not a very big number.

Number of All American tackles who entered college weighing (Klug) 207 and (Daniels) 210: I don't know, but it's not a big number.

Ranking, all-time, against all Big Ten d-lines, of the 2010 Hawkeye d-line:  I don't know, but we will find out in the next 60 days.

Likelihood that I'll have to remove my shoes and socks, and unzip my pants, to count the number of better d-lines in Big Ten history: ask Joe Paterno, he's our living history authority, but I suspect it's extremely low.

Number of pussies who start for an Iowa defense coached by Norm Parker (cumulative, all years):  0.

Wealth created by Chris Doyle, empowering his willing charges:  hundreds of millions of dollars (think about it).

Number of hours Norm Parker has spent lying on his back thinking about Denard Robinson while people cut off his body parts:  150 (here's hoping).

Number of times Norm developed a bad game plan when he had time to think about it:  0.

Most physical football games played in the FBS division, last four years:  Iowa v. Michigan State.

Value of Iowa's serendipitous bye week occurring a) while Michigan prepares for the unrelenting pain that is Michigan State; and b) Norm has nothing to do but reflect on the mystery that is Denard:  To Infinity, and Beyond!

*[Apologies to Harpers Index]

The Gazette Company, flag of convenience for Marc Morehouse and Mike Hlas, has breached a new frontier in web design and usage: they have relaunched their site and created a broken muddle of dysfunction, intrusive registration requirements, and brain-choking ugliness.  Honestly, it's so bad I thought it was a self-satirizing Onion piece.  It's so bad it's hard to imagine someone achieving this level of badness and surviving.   It's so bad their own "Feedback" page is broken.

Dialogue boxes don't work, links are broken, it appears that they released this pig without doing any QA in Safari, you can't make a waggish remark on football without leaving your full fucking name there to be googled by your customers or next girlfriend.  (Google: perhaps the New Media wunderkind at the Gazette thinks it's a passing fancy?)  

Morehouse and Hlas have been very sincere about engaging a readership, and bam, I think that just got killed.

That is all.

On Domination (and Pride, Delirium, and Unearned Triumphalism).

This is a lot of fun and all, and far be it from me to rain on the SMA "We're actually gods in black and gold" meme, but as a guy in the software business, I'm reminded of what happens when a development-stage company, after three years in a very unkind wilderness building its product, makes its first $million sale.  Let us Do the Metaphorical, soon to be a weekly feature.

How post-ISU euphoria is like building a software company that makes it's first $1 million+ license sale: 

a.  the salesmen get out their spreadsheets and calculate that they just have to make seven additional sales of like-quality, and they'll be driving a Modena to work, taking Scarlett Johannsson away from her husband so she can enjoy the majesty that is the after-game party at The Mill, and summering at Madaket;

b.  the venture capitalists call the ceo (this really happens) and tell him good job, but he'd better start working harder or he's fired unless he makes 17 like-sized sales in the next three months, because they need to get a $1 billion liquidity event in order to sell their house at Madaket and upgrade to a West Chop compound, complete with the first helipad authorized by Martha's Vineyard in 31 years;

c.  some twit from Goldman rings up and says to the ceo that he's a lock for the best software IPO of 2011 if he just completes 250 additional sales of identical class and character in the next 6 months; and,

d.  the ceo looks around and sees 75 half-insane people, overcome with pride, relief and wonder, who have been working 24x7 for three years, now strangely convinced that their wives maybe won't divorce them after all (for the gardener, since he's around more often), and wonders:  how the hell do I convince these people that the real work has just started?  Before going back to doodling about the pros and cons of a clean used Falcon 20 vs. a pleasant little single-pilot Citation, he walks out into his plain of cubicles and hangs a banner that says, 

MISSION NOT ACCOMPLISHED.

Iowans do not handle prosperity so well, my friends.  It's not in our DNA.  The gods have all fall to destroy this fine-appearing, lush crop of football joy: hail, floods, PAULAS, and jNWU.  Pride goeth.

*I sorta stole this concept from Spencer Hall.  But he deserves it for not mentioning us this week in The Alphabetical.

Well, the argument has been that any junior who can get drafted early should exit college and take the money.   Last year in particular it was common to reference Sam Bradford's shoulder injury, and Bulaga certainly had his concerns that, having gotten sick, he should not take his playing career and future income for granted.

However, this deal flips that thinking on his head, and I do wonder if Bulaga, Greene, and Dace didn't cost themselves a great deal by leaving before they had to.  Not anyone's decision but their own, but I can't believe that Greene in particular left 8 figures on the table by not coming back.

But it is fun, and that's what a good internet pseudonym is for, n'est-ce pas?

***

So, Michigan self-reporting major violations to the NCAA.  How is it possible that [they found the cash in the freezer] that such "mistakes were made"*?

Sage of all things Blue, Mr. Brian Cook, September 2009:

"do you have anything substantive to say …about what’s on the site, or are you a one-trick pony?"

For more of the charming repartee, and he really hurt my feelings before banning me from his site (meanie!), go here:

http://www.blackheartgoldpants.com/2009/9/1/1010576/brian-cook-named-new-attorney-for

But this is now:

"Everyone involved with Michigan football compliance administration has failed massively and should be fired.  Now."

I think, incidentally, that he still misses the point, as he wades through 73-page exhibits and such.  Just from the perspective of governance and culture, what this huge document dump reveals is two things, and I don't think either one is 'We gotta fire some nobodies, and pronto.'

First, there was no compliance in effect at Michigan.  When executives do not follow the rules, staff do not follow the rules; at this point the rules cease to exist.  The staff is not there to protect the executives from themselves.  There was systemic, institutional flouting of the relevance of compliance by program executives, including the head coach. Analogy:  change the problem here from a compliance failure at a popular football school, to, say, an accounting or sexual harassment problem in a corporation or a battalion -- any independent evaluation would say that the violations are so consistent, persistent, and so casual as to indicate complete disinterest in preventing fraud or sexual harassment.   (The NCAA has already stated that Michigan created a hostile-to-compliance environment. Note to future execs: when you are told you have created a "hostile environment" for anything, you are a) being sued; b) about to lose some money; and c) at risk of losing your job.)  I have no idea how the NCAA deals with a cash-generating athletic monster like UM, but if this were a corporate governance problem, and it really is, on a level with lying about receivables and ginning up phony expenses, or trading bonuses and promotions for sex, there would be consequences.  The consequences would not be limited to firing a couple of clerks.

Second, RichRod considered compliance somebody else's problem, didn't look into it, didn't inspect it, didn't hold meetings on it, didn't take responsibility for it, didn't execute according to his responsibilities, appears not to have even read the rules.   This is the strangest, and yet most plausible, aspect of the story.  Strange, because why would a HC in the NCAA not trouble himself with core compliance due diligence?  And strange, because when was the last time you heard a football coach stand up and blame "collective failure"  and say, 'Hey, I'm just one of many gullible, innocent pawns' here.  But plausible, because he is a corner-cutter, a self-dealer, and a refugee from seamier climes. 

Anyway, Michiganders seem pleased that RichRod has some sort of plausible deniability, and that compliance failure may have preceded his arrival (a variation of the 'I inherited this mess' meme that we see elsewhere these days).  Okay, fine.  But I think they're arguing about whether or not those were $100 bills, or twenties, that they found in the fridge.  And I do think that there is someone who is in charge of and accountable for the UM football program.  

*Yes, the HC of UM actually said, in his defense this week, "mistakes were made":  

http://www.freep.com/article/20100526/SPORTS06/5260375/1054/sports06/Rich-Rod-Collective-failure-caused-violations

P.S.  In another story the Freep implies that, if fairly reviewed and associated with prior, punished infractions at (less powerful) schools, they'll lose a few scholarships.  

P.P.S.  What I see with this editor is definitely not what I'm getting.  Is it Safari?

The train went on up the track out of sight, around one of the hills of burnt timber and illusions, around the low hills and coruscated ground of the late Iowa autumn.  The sky was the hard, hard gray sky, high overcast, of November in Iowa.  This was the sky that said, You are alone now and the wind is about to blow for the next four months, and you don't want to be alone and in a tent, or alone on a gravel road walking, or alone standing on the sidewalk outside the bank, in this wind, for this wind does not care about you or anyone else.  

Pat sat down on the bundle of canvas, leather and advanced polymers that comprise his weekend attire, all of that pitched out the door of the ancient, wind-whistling car of the Rock Island, the train that no longer exists.  One hundred boys stood a few dozen yards away, each alone in his thoughts, wondering what brought them here.

A lone aircraft hurtled through the brutal flat sky and Pat heard the train clatter forward into time, without him, without anything really, because none of this is real, and none of it even probable.  He listened, and heard them still, all of them, the men who had accompanied them, here, in the graven earth of north Iowa where quiet men speak of the abnormal autumn of corn too wet to pick, too expensive to dry, of picking it anyways, of standing in the line in the elevator, one after another of new-bought Deeres, standing in line to sell too-wet corn to brokers who said, "Sorry, that's 24% corn, that's a fifty-cent drying fee, each bushel."

The plane was an old one, all fabric and wood and steel inside, round engine thrumbling in the air, rolling into an inverted wingover, diving directly at Pat, alone on his kit, then squaring its wings once, rising precipitously with the stored energy of the dive and its big Wright radial motor, before returning to its eastward flight, away and away, leaving echoes of its presence.  Lindbergh had wanted such a plane, for his trip across the ocean, a Bellanca it was, but that didn't work out (Lindbergh was asked to haul a sales manager as some sort of promotional stunt, all the way to Paris, and Lindbergh had said, "I don't think so, at all" and that was that.  Two weeks after Lindbergh landed in Paris, that Bellanca landed in Berlin, a more extraordinary feat, but no one cared.  It mattered how one did things, it really mattered, which Lindbergh knew, and the others did not, and that is why Lindbergh is remembered and Giuseppe Bellanca is not).

Pat sat alone.  Conversations rang in his head, the conversations from the train, this old Rock Island line train, a train he never knew he would ride.

Jeter was there.  Evy was there, in a Hart Schaffner & Marx three piece, a Churchill jammed in his mouth.  Duke Slater was there.  Kenny Ploen was there, Karras was there, Krause was there, Denny Green, Ray Nagel, elegant in a JFK way, Dr. Eddie Anderson, Cilek, Lawrence, and Podolak.  Bump, exiled by Michigan, for god's sake.  Larry Station, quiet.  Harmon, and Harmon.  Long, strangely unathletic, with eyes that saw everything. Dwight, pounding bone bruises into his seat-mate, one of the Hilgenbergs it looked like, the both of them laughing without reserve.  Laaveg, and Devlin, Tippett, filling an entire lounge with a tender knee elevated, Hayes and Cook, Rogers and Hartlieb and Burmeister, Tavian, Bell and ... so many of them.  Guys no one remembers: Frank Holmes, who destroyed Oregon State one perfect September day.  All of them.  Quietly talking while Pat Angerer and his team, boys who knew none of them, sat in the back wondering who, what, where any of this truly was.  One of them, though, youthful again and proud, the ex-Marine and not actually an Iowan at all, knew everyone.

"Angerer, get up here," he said.  The man spoke with a drawl.  Iowans don't drawl but somehow he was one of them.

Angerer walked slowly, not a man who had ridden trains, balancing with both arms against the racketing noise of the train.

"Angerer," said Fry.  "Listen here.  Do you know where you are?"

"No sir."

"You are on the Iowa train, and it's the train you will ride the rest of your life.  Do you know who these men are?"

"No sir."

"Do you have a clue as to who I am?"

"Of course."

"Well, I am not who you think I am, and we are not where you think we are.  But you will.  You will and we can't get off this train and this will be you.  You as well."

Angerer stood, his brilliant, massive arms clasping the tarnished stainless of a rail car long since retired.  He was surrounded by ghosts, but of course ghosts don't exist, and what matters is the present, the here and now, the noise of commerce and easy flirtations, various anesthetic pastimes.  Oh, and chicks.

"We can't get off this train.  But you can.  You get to walk off this train.  You get to step down on that ground and hear the wind in the river oaks, the disturbances of birds, unsettled, the rushing of the water over the river-snags.  In the quiet, the morning doves."

Angerer liked to bowl with his buddies, wrestle on the rented-apartment rugs, knock shit out of freshmen at practice, listen to the roaring in the old stadiums of Ann Arbor, Columbus, Madison.  

"We can't get off this train.  That's a hell of a thing.  Who do you suppose that is, over there?"

"I don't know."

"That's Bob Elliott, and he would have been your coach.  Only the one thing he wanted, he lost, because he got cancer six months too soon.  Do you understand what I'm telling you, son?"

"No."

Fry leaned over and whispered something to the man to his right, a guy built like any other undersized linebacker grown into a middle-aged man, quietly sitting next to the window, thinking about trains and buses from the past, and saying nothing.  He chewed gum in an odd way, his jaw canted as though in a perpetual smirk.  He had a young man's face, a face that had not been sanded bare by alcohol, embarrassment, divorce.  Fry finished whispering and squeezed the man's shoulder once, and the man gave a series of quick nods, eyes bright.

"Well, it worked out all right.  For everyone except Bobby.  One job after another, out of town, his wife staying here, nothing going nowhere.  Well, that's enough of that.  Listen.  You will be one of us and soon.  You won't be getting off this train.  You don't know what that means, but maybe something will warrant your attention.  We all want to get off this train with you.  But we can't."

The train, in rust-screeching protest, was then slowing and then at rest.  Ferentz, rising now, while the forward cabin men all looked impassively at him, frozen in their irrelevance, because that is what time delivers, irrelevance, and he  rolled his chin casually toward the the train car door.  A conductor, a pot-bellied man in a white shirt and a blue wool uniform, stood there, his blue cap tilted back, stood there with his eyebrows raised.  "We going, big guy?"  he said.

Angerer had moved quickly and easily through the slowing train, looked for a moment at the conductor with the distended gut, and descended into the prairie twilight.  The rest of the team disembarked, two cars back, he heard them back there, but he descended along on the formed steel steps, one hand sliding down the dirty steel rail, the night-air already filling his senses as he neared the last step.  What was this, he thought.  Who were those guys?

So now he sat, the noise of the train fading, a steel-against-steel clatter like the whispers of that girl you lost explaining everything to her friends in the dark,  you hear it but hear nothing.  Sun, going down fast in the upper midwest, November.  No beer, no girls, no suck-ups, no reporters asking "How did you feel ...."  Standing on the hard stone of the roadbed.  Just wind, dirt, rock, and muscle.  

He looked around.  The landscape, recently burnt, and badly.  Stillness.  Well, things grow again.

Ferentz left the gaggle of boys and their chatter 100 feet back.  

"What are we doing here, Coach?"

"You tell me, Captain."

Doyle plodded down the trackbed.

"Angerer," Doyle said.  "What, you seen a ghost?  Are you a captain of this team?"

"I don't know.  This is a hell of a place to be, now."

The dust, smear and HID glow of another guy combining his livelihood against the wet corn as darkness fell distracted them all, over there, across the river.  A diesel's throbbing roar will carry for miles or more, here.

"You're here," Doyle said, "because this is where you belong."

"I thought we were playing Minnesota," Angerer said.  "Not rumbling around in the dark and freezing our butts and playing boy scouts on Tuesday night."

"You're here,"  Parker said, crutches carefully placed on the hardest ground he could find in the darkening light.  "You're here because one day you're going to be on that train.  And you won't be getting off."

Another figure emerged from the other side of the tracks.  He hadn't seen this guy.

"No one gets off, in the end," a voice said.  "Norm, there, this might be it, for Norm.  He's played it out a long time."

Angerer had had enough.   "Jesus, who the fuck are you?" he said to the shortish Lieut. j.g. in the A2 jacket, starched WWII khakis, and the lithe figure of yet another old timer who played college football at 170 pounds.  These guys got on his nerves.   Museum pieces, all of them, when you got down to it.  "I'm listening to you because ...?"

"I'm the guy they do let off the train.  Every once in a while.  Usually there's no point."

"I give up on this scene."

"So I'm the guy they let off the train, from time to time.  I don't know why.  Maybe it's because I was an okay guy, maybe it's because they think guys like us should still play football and I should say hello."

"I'm not like you."  Angerer snorted.  "For christ's sake.  Bunch of circus freaks."

The shortish Navy-clad dude in the old khakis drove a shoulder into Angerer (just underneath his ribs so as not to crush a couple) and lifted him into the air and down onto his back.  The Navy dude jumped lightly back to his feet and just stood there.  Maybe he was a wrestler, Angerer thought, they were crazy like this.

"You're the luckiest guy on that train, Pat.  And you are like me.  You are the luckiest guy on that train because you get to play this game, and at least one more.  People like us don't curse, by the way."

Angerer lay on his pile of leather and plastic and nylon and the brand names and logos of a very important multinational sports equipment corporation.  He'd just been knocked stupid by some guy who looked like a figure from an old movie, some sort of trainee pilot who had walked away from law school, politics, the NFL, everything, to fly crappy planes off boats.  He started to gather himself and stand, wondering if wrestler-guy in the khakis would knock him down again.  He sat back down.

"We're counting on you, Pat.  And I tell you, this all will pass.  And you will be on the train with us, leaving the next crew here, sun declining, temperature crashing, and you will wish, if you are not careful, you were 22 again.  But none of us ever gets to be 22 again."

Ferentz, the undersized linebacker, took a straw of switchgrass from his mouth.

"We all done here?"

"Yes sir, we're all done," said the Navy guy.  He turned back to see where O'Keefe and Parker were organizing the rest of them.

"Pat, you all done here?"

"I am done here, Coach."

"I think we're going to set up over there and wait for those guys from Minneapolis now."

"Here?"  Angerer, distraught.  "Here?"

"This is what it is all about, Pat.  We're on our own and we make our own future."

"What about them,"  Angerer said, gesturing to the rising crowd of oversized boys, drifting idly over to the small group of coaches, Angerer, and the solitary ghost.  He saw them, and thought of a grade school, seeing them now as a mass schoolchildren on the polished cement of the hallway floor, moving en masse down to the gym, lockers clanging shut as they passed.  Strange.  He shook his head.  He never thought like that before.

"They're wondering what you're going to do," said the Navy guy.

Overhead the disappearing archaic round motor aircraft was no more than a muffled tapping in the distance.  It turned out that it mattered very much how one did things.  Night arrived like the future, an unknown like no other.  Across the river, shouts, a second tractor pulling a wagon, corn pouring from the combine, so much sand through one more hourglass.  Angerer finally stood, lifted himself off his pile of branded duffles, felt the chill of death and quickly shrugged it from his massive frame.

Parker laughed.

"What's so funny?"  Angerer said.

"You get to play this one, and we all just have to watch."

The Big Two-Hearted Iowa River washed by, time and the vanity of boys notwithstanding.

"No one gives a shit about you anymore, Pat," said Parker.  "You're one of us now.  You don't know it but you are.  So pay attention so you have something to remember."

Quietly 100 strong young men made camp. The farmboys and small-town boys did all of the work.  They knew their knots, the difference between an axe and a maul, where a tent needed to be if it rained, how to get a fire going on just a couple of matches.  A few of them knew what the rest of it meant, a few of them did pay attention.  Night falls quickly in the dark of northern Iowa, beside the rails long since abandoned, in a world that treasures sensation and noise over meaning, and the relentless assault of a merciless sky, bringing the cold.

"You can be remembered, or not," said Ferentz. "But the sun's coming up tomorrow, with or without you.  It would be better if we beat these guys, and everyone knows your name.  I haven't enjoyed the last two weeks so very much."

Angerer heard nothing but the disappearing ka-chunk of the yellow Rock Island caboose, the sound blowing south and east in the wind, over him and away from him, leaving him with nothing now.  He saw little beyond the silhouettes of the group as the collapsing dark muted shape and color.  For a moment it was as though he were 10 again, alone in the woods for the first time.  And then he understood and the understanding was like no other in his life and he embraced it, holding it close like fear and he narrowed his eyes and squinted into the dark.  He was a man now and he knew this fear to be his companion.  

The Navy guy walked into the river, the Big Two-Hearted Iowa River, where he slept and where he lived alone, and he was gone.

###

MADISON, WISC. -- October 17, 2009.  With cries of "No Fair!" and "Meanies!" echoing throughout the Wisconsin Badger clubhouse, and ill-considered reporters, bloggers and cardboard sign-bearing homeless men asserting phony Vietnam War injuries expressing unanimous disapproval, Iowa slowly asphyxiated, prior to pummeling mercilessly, their latest opponent today, 20-10.  The football world, collectively, is up in arms.

First, our soundtrack:

Sixty Minute Men

Now, the backstory:

Lacking glossy media hero-material, such as Tate "Baby Jesus (P.S. My Hands Are Really Cold)" Forcier, 

Jimmah "Speedo" Clausen,

 and Tim "Ewwww, Not Until We're Married" Tebow, 
 

protests rose to a crescendo pitch with SadBadger offensive tackle Gabe Carimi disclosing that he was going straight home to complain to his mother.  "These guys don't play fair," said Carimi.  "Everybody could see we were way better than them, in that first quarter, and it was OUR yard and we were using OUR balls and they just acted like they didn't EVEN CARE.  By the end of the game, they hardly let us do anything and were running around like they OWNED THE PLACE.*

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Iowa and the Slow Reveal.

As OPS says at left, the stats all favor Wisconsin, and even some of the trends. If I were a betting guy, I guess I'd have to take the men in red: yes, logic suggests that we are a 6-0 underdog. But that's a portfolio theory approach to picking winners: if you bet 100 games a year, don't go looking for immaterial freaky insights and oddball quirks, and just invest in the facts, take your random walk, assume everyone regresses to the mean, and try to win 3 out of 5. It's a rational way to make money. Fortunately, I don't bet, so ...

Reasons to be cheerful?

Two semi-intangible things that matter: a) their head coach is the bloviated Bret Bielema -- and ours isn't; b) their confidence can't be too good after that fiasco last week.

More important reasons to be cheerful?

This (the second season) is when the vaunted Iowa 'get better every day' ethic starts to kick in and create separation with the league. We all know that Iowa has played well enough -- usually 2-3 quarters -- at times this year to beat anyone in the conference, with the possible exception of OSU. And I would not take Wisconsin over Penn State. Would you? Why did we go into PSU with more confidence than we are to Madison, then?

Well, because we've put together exactly one game this year with four strong quarters. I believe we won that one 35-3 on the road, and I do think ISU has a real coach and a real program again. They're not getting punked by people like Kansas and could easily be 2-0 in the Big 12, 5-1 overall. I don't think this is fanciful. Rhoads is the real deal.

Can Iowa play four quarters of good football? I think we're a 9-3 team, which is fine with me, if we can't. In years past, however, e.g., last year, we incrementally, gradually put it all together. Do we start today? I don't think the general unease in this game is so much about some inherent competitive weakness that we suffer v. Wisconsin, and rather about our mystifying capacity for the Big Screw-up and introducing into several games the Quarter (or even the Half) Without a Pulse.

And we can't forget that our coach just delivers a better game against better opponents. Why, I have no clue, but I hate playing teams like Northwestern, Arkansas State, Purdue, with this staff.

So it's all about intangibles, to me. We should be better prepared than they, and I really don't care about their run-D because Stanzi is capable of being 10x the passing QB that Pryor is. Obviously they'll force us wide and vertical just to find out if Ricky is feeling charitable today. I just don't think you can say Iowa has to run to win, because I don't think we're really a run-first team; we're a run-first team if someone wants to play us honest on D, but no one is and no one will, until Ricky plays his A game for four quarters. No one dares us to run; they dare us to throw, because they don't think they can beat us with only 7 up front.

I will get on the bandwagon (so will the entire country, incidentally) if we beat this team and, absent charity by Manzi, major cognitive dissonance by the Idiot Savant, or Tolzein playing the best game of his life, I believe we will.

Let's not be too Iowan about all this and shuffle our feet and look at the sky and rue the gods that will probably bring rain before the corn is drying in the bins before the bank calls the note and our women take the Greyhound to Chicago; let's not overlook the extraordinary. Last week we undressed Baby Jesus Forcier, and his coach, one of the primary offensive innovators of the game's last 30 years, blew every gasket and fuse in his monomaniacal brain; we were doing something right because he just flat lost control of himself. Michigan ran the ball pretty well, but their longest run was 12 yards, and I bet they do better than that against Ohio State. So in each significant game this year we have done something extraordinary. This is a game where I don't see truth in numbers. Clayborn's block and score against PSU; Moeaki just gliding into the end zone twice, a man among boys; freshman backs who don't fumble; Reiff beating out Vandervelde; DJK on 3rd and 24; our pass defense efficiency; Tarp's Sanders-like hit. Greatness is in this team. The only question is if we can show greatness for 60 minutes. We don't know. This is the season's narrative. True greatness is systematic, not anecdotal. This is Ferentz and the Slow Reveal and this is why we stare and obsess. We showed the shotgun on the wall, attentive theatre-goers; not to get all Chekhovian on you, but it was there on the wall, for a reason, back in the first act. We've enjoyed intermission, there was a little dust-up, nothing serious, last week: just a little foreshadowing. There, now, we're back in the drawing room and I see that shotgun again, still unremarked. It's there on the wall for a reason.  It's time now for the fucker to go off. Go Hawks.

This is what you get when undocumented athletic aliens evaluate complex systems -- like football.

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a. Michigan didn't get a rush play for more than 12 yards. To me this is the key to the game. It certainly was my biggest concern, their capacity to break big ones. This is the only game this year, I predict, where Michigan's longest play goes for 12.

b. Forcier's line. He is the fourth QB to be humiliated by the Iowa defense, third to be benched (and Clark should've been benched). Someone else will calculate his in-game pass efficiency, but I'm sure it's in the 50-range. Happily for us, his coach then piled on with a televised meltdown and with luck QBForce-Nobel-Peace-Prize-Mother-Theresa-Tate is permanently twisted now in the head. Rodriquez lost control of himself in this game, and it was good to see.

c. Stanzi seems to drink from the idiot savant's cognitive dissonance cup all right. And it is scary bad when he sees someone the other 70,000 people watching don't see -- and then initiates a conversation with him and attempts to play nice and share his football, before the meds kick in. Still and all, our QB play for the season is better than the collective opposing QBs' play.

d. We all thought last year's 32 turnovers was an irreproducible quirk. However, we are >20% ahead of that pace.

e.  We should remember that there probably isn't a team in the Big Ten that doesn't think it can beat Iowa.   We just got 5 takeaways but yielded 28 points and won by 2.   And we returned to clock management hell, while descending to a new circle -- pushing a 48 yard field goal to 53.  

Notes on numbers after grazing the NCAA summary statistics:

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[Bumped. Classic Bellanca. --OPS]

CEDAR FALLS, IA -- Sept. 28, 2009 -- The athletic world reacted with wonder, ill-disguised glee, and mild horror today at the late-night decision by the presidents of tUNI (the University of Northern Iowa) and tEIU (the Eastern Illinois University) to swap dates on October 10, 2009.  Quel surprise: apparently it was all to do with money. 

tUNI, scheduled to play North Dakota State on October 10, will switch partners under this arrangement with tEIU, booked into State College, PA, to play the recently disrobed Lions.

Coach Mark Farley was isolated en route to his Chevy half-ton at 11:30 p.m. last night, making notes to his iPhone, the substance of which we didn't catch but sounded like, " ... seven seconds?  seven seconds?  We let them score with seven seconds left in the game and blow the shutout?"  He was a little wound up.  tUNI has allowed a total of 14 points in three games (0, if you do the statistically cool thing of throwing out the high and the low) after losing on an NCAA-record two consecutive blocked field goals against Iowa.  And half of the 14 came with seven seconds left against former tUNI head coach Terry Allen with seven seconds left.

"Sorry.  Didn't mean to be outspoken.  But Terry left, gonna be a big shot at Kansas, now he's going to get it.  He shouldn't have gotten that touchdown with seven seconds left.  What was your question?"

"Swapping opponents.  Why in the world would you want to swap with tEIU, and get Penn State instead of North Dakota State?"

"Who told you we did that?"

"Uh, Coach, it's on the state-sponsored AP wire."

"I see."

"You're quiet."

"I'm always quiet before I speak to the press.  I don't have a lot of experience at that, actually.  I live in Cedar Falls.  I get up early, try to do a good job, go home, repeat cycle.  No press in doing a good job.  In this country, that is.  Sorry, being philosophical.  I didn't get an interview for the ISU job, and I woulda kicked their ass this year."

"Swapping Oct. 10 dates?"

[Silence.  Mercury vapor lamps bathe the parking lot with ill-yellow light, the rancid colors of this or that import; worse, the reporter is standing there in Dockers and a sweater.  The smell of cooked-off diesel, cut grass, and deep fat frying machines drifts through the night.]

"Did you see us play Iowa, in Iowa City?"

"Yes, actually...."

"'Yes, actually' ....' and what does the "actually" mean?  Is that more post-modern bullshit like what I hear that idiot Cook writes, slavering over some bare facsimile of what we run in Cedar Falls -- only we have a quarterback big enough to run the zone read?  Do you know what Iowa's line is going to do to Tater Forcier?"

"Tate."

"He's in deep shit, that kid.  Both of his shoulders are going to be separated.  They'll kill him.  Get a stretcher.  It's not even funny.  Clayborn is as fast as that kid, and Binns will just clothesline him like he did to Powell last week.  Klugg --"

"It's Klug.  Like Kloog."

"Klugg is built like an NFL tight-end, anyone notice?  Jesus, it's not fair."

"You think they will handle the Michigan spread-to-run-thingy."

"RichRod is running a stupid offense in an attrition conference, and I feel sorry for his kids.  Of course, Rodriquez will keep throwing injured kids out there until it's over, because he's got, like, $7mm of real estate debt to pay off.  He's from West Virginia, and it's a third world country.  Go Blue.  Brian will explain why this is all totally great."

"Ummm.  October 10."

"Right.  We have an alum, a mystery guy, seems to have made some money.  He paid tEIU $500K to swap Oct. 10 dates with us, so we get to go to Happy Valley."

"Why would he do that?"

"Don't know.  I think, he thinks, maybe, Penn State doesn't get it yet."

"What's that?"

"We can play football too, and maybe better."

"They don't get it yet?  Seven out of eight?"

"No.  Evidently it's a fluke.  Because they get the "five star" 17 year-olds.  Can you believe that shit?"

"I'm a reporter, no opinion."

"I'm a coach.  And a father.  I'm more interested in what people do when they are 20 than when they are 17.  I can't do anything with a 17 year-old.  Do you know what the attention span of an athletic 17 year-old is?  My kitchen table has a longer attention span."

At this point Farley, who had been pacing slowly, left and right, his eyes narrowed and his right hand reflexively reaching for the sandwich, the fork, the slice that he hadn't eaten yet at 11:30 p.m., stopped.

"Jesus, I'm hungry."

"It's midnight."

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Arizona has something going on: they lost to USC by 7 last year, in mid-season.  However, since then they've lost their two best offensive playmakers (QB and TE (Gronkowski is reportedly out).  All the noise this week has been about the RB Grigsby, and his 8+ ypc average.  

I don't think Grigsby is that good, that tough, or that big.  Here's why, and after shutting down LeSean McCoy and Javon Ringer last year, if we have trouble with this guy, we're in for a long year.

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[No reason for us to write today.  Gracias.  Bumped. -- Ed.]

I've been working nonstop and not scanning the intertubes much the last few days, but I offer this modest proposal, which I don't think has made the rounds yet:

The story of the ISU game was neither Wegher, nor our safety play.  The story of the game has huge implications if we implement it going forward.

We started that game with a hard commitment to a pro-spread.  From what I could see, and it's not much on a 15" computer screen, we have added the New England passing game to our Broncos' zone rushing game.  By pro spread I mean 4- or 5-wide, with no QB run option.   I can see college defenses game-planning one offense successfully, but not both -- and if this is the new Iowa offense, and Stanzi decides to start playing earlier in games (please?), we will be more explosive than many people expect.   If Stanzi has an average day, accuracy-wise, versus ISU we hang 50 on them.  

Something must be up.  Vandenberg gets in the game, it's a blowout -- and we've got him throwing the ball.  Ferentz is not a guy who embarrasses his opponents, much less an opponent he has to play every year.  But he wanted the sophomore throwing the ball in his first series against the in-state rival in a blowout.

Footnotes to this idea: we have RBs, at least two, who can catch the ball, and thus we can shift out of the zone rush game into this pro-spread look -- after defensive personnel are fixed.  My suspicion is that we'll rarely go empty backfield, because of innate conservatism and concern about Stanzi's health.  I noted that we were rotating Morse into the game on obvious passing downs Saturday.

Another reason to keep this look in the book:  I believe we have the deepest receiver corps in recent memory, and there's evidence of that in the distribution of catches, as well as the volatility in Moeki's numbers (10 catches, 1 catch: this is good news because if someone wants to take him out of the game we'll just shrug and throw it to the other guys -- successfully).

Incidentally, we came out four-wide v. Pitt last year, so I suppose that I should note that our pro-spread look may be unique to something Rhoads likes to do on D.

Certainly I'd welcome correction from the group.  Perhaps I'm missing something.  But consider the implications if people have to start using the words "Iowa" and "multivariate offense" in the same sentence.  This is constraint-based scheming to the max, and is a great, Iowa-specific, strategic response to spread mania as well as our opponents' extreme familiarity with our zone rush game.  Last, we still have the play-action passing game out of the zone rush look, and frankly, when we don't drop the ball or throw it to the wrong color jersey, no one has stopped that, either.  

How'd you like to play a team that runs like the Broncos and throws like the Pats?  "Wow," I believe one guy would say, post-modern sense of irony fully in check.  "That would be some kind of a tough deal, you ask me."