There was also the announcement near the end of the game thanking people, congratulating them if I remember correctly, for being part of the crowd of 109 thousand plus which continued or furthered some Michigan streak or other of record attendance or nation-leading attendance. Here we were watching a game in which Michigan was having its posterior part handed to it for the second straight week, and we were supposed to feel good about the fact that we were part of some record setting or record furthering crowd. This is a lot like, is perhaps exactly the same thing as, the usual huckstering advertising of America which explicitly or implicitly tries to convince you to feel good because you’re one of the group that has this unnecessary dress or that unnecessary pair of blue jeans or this horrendously expensive watch or that overpriced car. Substantive merit or true need are irrelevant. The point is to be part of the crowd. The Michigan football team and its coaching stank. But we were supposed to feel good because we were part of the crowd. If only the whole country would rise in unison against all of this and say “Gimme a break.”
Yep, there were parts of the scene that were ironic or shameless. And as for Michigan Stadium’s bathrooms, which are so, shall we say, “inadequate” that the local Ann Arbor newspaper commented on them on game day, suffice it to say “You shouldn’t ask.”
We of course discussed the defeat that night at the banquet, and some interesting, sometimes even philosophic, things were said. One handsome and athletic fellow, the bongo drummer for those of you who are either familiar with the fraternity or with the first volume of the quartet, said that everyone must have their turn in the barrel (apparently at the bottom of it). This is interesting as a philosophy, is certainly true in life for most of us, and in its way was of a piece with other folks’ view that one of the psychological problems was that expectations had gotten so high because of years of success. (One of the newspapers, on Sunday, told of people wearing Michigan shirts that said, “We’re not arrogant. We’re just better than you.” Which captures, unintentionally but rather perfectly, the arrogance and elitism of the place.) My own view, however, perhaps because a time of agony is not a time for philosophy, was not as charitable as the “everyone gets their turn in the barrel” philosophy. The collapse seems to me attributable to bad coaching. Realistically, of course, what the hell do I know about whether the coaching is good or bad? But some of the local news media say the same -- but, realistically, what the hell do they know about it? They’re just mass media reporters, mass media hacks some would unkindly say. Of course I did briefly hear Lou Holtz say some things on TV that seemed to reflect badly on the coaching, and Lou Holtz should know. Nor do guys on TV make a habit of blasting coaches as far as I know, which would mean something must really be wrong for Holtz to say things that reflect badly on the coaching.
Whatever the (undiscoverable? debatable? subjective?) truth may be, there has been, one gathers, a body of thought for a few years that doesn’t hold much with Lloyd Carr. There are people who think he’s not a very good coach, is too conservative, loses too many games for a team that puts so many players into the pros, etc. (Last year a colleague of mine looked it up and found that Michigan -- and Notre Dame, which hasn’t been too successful for awhile -- are among the teams which have the most players in the NFL.) The question, or problem, has always been: how do you fire a coach who wins, somewhere around 73 or 75 percent of his games? (Though as a fraternity brother put it in an email to me last week, the reason Carr wins 70 some percent of his games is that his personnel is 70 some percent better than that of opponents.)
Well, I guess that Michigan’s team is making it easier to figure out how to fire Carr despite his percentage of wins. The headlines, articles and pictures in the local, what might derisively be termed so-called, Detroit and Ann Arbor newspapers said it all about the team and the coach. They carried articles saying that Carr should go and pictures of fans holding signs saying he should go. A local, so called Detroit newspaper carried a column calling for Carr’s firing. The front page headline in the same so-called Detroit newspaper said “Not Again!” in huge black 1½ inch high letters of the kind newspapers use when a man lands on the moon. One version of the same paper’s sports section said in an even bigger, 2½ inch high headline “CARR SICK” (Next it will be talking about “FIRECARRS”). In another version of its sports section (in a different edition, I assume) it said, in nine gray and two blue letters “only” two inches high “HUMILIATING.” (The U and M were blue, the rest of the letters were gray). In the Ann Arbor paper’s sports section, an article’s headline was “Wolverines lose fourth straight game, suffer worst home defeat since ‘67’.
The articles repeatedly made clear that the 109 thousand of us in the stands whom the PA system congratulated for being part of some continuing attendance record had been privileged to watch history being made, or at least what passes for history in this ahistoric country. (Pace Jim.) The newspapers repeatedly pointed out that this was the first time Michigan had lost four straight games since 1967 (Michigan lost its last two games last year and now its first two this year), was the first time Michigan lost its first two, opening games at home since 1959 (losses that we of the ’50s saw), was the first time Michigan lost by 32 points or more at home since 1967, was the first time Michigan lost home games on back to back weeks since 1990, was the second highest total of yardage (624) that Michigan has ever given up in all its 110 or 120 years of football (it gave up 654 yards to Northwestern in 2000, when N.U. scored 54 points -- but Michigan itself did score 51 that day), was marked by an 85 yard Oregon scoring pass play that was the longest pass play against Michigan in all the years since the forward pass was legalized in 1906 except for an 88 yard pass play in 1968 and a 94 yard one in 1992, was the first time Oregon had managed to score any points at all in its four trips to Ann Arbor, and a few other statistical points that pass for history in America.
But often a potential ray of light was thrown in by the newspapers: it would be pointed out that in 1998 and 1988, like this year, Michigan got off to an 0 and 2 start, yet won the Big 10 and then won the Citrus Bowl after the ’98 season and the Rose Bowl after the ’88 season. Of course, in 1998 Michigan’s quarterbacks were Tom Brady and Drew Henson, and its first two losses were to Notre Dame and Donovan McNabb’s Syracuse team. (The wife of a fraternity brother said that Michigan hasn’t been able to stop a running quarterback since it lost to McNabb, e.g., it was beaten by Vince Young of Texas, Troy Smith of Ohio State, Dennis Dixon of Oregon, and Armanti Edwards of Appalachian State. Redbern said that, for nearly a decade, Michigan has been pretending, on both defense and offense, that running quarterbacks and the spread formation do not exist.) And in 1998 Michigan lost to the 13th ranked team, Notre Dame, and the great No. 1 ranked team, Miami -- by a combined total of 3 points. Thus 1998 and 1988 do not seem precisely apt comparisons to the 2007 situation.
So, as the newspapers made clear, we of the ‘50s were privileged to come back to see a historic game in 2007. What a stroke of luck! And there were other bright sides too, both to this game and to the Appalachian State game. For example, after this game Carr said that the defense should learn from a game like this -- “’You would hope a game like this would help,”’ he said. By Carr’s reasoning, I am sorry the score wasn’t 62 to 7. The defense would have learned even more. And the Appalachian State game was said by the Big 10 Commissioner, Jim Delaney, to be helpful to the new Big 10 Network. For phones at the new network, as the papers put it, “were ringing off the hook” from media outlets seeking clips of the Appalachian State debacle, a game which, Delaney said, ‘“shattered the perception that we didn’t have competitive games.”’ Yes indeed. And I’m sure that Noriega’s phone would have been ringing off the hook too if Panama had smashingly defeated the US during one of the most recent times that we decided to pick on a 25th rate military power. George Bush the First would have said the debacle proves that “We fight competitive wars.” George Bush the Second, of course, did prove that we fight competitive wars.
Maybe the brightest of the rays of hope put before us, though, is the idea that next week Michigan gets to try to begin recouping by playing Notre Dame. The problem here, though, is that right now Notre Dame looks to be as bad as Michigan, and Charley Weis may yet prove to be the second coming of Joe Kuharich, not Ara Parseghian. The arguably two greatest college football “programs” of the last 108 years (though this could be vigorously debated by fans of, say, Southern California or Ohio State) have both fallen on bad, bad times this year. So even beating Notre Dame could be no big deal. And, if Michigan loses to Notre Dame, it would probably be 0-4 after the Penn State game the following week and, if you look at its schedule, could conceivably , though not expectedly, end the season with very few wins -- maybe only three or four, less conceivably only one or two. Wow. Bad. Very bad.
And, in a truly perverse way, Michigan wouldn’t be the only team for which that kind of horrendous, wholly unexpected result would be terrible. It would also be terrible for Appalachian State. Its great upset victory, which the so-called Detroit newspaper is still calling the greatest upset in college football history -- having still not heard of Centre College’s win over Harvard in 1921, one assumes -- would begin to look far more paltry in retrospect. Instead of having defeated a great Division 1A football team, Appalachian State would only have beaten a bad 1A team. But it has already beaten 1A teams seven or eight other times since 1982, and in retrospect the win over Michigan would lose the luster it had a week ago -- though, as the Appalachian State coach said after Oregon beat Michigan, “’I don’t care what kind of season they have. We were the first one to go into that stadium this year. It’s still Michigan.’”
My personal preference, which one fears is very unlikely to be realized, would be for Appalachian State’s glory to be salvaged by a successful Michigan season from this point onward. Michigan should adopt, but alter, Notre Dame’s famous historic motto of “Win one for the Gipper.” Michigan should adapt this motto to “Win ten for Appalachian State.” Such wins would make Appalachian State feel pretty good, and would also make Michigan’s fans feel better. They also might save Carr’s job, though there may already be nothing that could do that, and lots of people think that it wouldn’t be too desirable anyway. But . . . I wouldn’t bet on Michigan sweeping, or even winning a majority, of its remaining games. There’s no Brady, no Henson, right now no defense, and Michigan may be lucky to break even the rest of the way. Yet even that would make Appalachian State feel okay, I guess. And no matter what happens from here on out, on behalf of the people from the ’50s I beseech the guys on the team, I beseech Lloyd Carr, to at least keep Ohio State’s and Jim Tressel’s margin down to two touchdowns this coming November. My septuagenarian and near septuagenarian fraternity brothers are just too old to have to endure another 50 to 20 or 50 to 14 shellacking from The Ohio State University.*
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