Michigan vs Everybody

 EAST CAROLINA

Sunday, September 3, 2023

MINNEAPOLIS - Dog days of September continue on the Sunday morning of Labor Day weekend, with temperatures reaching the mid-90s yesterday and expected to do the same today. The low overnight was only 75, meaning I kept the AC unit running all night long; in fact, it ran most of the day yesterday, too, except for the hours during the Michigan game, as the white noise of the machine made it hard to hear the football broadcast. This morning I’m listening to a biography of JFK on audiobook while waiting for Northwestern v. Rutgers (11:00 a.m.) to kick off a second day of the college football weekend marathon. Jack’s dad, Joe Kennedy Sr., residing in London as the U.S. Ambassador to England, sides with Neville Chamberlain and his policy of appeasement towards Nazi Germany; Jack, a rising junior at Harvard, rejected his father’s views on the matter, a stance that clarified Jack was his own man, an independent thinker, by no means chained to his father’s affairs or bonded thereby.

CBS had the Rutgers v Northwestern game, so I had that channel on in the background for an hour or two before kickoff. Pregame narratives centered around the turbulent offseason in Evanston. Northwestern, who fired longtime head coach Pat Fitzgerald after hazing allegations surfaced this summer, named David Braun its head football coach in July. Commentators thought this transition gave Rutgers an edge in the contest. They predicted a rough year for the Wildcats.

Yesterday Michigan Football kicked off its 2023 campaign against East Carolina at 11:00 C.T. on Peacock. My lack of a Peacock account created an obvious predicament. At the last minute, Al sent me the login and password for a throwaway Peacock account, which I hastily typed into my Roku in time to watch the kickoff. I had planned, as a last resort, to listen to the game via Mgoblue.com's radio feature. I figured the game should be over for all intents and purposes by halftime, anyway.

The big story before the Michigan game -- and the season at large -- was Jim Harbaugh’s absence. ESPN salivated over his suspension for weeks; the College Gameday Crew covered it extensively. JJ McCarthy wore a “Free Harbaugh” shirt during pregame warmups, alluding to his coach’s three-game suspension for dubious recruiting infractions (supposedly Harbaugh bought a recruit a burger). McCarthy has the swag and the attitude, for sure; it has changed the culture. Defensive Coordinator Jesse Minter, previously an assistant under John Harbaugh in Baltimore, assumed head coaching duties for the ECU game. Michigan announced that Mike Hart and Jay Harbaugh would split head coaching duties by halves in the second game against UNLV, and Offensive Coordinator Sherrone Moore would take on those responsibilities for the third game of the season against Bowling Green. Expected to roll over its first three opponents -- cupcakes, really -- Michigan expected to have Harbaugh back in time for the meat and potatoes of the Big Ten schedule. Having won back-to-back conference championships but failed twice in the College Football Playoff, the Wolverines had their sights set on more than just the conference title this season. 

“They’ve been coming here since 1927,” Mike Tirico declared as cameras panned over Main Street in Ann Arbor, then the maize-out crowd. “The Big House is full. College football Saturdays are back.” Minter’s defense took the field first after Tommy Doman kicked off to the Pirates. They forced a quick three-and-out. The ECU punter pinned Michigan at their own 2-yard line, creating a dilemma the offense failed to resolve; Michigan, too, went three-and-out on their first possession, failing even to get the ball out of the shadow of the endzone. Doman punted.

Then, on the third play of the Pirates’ second drive, a 3rd and 9 scenario for ECU, Pirates quarterback Mason Garcia misfired. The errant pass ended up in the hands of #0, Mikey Sainristil, a converted wide receiver and Michigan’s emotional leader on defense. An auspicious start for Jesse Minter’s Ravenesque defense. 

Again J.J. and the offense took the field. Concern mounted as Michigan threatened to go three-and-out again, but on 3rd and 7, JJ found Roman Wilson for a sixteen-yard gain. Following a 2-yard pass on the ensuing first down, Blake Corum broke loose for a run of 23 yards to the Pirates' 15-yard line, giving Michigan their first red zone opportunity of the young season. Then on a 3rd and 9 from the 14-yard line, McCarthy found Roman Wilson in the endzone for the first points of the season. 7-0 good guys. JJ looked crisp and clean to start the game.

Michigan forced another punt on defense, then went 90 yards in seven plays for their second touchdown. A quintessential Michigan drive, it included a 20-yard pass reception by Cornelius Johnson and a 37-yard run by Corum. From the ECU 2-yard line, Sherrone Moore went to Corum, Mr. Automatic from close range. Blake punched it in for his first score (of many) of the year, making it 14-0. He had 18 touchdowns in 2022.

Later in the second quarter, the passing game opened up to my relief. On a drive that started with 9:48 left in the second quarter, JJ completed 5 out of 5 throws, including one for a touchdown, his second of the game. One ball went to Donovan Edwards for 12 yards. Another went to Cornelius Johnson for 16. Two went to tight end Colston Loveland, the rodeo sophomore from Idaho – one for 24 and one for 15. Good to see the big guy getting involved in the passing attack. And the last pass went to Roman Wilson for a 10-yard touchdown, his second of the game. That put the game pretty comfortably out of reach at 20-0, but kicker James Turner prompted worry about a potential Jake Moody hangover by missing the extra point. Impossible to replace Moody, probably the greatest kicker in Michigan history (Jay Feely is up there), but Turner responded by hitting a 50-yard field goal as time expired in the first half. Maybe there wouldn’t be a hangover, after all. It was 23-0 Wolverines at half. 

The second half played out like a formality. In the 3rd quarter, McCarthy yet again connected with Roman Wilson for their third touchdown, this one a 16-yarder. “Wilson! The hat trick,” Tirico wittily mused. Wilson, who donned the iconic number 1 jersey for the first time on Saturday – having switched from number 14 before the season started – said he wanted to play a game worthy of the other great Michigan receivers to earn the jersey. That select group includes David Terrell, Braylon Edwards, Marquise Walker, and Anthony Carter. His three-touchdown performance proved he belonged among them. Michigan led 30-zip. Second-stringers started filing into the game. 

On the last play of the game, East Carolina kicker Andrew Conrad booted a 33-yarder through the uprights, thereby negating the shutout. It was scrub time, and the field goal mattered not a lick, but I still wanted the shutout. No matter. Without their head coach, Michigan starts the 2023 season 1-0.

JJ McCarthy went 26-30 for 280 yards and three touchdowns in the game, posting a solid passer rating of 95.9. His performance might have been worthy of some early Heisman Trophy hype had it not been overshadowed by a simultaneous performance by Shedeur Sanders, quarterback of the Colorado Buffaloes and the son of head coach Deion Sanders. Deion Sanders, who took over the helm at Boulder in the offseason and brought son Shedeur with him, created waves in the college football world by implementing an unprecedented roster overhaul in the offseason. In total, Deion brought in over 50 players from the transfer portal to join the new-look Buffs. The old-fashioned among the sports media scoffed. Without having coached a single game, Deion had brought intrigue back to Boulder, Colorado for the first time in two decades. The eyes of the college football world were thus on Fort Worth for Colorado’s road opener against the Horned Frogs of TCU. I switched to this game, televised on FOX as part of the network’s Big Noon Kickoff show, when Michigan went up 30-0 in the third quarter. It turned out to be the game of the day from a competitive standpoint, with the Frogs and Buffs battling back and forth in a shootout. 

It looked like another one of TCU’s patented thrillers from a year ago, when they danced like Cinderella all the way to the National Championship Game, but this time they did not have quarterback Max Dugan. More importantly, Colorado had Shedeur Sanders, whose fourth down, 46-yard touchdown pass with less than two minutes left in regulation put the Buffaloes ahead for good. Shedeur amassed more than 500(!) yards passing and accounted for five passing touchdowns, both school records. Instantly he shot up the way-too-early Heisman Leaderboard as a dark horse. 

“Do you believe now?” Coach Prime said emphatically in the post-game presser. The Buffs are here. 

All that excitement and we hadn’t even gotten to the second wave of Saturday games. Probably the biggest game in the 3:30 time slot was tenth-ranked Washington versus Boise State in a battle of Pacific Northwest powers. Boise State scored first. They held a 6-0 lead at the end of the first quarter, but Washington owned the final three quarters. UW scored 28 points in the second quarter and rolled to a 56-19 victory. Huskies QB Michael Penix Jr. nearly matched the stats posted by Shedeur Sanders. One of the favorites for the Heisman, he threw for 450 yards and 5 touchdowns. In other scores, #3 Ohio State defeated Indiana 23-3 at The Horseshoe, Iowa prevailed over Utah State, and Joe Milton and the Volunteers from Rocky Top beat Virginia, a team still reeling from a shooting tragedy last November that took the lives of three players. Bama beat a cupcake, Georgia beat a cupcake, OU beat a cupcake, et. al.

Before the 6:30 nightcap, the Duke’s Mayo Carolina Kickoff featuring Drake May’s North Carolina Tar Heels and Spencer Rattler’s South Carolina Gamecocks, I drove to the Target in St. Louis Park for the first time. First time there because the Uptown Target, which I liked to walk to, recently closed permanently. It had to be Target because my bank account is empty and I got a gift card to Target from one of my students on Friday. As I pulled into the Target parking lot, a sherbet sunset colored the sky with pretty shades of purple, pink, and tangerine. This Target felt like one on a college campus, with a full-sized store (as opposed to the mini-Target Uptown had) and lots of college-aged students roaming the aisles. As a treat, I bought myself dairy-free ice cream to enjoy while I watched the Carolina Bowl, which the Tar Heels ran away with. 

In Piscataway, Rutgers ended up downing Northwestern 24-7. When the Knights took a 24-0 lead in the third, I decided to walk to the park. I found Mueller Park, my go-to, mostly empty. The temp, at a sizzling 95 degrees, explains that. A kid’s birthday party is taking place across the street on Bryant Ave.: a string of colored balloons hangs over the garage door opening, where tables are set up for the party, and there is a kiddy pool and water games in the driveway. The sounds of the kids at play remind me, somehow, of the Roller Coaster Tycoon game on CD-ROM.

The sunflowers on 26th Street, reaching upwards of twelve feet tall, have started wilting in the heat. The grass at Mueller Park is yellowed and dried out, no longer lush or wavy but mostly flattened out. Some hobos sleep on this grass, after all. Airplanes roar overhead every ten minutes or so. Cicadas rattle in the treetops. A police siren wails from downtown. A basketball bounces on the cement court within the park. 50 Cent blares from a passing car, its windows rolled down. 

Sweaty, I walked home for more football. The Beavers of Oregon State, who enjoyed a season for the ages in 2022, look to rekindle the magic as they start the season against San Jose State. DJ Uiagalale, once a Heisman hopeful at Clemson, transferred to Oregon State in the offseason. He accounted for five touchdowns – three passing, two rushing – in a 42-17 rout of the Spartans from San Jose State. 

At 6:30, I turn the channel to the Camping World Classic, a rematch from last year, pitting #5 LSU against #8 Florida State in the first top-ten matchup of the season. Kirk Herbstreit and Chris Fowler called the game for ABC, giving the broadcast an air of exclusivity and importance. Last year the Seminoles prevailed by a point, handing former Irish coach Brian Kelly a loss in his first game coaching the Tigers of LSU. Quarterback Jadyn Davis marched the Bayou Tigers downfield on the opening drive only for FSU’s defensive front to put up a goal line stand. Noles QB Jordan Travis subsequently marched downfield just as easily, scoring on a slant pass to Keon Coleman, a transfer from Michigan State, that went for 40 yards. Daniels and the Tigers answered with a 9-play, 75-yard drive to make it 7-7 in Orlando. 

LSU took a 17-14 lead into the half, but the Seminoles dominated the second half. Jordan Travis wound up throwing for 342 yards and 4 touchdowns. Three of those went to Keon Coleman, who made a statement in his first game in a Seminoles uniform. In the post-game presser, Brian Kelly called his team’s performance in the second half a “collapse.” Florida State wins a statement game 45-23. In Baton Rouge, they have to be wondering why they chose Brian Kelly when Deion Sanders is in Boulder rebuilding that program from the ashes. 

Monday, September 4 - Labor Day

I just smoked a Marlboro (a snowcone, actually) and walked around the block, listening to the cicadas rattle. The sun is going down in the direction of Hennepin and Lake of the Isles, but the heat refuses to let up – as if the heat is a mass or force unrelated to the sun. 

At 7:00, Duke v. #9 Clemson from Wallace Wade Stadium in Durham, North Carolina wraps up an excellent opening weekend of college football. Dabo Swinney’s team looked vastly overrated. Tigers fans were high on quarterback Cade Klubnik, a five-star recruit from Austin, Texas, who replaced DJ Uiagalelei, but the sophomore disappointed in his first game as Clemson’s true starter. He went 27-43 for 209 yards passing, throwing one touchdown and one interception. After trailing 7-6 at halftime, the Blue Devils scored 22 unanswered points in the second half to topple the Tigers 28-7. For Clemson, the season already looked like a downer. 

Goodbye, summer. Gone forever.

Fall 2023

 

"A storm is coming?

Nah, we are the storm."

Inscription for the Entrance to a Wood

 Stranger, if thou hast learned a truth which needs

No school of long experience, that the world

Is full of guilt and misery, and hast seen

Enough of all its sorrows, crimes, and cares,

To tire thee of it, enter this wild wood

And view the haunts of Nature. The calm shade

Shall bring a kindred calm, and the sweet breeze

That makes the green leaves dance, shall waft a balm

To thy sick heart. Thou wilt find nothing here

Of all that pained thee in the haunts of men

And made thee loathe thy life

William Cullen Bryant

"Inscription for the Entrance to a Wood"

Cider and Slaughter and Football

 

"cider and slaughter and football games with white fogbanks of breath exiting helmets"

David Foster Wallace

"Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley"

1991

The Pine Forests of the Navajos

 

"THE San Francisco Mountain lies in Northern Arizona, above Flagstaff, and its blue slopes and snowy summit entice the eye for a hundred miles across the desert. About its base lie the pine forests of the Navajos, where the great red-trunked trees live out their peaceful centuries in that sparkling air. The PINONS and scrub begin only where the forest ends, where the country breaks into open, stony clearings and the surface of the earth cracks into deep canyons. The great pines stand at a considerable distance from each other. Each tree grows alone, murmurs alone, thinks alone. They do not intrude upon each other. The Navajos are not much in the habit of giving or of asking help. Their language is not a communicative one, and they never attempt an interchange of personality in speech. Over their forests there is the same inexorable reserve. Each tree has its exalted power to bear."

Willa Sibert Cather

The Song of the Lark

The Moonstone Tramp

"Early in July, soon after Thea's fifteenth birthday, a particularly disgusting sort of tramp came into Moonstone in an empty box car. Thea was sitting in the hammock in the front yard when he first crawled up to the town from the depot, carrying a bundle wrapped in dirty ticking under one arm, and under the other a wooden box with rusty screening nailed over one end. He had a thin, hungry face covered with black hair. It was just before supper-time when he came along, and the street smelled of fried potatoes and fried onions and coffee. Thea saw him sniffing the air greedily and walking slower and slower. He looked over the fence. She hoped he would not stop at their gate, for her mother never turned any one away, and this was the dirtiest and most utterly wretched-looking tramp she had ever seen. There was a terrible odor about him, too. She caught it even at that distance, and put her handkerchief to her nose. A moment later she was sorry, for she knew that he had noticed it. He looked away and shuffled a little faster.

A few days later Thea heard that the tramp had camped in an empty shack over on the east edge of town, beside the ravine, and was trying to give a miserable sort of show there. He told the boys who went to see what he was doing, that he had traveled with a circus. His bundle contained a filthy clown's suit, and his box held half a dozen rattle snakes.

Saturday night, when Thea went to the butcher shop to get the chickens for Sunday, she heard the whine of an accordion and saw a crowd before one of the saloons. There she found the tramp, his bony body grotesquely attired in the clown's suit, his face shaved and painted white,—the sweat trickling through the paint and washing it away, and his eyes wild and feverish. Pulling the accordion in and out seemed to be almost too great an effort for him, and he panted to the tune of "Marching through Georgia." After a considerable crowd had gathered, the tramp exhibited his box of snakes, announced that he would now pass the hat, and that when the onlookers had contributed the sum of one dollar, he would eat "one of these living reptiles." The crowd began to cough and murmur, and the saloon keeper rushed off for the marshal, who arrested the wretch for giving a show without a license and hurried him away to the calaboose.

The calaboose stood in a sunflower patch,—an old hut with a barred window and a padlock on the door. The tramp was utterly filthy and there was no way to give him a bath. The law made no provision to grub-stake vagrants, so after the constable had detained the tramp for twenty-four hours, he released him and told him to "get out of town, and get quick." The fellow's rattlesnakes had been killed by the saloon keeper. He hid in a box car in the freight yard, probably hoping to get a ride to the next station, but he was found and put out. After that he was seen no more. He had disappeared and left no trace except an ugly, stupid word, chalked on the black paint of the seventy-five-foot standpipe which was the reservoir for the Moonstone water-supply; the same word, in another tongue, that the French soldier shouted at Waterloo to the English officer who bade the Old Guard surrender; a comment on life which the defeated, along the hard roads of the world, sometimes bawl at the victorious.

A week after the tramp excitement had passed over, the city water began to smell and to taste. The Kronborgs had a well in their back yard and did not use city water, but they heard the complaints of their neighbors. At first people said that the town well was full of rotting cottonwood roots, but the engineer at the pumping-station convinced the mayor that the water left the well untainted. Mayors reason slowly, but, the well being eliminated, the official mind had to travel toward the standpipe—there was no other track for it to go in. The standpipe amply rewarded investigation. The tramp had got even with Moonstone. He had climbed the standpipe by the handholds and let himself down into seventy-five feet of cold water, with his shoes and hat and roll of ticking. The city council had a mild panic and passed a new ordinance about tramps. But the fever had already broken out, and several adults and half a dozen children died of it."
Willa Cather

The Song of the Lark

It was in the summer that one really lived

 “And it was Summer, beautiful Summer!” Those were the closing words of Thea’s favorite fairy tale, and she thought of them as she ran out into the world one Saturday morning in May, her music book under her arm. She was going to the Kohlers’ to take her lesson, but she was in no hurry.

It was in the summer that one really lived. Then all the little overcrowded houses were opened wide, and the wind blew through them with sweet, earthy smells of garden-planting. The town looked as if it had just been washed. People were out painting their fences. The cottonwood trees were a-flicker with sticky, yellow little leaves, and the feathery tamarisks were in pink bud. With the warm weather came freedom for everybody. People were dug up, as it were. The very old people, whom one had not seen all winter, came out and sunned themselves in the yard. The double windows were taken off the houses, the tormenting flannels in which children had been encased all winter were put away in boxes, and the youngsters felt a pleasure in the cool cotton things next their skin.

Willa Cather

Song of the Lark