After further review

A few thoughts on the UW game....

Coulda, woulda, shoulda scored about two more touchdowns. Settling for field goals too often in one game is a sign that you need to shake things up with a short field...Washington's defense surprised me by being as strong as they were in the red zone. Of course, poor long snaps are just inexcusable. I think that if you just watched our offense vs. their defense, you'd guess that the score would be 49-0. Whereas if you just watched their offense vs. our defense, you'd guess it would be around 13-10. Maybe a 19 point win just splits the difference, but remember that our first team D gave up only 10 to their first team O. Point to the turnovers if you must, but the bottom line is we made those plays on the road and I'll take the production every time. Of course our pass defense is another story. Can we just retire #15, or at least not let anyone in the secondary ever wear it? Oh, and one last thing...did anyone think when McKnight and Stovall were recruited that they would both be passed as the #1 receiver by a white kid from Valpo?

I'm still not entirely sold on instant replay. Have any of the calls they've reviewed this season in our games been overturned? The closest call was the non-TD that we might have had by a toenail, but it was tough to see in the shadows.

The biggest turnaround I've seen in the first four games is the resiliency of the offense. Drive to drive and game to game they don't seem to be letting mistakes get to them as much as the last few years. How many times did it take a perfect drive to score points, and if there was one penalty or one busted play the drive would fizzle? The current level of production should really help when we play good defenses down the road. Already we've scored 136 points, which is more than our 4-game totals the past nine years. Yeah, it's been since 1995 that we've averaged 34 points for the first four games. Ty always took at least six games to get to 136, nine in '03! Only twice did Davie's teams need less than seven games to get to that mark. I've said it before and I'll say it again, it is nice to have a real football coach in charge.

All that being said, the Purdue game is a huge one for the rest of the schedule. Lose to them and go into SC at 3-2, we're looking at 3-3 and potentially 4-4 heading into the stretch. But head into SC with a bye week at 4-1 and the table is set for maybe a 9-2 season. Minnesota ran all over the Boilers so hopefully Walker, Powers-Neal, and Schwapp will have a big game. Let's bring back the full house backfield! Run some wishbone option! Just get the win -- beating Purdue could mean the difference between a New Year's Day bowl (with a very slim shot at an at-large BCS bid) and the bullcrap.com bowl.

Anything Goes

I've been listening a lot lately to "Liberty" 98.9 FM. When your choices of listenable radio stations number between four and six depending on how well 96.9 and 106.9 come in on a given day, having another button-worthy station is huge. Liberty is a "we play anything" station similar to Virginia Beach's Bob FM, and in a recent drive home I heard Dexy's Midnight Runners, Tom Petty, and Elton John in succession. They'll clearly play what might be labeled as classic rock, 80's, 90's alternative, pop, and rock -- but (like with Bob) I've never heard mention of country. Their liners literally say thing like "we play anything" and "you never know what's coming next" but evidently you always know what's not coming next -- country. I'm not even a fan of country music but it seems like the Bob/Jack/Dave/Liberty formats should at least have a Garth Brooks song thrown in once in a while to truly justify their "anything goes" format.

I'm figuring out how to post pictures.

Hail to the a**holes of the world

I can't think of anything more gay than teaching people the Michigan fight song.

http://sports.espn.go.com/ncf/columns/story?columnist=maisel_ivan&id=2155513

A few things stand out from this piece of intrepid journalism. First, it takes the typical Michigan football player five years to learn all the words to the song. "It is funny because the first time I sang it, I didn't even know the first couple of words. Now I have been here five years and I know all the words," says Wolverine tight end and lead baritone Tim Massaquoi. I never realized it, but the fact that it can possibly take a 22-year old college "student" five years to learn a simple, quite repetitive ditty is funny! Too bad he can't major in nursery rhymes or jump rope chants -- then he might actually be able to earn a degree. Secondly, none other than Bo Schembechler put it best when he said, "You've heard 'The Victors'...it really sucks!"

But the underlying reason that Michigan football will never truly be one of the storied college football programs is summed up in microcosm by Michigan music professor and castrati Willis Patterson. When he teaches the UM football team how to sing the song, no doubt over the course of many study groups and tutoring sessions, his goal is for the players to "really convince the people on the other side of the camera that are watching that you really believe that you are victors and you are the champions of the West." I guess even if the scoreboard says something else, a stupid fight song will convince these scholar-athletes that they are victors. Trying to convince the audience that they are champions of anything important is the very foundation of Michigan football. When you win one and a half national championships in 70 years and lose more Rose Bowls than you can count (literally, in the case of many Michigan players), all you can do is try to convince people that despite the evidence, you really are a champion. If you encounter any number of Michigan fans the discussion will eventually devolve to the point that they're saying things like "but our helmets are absolutely the best," "we have the most Big 10 championships," and the kicker, "but our stadium is huge! Over 100,000, baby!" as if any of those things could bring a modicum of glory to their program. You got an article on ESPN.com about how all your players learn the fight song? Big deal -- they make movies about Notre Dame.

Back to Normal

Winning in a blowout in the season opener sure is nice, isn't it?

I'll admit, after Pitt's first TD I was afraid the game would become a track meet and they would just throw at Richardson all night. God knows they should have -- when ABC said a "key to victory" for Pitt would be running 60% of the time I thought, please do that because it'll give us a chance! Instead, for the first time in a long time, we answered a deficit and took over a game that last year we would have let get out of hand. And by the time we took the second half kickoff and put together a seven minute TD drive, I knew it wasn't a fluke. It's nice that the second string got a couple of possessions, but it would be even nicer to see how they looked. Between ABC breaking in with news of Rehnquist's death -- and the accompanying, completely unnecessary biography -- and switching to the end of the Clemson game, we missed most of the fourth quarter! There is no excuse for that when watching on satellite. If I wanted to see some sorry ACC team I would have stayed home and watched free TV.

But I don't want to get too giddy. This is how things are supposed to be. We used to routinely score in the 40s in the opener -- granted against Northwestern, but the point is the team was prepared at the beginning of the season. And not blowing out -- much less losing to -- Pitt shouldn't even enter our consciousness. Between 1988 and 1996 we played Pitt 7 times and won 'em all by an average score of 43-12. So even if we're not all the way back yet, we're getting there. And in any game, I'll be happy when the postmortem is along the lines of this from the Chicago Tribune:

"By the end, Notre Dame's domination was absolute, Pitt's disintegration complete."