11/27/2021 – Michigan 42, Ohio State 27 – 11-1, 8-1 Big Ten, Big Ten East Champions The thing that cracked me was the folding chair. I don't know when this happened, exactly, but it might have been around the same time the turnover chain spawned its infinite variations around the country. There are three guys on the Michigan sideline who maniacally wave around folding chairs at key moments. They must be walk-ons. I can discern no rhyme or reason as to what prompts the chair waving. It does not actually seem connected to turnovers—Michigan acquired none in this game. I do not know if it's the same three guys with the chairs or if it's a rotating cast. But there are chairs, and they are jiggled at high rates of speed on the Michigan sideline, and sometimes they host small gatherings of hype. It feels like a cargo cult. The chairs have dropped from the sky and are venerated because we cannot think of anything better to do with them. Nobody has asked about them yet. Google turns up nothing but ads for folding chairs when asked about this. There has not yet been the Athletic deep dive about the slightly deranged 190-pound defensive end who seized upon the folding chair as his totem, and got his two buddies to join in mostly because the slightly deranged 190-pound defensive end absolutely will not shut up and if they agreed to wield the chairs they could go to the bar before 1 AM. They are thus a perfect mystery. I cannot understand why this is happening and no one is bothering to explain. The chairs merely are. They are there, so they are there. ------------------------------------------ This year Michigan went around stealing sports valor from the Big Ten. They Jumped Around at Wisconsin. They did the Zombie Nation thing at Penn State. They may have gone HOO HOO HOO when MSU did their 300 thing, but no one puts that on television. Michigan's players would gather at the most hype-adjacent spot they could access to do the thing all the undergrads in the stands were doing. The chairs were there. Grasped and exalted, they were there. In the third quarter, Michigan had just scored to go up 15 and something was playing during a commercial break. The Michigan sideline went nuts. The chairs were lifted again, and again, and again. They bobbed on an invisible ocean. Pure joy radiated from them. I've been pretty turned off this season for obvious reasons, and I was turned off for much of this game. I simply cannot expose myself to more emotional turmoil at this point. Hope and joy go hand in hand with loss. So I was stoic, for the most part. Little things squeaked out: a "go!" when Corum broke into the secondary, a "get him!" when Hutchinson flushed Stroud out of the pocket. Cracks in the façade. The impossible coming closer. Lucy, holding the football. The chairs somehow exist outside of this, in the same way I spent 15 minutes "meditating" to the buh-buh-buh-basketball song at one particularly stressful juncture last year. Was this the stupidest thing I could possibly have done? Yes. Did it work? Yes. The chairs are dada and do not follow the rules laid down by Michigan football. They are otherworldly. They worked on me. I am now into absurdist Buddhism. ----------------------------------------------------- So. There is a great mass of humanity on the field at Michigan Stadium. I'm sixteen rows up. I am surveying this field rush. There are elevated helmets, and what looks like a "slippery when wet" sign. Children sit on their fathers' shoulders. Somewhere in there a guy I think I saw in my section is putting an absurd gold chain around Brad Hawkins's neck; Hawkins will wear it to the press conference. Soon, Carl Grapentine will gently suggest that people on the field cease hugging and crying on the Michigan players so they can get back to the locker room. This will not work very well, so Grapentine will suggest it more sternly. That is the near future, though. In the present they're playing Seven Nation Army or that suddenly ubiquitous song about pumping it up, and my eyes are taking in a field rush that has carpeted a football field so fully that not a scrap of turf is visible. And there, at the forty-five yard line, is one of the chairs. The stupidest fucking thing in the world. A folding chair, held aloft like a beacon. Like it means something to someone, this generic slab of metal and plastic that could be put in a high school gymnasium and lost among hundreds of identical copies of itself. Somewhere on that field was a person who looked at the great black emotional nothing of Michigan football and said to himself "I defy you. This is fun." Then he handed the chair to someone else, and he said the same thing, and somehow the chair won, and then the chair gave something of itself to me. I wrote a big dumb column last year about how Paul Chryst's mask discipline contrasted with Harbaugh's and that was why this thing that just happened was never going to happen. Because Michigan was too chaotic and unfocused and the masks are the thing. It is the same big dumb feeling when I say that somehow the chairs are the whole thing. Going into Wisconsin, where you haven't won in twenty years, and not sitting sullenly on the sideline when the other tribe is doing their haka. Instead embracing the moment. Saying it doesn't have to be like this. Saying the past does not exist. Saying we can go into halftime up exactly one(1) point and tell them that they're shook. As teams were headed to locker rooms at the half. @OhioStateFB @UMichFootball About to be an interesting 2nd H @CollegeGameDay pic.twitter.com/knxp97O4Oq — Kirk Herbstreit (@KirkHerbstreit) November 27, 2021 And then it can be true. All of it can be true. AWARDS Known Friends and Trusted Agents Of The Week
legendary [Patrick Barron] you're the man now, dog #1 Aidan Hutchinson. On WTKA this Thursday I was asked what needed to happen for Michigan to win this game and the first thing out of my mouth was "Aidan Hutchinson wins the Heisman." Well: Current Draft Kings Heisman Odds: Bryce Young, -200 CJ Stroud, +400 (was -200 chalk last week) Aidan Hutchinson +1400 (first time listed all season) Kenny Pickett, +1600 Kenneth Walker III, +1800 Matt Corral, +2200 Nobody else with shorter than +5000 odds — jamie mac (@justcoverblog) November 28, 2021 Heisman voters are and old and crotchety and reliably predictable bunch with no imagination, but you have to figure that if Georgia shuts Bryce Young down the voters are going to blanch at 1) an Alabama quarterback who can't even get them to the playoff and 2) an Ohio State quarterback after Hutchinson dominated a game against OSU in which he had three sacks. Anyway, yes, three sacks. Yes, a holding call drawn. Yes, Ohio State flipping their first-round OL around in a desperate attempt to find anyone who could stall the guy out. Yes, this: Aidan Hutchinson had 15 QB pressures vs Ohio State Most in a game since we started tracking college in 2014 pic.twitter.com/Psmn0Fp6xh — PFF College Football (@PFF_College) November 28, 2021 Also this: Aidan Hutchinson did this to potential 1st round pick pic.twitter.com/uHPmZKnOsE — Anthony Treash (@PFF_Anthony) November 27, 2021 Heisman. Best player in the country. Period. #2 The Offensive Line. Zero sacks. Zero tackles for loss. One(?) zero-yard run, that on some tempo that got the snap count jumped. By the fourth quarter OSU defensive tackles were doing plainly insane things and getting fed buckets of garbage when that didn't work. Jump to the interior and get escorted past the play. Yeah, McNamara escaped some pressure. Also Hassan Haskins had ONE HUNDRED AND TEN YARDS before contact. Also Andrew Vastardis immediately reached the nose tackle on the long Corum run and the two guards wiped the LB level. Michigan is going to finish this year in the top 5 in sack rate allowed and just put up ~300 yards rushing on Ohio State. I officially withdraw any concerns about getting rid of Ed Warinner and making Sherrone Moore the OL coach. Give me my hairshirt