Vic Socotra

13 September 2008

Game Day 2008

They had said rain today, but the storms got here early. It rained last night and the clouds are broken today with shreds of blue behind.

It is not that way with Ike slamming over Galveston, where my cousin’s place is now under water.

Here, it is gentle. There may be some T-storms later, according to the Weather Channel, but by then we will be drunk and won’t care so much as standing under steady showers trying to get in the mood. We will already have arrived, I think, I am going to ditch the rain gear and go with shorts and a t-shirt.

I just finished the pepper and onion sauté to go with the brats, which were slow-cooked a night ago. There was some hysterical e-mail from the office to be dealt with, most of it good hysteria, and a stack of meaningless stuff on the AOl side. It is seven-twenty on Game Day, and I think I am mostly ready for the Subaru Outback to pull up at Big Pink's flank at 0900.

That is going to mean the first beer about forty-five minutes later, but thankfully the game is "dry" so this won't be a wasted day, or at least not terminally so.

Maryland pla ys Cal at College Park, kick-off at noon, I think. I am a mild Terps fan, since I like the people I go to the occasional game with. It is not a passion, which is liberating. It is odd to be going to Game Day in person, rather than being huddled in some sports bar, or barricaded in the den under the Cone of Silence, tensely awaiting the kick-off.

Michigan plays Notre Dame at 3:30, which is one of those events that used to make me go catatonic, but both teams are so bad this season that it is hard to dredge up the emotion. Like the Ohio State game, each year for most of my life there were Big Stakes on this contest, for ranking in the race for the mythical national championship.

It is not, this year. It may never be again, though of course hope springs eternal.

This is a year of transition in Ann Arbor, and another disappointing year in the long transition from Ara Parsegian at South Bend. The two programs that have been such storied rivals over the last hundred years are both uncertain, shaken to their cores. As recently as a couple seasons ago, both teams could boast the title of the "winningest program" in NCAA history.

It was a razor thin difference, though they both were right. Notre Dame had the highest percentage of victory in total games played, while Michigan passed Princeton for the most total victories a few years back. As of 2007, this is the way it stood:

Rank /Team/ Years played /Winning %/Wins/ Loses/ Ties /Total Games

1         Michigan       127   0.74475        869   286     36       1191
2         Notre Dame  118   0.73864        824    278    42       1144

Notre Dame football was a real religious phenomenon, as I have been told by my Mom abut my Grandfather’s devotion, but it is been a=2 0tough decade and many old scores have been settled. The Irish even lost a heartbreaker to Navy last year, an ignobility only surpassed by the upset of the Wolverines by scrappy little Appalachian State last year.

I was in College Park when the news of that disaster swept through the crowd, and I was stunned at the delight of my fellow citizens. I was glad not to be wearing any team regalia and become the East Coast lightning rod of humiliation.

At Michigan it is an abrupt change. The departure of stoic Lloyd Carr means the end of a tradition of straight-ahead power fo otball that goes back to Bo Schembechler and through his apprenticeship to Woody Hayes, to the Golden Era of the game with the legendary Fielding Yost. Lloyd's strong team of last year has been dismantled, the name players departing early for the National Football League because of the new coach.

Rich Rodriguez brings a new system to the Big House at Ann Arbor, one that represents a new style of football that is more akin to basketball than the Four Horsemen of the past. It is a bet on a totally new direction for the future, and shedding the skin of the tired past that is no longer competitive.

I am not going to go all weird and allegoric on you, but what with the election hyperbole so stark, I can't help but think that is the choice in that direction, too.

The Times commented on it this morning, saying that the candidates we have are not the people they were when they started the endless campaign. Honest plain-spoken John in the back of his bus is long gone. Now he mouths things that he must know are not true, and the Wunderkind seems not as much the gleam of hope as just another terribly ambitious young man who would be considered a real-comer at the office, though you might suspect he wants your corner office.

It seems that the grinding process and the hot light of celebrity anneal these people into something else. I have not heard anything from Senator Biden; maybe they have put a muzzle on his famously wandering tongue.

Governor Palin, had she been doing this for more than a year, would probably have learned something about the wider world out there and been more credible in her first grilling, in which she betrayed that she had no clue as to what the Bush Doctrine might be.

She said she agreed with whatever the soon-to-be-departed President said, and I’m sure that another year with the briefing books and the hard-eyed handlers and spin-doctors would have cured all that.

But then she would be right the rest of them, automatons, the products and creatures of those around them, and those with deep pockets who pay for this carnival.

I do trust allegory, though. I wonder why the parallel between that word and former almost elected president Al Gore did not strike me at the time- I must have been asleep at the switch.
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The choice before us, allegorically, is about junking the old program and going off in an entirely new direction. The new guy promises us dazzle and flare and a return to victory. The other guy promises to double-down on old strengths even if the nature of the game has changed.

I don’t know. It doesn’t seem to have worked out that well for Michigan and Notre Dame, but there will always be an audience for it.

Just maybe smaller, and not so noisy.

It only takes a few years for the totals and percentages to change. Look at China. Whatever.  I’m not going to cook the brats any differently.

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