Dear Coach...

Hey.  How are you?  I often think about how tough this must be for you, riding this out, knowing what you know, and trying to find a way to articulate it at press conferences without betraying the previous regime or belittling the current players.  I think about how the words "you can't make chicken salad out of chicken shit" is on the tip of your tongue, right next to "if you assholes would just be patient and let me do my thing, I will take you to the promised land in a couple years."  But you can't say those things.  You need to pretend to live for today, even though you pine, like those of us that understand, for tomorrow.

We the fans have stood by as things have started to unravel a bit, the latest chapter being the unspeakable loss to a bad MAC squad.  But as complicated and rabid Michigan fandom is, our needs our very simple.  We don't work with people from Toledo.  We rarely spend quality time with folks from Champaign.  I've never met anyone from Utah.  However, Sparty Alums are everywhere.  We see them in our offices (cleaning up the trash), we see them in restaurants (serving us fries), we bump into them occasionally in social situations (starting fires and jumping on police cars).

They have been a dominant force in college basketball for several years now, while our program has seen the ultimate demise.  And we hear about it, usually starting sometime after the 1st quarter of the Michigan - Michigan State football game and going through to March Madness.

On the flipside, we have the best football program of all time, and they have less Big Ten championships than Northwestern.  This is where we own them.  Where we have always owned them.  Where we need to always own them.  You can fix THIS season coach....and it starts by understanding what this game means to all of us.  While the Big Ten championships and National Championships will require a year or two of work, the state championship requires only 4 quarters.  Simply put Coach...BEAT STATE.  I promise you that if you win, you can do whatever you want until November 22nd.  It is then that we'll have to have another conversation.  See you then.