September Was Perfect
/It's been a wild ride. A defense full of holes, over and over their backs against the wall, bad snaps, freshman mistakes...and victories. I wouldn't have wanted it any other way. This is new for all of us, this rebuilding. It's from the ground up. But it seems that the men brought in to lay the foundation, to be the foundation, are not here to wait or to settle for anything less than Michigan Football.
When the season started, one of my biggest fears was the prospect of a losing attitude. When you lose 9 games, you get used to losing. Losing becomes an option. I thought that if this team found itself in a situation where the breaks were not going their way, when they turned the ball over, when an assignment was missed and the opponent began to put big points up on the board, that they would give in to the fact that they just aren't good enough. Compounding my fear was the negativity from disgruntled players that will never see the field, the press, and the fans that pine for Les Miles to show up make things Lloyd-like all over again.
So far, all of my fears have been debunked. I mean, sure, we probably aren't actually good enough to keep up this modicum of sucess, but we have a certain something. Maybe it's that most of the team is too young to know better. Sure it's a chiche used by teams that suck, but I am proud to say there is something about this Michigan team that cannot be measured, that doesn't show up on typical stat sheets. Like the fact that we are probably the best team in the nation when it comes to allowing long drives that end in field goals instead of touchdowns, or that if the NCAA tracked poise under pressure, we'd be the consensus #1.
Whatever it is, however it happened, we should embrace it. We don't know what the future holds, we only know that we already eclipsed last season's win mark, and that along with the assumption of Delaware State, we are a single victory away from returning to post season play.
That victory will likely occur this weekend, when Michigan travels to East Lansing to take on Michigan State. Because Michigan State sucks. Michigan State always sucks. They are the tied with Northwestern as the 2nd worst team in the history of Big Ten football after Indiana. They are an embarrassment on the field of play, where they routinely find ways to lose games that they have in hand through penalties and poor playcalling, and where they lose to far inferior (on paper) opponents. They are equally embarassing off the field, where their players are best known for ruining their professional careers through drug use and shooting themselves in the leg in New York clubs. They are inferior, less than human, and for lack of a better term, stupid. Yes, they're stupid. Everybody that follows them is delusional. Their coach is overrated. Their players are weak. And in what will be a new setting, a road setting, for a group of Maize and Blue clad freshmen, the Spartans won't have a chance.
