Stop Error

Illinois 38, Michigan 13; 5-4, 1-4

Dictionary.com defines the Blue Screen of Death (or stop error) as such:

Definition: a bright blue screen displayed by the Microsoft Windows operating system when it cannot recover from a system error; abbreviated BSOD Example: The blue screen of death almost always means the computer has frozen and requires rebooting.

The parallel I am making is obvious. Michigan football is Microsoft Windows. And a system error has caused it to freeze, crash, and reboot. The problem is, stop errors aren't random, flukey occurrences. They happen when something has become fundamentally broken or corrupted, and they continue to pop up until you go in, spend an eternity sifting through your computer and find what's fucked up and fix it.

Michigan experienced a horrifying stop error on Saturday. Against a team that had not stayed within 10 points of any I-A opponent, Michigan lost by 25, and in a sport full of subtleties that often escape the eyes of those untrained to watch for them, the turning point on Saturday was blatant, obvious, and horrifying. Failing to obtain one yard on four straight plays cannot be pinned on coaches, on players, on training staffs, on playcalls. It is pinned on all of the above. It is a fundamental failure on all levels of football when you have four chances to get three feet and fail every time. It's an indictment on everything you've done to prepare yourselves for the moment. It's an indictment on Roundtree for being inexplicably caught from behind, it's an indictment on the offensive line for not being able to create one measly hole, it's an indictment on the running backs for not being able to push the pile 36 inches, it's an indictment on the coaches for waiting until 4th down to put the power back in the game, and it's an indictment on everyone for what transpired afterwards.

For the past 22 and a half months, I have had a spot on the Board of Directors for the Rich Rodriguez Defense Corporation, somewhere next to Brian Cook and Rick Leach. I've shouted down naysayers at Michigan Stadium, played the e-bully on the internet toward people who micromanaged and nickeled and dimed every little fucking thing. I've constantly linked to material from MGoBlog which perfectly illustrates how the predicament we're in cannot be pinned solely on Rodriguez but on like a dozen different people over the past five years. I've stepped back when I needed to step back because wolves have to have a deer to hunt, and I've lashed out when I needed to lash out because sometimes ignorance must be called out for what it is.

At some point, "all in" becomes blind devotion. At some point, all true believers find themselves questioning that in which they have invested so much. For me, I reached that point some time around 6:00 Saturday evening, sometime between Illinois's 70-yard touchdown and Michigan's 10 trillionth fumble in the last 21 games. So now I'm stuck in no man's fucking land. I'm not about to plunge myself off the cliff and join the people I've spewed virulent hatred at for the past year plus...but I may need to take a leave of absence from the Board of Directors. I keep telling myself about the freshmen at QB, the walkons on defense, the abysmal linebacking situation, the absence of depth in the secondary...and it offers no comfort, because we just lost by 25 points to a team whose only prior win was against a 4-4 I-AA team. When faced with that reality, there isn't much to say that will make anybody feel better.

I'll be at the game on Saturday against Purdue, and I hope like hell that we win, because 6-6 seems like the best case scenario at this point, and good luck getting to six against Wisconsin and Ohio State. Other than that....whatever. I got nothing to say.

Attention, Brilliant Football Coaches of the Internet

Penn State 35, Michigan 10; 5-3, 1-3

If you think I'm going to stop, you are as sorely mistaken about me as you are about that which you bitch about so much. I take no pleasure in this, and I cannot say the same for those I am addressing, because these people are indeed taking at least a little bit of satisfaction in believing they have been proven right.

The in vogue phrase tonight on the increasingly insufferable Michigan message boards is "poorly coached." Michigan gets blown out, so it automatically has to mean the coaches are just a bunch of bumbling invalids. What exactly does "poorly coached" mean? Is it the amount of excessive penalties they're committing? Oh, five for 33 yards today.

The following is a post from a prominent Michigan message board, posted by someone who no doubt coached high level football for 20 years and is in a position to accurately judge.

I have totally jumped the fence. I'm telling you, during the coaching search RR was one of those guys in that top, top tier of my personal preferences (but I dismissed the notion because I thought he wouldn't change jobs). When UM landed him I was so happy. To have gone through the stupid crap with Miles and to actually end up with a much better hire! Wow! I was giddy. For weeks I was giddy. But halfway through his second Big Ten campaign - I'm over it. I understand the need to be 'all-in', the natural desire to believe this is just pain on the way to the top. But I do not believe that because: This team is terribly coached. The losses don't bother me as much as the certain knowledge of how badly coached this team is. I chuckle at the 'three things' did this team in notion (followed by an article which categorizes 60+ crappy plays into three things). This team is terrible at the fundamentals, haphazard in terms of scheme, pathologically deficient on special teams, and simply sloppy at every position on the field. They look like just the sort of crap can team that would spike a ball on 3rd down with ten ticks left on the clock. (By the way: Did UM really just blitz their asses off in the red zone against a team that Iowa proved can't succeed against zones in the red zone? And get beat like a drum every time? Yes they did.) Just look at the product on the field. Let all the other stuff go. No 'all-in', no Rosenberg, no in-fighting, just the product on the field. Remove the colors from the jerseys and just watch. UM is, by good measure, the worst coached football team in the conference. Period. A lot of it is basic fundamentals, so a lot of it is on the assistants, but ultimately, it is on Rodriguez. I never thought this would be the case. UM is terribly coached. And today, they reverted so far, that just like game after game last year, they quit. I apologize for this. I will not post regularly because I don't want to become that guy. But as for this coach - I no longer believe he can produce a Big Ten Quality team. (Of course, I'll be hoping like hell he immediately proves me wrong.)

Terrible at fundamentals? Like tackling? Because overall, this team has tackled better than most Michigan teams over the past few years, excluding 2006.

What does "haphazard in scheme" even mean?

Pathologically deficient on special teams? Our field goal kicker has missed one kick all season, our punter is the best in the nation, we blocked a punt today, we have two kickoff returns for touchdowns in basically 15 years, and one of them came this year, and the muffed/fumbled punt fiasco of a year ago has been almost completely eliminated.

Here's another gem:

the team is just not getting better. If we lose and play well then we just lose. PSU could have scored 50 today had they wanted to - the UM offense was so inept that PSU probably knew at half time that they already had enough points to win. This team is currently a train wreck and I believe this coaching staff is dangerously close to losing this team. To see Bruce Tall and RR go at it like they did on the side lines is not good for the moral of this team.

Wait, you mean the youngest team in the Big Ten regressed against the second best team in the conference with the best defense and a fifth year senior quarterback? The best defense in the conference, the one so many of our fans lust over what they want Michigan's defense to look like, confused and crushed our freshman QB, and somehow this reflects poorly on the coaches? Did Rich Rodriguez go out there and stomp on Molk's leg and I missed it?

And the meme circulating that RR and the coaches need to calm down on the sidelines is getting more and more comical everytime I hear it, because it's so painfully obvious the people complaining about this never played football (or any other sport). Or maybe they got so used to Lloyd's ho-hum nature on the sideline that they just assumed that was the way it's done everywhere. Well, here's a little newsflash for you: This is football. It's not chess. It's not ballet. It's not a trip to the grocery store. It's a violent, passionate, emotional game, and things get heated. Players yell at coaches. Coaches yell at players. Coaches yell at other coaches. None of this means jack fucking shit, and you need to shut up about it already.

Oh, but it gets even better. Here's that same moron from the previous post:

You my friend are in total Denial, You can try and spin this any way you want to try and make yourself feel better, but to say that the coaches getting in to heated arguments on the side line does not effect morale is ridiculus.It looks like RR and Tall almost went to blows over something as minor as 12 men on the field and you obviously did not look at the faces of those kids on the sideline as the two of them were going at it. PSU ran a basic offense at about the midway point of the 3rd qtr-open your freakin eyes.

"Something as minor as 12 men on the field".

By the way, that was on 4th on 4. You know, as in, if there had been a penalty called, Penn State would've had a first down instead of a field goal try. So, yeah...that's pretty fucking major, just like the timeout we had to use that we could've used at the end of the half.

And yeah, I'm sure the players were trembling in fear, shocked and appalled that their coaches might raise their voices.

It must be so comforting for idiots like this to pass judgment from the comfort of their couches, knowing no important decisions involving this team will ever fall on them. They get to preach about how they know all that ails this team without being in any sort of contact with any of the coaches, players, trainers, anybody. These people are no doubt preparing their resumes so they can deploy their brilliant knowledge on the football field when it counts.

I'll try and explain this, one more time.

1. Our quarterbacks are freshmen. Apparently people aren't accepting this excuse anymore, which is rather amusing. Just so you know, there is no light that magically goes on for freshmen quarterbacks. They're still freshmen in October and November, just like August and September. And for some reason, they often play worse late in the season than they do early on. This could have something to do with the fact that they're playing better teams and better defenses, but hey, I'm not the expert here.

2. Our defense is operating under its third different coordinator and system in three years. I guess this isn't being accepted either. Apparently it's supposed to be easy to learn something complicated in three different ways three years in a row.

3. There are walkons in the two deep at all three levels of defense. Jordan Kovacs is a great story. Will Heininger and Kevin Leach are gamers, I'm sure. But when they are backups who are asked to contribute significant time in real games and not clean up duty at the end of blowouts, there is a problem. How many times does this need to be said before people start listening? Er, scratch that. It's starting to become clear that it doesn't matter how many times it's said.

4. The transitive property does not apply in sports, EVER. People were operating under the following assumption. Iowa mauled Penn State up front. Michigan mauled Iowa up front. Therefore, Michigan will maul Penn State. This doesn't work. Each game is independent and stands alone. Previous results and trends can be used as a rough outline of what may transpire in the future, but there are never absolutes.

I mean...I don't know, man. I'm pretty close to my wit's end when it comes to arguing with these people. A year ago Michigan lost to MSU by two touchdowns to fall to 2-6. We're 5-3 now. We're nowhere close to where we want to be, and that seems to be the only thing these morons want to see. They refuse to acknowledge that while we're still far from the sky, we've risen from the sewers.

Even when the man who metaphorically tucks them in at night finally voices his support...

"Rich is a young guy, (and) he's got a great background for such a young guy," Carr said Saturday during his interview with Frank Beckmann and Jim Brandstatter. "What we're seeing here offensively throughout this season is a great thing for the future of Michigan football. "The transition a year ago you could expect it (the struggles) because what they were looking for in a quarterback. Certainly what we have here is exciting. I'm excited for the future."

...Well, I suppose that isn't good enough either?

I thought after the pleasant start to this season, it'd be possible to finally just sit back, watch some football and enjoy the growing process. And now we have one bad day - imagine that, a young football team being overwhelmed - against a really fucking good team, and it's time to run around with scissors, screaming and setting shit on fire because chaos is really fucking cool, man.

It's like pissing into the wind, trying to debate this over and over again with the same dense, close-minded people. You feel relief and you feel like you're getting something done, and then you realize you're just covered in waste now and you smell like urine.

Everybody wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die.