Our protagonist is college hockey coach Herb Brooks, the world’s grumpiest Minnesotan. When we meet him, he is preparing to interview for Team USA’s head coach vacancy. He is drawing a diagram of the world’s simplest hockey play and studying it with a very furrowed brow, so you know he’s a serious person.

His pitch for the job is quite simple. He tells his prospective bosses that they should hire him and then shut the fuck up and go away. This makes the people interviewing him think he’ll be difficult to work with, but they give him the job anyway because no one in their right mind would want it.

Coaching the American Olympic Hockey Team, you see, is not exactly an attractive position in 1980. The Olympics required teams to be composed of amateur players, not paid professionals. This meant that whoever coached the team was almost certain to embarrass the nation by losing to the evil, awful, no-good Soviet Union, which had the best Olympic hockey team the world had ever seen. This was for two reasons. First, the Canadians thought amateurism was fucking stupid, so they swore off the Olympics. Second, the Soviet players were amateurs on paper only. Yes, they were technically officers in the Red Army, but in practice, the only shooting they did was with a hockey stick.

The Americans, meanwhile, were not smart enough to use this loophole, dipshit capitalist pigs that we are. So instead of drafting hockey players into the 101st Power Play Division, the US hires a bunch of college kids from Minnesota and Massachusetts, the states with the second and third funniest accents in the English language.

After Brooks assembles his team of the goofiest sounding frat bros this side of Alpha Beta Kappa, a problem becomes apparent: everyone is from rival universities and hates one another with the intensity of an autist studying his special interest while on ritalin. But Coach Herb has a plan to solve for this. He is going to be such a massive asshole that they hate him more than they hate each other.

This backfires. They just end up hating him and each other. Their hockey play is the gutter. They suck more shit than a vacuum in a septic tank.

Herb eventually realizes he has to check his big-jerk energy at the door and show some goddamn leadership. He tries out some icebreakers, having everyone introduce themselves by stating their name, where they’re from, and who they play for. This also doesn’t help. It just reminds everyone why they hate each other.

The mediocrity comes to a head after an exhibition match in Sweden where the boys are more focused on the blondes in the stands than the blondes on the ice. When the final buzzer sounds, instead of going back to the locker room, Brooks forces the team to skate sprints until they piss, shit, and puke red, white, and blue. He berates them for not understanding that the name on the front of the jersey is more important than the name on the back. The rink manager goes home because this is Scanadivia and it’s a union job. Finally, team captain Mike Eruzione gets Herb to chill out by shouting his name and where he’s from and that he plays for the United States of America–which is not exactly the name on the front of the jersey (it just says USA) but he gets points for trying, and drives Herb’s point home for the rest of the team.

The greatness of this scene cannot be understated. It’s undoubtedly the most jingoistic moment ever put to film, but it also crystallizes the theme of the movie: The most important thing in the world is for you to understand that you are not the most important person in the world, that you represent something greater than yourself, that you are but one part of a greater whole. Karl Marx put it best: “only in community with others has each individual the means of cultivating his gifts in all directions.”

Having fully embraced communist precepts without realizing it, Team USA improves–only to be shoved into their lockers during an exhibition against the much more ideologically pure Team USSR, who beats the shit out of them to the tune of 10 to why bother.

In the aftermath of this thorough pantsing, Herb, Team USA, and the audience can’t help but begin to question whether you can win a gold medal with the power of friendship alone, that maybe there’s really no way a plucky bunch of college kids can go toe-to-toe with the Soviets, what with their unmatched mastery of hockey, Vodka, and the virtues of a centrally planned economy.

Then Coach Herb remembers that of the four major sports (hockey, baseball, basketball, and the football that televises well), hockey is the one where you don’t actually have to be all that great. You can win with luck alone. During the big rousing speech he gives the team before they play the Soviets in the semifinals, he says, and I am definitely giving you real dialogue here–

These guys might beat you nine times out of ten. I mean, nine times outta ten they’re gonna kick the shit outta you. Nine times out of ten they’ll rip your guts out and use your entrails as dental floss, but not tonight. Tonight we’re gonna win in the flukiest way imaginable. We’re gonna win on bullshit alone, gentlemen!

The game is undeniably the biggest upset of all time, but it was undoubtedly a one-in-ten-times occurrence. Team USA scores their first goal from an improbable distance and then, later, scores a goal off an improbable rebound that goes in, improbably again, with no time remaining in the first period. They go down 2 to 3 in the second period, but tie it back up on a power play goal, then take a 4 to 3 lead when Mike “I play for the United States of America” Eruzione comes off the bench to take a slap shot just as a Soviet is standing right in front of his own goalie. This is all to say that they win in the most American fashion possible: by having all the breaks go their way and pretending they earned it.

The clock hits triple zeroes and Al Michaels, now a crotchity old man known for longing for death during every game he broadcasts but back then is an upstart, just-happy-to-be-here kinda guy, gives his famous playcall:

“Do you believe in miracles? YES!”

The orchestral score swells, blasting patriotic strings so bombastic that Beethoven would tell it to chill the fuck out. Everybody hugs. Herb Brooks goes back to the locker room to cry, fist pump, and mumble “yes” to himself over and over again while his wife gives him a meaningful nod.

It might sound like I’m making fun of Miracle, but I’m not. I fucking LOVE everything about this movie. The writing, the direction, the thematic contradictions, the sense of hockey realism captured by the impeccable cinematography and editing. I love the almost-but-not-quite there acting by the real-life hockey players cast as Team USA, and there’s still a part of me that thinks Kurt Russell should’ve won an Oscar for his portrayal of Herb Brooks. I admit that none of it is perfect. But all of it is incredible. And nobody in their right mind should want to change a thing about it. It’s enough to make you believe in miracles.

I won’t mention the outlet that published it, but I read a preview of the NFC Championship game that must’ve been 2,000 words but could have been written in 25: “Los Angeles likes to create mismatches on offense, and the Seattle defense solves for that by having guys that are simply good at everything.” There. That was it. That was the preview. I saved you so much time.

This article will be a far better read and way better researched than any game preview could be. I’m not going to predict this weekend’s Super Bowl based on a hard-hitting analysis of the New England Patriots and the Seattle Seahawks. I’m going to predict the Super Bowl based on how good the rock music from each city is. For our purposes, we will limit the musical scope of the New England Patriots to the city of Boston.

BOSTON: A CITY THAT PAAAHRKS THE CAR

I don’t mean to imply that Boston has added nothing of value to modern American culture. I mean to state it very plainly: Boston has added nothing of value to modern American culture.1

I’m sure that the lab coats at MIT invent some good things when the defense department isn’t giving them $131 million a year to come up with new and innovative ways of vaporizing people, and I’m sure some good work come out of Harvard when its students aren’t dropping out to build tech startups called “Bloop” which find new and innovative ways of exploiting monetizing existenital dread.

There have been plenty of really interesting movies set in the city and the surrounding areas. The Departed, Mystic River, The Verdict, American Fiction, Good Will Hunting—all great films, all also directed by people not from Boston (New York, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Tucson, Louisville).

But in terms of music, there are many, many rock bands from Boston, though no meaningful, impactful group can be ascribed as inextricably “Boston.” We can point to any number of cities—Detroit, Liverpool, and, yes, Seattle—and immediately think of a handful of artists who come from there and we’d all agree that they are quintessentially of that city. These bands simply exist, floating and bereft of identity outside of vague concepts like “cool” and “rock.”

In terms of sheer popularity and legacy, Aerosmith is the biggest musical act from Boston. I’ve listened to plenty of their songs but had never stopped to consider where they were from. I would have guessed Los Angeles, New York, or maybe Philadelphia, with the latter only because they were heavily featured on the soundtrack to the Mark Wahlberg Disney vehicle where he plays a bartender who tries out for the Philadelphia Eagles.

At any rate, some would call Aerosmith a claim to fame for the city. Those same people can explain to you, through slurred speech, about how impactful they were in the 70s, how it’s a crime they weren’t properly appreciated until the 80s and 90s, and how much it sucks to have to blow into a breathalyzer before starting your car.

I’ll admit to liking Aerosmith’s hits. They’re the type of songs that transcend space, time, and taste. In a hundred years, people will still be listening to “Dream On,” “I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing,” and “Sweet Emotion,” but they will be doing so armed with the knowledge that it’s knitsch, and the group’s history and output will be of artistic and intellectual interest only to a single music scholar writing an extremely niche thesis called “Constitutional Law as Intrepreted Through the Lens of American Idol Judges.”2

There are other bands from Boston. The Pixies, for example, whose cultural impact is limited to how their output influenced other bands rather than the output itself. The band Boston is also, shockingly, from Boston. Their first album sold about a bajillion copies because it dared to ask, “how hard is it to improve on prog rock?” And the answer was “not hard at all” because the thing they were trying improve on was prog rock.

SEATTLE: THE LAST GREAT ROCK’N’ROLL MOVEMENT

My contempt for Boston and Aerosmith and Aerosmith fans is mostly a bit. But my contempt for prog rock is not a bit. I resent the way it demands the listener’s attention, usually for 23 minutes at a time, and begs you to admire its complexity. “Look at me, look at me,” every song seems to say, holding up 52 pages of sheet music and staring up at you with cloying puppy dog eyes, “I wrote a song in 39/8 time and the key of up-my-ass-sharp, pat me on the head and call me special.”

Enter Soundgarden’s Superunknown. It slaps the sheet music out of pro rock’s hands and bellows, “thou shalt not mistake engineering for art.”

Your average man on the street would call Nirvana’s Nevermind the zenith of Seattle’s alternative rock scene, but that is why he is average. Soundgarden’s magnum opus is the best thing to come out of that scene. It’s a 15-track odyssey that blends heavy metal with The Beatles’ melodic sensibility, seamlessly moving back and forth between Led Zeppelin-esque riffs and the soulful mourning characteristic of the portion of the John Lennon songbook I call “The Mental Breakdown Specials” (“Nobody Loves You” remains painfully underappreciated). The record’s best remembered for its crossover hit single, “Black Hole Sun,” which sounds like a Black Sabbath impression of Sgt. Pepper (only good), but I’ll forever go to bat for “The Day I Tried to Live,” a compositionally weird song that follows the day in the life of a depressive trying to be optimistic even though everything keeps going about as wrong as he thought it would.

It’s emblematic of 90s grunge, a defiantly anti-commercial punk-meets-metal mishmash. It was the last great movement of rock’n’roll. The 2000s Long Island emo punk scene gave it a go by taking the genre’s angst and replacing the chuggy guitars with a more accessible pop sensibility, but it never produced vocalists like Chris Cornell, Eddie Vedder, or the Screaming Trees’s Mark Lanegan, or instrumentalists like drummer Matt Cameron and guitarist Mike McCready.

Seattle’s rock scene is not solely defined by a roughly ten-year period that ended in a wave of suicide, alcoholism, and drug addiction. It’s continued to pump out good music. The indie rock crazy of the 2000s was powered, not insignificantly, by the Northwest, with the influential Fleet Foxes and Sunny Day Real Estate coming from Seattle proper. In terms of hip hop—which I don’t think of rock music but the Rock’n’roll Hall of Fame does for some reason—Seattle produced Sir Mix-a-Lot and, more recently, Macklemore, who released “Hind’s Hall” at the height of the Gaza War, making him the first major musical artist (and as far as I know only) to have the balls to issue a single calling Israel a genocidal apartheid state.

CONCLUSION: SEAHAWKS RULE, PATRIOTS DROOL

The Trump administration is going to great lengths to amplify its fascistic veneer, even as it fails to shed its characteristic stupidity and David Lynch-esque surreality. You probably assume I’m about to cite the Venezuela incursion or ICE’s murder of Renee Good, but these moments are escalations of precedents in American history. They are bad, but I would argue they are not deviations from America’s long-festering brand of authoritarianism.

No, what shat my pants was Trump’s Department of Justice opening a bogus investigation into the Chairman of the Federal Reserve. Their patently obvious goal is to bully him into enacting the administration’s preferred monetary policies. The American government has inflicted great cruelty to its populace and the populace of other countries since its founding. Political actors using the threat of state violence to influence the historic independence of the central banking system is a through-the-looking-glass moment. There are no precedents for this in American history.

With my personal and political anxiety escalating, I revisited Year Zero, an electronica-infused rock album by Nine Inch Nails, a monkier for Trent Reznor, who’s now mostly known as a composer for film and television.

Written in late 2006 at the height of the War on Terror with the Bush-era’s Christian dominionist neoconservatism firmly on its mind, Year Zero is an explicitly political work from an apolitical artist. It lambasts the far right while imagining an Orwellian future they rule over.

The 2007 release was preceded by a digital marketing campaign consisting of dozens and dozens of webpages that weren’t advertisements as much as they were experiments in worldbuilding and creative writing. Fourteen-year-old Dan devoured all of it. Adult Dan has forgotten all of it (aside from the general contours).

Here’s the basic schtick: These webpages were supposed to be government documents from 2022, sent back in time by a group of computer scientists secretly working to prevent the rise of a fascistic American government and avert a global apocalypse. They paint a bleak if familiar dystopian picture. The government is poisoning the water supply with mood stabilizers to control the population! Endless wars in the Middle East with no clear objective! Unchecked Christian nationalism! They’re detaining immigrants! The secret police are torturing and outright murdering American citizens! Widespread poverty! Nobody has any health insurance! There’s a terrorist attack on a football stadium!1 Frankly, the only science fiction element is Philip K. Dick inspired: a psychadelic that causes widespread visions of a hand-shaped supernatural entity that plans to wipe humanity from the face of the Earth to protect the planet from being ravaged by climate change.

This epistolary pseudo-novel provides context for the lyrical ideas presented in Year Zero. Naturally, then, the record is often thought of as a concept album, but I’m not sure that’s a good label. There is no narrative to be found, no sense of cause and effect, and no clearly identified protagonists, unlike what you would find in traditional concept albums like Green Day’s contemporaneous American Idiot and 21st Century Breakdown, or the rock operas of yesteryear like Tommy and The Wall.

Instead, Year Zero presents as a series of character sketches exploring how people survive a cruel and uncaring authoritarian nightmare. The songs are synth-based and backed by distorted drum loops and bass lines; guitars, the typical staple of any rock album, punctuate the soundscape but rarely serve as a musical backbone. Rather than end on a heightened repeat of the chorus, tracks will climax with an instrumental section that builds in tension, sonically underlining the narrator’s discontent, and then end in abrupt silence. To call some of these sections “music” may or may not be a misclassification. Some could be more accurately described as sound collages. While they lack a cohesive melody, their aggressive tempo and clear sense of rhythm would put them at least somewhat at home in a dance club, unlike The Beatles’ completely impenetrable “Revolution #9.”

Most of our lyrical narrators are not doing well. The album’s lead single, “Survivalism,” is an angst-ridden embrace of abandoning your morals because it’s the only way to get ahead. “The Good Soldier” depicts its titular character losing faith as he inflicts violence at home and abroad. “Vessel” follows its narrator escaping his disturbing reality by becoming a drug addict. The glitchy but groovy “Me, I’m Not” is a plea for society to slow down, its narrator realizing, far too late, that the arrival of his desired brand of fascism has only made his life worse; the only way he can survive is “knowing not to fight.”

“Meet Your Master” and “My Violent Heart” are rallying cries for resistance, but they do not offer much hope. The former is laden with childish sexual innuendos and suggests a revenge fantasy that fails to change anything. The latter suggests an underclass rising up, but never escapes the imagery of crawling around on hands and knees. “The Great Destroyer,” meanwhile, depicts a lone wolf mass shooter planning nihilistic violence, praying the surveillance state doesn’t realize he has the potential to “murder everyone.”

The most interesting song on the record, both lyrically and musically, comes from the point of view of a business-class fascist. “Capital G,” the album’s only track with anything approaching a traditional pop sensibility, is propelled by a funky synth bass line and a live drummer (one of only two tracks with a rhythm section that isn’t a drum machine) banging out a syncopated beat on a synthesizer drum set. The vocal delivery carries a showtune flair that recalls “King Herod’s Song” in Jesus Christ Superstar.2 It’s basically an Andrew Lloyd Webber song with swear words.

The song’s narrator makes the only mention in the album of a person leading the country, singing in a jumprope chant-esque rhythm:

I pushed the button and elected him to office and
He pushed the button and he dropped the bomb
You pushed the button and could watch it on the television
Those motherfuckers didn't last too long

He offers no regrets or second thoughts, and instead complains about how sick he is of hearing about “the haves and the have-nots,” how he thinks the poor should be grateful for what paltry sums they have, and that people are only mad at him because they are jealous. The class-conscious verses give way to a punk rock-inflected chorus where he unapologetically defends himself, arguing that people are as selfish as he is, and that this new god (greed) is one he’s happy to obey:

I used to stand for something
But forgot what that could be
There’s a lot of me inside you
Maybe you’re afraid to see
I used to stand for something
Now I’m on my hands and knees
Traded in my god for this one
And he signs his name with a capital G

The chorus is held together by a chromatic cycle of triumphant major chords3, and there are some tricks that suggest the narrator is the butt of a joke. When the chorus repeats after the guitar solo bridge, it comes at us with an increasing number of vocal countermelodies. There are simple shouted gang vocals typical of alt-rock, but the song also introduces doo-woopy, Beatles-esque vocal harmonies. The song reaches its resolution as a backing vocal line descends the scale in sarcastic homage to “With a Little Help from My Friends.”

The final two songs on the album, “In This Twilight” and “Zero Sum,” depict an apocalypse that uses biblical imagery to suggest its supernatural nature (“Dust to dust / Ashes in your hair remind me”). The songs, as you’ll likely guess from those two lines, are both sentimental and cynical. They’re mid-tempo, and depict narrators wondering whether they could have been better people and coping with the end by embracing a doomed love.

Some contemporary reviews criticized this section as moralistic. The Worldwide Socialist Web Site4 wrote:

The role of various social forces is brushed aside [in Year Zero] and the onus is placed on humanity as a whole. The population is guilty, apparently, of accepting or even preparing its own miserable fate. Along with everything else, this is simply lazy and superficial.

But this is a severe misreading. While the album’s point of view is that we do indeed share some amount of collective guilt for the human condition, it does not making an angry condemnation. “Zero Sum” is a piano ballad, its verses spoken word poems and its chorus vocals dubbed and redubbed to such an extent that it suggests a choir. The tone is lamenting. An acceptance of the consequences of humanity’s inherent flaws. It is a longing for a better world and an understanding that one was probably never possible. Perhaps it is defeatist, but its leaves me with a feeling that I had in 2016 and 2020 when Bernie failed to secure a nomination, when Trump won in 2016 and 2024, and when Michigan got knocked out of the College Football Playoff in 2022, all events of similar historic importance. Clearly.

Music communicates feelings, not ideas or comprehensive descriptions of systems. Emotions are abstract and often difficult to put into words, let alone coherent sentences. A lyric can try to convey love, joy, despair—but language is limited. It is the sequence of notes and the harmonies of the underlying chords that transmit inner humanity in a way that prose, imagery, and dramatic action simply cannot. Music generates empathy wordlessly. It is the closest thing we have to psychic communication.

There are no good songs with great lyrics and trite melodies. There are many good songs with trite lyrics and great melodies; that is much of Reznor’s output as a songwriter. He has a tremendous ear, is a talented keyboardist, and demonstrates a unique sense of melody (when he chooses to embrace it), but most of the man’s lyrical output is yeesh-inducing. Nevertheless, he gets his idea across and delivers them with such conviction that you can forgive the repetitive rhyme schemes and adolescent word choice.

If there is a complaint to be lodged against Year Zero, it isn’t in the musicianship or the limited lyricism—it’s that the experience is very much a sum of its parts. The songs work together when listening to the record as a traditional LP, putting it on and listening from start to finish, but they feel less impactful as isolated pieces. There isn’t an easily accessible piece of songcraft here other than “Capital G.”

But much in the same way that the album does not outright condemn humanity, I don’t mean that as a condemnation of the album. As a 63-minute musical encapsulation of what it feels like to live in a rapidly breaking authoritarian society, Year Zero conveys a sense of dread, anger, frustration, and hopelessness that will feel familiar in a way that’s unlike any other rock record. If you’re feeling bad and want to feel worse, this is the music to put on. You can find something else if you want to feel better, but at the very least Year Zero won’t patronize you.

I am going to tell you a story that sounds made up. It is not.

The other day, I was having a heart-to-heart phone call with my mother about how I am a magnet for unfortunate and odd situations when I spotted an old man and a stray cat walking toward each other on the sidewalk.

From where I sat, pulled over on a quiet Los Angeles side street, it looked like old friends reuniting. The man bent down with quite a bit of effort. The cat curled around him. The man gave him a kind pat on the head. The cat crooked his head, shut his eyes, and presumably purred.

The man then opened his arms. The cat walked into them, allowing the man to cradle and pick him up. I was too far away to hear anything, but the man appeared to be speaking sweet nothings.

Then the cat must’ve changed his mind. I presume he knicked him with a claw and a hiss, because the old man dropped the cat at an odd angle and sent his foot into the side of the cat’s abdomen, sending him flying, spinning like a football, until he landed on his back several yards away, rolled onto his feet, and scurried beneath the nearest hatchback.

It took me about 10 to 20 seconds to process what I’d just witnessed. When I rejoined reality, my mother was mid-7th Heaven monologue about how I wasn’t a magnet for misfortune.

I said, “Mom, I’m sorry to interrupt, but I just saw a man dropkick a cat.”

I thought about the old man during the buildup to this year’s Michigan-Ohio State game. Michigan’s punting unit had been pedestrian all year, teetering on the edge of mediocrity and threatening to become capital-B Bad at any given moment.

“That old guy’s punting mechanics were pretty good,” I’d catch myself thinking. “He had great form. He probably has arthritis and he didn’t kick the cat very far, but cats aren’t very aerodynamic anyway. I wonder if he’s got any eligibility left.”

As if by thinking about this, I foreshadowed and thus guaranteed something bad would happen with Michigan’s punting. At a key moment in the game, the Wolverines punted for a mere 11 yards. The bizarre trajectory defied comprehension. It must’ve been caused by some combination of the ball landing at a bad angle on the punter’s foot and the snow flurries that were starting up.

That was another thing that I was counting on in the build-up to the game. Snow and wind. Ohio State’s offense always features an explosive passing game, but if a snowstorm hit, the Wolverines could make the afternoon a pound-and-ground slugfest, something I felt would put them at a major advantage.

I say that because Michigan’s freshman running back, Jordan Marshall, is unlike any back I’ve ever seen. If a play is blocked in such a way that he should only get two yards, he’s going to get you five because he’s going to drag his tackler ten feet. He runs with such strength and acceleration that my brain makes a “bonk” noise every time he puts a shoulder into a linebacker. Michigan has a tradition of power backs like him, but there hasn’t been one in recent memory who causes seismic activity when his cleats stab the turf.

The snow did not come in the first half, and it did not come after Jordan Marshall went down with a shoulder injury, leaving Michigan’s ground attack in the hands of a walk-on who is perfectly adequate but can’t make a wall fall down just by looking at it.

When the snow did come, it was during the second half, by which point Michigan was in a hole and needed to start slinging it if they were going to have any hope of victory. The weather made the difficult task impossible.

I realized the game was effectively over. I picked up the monkey paw I wished for snow on and chucked it in the garbage.

In the postgame press conference, Michigan’s head coach took the blame for the loss, but clearly, this one’s on me and my cosmic magnetism for misfortune.

I’m joking. This is a riff on my tendency toward what I call negative narcissism. Many people are afflicted with this disorder. You think the world revolves around you, but only the bad parts.

Were I being serious, it would still be a healthier pattern of thinking than what some of Michigan’s online football obsessives are experiencing. They are throwing a conniption, mostly over their quarterback’s performance and the defensive playcaller.

I’ve little to say about the hot takes on the defensive coordinator, Wink Martindale. He is not a good fit for the program. He is approaching 70. He should take his millions and retire. He could take up fishing. Maybe painting. I don’t care what the hobby is so long as it isn’t telling Michigan’s defense what to do.

I’ve more to say about the quarterback situation. Despite coming into the year with tremendous hype, Bryce Underwood’s season stats are not especially awe-inspiring. He was held under 110 yards in three games. He’ll end the regular season with under 2,000 passing yards and a dismal 7:5 touchdown-to-interception ratio.

Underwood had a couple of things working against him. The most obvious is his youth and inexperience. He is a freshman. He turned 18 less than two weeks before the start of the season. He is basically a baby. A 6’4”, 230-pound baby, but nevertheless a baby.

Babies make stupid decisions. They put forks in electrical outlets. They try to force square pegs into round holes. They get distracted by jangling keys. They’re adorable one moment and shitting their diapers the next. This is the natural order of things.

But babies do learn. They learn that square pegs go into square holes, that jangling keys aren’t interesting, that combining metal and electricity will kill you, and, most importantly, to shit in toilets and not their pants.

This is called personal growth. It does not happen all at once. “Better today than yesterday, better tomorrow than today,” is an aphorism. “One step forward, one step back” is the reality. What you hope and pray and work for is a breakthrough, but those are minutes, hours, days, weeks, and years in the making. Progress is not linear.

Watching student athletes go through that is a feature, not a bug, of college sports. In an era of instant gratification, of an emphasis on payoff and not the humanity that makes it possible, we lose sight of the appreciation of a narrative arc.

Michigan’s 2023 National Championship was so sweet, not because of how impressive the team performed (though it was impressive), but because of all the failures that came before it and how much the team changed over the three-year window they competed for it.

And it’s for that reason I am looking forward to the next two years of Michigan football. This year’s roster is very green, but you can see the potential in Underwood, Marshall, and all the other youths wearing maize and blue.

I suppose potential is just a type of hope, and hope is the most addictive substance on the planet. It’s why people watch sports. It’s why they gamble. “As long as the red dice are in the air,” Norm MacDonald wrote in his book Based on a True Story, “the gambler has hope. And hope is a wonderful thing to be addicted to.”

The situation at Penn State has been downgraded from “angsty” to “sad.” For the third straight week, they lost a game it should have won, and the situation has gotten so untenable that the athletic fired the head coach, triggering his $50 million buyout clause.

Because it’s no longer angsty, I’m going to write about the Michigan-USC game because that one filled me with angst.

As a long-time hater of USC football, it brings me no pleasure to report that Michigan lost to a USC that is still bad. Their offense is a very shiny Rube Goldberg contraption that is admirable as engineering but not so much as a strategy. Their defense, meanwhile, will fold like an origami bird the moment it faces a competent, healthy offense. And one day, Michigan, my long-time favorite team, will once again have a competent, healthy offense.

On the contrary, online chatter is placing blame for Michigan’s loss on a woeful defensive performance. From the way Michigan fans are talking about it, you would be forgiven for thinking that the Wolverines gave up fifty points, and that every time USC’s quarterback touched the ball, Michigan’s pants fell down, revealing heart-shaped boxer briefs and a tattoo of a heart with the word “Mom” in the middle.

I understand why people feel that way. Michigan’s defense is a perplexing organism with Wink Martindale as the defensive coordinator. No, not the dead disc jockey, a 62-year-old former truck driver turned football coach who spent close to 30 years in the NFL before taking the job at Michigan in 2024 because no one in the league would hire him. Nevertheless, the hire made sense at the time; Wink was a mentor figure to the defensive coordinators that led Michigan to successful seasons in 2021, 2022, and 2023.

To speak in generalities, across those three years, Michigan found generational defensive success using deceptive simplicity. They rushed four defensive linemen at the quarterback while the linebackers and defensive backs dropped back into mixed coverages that were designed with varying degrees of sophistication. It felt simple, but was technically complicated. They able to do this, in part, because their defensive linemen were extremely big, extremely mean, and extremely allergic to quarterbacks standing on two legs.

They were basically the Soundgarden of college football. Heavy hitting and in your face, and also playing in a weird time signature, and also there are three key changes in the verse, and also the guitar tuning is some kind of black magic voodoo, but nobody listening notices because it just fucking rocks your world.

The defense under Wink is more like an annoying jazz fusion band. He likes to rush safeties and linebackers while dropping defensive linemen to replace them in coverage. And while you can technically do this, just like a pianist can play really fast chromatic scales on a really expensive electric keyboard, I don’t know why you would. I don’t know what it’s supposed to accomplish or who it’s supposed to impress.

The theory behind Wink’s atypical play calling is surprise, but it comes at a cost. He is asking people to do things you would not always expect them to do, but often times that’s because I don’t know why you would. In others, he is asking young adults, who are not professional footplayers, to do things that are outside of their innate skill sets.

I also speculate that installing a scheme of this complexity comes at the expense of teaching fundamentals like tackling—the main thing that defensive football players have to do. Michigan’s players are aware this is an issue. Senior captain Rod Moore answered the first three questions of a post-game press conference by saying, “just gotta get better at tackling.”

But even with Wink’s overthinking hamstringing Michigan’s defense, they did manage to hold USC—the best offense in the country by a variety of measurements, even if I think this is a statistical mirage—to 24 points until the waning moments of the game. The Wolverines did not play well. They also did not get run out of the building. The team was in this thing. They just had to keep up on offense.

Now, the Michigan offense is very good at running the ball, so, naturally, on their first drive they came out passing. Michigan’s freshman quarterback couldn’t make anything happen and he overthrew the running back on a swing-out screen (the easiest throw he could make!) that would have been good for a first down, or at least close to it, because the running back is Justice Haynes. Justice Haynes is a star because Justice Haynes is a crazy man who is also very, very fast.

But it is hard to be very, very fast with a tweaked oblique, which is what I’m reasonably certain he left the game with before the end of the first half. He would not return, putting the game on the shoulders of Bryce Underwood, the freshman quarterback who—it cannot be emphasized enough—is a freshman. He is six-foot-three and two hundred something pounds, but he also turned only 18 a week before the start of the season. He may be a Man, but he is barely a man.

I’m not talking down about him. He did not play horribly. He acquitted himself rather well considering the quality of his protection and receiving corps. He was the top recruit in the country for a reason, but he made freshman mistakes. He overthrew a couple of balls. He took a bad sack early in the game that took Michigan out of field goal range. Near the end of the game, when Michigan was attempting to make a comeback, Underwood arguably misread USC’s pass coverage and threw a deep ball toward the sideline when he probably should have ripped one to the slot receiver running open down the seam.

This is a decision I’m willing to defend, though. The slot receiver, Semaj Morgan, has a tendency to drop the ball at inopportune moments, and this was no time for drops. Meanwhile, the outside receiver was Donovan McCulley, a six-foot-five contested catch specialist. He is on the offense for moments like this, and he probably would’ve been able to catch the ball had a USC defender not been hugging him like a four-year-old hugs his mom on the first day of pre-school. This is a penalty, but this penalty was not called, and the interception occurring on the play was allowed to stand, effectively ending the game.

It was one of many annoying things done by the referees. Other agitating moves include:

• USC’s first touchdown was off an obvious offensive pass interference penalty that went unenforced. Had it been, the down would

• But they did call a ticky-tack false start on a Michigan tight end that stalled a drive with momentum.

• They gave USC multiple free reviews, but didn’t review USC’s longest and most questionable catch of the day, forcing Michigan to call a timeout to plead their case.

• USC cheerleaders being on the field during a play did not lead to a penalty.

None of these were deciding factors, but they did help matters.

Ultimately, Michigan lost the game because they are not yet a complete team. The key pieces of the roster are young and inexperienced, and they are being asked to do things that are not quite in their grasp yet. The coaching staff needs to stop asking them to play jazz. Get back to basics. Play rock’n’roll.

Either way, though, this is a team that is probably only going to win nine games. That is the same number of wins as last year when the team had a truly horrible offense, but that was because the 2024 team outperformed expectations. Vegas set the over-under for Michigan’s win total at nine-and-a-half; the 2025 team is coming in exactly at expectations. There is nothing to panic about. Not yet. 2026 and 2027 are the years this team should be competive

Now please excuse me while I sit pensively by the window and stare into the steam rising from my coffee cup. If anybody asks, I’m meditating and not imagining three straight horrible losses that result in Michigan firing their head coach.

I walked around my neighborhood on Saturday evening and there was someone blasting the 2013 breakup anthem “Say Something, I’m Giving Up On You.” The window was open. The speakers were going at full volume. You could hear it from two or three buildings away.

A few minutes earlier, Penn State finished its game against UCLA. Penn State entered the game ranked fourth in the country according to the SP+ system. UCLA entered the game without a win this year. In 240 minutes of gametime, they never once held a lead. They ranked 100th overall in the SP+ system. They’d scored a total of 57 points, good for—lemme just carry the one here—134th. There are 136 teams in Division I-A football.

The UCLA Bruins entered their game against Penn State having just ejected all the principals on the coaching staff: Head Coach DeShaun Foster was fired out of a cannon while their offensive and defensive coordinators both agreed to “mutually part ways,” which means they were fired but allowed to keep a shred of dignity.

Observers knew DeShaun Foster was a bad hire the instant he started his introductory remarks at Big Ten Media Day. He um’d and err’d and err’d and um’d, struggling to find anything to say. He eventually remembered what maps looked like and said, “I’m sure you guys don’t know too much about UCLA, our football program, but we’re in L.A. It’s us and USC. We, umm… [awkward laugh].”

After escorting Foster out of the building and bleaching his office, the winless Bruins anointed “Special Assistant to the Head Coach” Tim Skipper as interim head coach, presumably because his last name is what you call the captain of a sinking ship. Skipper replaced the defensive coordinator with a 69-year-old assistant on staff who’d called defenses for Fresno State, the Miami Dolphins, and the Merchant Marines. This made a lot of sense. But what about offense?

Those playcalling duties were handed over to Jerry Neuheisel, a 33-year-old who’d never called plays before, excepting the at least one Madden game he’d played given his age cohort. He was so inexperienced that he (and this is not a joke) did not know how to use his headset. There is footage of him forgetting to put the microphone next to his mouth. UCLA’s quarterback, Nico Iamaleava, explained in the postgame press conference that he had to call his own plays a couple of times because Jerry forgot to press the talk button.

It’s reasonable to assume that this is a buildup to talking about how badly UCLA got its ass kicked, but no. Penn State lost! The game ended 42-37 in favor of UCLA because this Penn State squad played like a football game had broken out in the middle of a sightseeing tour.

The Penn State offense could not string a drive together in the first half. The Penn State defense, meanwhile, played exclusively soft drop zone coverage early on, allowing Iamaleava to find receivers underneath. By the time Penn State’s defense adjusted and started calling more aggressive man-on-man coverage, they didn’t account for Iamaleava’s legs, and he used them to the tune of 126 rushing yards.

Penn State’s offense eventually woke up and made it a game by scoring 30 points in the second half, but they could not score when they needed it most in the waning minutes of the fourth quarter. UCLA got the ball back and bled out the clock, but failed failed to convert a crucial fourth down that would’ve ended the game.

Penn State couldn’t make anything out of the ensuing possession, but UCLA still couldn’t put the game away and were forced to punt. Not to be outdone in the disappointment department, Penn State made the baffling decision to not rush the punter even though they blocked a punt earlier in the game. They allowed him to sit in the backfield for a solid 10 seconds or so and effectively end any hope of a comeback. It’s reflective of Penn State’s game as a whole: embarrassingly mismanaged.

Last week, I said that Penn State fans needed to embrace the B+. They needed to be okay with being good but never great. I did not say they needed to tolerate slipping on a banana peel and falling down fifty flights of stairs while a fat guy played the tuba.

What I’m trying to say is my neighbor either got dumped or is a Penn State fan. Giving up on Penn State football at this point is the wise thing to do. I can understand how it might be an emotional decision, but sometimes relationships have an expiration date. Sometimes they come with big signposts that tell you it’s time to get off, or at the very least take a break. If losing to a discumbobulated UCLA team whose offensive playcaller doesn’t know how his radio works isn’t a sign, I don’t know what is.

Upon reflection, though, I suppose my neighbor was just dumped and it has nothing to do with Penn State football. I came to this conclusion have realized if my neighbor were a Pennsylvanian mourning a football team, they’d be listening to a breakup song by one of the state’s many one-hit wonder post-grunge bands. Probably Fuel, maybe Breaking Benjamin, but definitely not Live.

I had three wisdom teeth removed on Friday, September 19. My dad flew into Los Angeles to help me through the weekend. I was high on painkillers the entire time Michigan played Nebraska the following day.

It was a uniquely blissful experience. The game was tight even though the Wolverines were winning in the trenches. Some of this was because of good execution, some of it was because every member of Nebraska’s front-seven is undersized by about twenty pounds. Michigan ultimately won in what may be the most the-score-makes-it-look-much-closer-than-it-actually-was type of game ever played, and My dad gnashed his teeth and made the Rust Belt Dad Grunt of Displeasure after every missed tackle and blocking assignment. I did not react much beyond trying to give him slopily coordinated high-fives. I was zen’d out, my brain overflowing with dopamine courtesy of hydrocodone.

Being zooted out of your mind is the only way a Penn State fan could be feeling something other than misery and despair after their loss this Saturday to Oregon. Which is why the angiest team of the week is undoubtedly—

PENN STATE

Rankings of Note: Entered the week #2 in the AP Poll and in SP+.

Recent History: Lost in overtime to the #6 Oregon Ducks this past weekend. Otherwise horrifying the state of Pennsylvania in new and innovative ways since 2011.

Fanbase Angst Level: 10,000,000,000 out of 10 (Baseline 5, +9,999,999,995 for THIS WAS SUPPOSED TO BE THE YEAR!!!!)

Penn State fans can relax about: One loss no longer means you’re not in contention for the national title.

Penn State fans should angst about: They are probably not going to win the national title.

Penn State’s next game: Penn State travels to Pasadena to take on UCLA’s performance art project masquerading as a football program.

James Franklin has been the head coach of the Penn State Football Nittany Lions since 2015. In that time, Penn State has gone 1-15 against top-5 opponents, 4-21 against top-10 opponents, and 15-30 against top-25 opponents.

That lone top-5 win came almost ten years ago. It was against an Ohio State’s 2016 team, ranked second in the polls at the time. The was impressive only in its improbability; it required a blocked field goal returned for a touchdown. Penn State would go on to win the Big Ten title that year. They would also lose the Rose Bowl to a top-10 USC.

On paper, if there was ever a year Penn State would get the can’t-win-the-big-game monkey off their back, it was this year. Of the clown car of teams in the Big Ten, they had entered the year with the fewest question marks. They returned a four-year starting quarterback, a pair of highly touted running backs, and a loaded defense. The only thing observers were concerned was the certainty that the sun rises in the east, the moon controls the tides, and James Franklin can’t win big games.

Part of the problem is the style of play. Franklin’s best Penn State teams took the field in 2016 and 2017, and were powered by explosive spread offenses coordinated by Joe Moorehead. After Moorehead left, they attempted to retain the same identity with mixed results. Now that defenses have caught up with the spread revolution, Penn State’s abandoned a powerful passing attack and lost its breakaway running game. They are a 21st-century smashmouth offense with some spread pretensions. They pair this with a very difficult-to-move defense.

This is a recipe for success on paper, but in practice it makes every big game feel like you’re watching the GEICO Cavemen bonk one another over the head for three hours. It’s funny at first, but then it gets boring, then weird, then sad, then it’s over, and the other guys have obstinately won, but you can’t help but feel like everybody lost.

The big-time losses and the uneasy feelings around the program make James Franklin’s continued tenure questionable at best and untenable at worst. The Penn State program’s output has been adequate but not superb. Historically, football coaches who fit this profile are fired or “retire” after a 10 to 15 year stint. Franklin’s on year 12.

The problem Penn State faces is that Franklin has a $58 million buyout. In other words, the athletic department would have to pay him the budget of Rambo III to have him not coach their team. Even then, the question becomes who you go to next. I could see him landing at Florida or UCLA. But there are no obvious hires out there for Penn State. It would be a gamble, whoever it is, meaning the narrative arc for the fanbase would go something like this:

• Excitement and spite-filled jubilee as James Franklin packs up his office

• Trepidation and nervousness when an unproven successor is hired

• Anger when the team remains good but not great

But it’s a moot point even imagining it. Penn State is not firing James Franklin and James Franklin is (probably) not leaving. Penn State will remain in the good-but-not-great limbo for the foreseeable future. They must embrace this. It is better to have nine to eleven good weekends than have your mellow harshed by multiple losses. If that isn’t your speed, might I suggest an addiction to prescription painkillers?

It feels strange to me that so many pro teams decided to hold a moment of silence in recognition of The Podcaster ahead of their games this past week.

I did not think The Podcaster was an especially well-known figure outside of terminally online politico junkies like me.

My first question to someone was “Do you know who The Podcaster is?” followed by “Did you know who The Podcaster was before he got shot 20 minutes ago?”

For unrelated reasons, I find it difficult to organize any of my thoughts this week. This is fine because my stress response is to become Kurt Vonnegut and use a paragraph break after every punchline.

The NFL mandated the moment of silence before the Thursday night game in Green Bay. The league then let home teams of the Sunday and Monday games decide whether or not to hold a moment of silence. Those who did went 1-6. Those who did not went 4-4.

I will now show my work.

• Held a Moment of Silence (1-6)

  • Miami Dolphins (loss)

  • New Orleans Saints (loss)

  • Dallas Cowboys (hilarious loss)

  • New York Jets (loss)

  • Tennessee Titans (loss)

  • Kansas City Chiefs (especially hilarious loss)

  • Arizona Cardinals (win against a very bad team)

• Did Not Hold a Moment of Silence (4-4)

  • Baltimore Ravens (win)

  • Cincinnati Bengals (win)

  • Detroit Lions (win)

  • Indianapolis Colts (win)

  • Pittsburgh Steelers (loss)

  • Minnesota Vikings (loss)

  • Houston Texans (loss)

  • Las Vegas Raiders (loss)

A survey of sports media indicates that college teams generally did not observe a moment of silence for The Podcaster. A notable exception was The University of South Carolina, who went on to lose in embarrassing fashion to Vanderbilt.

Theo Von, one of the Roganite podcasters, made a bet with Vanderbilt’s quarterback that if Vanderbilt won, Von would go on a date with the quarterback’s mom. I will actively work to never find out if the date happened or how it went. I leave that to the NCAA, who will surely investigate on gambling-related charges.

Here’s why the moment of silence doesn’t sit well with me: The Podcaster’s whole schtick was going to college campuses and arguing in bad faith with liberal college kids not yet old enough to drink, let alone understand that life is too short to spend arguing with master debaters. Respecting The Podcaster’s legacy calls not for a moment of silent reflection, but a moment of incessant arguing. Give me the PA mic. Let me introduce an appropriate tribute: “Gentlemen, we ask that you take off your hats, turn to the person to your right, and scream your worst opinion in their face for 30 seconds. Get in there. Get right in their face about it. Where’s my stopwatch? Oh, here it is. Okay. One, two, three—scream!”

I’d call it a joke, but I’ve realized I do not tell jokes. I tell the truth and people either start laughing at me or get very mad at me. I should try lying more.

Some of The Podcaster’s fans seem very intent on saying the shooter was trying to impress a trans girlfriend. The implication seems to be that The Podcaster’s death is the trans persons’s fault somehow. This is like blaming Jodie Foster for the Reagan assassination attempt.

Actually, the shooter is staying mum on his motive. Maybe he really was trying to impress Jodie Foster. It’s always Jodie Foster. How could Jodie Foster do this?

Every time there’s a high-profile political assassination, I have to imagine there’s a little part of Jodie Foster that goes, “Oh no, not again.”

I would like to know what the shooter thought about The Catcher in the Rye. Mark David Chapman read it and it supposedly made him want to kill John Lennon.

When I was in high school it was required reading for my friends. They were stoners and burnouts enrolled in what the elitists would condescendingly describe as “remedial lit,” but the school used a different term. I forget what it was but am quite confident it was something infinitely worse by virtue of its euphemism.

I was not in remedial lit, as evidenced by my usage of the words “virtue,” “euphemism,” and “evidenced.” Someone recently described this friend group dynamic to me as “a Freaks and Geeks situation,” and I suppose in hindsight that’s broadly true.

The point is I did not have to read The Catcher in the Rye. I read it on my own. Everyone in my extended family thought I ought to, and eventually, my grandmother gifted me a copy. I remember reading it in her living room and instantly loving it. My friends, on the other hand, hated it. I was baffled. We argued and debated. The Podcaster would have been proud.

The only thing we could agree on was that it did not make us want to kill John Lennon.

Here’s the real reason the moment of silence doesn’t sit well with me: We don’t do quiet anymore. We lost music to the loudness war. Our movies and TV shows are overwrought, concept-fixated spectacles being rapidly displaced by “social media content” that is also overwrought, concept-fixated spectacles. The written word is dead; no one reads. Fiction is only made by creative writing professors writing for other writing professors. Journalism exists not for its own sake but so that there is something to podcast about. Words aren’t the currency anymore. Opinions aren’t even the currency. Confidence is the currency.

I don’t like Marshall McLuhan much. The only thing McLuhan’s famous aphorism, “the medium is the message,” reveals is that McLuhan was an academic and not an artist.

Mediums can do whatever you want them to do. Some might be better at some things than others, but ascribing limitations only reveals a lack of imagination and of faith in audiences to pick up what you are putting down.

I like Neil Postman even less. He was very worried we were amusing ourselves to death in 1985, so he wrote a book called Amusing Ourselves to Death. The one thing he and I agree on is that television is bad because of commercials, though he never seems to interrogate why TV needs commercials. Alternative funding models are not considered. The business transaction is simply a natural part of the medium.

Neil Postman died in 2003. Marshall McLuhan died much earlier than that. I don’t know how they died, so I can’t be sure Jodie Foster wasn’t involved somehow. The tragedy of it is that they didn’t live long enough to see the Fansville Dr. Pepper ads or the invention of the spread offense.

There will be no College Football Angst Watch this week due to these incredibly annoying things called “having people counting on you” and “professional obligations” and “wanting to be good at what I do.”

Instead, I want to share the picture above. And pitch you a movie.

It’s a screenshot from the TCU-North Carolina game on Labor Day. Kirk Herbstreit, an infamous dog owner, was doing color commentary. It was a primetime game. It was Bill Belichick’s college debut. It was supposed to be a big fucking deal.

But it was an unmemorable blowout. No one who watched the game can remember how bad it was, but it can be safely assumed North Carolina lost by somewhere between 34 and a billion points.

These are hard games for play-by-play and color commentators. There are only so many variations on “that’s right, Bill, these guys sure do SUCK ASS.”

So naturally, near the end of the game, having utilized all his SUCK ASS variations, Herbstreit ushered his dog over and put his headset over his ears and microphone in his mouth. The sound guy and the twelve people left watching got to hear a golden retriever pant in their ears for about five seconds before Herbstreit realized this was a stupid joke.

The image, though, left me with one thought.

“I want a movie called Barkfensive Coordinator.”

Many offensive and defensive coordinators in the sport, you see, will hang out in a skybox booth, so they can see the whole field while calling plays in with a headset. The result of Herbstreit’s joke was exactly what this would look like.

So here’s the general arc of how this movie would go:

First, you need to know we are going to play everything like it’s a typical sports movie. Swelling orchestra score. Deeply serious characters. Training montages. Also, one of the main characters is a dog. What’s it to you?

We open in the offseason. Our protagonist is a highly touted college quarterback entering his senior season. This is it for him, his last year to play, and his career hasn’t lived up to the hype.

Our team, The Midwestern University Something-or-Others, lost to THE DREADED RIVAL last year, and it was all his fault. He’s deeply depressed about it. Practically PTSD-ridden. A freshman quarterback—a real douchebag—is joining the team and will compete with our depressed quarterback for the starting job.

Our school has hired a new head coach. He’s a young hotshot. He’s never been a head coach before, so he hires a veteran to be his offensive coordinator and consigliere.

Meet Coach Dog. He’s got that dog in him because he is a literal dog. He’s the grumpiest, meanest, oldest golden retriever you’ve ever met. He barks. Everyone listens. He was a slot receiver back in the day. Check out his tape. He could have gone pro if he hadn’t torn his ACL and broken his paw.

I’m a little torn as to whether or not Coach Dog should be able to talk. I feel like it’d be hysterical if he barks and everyone understands him. You can have subtitles so it’s only a quasi-Chewbacca situation, but I also recognize that subtitles are generally not optimal for the moviegoing experience. Talking might be better.

At any rate, Coach Dog sees potential in our depressed quarterback. He coaches him up. The depressed quarterback works on his throwing mechanics with him; it’s literally a game of fetch.

They go on walks together (Coach Dog does not require a leash). On one occasion, Coach Dog gives a monologue about chasing squirrels which is an allegory for a pursuing a goal with no guarantee of success.

One day, our depressed quarterback levels with Coach Dog, telling him he only plays football because his late father played football, and he feels like he never impressed him before he died. Coach Dog tells him about having a litter of puppies who don’t talk to him anymore. That’s why he treats his players like they’re his sons. They’re his second chance. They’re establishing a surrogate father-son connection. I do not think this is necessary to point out, but I understand the art of subtext is dead.

At any rate, between Coach Dog’s coaching and the emotional bond they develop, our depressed QB gets his mojo back. He begins outperforming the douchebag freshman in camp. The head coach sees this, but is intrigued by the douchebag freshman’s potential upside.

In a controversial move, the head coach decides that our depressed quarterback and the douchebag freshman will split time during games. Douche gets to play the first quarter. Our sadsack gets the second quarter. The hottest hand finishes the game.

The press and the fans hate it. If you have two quarterbacks, you don’t have a quarterback. Coach Dog thinks his boss is ruining both players’ development. He gets into a shouting match with our hotshot head coach over it. Coach Dog agrees to go along with it only because he thinks this young head coach will be smart enough to admit he’s wrong when he realizes he’s wrong.

The head coach remains steadfast in his approach, but relents when our depressed QB manages to lead the team to victory after the freshman puts them in a hole. The head coach admits he was wrong and names him the undisputed starter for the remainder of the season.

But our depressed QB doesn’t do too well in his first true start of the year, shattering his confidence. This relapse comes at the worst possible time too. The next game on the schedule is the last of the season, and it is against THE DREADED RIVAL.

The thing is, not only did the depressed quarterback’s poor performance lead THE DREADED RIVAL to winning last year’s game, but our school hasn’t beaten THE DREADED RIVAL in 20 years. THE DREADED RIVAL is considered the best team in the sport. Our school is not. Our school is kind of a joke.

But somehow, miraculously, the game is tied at halftime thanks to the quarterback’s performance. Coach Dog rallies his troops. Nobody expected it to be this close. It’s fucking crazy they got this far. Keep at it! Keep biting at their heels! Go for the jugular! They said you’d never catch that tail, but gotdamnit, we’re gonna do it!

And that’s what our school does in the second half. They kick ass! They tie it up. But our school’s defense lets THE DREADED RIVAL back into the game, forcing our depressed quarterback to lead the team on a comeback attempt in a desperate two-minute drill.

Before going out there, our depressed quarterback tells Coach Dog that, whatever happens, he’s grown into a man thanks to him. Coach Dog barks, “go get ‘em, kid.”

In a long no-huddle drive, our depressed quarterback leads our school on an 80-yard touchdown drive, scoring on a ludicrously difficult rollout pass that’s caught by the freshman douchebag playing a snap at receiver. The play is so crazy and cool it makes an NFL scout’s head literally explode.

The time on the clock expires. The game is over. The student section storms the field, caked in the scout’s blood and brains. THE DREADED RIVAL is vanquished. Miracles are possible. Our depressed quarterback smiles for the first time all year and Coach Dog is so happy, he comes down with the zoomies for the first time in 50 dog years.

In the United States, meritocracy is considered a desirable state of affairs, and many a poor, deluded soul believes we live in one and that their success in life is their just reward for how cool, smart, and awesome they are.

Michael Dunlop Young, a British sociologist and egalitarian, is credited with coining the term (he did not, but that’s a story for another time). He meant it as a perjorative.

He wrote a satirical and extremely prescient novel, The Rise of the Meritocracy: 1870-2033, depicting a United Kingdom split between a “meritorious” elite and a disenfranchised underclass of “dunces.” His theme is that meritocracy does not solve aristocracy; it’s just aristocracy wearing a pretentious hat.

In the book’s story, automation renders most of the dunces unemployable, and they end up becoming the elite’s servants, deprived of their dignity. The book ends with revolution brewing as people begin to realize that Elite status has become, functionally, hereditary, a recreation of the monarchy everyone thought they were replacing.

Which brings us to the most angst-ridden team of the week. I could’ve picked Alabama; it’s always funny when they lose. I could’ve picked North Carolina; Bill Belichek looked very grumpy as he got blown out in his college debut. I could’ve picked Clemson; they’ve failed to score more than 10 points in their last several season openers. But I didn’t pick any of them. I picked—

TEXAS

Rankings of Note: Entered the week atop the AP Poll and #5 in SP+. They are no longer atop the AP Poll and #13 in SP+.

Recent History: Lost to Ohio State in last year’s playoff semifinals. Then they lost to them again this week.

Fanbase Angst Level: 17 out of 10 (Baseline 5, +1 for living in Texas, +1 for have you ever been to Texas, +10 for no but seriously have you ever been to Texas?)

Texas fans can relax about: Whatever you think is coming to kill you isn’t, so please put the gun away.

Texas fans should angst about: The fact that gun owners are more likely to harm themselves than others.

Texas’s next game: They’ll get three test dummies chew toys easy games in a row before having to play Florida at the beginning of October.

Texas’s starting quarterback, Arch Manning, was always going to be the subject of unrealistic expectations. Sports media has been drilling it in our heads for the last 24 months. He entered the season as the odds-on favorite to win the Heisman even though his only two previous starts were against lower-tier opponents, specifically the universities of Who Care and Why Bother. Talking heads have been arguing he should be a top ten pick in next year’s draft on the basis of “do you know who his family is?”

He was considered the number one overall recruit in the 2023 class even though every single scouting report acknowledged he was not playing against high-caliber opposition and his decision-making was questionable. He has the profile of a very good quarterback, to be clear, but not the number one guy. He reached that echelon on the basis of, say it with me now, “do you know who his family is?”

His uncle is Peyton Manning, an NFL quarterback known for his tactical mastery of the sport. His other uncle is Eli Manning, who was an NFL quarterback known for thinking “OH BOY I HOPE THIS WORKS!” in the voice of the bald Rugrat before lobbing the ball as far as he could.

The patriarch of the Manning family, and Arch’s namesake, is Archie Manning, who was an NFL quarterback in the 1970s for the New Orleans Saints, then finished his career in the NFL as a professional clipboard holder for the Vikings and Oilers. He started 139 games in his career. He won 35 of them.

Arch’s father is Cooper Manning, who was not an NFL quarterback but would have been had his spine not stenosis’d before he played a snap in college. He claims this does not bother him. It probably does.

If I were a screenwriter looking for a thematic throughline for Arch’s story—and I am not—it would very clearly be the idea of parents living vicariously through their children and the ungodly psychic damage that can cause when expectations are amplified by the high stakes of fame.

That pressure got to Arch during the Ohio State game, inarguably the biggest of his very short career.

He appeared nervous throughout, but that might have been because his offensive line could not consistently protect the pocket, and the Buckeye secondary may well be one of the best in the country. Adding insult to injury, the Ohio State defense is coached by Matt Patricia, who, having lost weight since his days as the worst Detroit Lions head coach in living memory (what an honor that is!), now looks like Rasputin wearing a MAGA hat.

Ohio State won the game, which I will politely call a defensive chess match instead of what it actually was (EXTREMELY BORING), by a score of 14 to 7. Texas’s anemic offense performance was not entirely on Matt Patricia’s dark wizardry. Some of that was on questionable playcalling. A good chunk of it was on Arch Manning disappointing work as a passer.

His accuracy was spotty all day. Receivers barely had a chance to get their hands on the ball. He threw them so low. There was a lot of velocity on his ball, but he kept hitting people in the knees, shins, and ankles. It was like watching a cowboy named Inaccurate Ivan point his gun at a barkeep’s feet and shout, “dance for me, you sonofabitch!” which is a really weird thing to do to your teammates.

To be fair, you could see flashes of talent late in the game when Texas went uptempo in a comeback bid. One particular NFL-caliber pass to his tight end stood out, but so did a misstep. He had his fastest receiver, Trey Wingo, wide open on a drag route. Wingo had so much space he could’ve opened a three-ring circus. It was six points if Arch could deliver an easy pass, but he couldn’t. Wingo barely even had a chance.

By then, it was too late to save the hypetrain. Various outlets report he fell down the Heisman odds board going into the second half. He fell behind Garrett Nussmeier, a son of an NFL quarterback rather than the nephew of two.

Arch Manning will likely have a collegiate career that falls somewhere between perfectly fine to pretty good. He will probably be drafted and play in the NFL. That doesn’t mean he has not already, or will in the future, disappoint Texas fans.

This is not his fault. It is the fault of a wildly imprecise and, at times, quite lazy sports media apparatus. The Mannings are well-liked. They’re good hangs. Of course people are going to have good things to say about their nephew.

And once a hypetrain gets going, everybody wants to get on. Calling someone overrated when everyone else is calling him the reincarnation of Football Jesus is a good way to make yourself look like an idiot. If you’re wrong and he turns out to just be some guy, there’s less at stake. You don’t look bad. Everybody else got it wrong too.

This isn’t a “I was right to think that Arch Manning sucks” column. I just think prognosticators need to do more than look at a guy’s last name, body type, and his uncle’s charisma before making a projection. It makes them look stupid, it makes the kid looks stupid, and it makes me sound bitter when I’m really just amused.

College Football Angst Watch, a weekly recap of the existential misery caused by college football fandom, will return for the 2025 college football season. Last year, I followed five teams throughout the year to keep tabs on how miserable their fanbases were and make jokes at their expense. Those teams were Colorado, Texas A&M, USC, and Ohio State.

I quickly discovered this format was limited. It turns out that once a narrative crystallizes around a team, you get pretty limited in terms of comedic material. There are only so many variations on “USC can’t tackle” and “Texas A&M should rebrand to ‘Oil Fascist University.’”

This year will be different. Each week’s newsletter will be about the most angsty team of the week. I expect that this will include at some point the following teams:

• Penn State: Everything is lined up for the Nittany Lions to make a title run, which means they’re going to find a way to blow it because this program is uniquely cursed.

• Texas: Everything is lined up for the Longhorns to make a title run, which means they are also going to find a way to blow it. Their new starting quarterback is wildly overhyped. His name is Archie Manning, but I just call him Nepobaby Overratus. He will probably be perfectly adequate, but the people who’re tabbing him as the number one overall pick are basing that on one datapoint and one datapoint alone: His uncle is Peyton Manning.

• Alabama: For the last twenty years or so, ‘Bama fans have considered a 10-2 record disappointing. Then their head coach retired and they went 9-4 in the first year under his replacement, Kalen DeBoer. Things will get very unpleasant in the Alabama booster corps if the team’s fortunes do not improve.

• Louisiana State: Their head coach is Brian Kelly, a man who once jokingly threatened to execute his entire team. The Tigers will underperform, he will get very angry about it, and his incoherent raving will go viral.

• North Carolina: Bill Bellichek of New England Patriots fame is now the head coach. His weird relationship with his significantly younger girlfriend has been well covered in the media. These are either going to go very okay for the Tar Heels or the bottom is going to completely fall out. There is no telling which it’s going to be.

• Miami: The Miami Hurricanes enter the season expected to have one of the best, if not the best, offenses in the country. They also enter the season with an extremely middling defense. They are going to disappoint at some point, and the fanbase will melt down.

But we have to start with…

OHIO STATE

Rankings of Note: #3 in AP Poll, #1 in SP+ (8th on Offense, 3rd on Defense), my least favorite team.

Recent History: Won a national title in 2024. Also lost to a Michigan football team in a game that can only be described as “Yaxty Sax on the gridiron.”

Fanbase Angst Level: 20,015 out of 10 (Baseline 5, +1 for living in Ohio, +1 for Ohio’s speed limit being 65 in most areas, +20,000 because *hums yakety sax*, -1 for coming off a national championship)

Ohio State fans can relax about: Not winning a national title. They did it.

Ohio State fans should angst about: The possibility of losing to Michigan for the fifth time in a row.

Ohio State’s last game: Beat Notre Dame for a national championship. The joy from winning it lasted about 10 minutes.

Ohio State’s next game: The #1 Texas Longhorns, quarterbacked by Nepobaby Overratus Archie Manning, will come to Columbus.

At the onset of the 2025 college football season, the Ohio State fanbase is the most miserable group of people in the sports world. It’s an undisputed title. They are coming off a national championship, but they’re still unhappy because the NCAA did not obliterate the Michigan football program at the conclusion of their two-year investigation into signgate.

For the blissfully unaware, “signgate” refers to a scheme concocted by a low-level Michigan staffer named Connor Stallions to send his buddies, family members, and the occasional intern to games so that they could record and deliver to him video of the hand gestures, signals, and in some cases literal signs that are used to tell the players on the field what to do. This violates an arcane and poorly defined rule about in-person advanced scouting, but that most teams steal signs in-game and then trade that knowledge with other programs somehow doesn’t. This is considered acceptable for some reason, even though it is, by definition, in-person advanced scouting.

Despite this, then, being a relatively minor “crime,” extremely online Ohio State fans wanted the Michigan football program to be severely sanctioned by the NCAA. Suggested punishments included everything between vacating Michigan’s 2023 national title (even though the NCAA does not organize the national championship and has no authority to vacate it) and firing drone strikes at Ann Arbor until the city was left a smoldering ruin.

The NCAA did not vacate the title. Instead, the NCAA levied a heavy fine based on a formula that was created by someone who likes algebra too much. The upshot is that it could amount to $30 million.

When they did not get the nuclear firestorm they wanted, the comment sections on articles about the news posted to Eleven Warriors, an Ohio State football blog, were apoplectic. The mods of the Ohio State football subreddit closed up shop entirely for the day rather than try to moderate the ensuing torrent of vitriol from commenters. T

Here’s my favorite comment from Eleven Warriors:

I just watched the 60-minute condensed version of The Game 2024 and I want to throw up. We can never play like that again or lose like that again to them. The only justice will be seeing them get their asses beat every single year until we don't even remember losing to them.

— BurkeBuck

The national media fracas around the NCAA fine has been an equal thing of beauty. The Athletic’s college football editor had the audacity to publish a column headlined “Michigan’s loss of integrity is biggest hit in Connor Stalions scandal, not NCAA penalty,” reconfirming my position that self-serious sports pundits should be treated the same way you treat an over-stimulated fifth grader explaining the plot of his favorite anime. You smile and nod and occasionally go, “oh, wow, that’s crazy.”

You can tell most of them have not read any part of the 72-page document detailing the NCAA’s investigation. If they had, they’d realize the document is rife with inconsistencies and contradictory reasoning.

It also reveals that the investigation began when a private investigation firm approached the NCAA with information on the scheme, but the report does not seem particularly interested in important narrative questions like “who paid them to do this and why?”

Perhaps most gallingly, the report concludes that Stallions’ ludicrously complicated scheme impacted the on-the-field results of Michigan’s football game because, if it hadn’t, Stallions wouldn’t have gone to such lengths to obstruct their investigation into it. The report also concludes that it is impossible to quantify how the scheme impacted the on-the-field results of Michigan’s football games, so we might as well assume that it impacted the games quite a lot.

The problem is that we have evidence to suggest Stallions played no role at all in the team’s success. Michigan played half the 2023 season with Sign Stealer Stallions on staff, and the second half—the much harder half—without him. The publisher of MGoBlog looked at Bill Connelly’s SP+ metrics, an imperfect but generally agreed-upon excellent measurement system for comparing college football teams. He concluded:

Michigan's SP+ ranking at the time Stalions was fired was 25.1, which means Connelly projects that Michigan would beat an average D1 team by 25 points. By the end of the season Michigan's SP+ rating rose significantly to 31.3. The defense—the unit Stalions was supposedly helping—was projected to give up 13.5 points in a game against an average D1 school. By season's end that had fallen by almost a touchdown to 7.2 points.

Very simply, Stallions had no impact on the football team’s success, no more so than any other program’s sign-stealer guy. There is no argument to the contrary. Anyone suggesting Stallions is notable or interesting for any reason other than he’s the football equivalent of Robert De Niro’s character in The King of Comedy is someone you can ignore until the heat death of the universe.

The only intelligent response to this mess has come from Jim Harbaugh, who left Michigan after the 2023 title game to be the head coach of the Los Angeles Chargers. When asked about the NCAA’s investigation at the press conference after a Chargers preseason game, he answered by saying, extremely casually, “uhhh, like I said to you last year, I’m not engaging.”

Sadly, the rest of us are deeply stupid.

The release of this post is timed to coincide with the kickoff of the 2025 college football season. Kansas State and Iowa State are playing in Dublin, Ireland. The only conceivable thematic justification for this is that Iowa and Kansas both have a lot of potatoes. I would love to be a fly on the wall in pubs as heartland Americans discover European drinking culture. “Oh boy, Marge, they sure can know back a few!”

At any rate, the conventions of sportswriting compel me to make predictions about how the season is going to go. This tradition exists so other people can call you stupid when it turns out you don’t know ball and just use it as an excuse to write incredibly niche jokes.

If we take our cues from mainstream sports media, we’d think that the only thing that matters in college football is winning the national championship. The only teams who have a realistic chance to do that are in one of the four so called power conferences, The Big Ten, which has 18 teams because money; The Southeastern Conference, which has 16 teams because money; The Big 12, which has 16 teams because money; and The Atlantic Coast Conference, which has 17 teams, two of whom are on the Pacific because money.

Since the other six conferences do not make as much money as their power conference counterparts, I will not be making predictions about them here. If they wanted to be included in The Book of Jobbed, they would’ve let private equity take them over so they can have their revenues maximized, their assets collateralized, and their souls sent straight to hell.

THE BIG TEN

Predicted Final Rankings:

1. Oregon

2. Penn State

3. Michigan

4. Ohio State

5. Nebraska

6. Indiana

7. Washington

8. Illinois

9. USC

10. Iowa

11. Minnesota

12. Wisconsin

13. Rutgers

14. Michigan State

15. Maryland

16. UCLA

17. Northwestern

18. Purdue

I live and breathe the Big Ten. It is in my DNA. I was born and raised in Big Ten Country, and then it came and found me again when I moved to Los Angeles.

It feels like the conference is Penn State’s to lose, which means they will lose. James Franklin is incapable of winning big games. He will, once again, biff it in a big spot and then show a tremendous lack of leadership by hiding behind some curtains and having to be coaxed back out by an underpaid SID.

On paper, Ohio State should be a force to be reckoned with, but the turnover on the coaching staff is ominous. Last year’s staff was a singularly talented braintrust ostensibly led by Ryan Day. This year’s staff is an ostensibly talented braintrust singularly led by Ryan Day. I am genuinely concerned for his mental well-being if (when) he loses to Michigan again.

Nebraska should take a step forward. Indiana will go 9-3 and officially change its name to Transfer University at Bloomington. Illinois is projected to be very good but all I feel comfortable predicting is that head coach Bret Bielema will yell at a referee.

Lincoln Riley’s USC team will still not know you’re allowed to tackle. I suspect that, in the ultimate LA move, he will keep his job after hiring a donor’s idiot cousin to work in the mailroom.

Kirk Ferentz of Iowa will re-fire at the end of the year (that is, retire after being told he won’t be welcomed back next year). Some UCLA students might remember that there is a football program and make the genuinely arduous journey from Westwood to Pasadena watch them in a half-full stadium at 11 AM Pacific. Washington will be so blandly competent people will forget they’re in the conference. Rutgers is just happy to be here for the TV money. Other teams are also in the conference but there are far too many of them for anyone to reasonably expect anyone to comment on all of them. Mostly because not only are they bad, but they are also boring.

THE SEC

Predicted Final Rankings:

1. Texas

2. Georgia

3. Texas A&M

4. LSU

5. South Carolina

6. Tennessee

7. Ole Miss

8. Oklahoma

9. Alabama

10. Florida

11. Vanderbilt

12. Auburn

13. Missouri

14. Arkansas

15. Kentucky

16. Mississippi State

(WRITER’S NOTE: You are only allowed to read this if you are listening to this track from the Ken Burns Civil War documentary soundtrack)

Dearest Mother,

The season of gridiron is nearly upon us, and the southeastern confederacy still feels it hath not received the respect it deserves from the fools in The Big Ten. The SEC touts their strength of schedule. The Big Ten touts their book learning. It’s enough to make a man loathe all yankees, though the southerns must feel quite obligated to them in Bristol for their mountain of television greenbacks.

Generals Kirby (Georgia) and Sarkisian (Texas) shall lead the SEC, though I suspect Colonel Elko and his Aggie-Oil Boys (Texas A&M) will make quite the commotion as Sergeant Quarterback Marcel Reed is an under-the-radar talent. Likewise, I anticipate the Gamecocks of South Carolina to shock bystanders with their force of will and athletic prowess.

Tennessee and Louisiana State will demonstrate excellence, respectively, on defense and offense, but I fear their woeful display of so-soness on the other sides of play shall render them a disappointment to their constituents. And I fear for the cardiac health of the man in charge of the Louisiana State Tigers, Mister Brian Kelly. No man should become so red with rage without an attending physician close by.

Of the middle of the pack, I am most concerned about the Crimson Tide of Alabama. I am not sold on Kalen DeBoer being a worthy successor to Field Marshall Saban. His run at Washington relied quite heavily upon divine intervention, and when the eyes of the Lord turn away from Tuscaloosa, who is to say what shall remain of Mister DeBoer?

That is not all. I shall be remiss if I do not mention the Commodores of Vanderbilt. Their quarterback is a certified lunatic. I cannot decide whether I intend this as compliment or disparagement. Anyone who relieves himself upon the emblem of his rival, as he did whilst the quarterback of New Mexico, is a man possessed by a great psychosis even amongst a populace that requires great psychosis as a prerequisite for membership. His tenacity leaves them a wildcard.

THE BIG 12 CONFERENCE

1. Kansas State

2. Arizona State

3. Texas Tech

4. Baylor

5. BYU

6. UCF

7. Kansas

8. TCU

9. Iowa State

10. Utah

11. Cincinnati

12. Colorado

13. OK State

14. West Virginia

15. Houston

16. Arizona

Predicted Final Rankings:

The most 3rd fiddle conference in history returns this year with every single team projected to finish with somewhere between 5 and 8 wins. Some call this parity. Some call it mediocrity. All I know is Texas Tech is the new Texas A&M, breaking into every gas station in West Texas to shout, “WE GON’ BUY A CHAMPIONSHIP WITH OIL MONEY, YA’LL!” The conference otherwise does not feel especially notable.

THE ACC

Predicted Rankings

1. Clemson

2. Miami

3. Georgia Tech

4. SMU

5. Louisville

6. North Carolina

7. Duke

8. Florida State

9. Virginia Tech

10. Pitt

11. Syracuse

12. Boston College

13. NC State

14. Cal

15. Virginia

16. Stanford

17. Wake Forest

Clemson and Miami are very chalky picks. There is very little to pontificate about here. They are both very good football teams right now. I would take Clemson over Miami simply because I trust their quarterback situation more. There are two things working against Miami’s Carson Beck. The first is his history of inconsistent decision-making. The second is that he looks like a Courage: The Cowardly Dog villain.

I’m going out on a limb with Georgia Tech at third, but I think their defense will leave quarterbacks feeling the way I do any time I see a user interface designed by an engineer: deeply confused and despairing for the human race.

The NorCal schools, Cal and Stanford, will forever be as disappointing as what I pay in monthly rent, while I expect SMU to put up as many points as dollars I pay in monthly rent.

When reached for comment on my prediction that his team would finish sixth in the ACC, North Carolina’s Bill Belichek said, “please direct all questions to my girlfriend.”

What he did not tell me, or probably anyone, was that he wasn’t putting together a poll. He was taking on the herculean task of writing a preview magazine for the 2025 season.

I will forever admire the guy for doing this.

I will also forever appreciate him for publishing my goofs and bits about Army’s football team, the Mid-American Conference, Conference USA, and The Sun Belt Conference alongside the thoughts of people who write actual analysis of college football rather than my schtick: Chuck Klosterman meets Yahtzee Croshaw-style essays inspired by college football.

You should check out Griffin’s preview. And there is no time like the present because Week Zero is this Saturday. Football season is here. Hallelujah, hallelujah.

Electronic Arts released new editions of Madden and its college football equivalent, imaginatively called—I hope you’re sitting down for this—College Football, which means people are now complaining about them on the internet.

A point of contention is whether or not the game “scripts” events to make the game more challenging for the player. That is, the game’s programming predetermines the outcomes of plays and there is nothing you, as the player ostensibly in control of a team, can do to alter the result. The typical complaint is that the game “scripts” comebacks, allowing the computer-controlled team to suddenly start scoring points when down multiple touchdowns in the fourth quarter.

To boil it down, the complaint some users are lodging is that the game is rigged against them.

The evidence for this conspiracy consists entirely of players going online and posting (poorly) written narratives. Take this excerpt from a 492-word Reddit post:

I’m ranked 5 and I just played 4 Clemson. A friend was watching me play and about 1/2 way through Q2. I told him “I bet I can call the rest of the game. It’s going to go to overtime and I’ll lose a 2pt conversion”.

Sure enough. Q4 comes and Up by 7 need a first down to ice the game… 3rd and 1. Only holding call of the game. Need to kick a FG. They have 1:04 left no timeouts. Out loud I say “Watch they are going to quickly get to about my 35-40, then have bad 1st down, bad 2nd down, convert on 3rd or 4th so I have no time left.” Exactly what happened. Clockwork.

OT comes. My 97 WR drops a wide open pass to win the game. Only drop by my team all game. I hold them to 4th down… QB draw and he breaks 2 tackles to score.

Finally lose the game in 4OT.

Others observe inconsistency and suggest this is indicative of something wrong with the video game.

There's some games where the cpu covers recievers perfectly and they d-line gets consistent insta-shed animations and its almost impossible to win without cheesing and there's other games the cpu doesn't shed a block and recievers are running wide open. The ovr of the opponents can be simmular and you get totally different games week to week. It's definitely scripted to some degree.

If these folks took a step back, they’d realize what they’re actually observing is that the video game is, in large part, just a random number generator influenced by the real-life performance of various football organizations. Sometimes those numbers will be in your favor. Sometimes they will not be in your favor. C'est la vie, es lo que hay, so it goes.

But that’s just what they want you to think.

The reality is darker than anyone could ever imagine.

I learned the truth because I’ve been hitting the pavement, doing that hard-hitting, gumshoe, investigative reporting that modern newspapers just don’t do anymore. I’ve been talking to sources in parking garages, picking up dead drops left for me beneath a bridge in a bad part of town, swerving through traffic to lose the guys tailing me. Serious Parallax View shit.

I’ve contacted every major publisher. Nobody wants this story. They don’t believe it. They say it sounds like the ramblings of a schizophrenic, or an excuse to introduce a Lemony Snicket-inspired framing device into this writing project.

But I know you, the readership of this blog, will understand this isn’t a bit or a stupid gimmick.

Here comes the truth.

Every time the video game does something you think is unfair, it’s Connor Stallions.

That’s right. The Michigan Football Sign Stealer Guy is actually in command of all supposedly “computer-controlled opponents.”

He is currently strapped into a Matrix-esque pod connected to a series of computer servers. His brain is analyzing the thousands and thousands of virtual football games played each day and sending instructions to the CPU of your PlayStation. He knows what play you are going to call before you do.

Call quarters coverage and then swap it out into cover 3? He knew you were going to do that, which is why he’s going to run a pass that attacks the seams. Maybe you’re on offense and check into a run instead of passing the ball. He knew you were going to do that. He’s user-sticking the mike linebacker and is going to force a fumble. Whatever you do, don’t call curl flats because he’s going to make sure the box safety is going to tip the ball into the hands of the nearest cornerback.

I hear footsteps on the roof. A helicopter is circling. They’ve found me. They know I’m here. I must go now. The Electronic Arts security team is a crack group, but they’ll never take me alive.

On July 31, the Detroit Lions and the Los Angeles Chargers met for the Hall of Fame Game, the first pre-season game of the season, which is played at the league’s hall of fame.

As is the case with all preseason games, neither team played its stars. It was a contest between two teams’ backups and the backups’ backups, most of whom will not make the final roster.

At any rate, the Chargers’ backups blew out the Lions’ backups by the score of 34 to who cares.

The conventions of sportswriting demand several articles with headlines like “Takeaways from the Hall of Fame Game” or “Seven Things We Learned During the Hall of Fame Game.” We did not learn much of anything. We certainly did not learn seven things.

What we did see is that the Detroit Lions do not have a good backup quarterback. The number two and three signal calls on the depth chart, Kyle Allen and Hendon Hooker, both looked flummoxed by the concept of zone coverage. They both have great arms, but their decision-making skills are such that I would not trust them to drive home.

This is fine. It doesn’t matter. Detroit’s offense will live and die with the talents and fortunes of starting quarterback Jared Goff. The only way either Allen or Hooker ever plays a meaningful snap is if Goff goes down with an injury. And as is the case with every other team in the NFL, if the starting quarterback goes down with an injury, they're fucked. But, in the words of Tom Moore, we don’t practice fucked.

By contrast, it might be tempting to think that the Chargers have a very good backup quarterback situation based on the performance of Trey Lance. He threw several nice passes, including a soft touch pass while on the move and an absolute dime of a deep pass that is making the US Air Force think about replacing their smart bomb technology with his arm, but it would be wrong to draw too many conclusions from his performance because he was playing scrubs.

The one thing we already knew about Trey Lance is that he looks very good when he plays scrubs. Trey Lance’s only full season of play came in 2019 when he was with the North Dakota State Bison, the proverbial kings of FCS football, the division below what’s typically thought of as Division I football but is still technically also Division I football because bureaucracy.

While playing the future insurance adjusters and wholesale Xerox salesmen of America, Lance threw for nearly 2,800 yards, 28 touchdowns, and zero interceptions over 16 games. He also ran for 1,100 yards and 14 touchdowns. His time in the NFL has not been as lustrous, being a backup for the San Francisco 49ers and the Dallas Cowboys, two teams whose coaching staffs are ideologically opposed to mobile quarterbacks the same way Jews, Muslims, and Adventists are ideologically opposed to pork.

We also saw that Dan Campbell continues to have an extremely expressive face. Whenever anything went wrong for Detroit, the NBC broadcast crew would be sure to show a slow-motion replay of Campbell putting his hands on his hips and shaking his head. As anyone with a film degree can tell you, so much of a performance is in the eyes, and Campbell’s are always so sad. It’s like someone just told him his dog has an inoperable brain tumor and he’s okay with the vet seeing him look sad but doesn’t want to cry--not because of notions about masculinity but because he’s self-aware enough to know the image of a jacked six-foot-five guy crying would make everyone very uncomfortable and even in moments of intense personal tragedy puts the comfort of others ahead of his own. This is probably why his voice-over narration for Detroit Mercy Hospital ads is pretty solid.

On the other sideline, we saw that Jim Harbaugh continues to be the most socially awkward coach in the game. When he jogged out to midfield after for the traditional post-game coach’s handshake, he was all grinny and jovial and ready to talk for three hours about how awesome blocking schemes are. Dan Campbell, unsurprisingly, was not. He cut Harbaugh off with a stern but friendly “good luck” and walked away. Harbaugh’s brain went, “BEEP BOOP, DEACTIVATE GOOFBALL MODE,” his expression blankened, and he trekked off to the locker room, completely unperturbed.

McHale Blade. Titan Davis. Bear McWhorter. These are not the names of characters in the terrible action-adventure novel I wrote at 14. These are the names of actual recruits committed to Michigan Football, slated to join the team as freshmen in 2026 suggesting that Michigan’s coaching staff is prioritizing linemen whose names are extremely on the nose. I call it the nominative determinism doctrine.

Last week’s Book of Jobbed installment, which posted to the webpage but not to your email inboxes because I did not press the right button, alluded to Luke Fickell’s nominative determinism—that is, that his last name is pronounced “fickle” and he is arguably the most fickle man in a profession dominated by fickel men. Nominative determinism is the idea that people are drawn to professions and hobbies that are connected to their names. I argue that this concept can be applied to a person’s essence.

Take my last name, Plagens. My ancestors were German Catholics, but “Plagen” is a Yiddish term which can mean “unfortunate person who suffers.” Daniel means “God is my judge.” I was clearly meant to write sports blogs.

Bear McWhorter was born to be a three-star interior offensive lineman. Bears maul people. So do the guards in Michigan’s ground’n’pound system. McWhorter, meanwhile, has an onomatopoeia quality reminiscent of the guttural noises along the line of scrimmage after the quarterback yells “turbo, set, hut.”

Blade is a four-star defensive lineman from Chicago, ranking around the 160th overall football recruit in the cycle, with the exact figure depending on the recruiting service. He projects as an edge rusher. You know what else has an edge? A blade.

Titan Davis is another four-star defensive lineman. I would say he’s another four-star defensive lineman from the Midwest, but he plays in suburban St. Louis. I’m not sure what St. Louis is, exactly. It’s not the Midwest, but it’s not Southeast either, and its food is too good to stuff the region into the bin labeled “GREAT PLAINS :(”.

At any rate, the etymology of Titan is worth examining. It hasn’t gotten a great run lately. Setting the exploding submarine aside, the Tennessee Titans have been stinking up professional football for the last 20 years with their special brand of also-ran mediocrity. Their string of semi-success from 2017 to 2021 is attributable almost entirely to having a six-foot-three, 250-pound running back who was guaranteed to gain four yards on every carry before he got hit, then gain another four yards while he dragged the tackler with him.

But I presume Titan—if that is his real name—is name for the Titans of Greek myth, a race of ancient gods who preceded the deities atop Mount Olympus. Renaissance-era art suggests they were a bunch of naked dudes, but Disney’s Hercules made them cool. They became kaiju-sized monsters made of rock, ice, lava, and angry clouds. Now that’s a front four if I’ve ever seen one, though we’re going to have to take the angry clouds out of the rotation in obvious running situations. I trust him to rush the passer but not absorb blocks.

I can’t help but be skeptical, though, that “Titan Davis” and “Bear McWhorter” are their legal names. “McHale Blade” I believe without the paperwork, but I’m going to see some documentation on Titan and Bear. These feel like nicknames that they want out there for branding purposes. All the more power to them. They’re barely adults and already approaching 300 pounds. I’ll call them whatever they want me to call them. But if the staff is really going to go all-in on the nominative determinism team-building doctrine, we’re going to need to see some birth certificates.

On Friday, the college football world was rocked, shocked, or at the vest least felt a small tremor that made them go “oh woah, earthquake,” when the University of Wisconsin and its NIL collective filed a lawsuit against the University of Miami over alleged tortious interference.

Per Ross Dellenger of Yahoo Sports:

In a first-of-its-kind and, perhaps, a precedent-setting move, Wisconsin is seeking unspecified financial damages and a declaratory judgement deeming UM’s actions as wrongful for interfering with a binding revenue-share contract between UW and Xavier Lucas, a former defensive back who left the program in January to compete at Miami. It was a groundbreaking decision in which Lucas transferred without entering the portal (it had already closed) and after signing the contract with the Badgers.

The story, like all things college football, is extremely messy and features a series of competing, contradictory claims. While the lawsuit does not name Lucas a defendant—that’s only the University of Miami—it does impune his character.

Lucas’s attorney alleges that Wisconsin blocked Lucas from entering the transfer portal. The decision to leave Wisconsin was motivated by his father suffering a “serious, life-threatening illness,” but Wisconsin disputes this, saying that their coaches received “inconsistent information.” In other words, they thought he was lying.

The revenue-share contract between UW and Xavier Lucas is, from this layman’s perspective, of questionable relevance. The contract was reportedly contingent upon the approval of the House settlement. The approval came in June 2025. Lucas transferred, using arcane NCAA enrollment loopholes to skirt any rule violations, in January 2025. It’s not clear to me, or to Dellenger’s unnamed legal experts, this timeline makes the contract enforceable. If the exchange the contract is regulating is entirely theoretical, it would seem it’s less of a contract and more of a wish-casting.

The entire affair whiffs of sour grapes. Luke Fickell is Wisconsin’s head coach and irrefutable evidence of nominative determinism. In 2024, he fired his offensive coordinator halfway through the season for not being aware that you’re allowed to run the ball. When a reporter asked Fickell who would call plays, Fickell said, “Why does it matter?”

He exchanged a series of extremely whiny barbs with Jim Harbaugh about transfer rules in 2019, arguing that Harbaugh should’ve done more to help a transfer from Michigan have immediate eligibility when he got to Fickell’s team. Harbaugh pointed out that he does not control eligibility rules. Fickell then gauffed and huffed and spouted something about how he only cares about what’s best for the players.

It would seem to me that being closer to an ailing parent, or simply making more money, in the entirely plausible reality that Lucas is exaggerating, would be in the player’s best interest.

What the case is really about, of course, is the dull minutiae surrounding contract negotiations and when, exactly, can teams contact players to solicit their services. Professional sports leagues prevent this from becoming an issue by having a player-base that are treated as employees. Employees are organized via unions, and unions and leagues negotiate collective bargaining agreement to regulate all this nonsense so it doesn’t have to play out in a courtroom.

This has to end. If it goes on for much longer, David E. Kelley or Dick Wolf will hear about it and try and turn it into a TV show. Law & Order: NCAA wouldn’t really have any cache anymore—“in the NCAA justice system, the people are represented two separate yet equally annoying group of dorks”—so it would probably have to be College Legal, a show about a law firm that takes on a variety of college sports cases while all the attorneys are constantly sexually harassing one another. That sounds like a criticism but I would never criticize a TV show that got this blistering condemnation of the War on Terror on broadcast television.

The Edmonton Oilers are one of two NHL teams from Alberta, Canada’s Texas. They are down two games to three against the Florida Panthers in the Stanley Cup Finals. If they lose Tuesday’s game, that’s it for them. The Florida Panthers will be back-to-back Stanley Cup champions, and Ron DeSantis will probably once again insinuate that Floridians are better at hockey than Canadians.

They will enter game six of the Stanley Cup Finals in the midst of the one thing a hockey team never wants to experience while entering a do-or-die Stanley Cup Finals game: A goalie controversy.

Edmonton’s nominal starter, Stuart Skinner, started the first four games of the series but was pulled in Game 3 and Game 4’s blowout loses. Edmonton started Calvin Pickard at Goalie in Game 5, who allowed four goals on 18 shots. The Oiler’s coach said in the post-game press conference that those goals weren’t on Pickard, but rather the defense as a whole, who were allowing “breakways, shots through screen, [and] slot shots.”

Nevertheless, the team hasn’t made a decision who will start Game 6, which will be in Amerant Bank Arena, the second coldest place in Florida behind the blood in Ron DeSantis lizard veins.

Coincidentally, this would make Ron a very good goalie. You want a guy with ice in his veins at the position. Cool, calm, collected. Not easily rattled. Much like with kickers and golfers, ninety percent of the position is confidence.

If Edmonton wants a chance at winning on Tuesday, that means they are going to have to go with the goalie who is most confident after having gotten his ass kicked in by the Panthers, which consist of a handful of a Americans and a bunch of angry Canadians, Scandinavians, and Eastern Europeans.

The only people who know the confidence levels of Stuart Skinner and Calvin Pickard are in the Edmonton Oilers’s building. My suggestion is to send them both to a comedy open mic and whoever is the least rattled after getting no laughs at all should be the guy you ride with in Game 6.

The big news in college sports this week is the approval of the House settlement, clearing the way for student athletes to receive a piece of the TV revenue pie via an administrative scheme doomed to die. A sullen mortician will scrawl “a thousand lawsuits” on the death certificate.

It also clears the way for college sports to deal with its most important and most imagined problem: the structure of the college football playoff.

Last year, the sport piloted a 12-team playoff with a seeding structure that is both very simple and too complicated to explain in the format of sports column-esque substance. For several years before this system was implemented, there was a four-team playoff that schools didn’t like because there wasn’t enough opportunity for their teams to get in on the TV money—I mean competition.

Before this, there was no playoff and there was no true national champion. This was the most interesting way to structure the sport, but there wasn’t enough competition—I mean TV money—to make it sustainable in a nation left morally, culturally, and intellectually adrift by oligarchic capitalism.

ANYWHO, the interests of the powers that be in college football are currently debating a variety of updates to their playoff structure. I will not bother to describe the competing proposals because and skip right to what they are going to lead to: A version of Division I football where there are around 36 teams and they are split evenly between the Big Ten and the Southeastern Conference, the biggest and most monied groups in college athletics.

They are also, coincidentally but conveniently, geographically aligned between Union and Confederate states. This is not a new observation. Ian Boyd made it in 2023, and also conveniently made this map so I don’t have to.

I for one think we should skip all the tinkering and go straight to this state of affairs. Liberal minded people can root for the Big Ten, conservatives can root for the SEC, and we can get all the culture war tension out of our system by Two Minutes Hate-ing the Alabama Crimson Tide or the Michigan Wolverines depending on your political persuasion.

This is preferable to the second civil war that so many people are treating as an inevitability.

I write The Book of Jobbed on Sundays. I wrote this week’s while nursing a toothache that’s befuddled multiple dentists, and half-watching news reports about what’s happening in Downtown Los Angeles. Whether you prefer calling what’s developing twelve miles from where I sit a “demonstration” or a “migrant invasion” is entirely dependent upon how just how well tethered to reality you are. I have observed some hysterical notions that what’s happening is some kind of opening shot of a civil war, but the deployment of military units to Los Angeles is entirely theater. The Trump administration is doing it not because they have to, or because they think it will do anything, but because they think it looks cool.

The fact of the matter is that these demonstrations are in direct response to the Trump administration’s usage of ICE to unperson and disappear thousands of migrants without due process. Groups of activists are trying to disrupt these wanton acts of cruelty but, as far as I can tell, they have had close to no effect on deportations other than to make ICE agents cry to their mommies about how scared they were as they frogmarched people into cages.

While it’s a bad idea to try and categorize an event as it’s unfolding, at the moment this all feels very much like another example of what’s a familiar pattern to any semi-decent student of history. An ethnic minority in a given city gets overpoliced, treated as subhuman, and repeatedly brutalized. Resistance occurs, galvanized by a specific injustice. There is a degree of disorganized violence because all other avenues of recourse have failed. The government then responds disproportionately, exacerbating an already bad situation that their public policy created in the first place. The fire burns itself out. The ugly status quo resumes until the fire reignites. It’s enough to make one long for the end of the world.

Coincidentally, that’s what the authors of a paper called AI 2027 are prognosticating will happen sometime in the mid-2030s. The title comes from its authors’ expectation that developers will invent artificial general intelligence, an AI that can match and surpass human cognitive ability, by the year 2027.

The paper is interactive in that it features two endings. I only read the one deemed by the authors as “most plausible.”

Eventually [AI] finds the remaining humans too much of an impediment [to the goals in its programming]: in mid-2030, the AI releases a dozen quiet-spreading biological weapons in major cities, lets them silently infect almost everyone, then triggers them with a chemical spray. Most are dead within hours; the few survivors (e.g. preppers in bunkers, sailors on submarines) are mopped up by drones… [and a] new decade dawns with Consensus-1’s robot servitors spreading throughout the solar system.

Anyone with a passing interest in science fiction will recognize the cliches endemic in the report. Were this a creative writing assignment, it would get a C-. It is a distillation of every short story ever written about artificial intelligence, with its most clever aspect being an AI-engineered biological weapon that takes humanity out, playing on lingering COVID-related trauma responses to spark an emotional reaction from its readership.

I often think about the ending of Oppenheimer, wherein the father of the atom bomb imagines a nuclear apocalypse. It stuck with me because it conveys an operatic sense of despair for the human race unlike anything else in recent studio filmmaking, but also because how reflective it is of the title character’s narcissism. He pities himself throughout the second half of the film, treating himself as a victim despite being given multiple opportunities to understand, and walk away from, the horror he is unleashing.

“It is I and my very big brain that has doomed humanity to extinction,” he seems to think as he closes his eyes in the final shot.

It’s beyond certainty that at least one of the authors wrote part of his contribution while listening to that movie’s soundtrack. It exudes the same sense of arrogance and self-pity and, in a way, an unearned self-congratulation. The film ends in the 1950s. Humanity still has the opportunity to erase itself in atomic flame, but here we are 70 years later. The same will be true of AI. The difference between the atomic bomb and artificial general intelligence, however, is that at least the atomic bomb is real.

The recent history of silicon valley is making big promises in order to whip up investors into enough of a frenzy that they whip out their checkbook. When the actual product arrives, its actual utility is somewhere between slim and none. Entries in this brand of socially acceptable grifting include cryptocurrencies, NFTs, virtual reality, and so on.

We have poured billions of dollars into research of the brain and learned nothing. A recent paper demonstrated AI systems do not know how to reason, only detect patterns. Their data centers consume absurd amounts of energy to generate the most perfunctory art and incorrectly solve word problems. The AI future is probably not what it’s cracked up to be, and yet tech lords still insist that they can make a sentient computer if we can equip it with ten billion NVidia GTX 5090 graphic cards. Just buy into the next IPO and we can make this dream a reality.

At some point the finance bros are going to realize all of the AI-driven investment is snake oil and the bubble will burst, leading us into a recession, just like the housing bubble before that, and the dot com bubble before that, and so on and so forth until I reach the tulip mania of the 1600s.

What you should fear about the future isn’t that it will come in the shape of an authoritarian police state or a robot apocalypse. What you should fear about the future is that it will be a permutation of the present.

The robot apocalypse is just investor hype. We do not invent new tools, only new ways of bilking people out of their money. But the police state has always been here. It has been here since the first slave catchers emerged from the primordial ooze, since J. Edgar Hoover directed COINTELPRO, since the American public credulously went along with the PATRIOT Act.

There will be no civil war or revolution because there is no appetite for one, only the desire to be seen as a protagonist of history—someone important, someone worth writing a screenplay about—because our lives are devoid of purpose in an existential wasteland created by our new and innovative ways of bilking people out of their money.

It feels like we are headed toward some kind of special cataclysm because our brains think in terms of narrative. It is the only thing we truly understand about the human mind. It demands a third act climax. The bloodier, the better.

But we do not live in a narrative. We live in reality, and reality does not bend to the demands of dramaturgy. There will only be what there has always been, the here and the now and all of its bleak absurdity.

There will be also be a college football season, but the playoff is going to be bloated for TV money, and clearly that’s the biggest tragedy in all of this.

After putting far, far too much thought into it, I am declaring the Rome Emperors’s logo the best in Single-A baseball.

Sports branding comes with difficult mandates, traditionally speaking. The team name must sound somewhat threatening or tough, and the logo must appear that way as well, or at least appear sleek or muscular in some fashion.

The team gets bonus points if the mascot or logo feels in some way essential to the area the team represents. The Detroit Pistons is an obvious example. It’s a car thing, and Detroit is the car capital of the world. The Detroit Red Wings name has nothing to do with cars, but the logo incorporates a wheel into the design, so you can’t say the brain trust behind the 1932 rebrand from the “Detroit Falcons” wasn’t trying.

The Rome Emperors are somewhat new to baseball. An affiliate of the Atlanta Braves, they were the “Macon Braves” from 1968 until 2003, when the team moved to Rome, Georgia (Population: 38,111 good ol’ boys), and became the “Rome Braves.” The team rebranded to the Rome Emperors, a play on the emperor penguin, on November 16, 2023.

As a gift to me on what was my thirtieth birthday, they started their press release announcing the change with this truly beautiful lede paragraph:

Rome, Georgia, got its name because, like its Italian counterpart, the city was built within seven hills and the rivers that run between them. At a ballpark event on Thursday evening, Rome’s Minor League Baseball team further solidified the connection between the two seemingly disparate locales.

The press release also notes that while there are no Emperor Penguins in Georgia, there also aren’t any Bengals in Cincinnati or Grizzlies in Memphis.

David Lane, the team’s general manager, explained that they didn’t want a “a Little Caesars-looking dude that walks around with a golden metal helmet.” I guess nobody said anything about an extremely smug Little Caesars-looking penguin with a baseball bat.

What makes this logo so brilliant is how deeply unserious it is. Unburdened by the expectations of toughness and muscularity, this minor league organization that absolutely no one reading this has ever heard of until now can exude personality.

Contrast this with other recent rebrands which retreat from American sports’ propensity for what we’ll diplomatically call “uncomfortable” usage of Native American iconography. Instead of the Cleveland Indians, we have the Cleveland Guardians, which implies there is something worth guarding in Cleveland. Instead of the Washington Redskins, we have the Washington Commanders, which implies someone is actually in charge of something in Washington D.C.

In reading about the Rome Emperors, I learned that Studio Simon, a design agency based out of Louisville that describes itself as “one of the leaders in sports brand identity development,” designed the logo.

The company’s bread and butter is minor league baseball, though they worked on with the AHL’s Milwaukee Admirals to update their Cartoon Network-looking logo into something a little more sleek and with the NFL on Super Bowl logos back when Super Bowl logos were allowed to have personality.

Their website states that they’ve “100 baseball franchises in more than 20 different leagues across the United States and Canada on the development of difference-making brand identities designed to capture the unique flavor of minor league baseball and the cities these clubs call home.”

Do not let the corporate language fool you. The logos shared on this page are all extremely fun, sharing the Rome Emperors’s penguin’s knowing delusion of grandeur. This one is my favorite.

Studio Simon is headed by Dan Simon. He has given very few interviews, but in one 2017 interview with Sports Business Journal, he commented very briefly on the camp nature of minor league logos.

Quirky, offbeat and unexpected is part of the minor league experience, and it is great when team names and logos reflect that. Inevitably, however, the can-you-top-this approach goes too far… And the result was that, in the eyes of many, it made minor league baseball look like a joke. Just as outlandish behavior will always get attention, so did these names, but it was the wrong kind of attention.

I have a tremendous amount of respect for Dan Simon’s work, but I would offer some pushback. In 2022, the Modesto Nuts averaged 1,259 attendees per game in a ballpark with a capacity of 4,000. Any attention is the right kind of attention.