Here are the four thoughts I had to share with you this week:
1. Why do we cater to the lazy, regarding Michigan and the intent to deceive?
Michigan’s “intent to deceive” penalty is the dumbest thing anyone has ever seen.
Basically, Michigan broke the huddle in its game against Rutgers, and tight end Jake Butt went screaming to the sidelines as though he was going out … so he lined up without going out, and Jake Rudock threw to the open Butt for a big gain. It was called back on an “intent to deceive” penalty, which I’d never heard of. That doesn’t make it stupid, though.
Every play in football is an “attempt to deceive.” That’s football. It’s like NBC getting hate mail for putting Carrie Underwood in a short dress for Sunday Night Football on the pretense that it’s “attempting to be sexy.” Much like the ineligible receiver rule changed in the NFL this past offseason, why do we always move the meter to cater to the under-studied and lazy rather than say, “You know what: Cover wide-open guys and/or learn the rule book.”
2. Can we use our time, talents, and treasures for more productive things, Rutgers?
In case you haven’t noticed (and the Big Ten didn’t shoehorn its way into all those East Coast homes with their network in hopes that you wouldn’t notice), Rutgers is pretty bad at football. So, predictably, the fan base has charged up a GoFundMe account to have donations to have coach Kyle Flood fired, because nothing helps an athletic director understand a human resources decision like fans donating to a mostly useless cause for clicks.
Internet muscle has now merged with disposable income, because for any injustice or action fans latch onto, GoFundMe has a movement pop up almost immediately. Rutgers has said it won’t accept any donations, and those donations could have probably been made either to the school, a charity, or something else rather than to lobby to make someone unemployed. RU probably has a pretty solid idea as to what it’s doing with all of that anyway.
3. In a season of absurd finishes, don’t forget to get you some Montana.
I don’t know that I can remember such a season with crazy finishes, but Montana wasn’t going to sit idly around letting everyone else have fun without getting its pound of flesh. Watch all of this nonsense, which had a little Michigan-Michigan State special teams insanity, some Miami-Duke “knee probably being down” action, and some Hail Bielema “throw the ball in the air and … holy hell we got it” to it.
WATCH: #GrizFootball game winning play vs ISU in OT. Gotta see it to believe it! #GoGriz#BigSkyFB#SCTopTenpic.twitter.com/QaJIMPY0JX
— UMGRIZZLIES (@UMGRIZZLIES) November 8, 2015
Solely as a television viewer, this has been one of the more exciting seasons in recent memory. Quietly, though, after stunning North Dakota State in the first televised college football game of the season, the Griz have not seen enough positive Stitt happening on Saturdays and are 5-4.
At least they know how to entertain — they’ve fit in with the rest of this always-interesting ride.
4. Gary Pinkel and the ABCs
I’m definitely not dipping into what’s going on at Missouri other than from a football aspect, but I’ll be interested in a time when a program’s student athletes support some sort of movement that is divisive enough that the coach might not be able to agree with it.
Pinkel’s response, while perhaps altruistic in his own heart, was the only response because of the ABCs — Always Be ‘Crootin. Coaches have to ‘croot in their sleep, while they eat, while they’re out for a nice dinner dressed to the nines with their wives, wherever. Taking up a student cause only helps, but what happens when the student cause (and it will happen, now that we’ve seen it “work” because we live in a copycat world) doesn’t intersect with an easy solution to support it? More specifically, what happens if that inconvenient cause goes against the personal beliefs of a coach?
One Bonus Thing
I’m not entirely sure how many of the readership watches “Project Runway,” which is a show where mostly underground and often self-taught designers make clothes for a host of judges, the most famous example being Heidi Klum, whose fame I will forever attribute more to marrying Seal than being a supermodel.
Anyway, the show tends to not go for the low-hanging reality television fruit, focusing on the content rather than the personalities of the people on it and instigating conflict. The show lets conflict emerge organically.
The finale of this season saw a woman design a plus-size model line which was equal parts unflattering and significantly less skilled than the other designers. It was stuff that wouldn’t make the shelves at Kohl’s next to the other designers. The woman won, which was a hideous nod to political correctness, something so poorly done that even people who watch this show (saying 95 percent of the audience is extremely liberal is probably selling it short, which makes me a giant outlier) were decrying what a crappy, hyper-PC finale it was.
Look, if you’re not going to judge people on merit and do it based on heartstrings, this is going to be no better than those cheap reality dating shows. I’m not fully ready to sign off yet, but if Miami-Duke was a reality show about designing clothes for New York Fashion Week (in that totally likely scenario), it was this trash. It should be rescinded, and Kelly ought to be given the win. I’ll stop now. Total and utter rubbish, I say.
