Threat Level: Michigan, Men Can Float

In that time, I have rewatched The Game in its entirety, listened to roughly an hour of the home Wolverine radio broadcast, listened to two podcasts (one 11W, one from enemy lines) about the outcome, watched a great highlight video with the Ohio State radio call, and am writing this with a one hour mini-broadcast of the game playing in the background.

I've done other stuff, like eat and be a dad and a husband and go to the movies. In every other waking moment since the end of the Michigan game I've been attempting to permanently sear every beat, every rhythm, of this win into my brain.

And if your reaction to that is "wow, that sounds like an undiagnosed mental health issue" my response would be: it is diagnosed, and also, shut up! I'm back to write about a badass win and I refuse to apologize!

For the first time in way too damn long, Ohio State beat Michigan! Let's Threat Level about it!

Down Bad In Ann Arbor

Believe it or not, I actually have been keeping an eye on things Up North. You can take the dude out of Threat Level but you can't take Threat Level out of the dude, and I've habitually watched pretty much every Michigan game this season with a special focus on a certain quarterback named Bryce Underwood.

Underwood has enormous potential and an enormous price tag, and in a freshman year in which he was pretty much Michigan's only option, he was fine. He was fine! Often he was worse, and rarely he was better, and that's how it played out on Saturday, too. Hell, that's the whole team: kinda good, sometimes. But also weirdly ass? About halfway through the 3rd quarter, Underwood rifled a pass to receiver Donaven McCulley for 26 yards, a throw that was impeccably timed and required elite arm strength to even attempt. You can imagine a version of Michigan that combines smashmouth football with a guy who can make throws like that and think "damn, okay."

And then rewatching it after the fact, you notice that a) the pass was into triple coverage, b) was followed by a pass for zero yards, a rush for zero yards, and an incompletion, c) was part of a drive capped by an 11-yard punt, and d) less than a minute later Julian Sayin hit a 50-yard bomb to Carnell Tate to put the game on ice. Yeah, Michigan is dealing with some key injuries, especially in the run game. But so much of what they do relies on slamming their heads against a wall and looking for a crack.

Bryce Underwood could, with decent coaching, evolve into a really great quarterback. Michigan could, with decent coaching, maintain a position as one of the top five or six best teams in the United States. I can't see it happening with Sherrone Moore and company, who seem hellbent on crafting a bespoke college football program made from fifty thousand variations of a single bash run play.

The Game will always be weird and have unpredictable outcomes because it exists in a dimension of paint fumes and coked-up opossums with knives taped to their paws. I've learned to accept that.

But I've seen the future of the Michigan Wolverines and it has a ceiling of losing in the first round of the CFP on the road at Tulane.

Immovable Objects

I was not happy with the Matt Patricia hire when it was announced. A guy who was run out on a rail in Detroit and then failed to accomplish anything in Philly was not, in my estimation, going to do a whole hell of a lot in Columbus.

Wrong! Extremely wrong! This defense is somehow even better than last year's, and a big part of why the normally incredibly pessimistic yours truly was confident in a win last Saturday. Every unit on the defense enhances what the others are doing. Every stunt or blitz is supported by what the other guys are doing, and it allows Patricia to take smart, calculated risks when he has to (although he very much did not have to against Michigan).

This of course is helped by having like five NFL dudes as starters, and while my personal preference of football narratives typically leans more towards "scrappy no-names just trying to get by in this crazy world," I guess I'll take the current crew of T-800's instead.

There are very few comparisons to be had here. It's the first time since 1975 a team has given up 16 or fewer points during the first 12 games of the season (the Florida team that did it went 9-3), but it goes deeper than that; the Buckeyes are giving up just 203 yards of offense a game, while the next closest defense is giving up over 40 yards more than that.

In the last 30 years, the only teams that I could find that come close to matching that kind of distance from the rest of college football were the likes of the 2001 Miami Hurricanes, the 2011 Alabama Crimson Tide, and the 1998 Florida State Seminoles.

College football might not see a better defense than this for a decade or more. Also it was extremely funny watching Caleb Downs get annoyed at Iggy for taking his helmet off after his interception.

Men Can Float

The first thought that I had at the end of the Michigan game was "Jesus, nervous sweat really does smell a lot worse than regular sweat."

My second thought was "The only person I'm happier for right now more than Ryan Day is Jayden Fielding."

Fielding got way too much shit after the Michigan game last year. In this case, "way too much" is synonymous with "any" because there's a long list of reasons why Ohio State lost and he's not anywhere near the top. Actually, let's say he is at the top, if you want to be literal. If he hits two field goals, Ohio State wins. Fine. Doesn't matter. Nothing excuses insane bettors threatening him because they bet their weekly scratch-off allotment on college sports.

Or doxxing Ryan Day and his family, or yelling at his kids, or any of the other bullshit that morons with a parasocial fixation on Ohio State football did to satisfy their inferiority complexes. Those people don't get to celebrate this year. Sorry. Try to be a better person in the next 365 days.

Fielding hit two field goals on Saturday. They didn't end up impacting the outcome of the game, but they matter because it closed a circle on a story that started a year ago, saw him seal a national championship, and find redemption in Ann Arbor. He deserved to have that chance, not just because of the crap he went through, but because of the work that he had already put in before all the crap he went through. Fielding earned it in a way that no troll on the internet could ever encourage or validate.

Ryan Day was composed after The Game, but I know those are the kinds of things he thinks about and internalizes. He's a thoughtful dude, and it only takes a cursory look at the state of college football to understand that Ohio State is insanely, unbelievably lucky to have a person of his caliber leading the Buckeyes.

You want championships? You want more Jeremiah Smiths and Julian Sayins? You want to continue to be one of the best 2-3 football programs in the country? Then you need him on that sideline.

You want to keep beating Michigan? That's weirder and more mercurial, but for his part, Ryan Day has learned some tough lessons as a coach. And he's there. You can see it.

For us as fans, our only real role is celebrating the players and coaches putting themselves on the line to drag this whole goofy state to the promised land with them, and being there to lift them up when they fail.

That's it. Because in lifting them up, you can watch them go even higher.

The Threat Level is LOW. For another year, anyway.