Pressure is Easy to Find in the World of College Basketball, but Perseverance Plays Hard to Get

Billy Joel's 1982 hit (?) "Pressure," off his album The Nylon Curtain, is probably the most Billy Joel song ever created, in that a) it's terrible, b) it has an absolutely batshit insane music video, and c) you will never be able to get it out of your head ever once you listen to any more than five or six seconds of it.

Here's what Billy Joel had to say about the writing of "Pressure," a song about, uh... pressure:

...[T]he woman who is my secretary came into the house at that point and said, "Wow, you look like you're under a lot of pressure. I bet you that'd be a good idea for a song." And I went, "Thank you!"

Good call, Billy Joel's secretary. Basic feelings really do translate well into songs, especially inane synthesizer crap. Truly your insight into the human condition is unmatched.

Anyway, as infuriating as this dumb song is, it also is incredibly effective as a piece of media that wiggles its way into your brain and refuses to leave, like a crayon stuck up the nose of a three year old. It's able to generate a lot of anxiety simply by forcing a cat to run up and down a Casio keyboard while Billy Joel yells "YOU CAN NOT HANDLE... PRESSAAA!" I can truly feel the kind of 80s hell that Joel imagines himself being in, and it's paralyzing.

In Billy Joel's case, his source of pressure was writer's block that motivated him to write about having writer's block, always fun to read about, and helped him create a critically and commercially successful album filled with adult contemporary ballads that dads everywhere would mistake for edgy power rock for years to come. It's a feeling everyone can relate to, with varying degrees of success in dealing with it.

Pressure led to perseverance which in turn led to "Pressure." Neat, huh?

35 years after The Nylon Curtain, Michigan men's basketball found their source of pressure when their freaking airplane ran off the runway and nearly crashed into a ditch.

That's right, I never start a tortured analogy that I can't finish (and besides, Michigan is totally the Billy Joel of Big Ten universities). The Wolverines, led by John Beilein, had every reason to completely suck ass in their first Big Ten tournament game against Illinois. Their uniforms were stuck on the plane as part of an investigation into what happened so they had to play in their practice unis, they were obviously forced to arrive later than they wanted to to prep for the game, the game itself was only pushed back approximately 20 minutes, and oh yeah, they almost died a horrible fiery death just a day before.

There were screams and tears. Multiple people had bumps and bruises. Derrick Walton Jr., it's been learned, sustained a cut that would require stitches.

...

The inflatable chutes were deployed, but wind gusts caused them to flail and flop.

Michigan coaches and players helped others off the plane. There were 109 passengers aboard the flight, including family members of the staff, the team band and cheerleaders.

...

Everyone ran away from the plane. The engine, darkened and burned, was still churning with noise.

"Thought it was gonna blow," Sanderson said.

As someone who hates flying with a passion only rivaled by my hatred of virtually every other form of public transit, I think Michigan could've been forgiven if they'd gone out and laid an egg against Illinois.

Instead, they went ahead and beat the Illini by 20 while looking like a bunch of goofballs. And if you watched the game you'd have seen that it wasn't even that close; the Wolverines led wire-to-wire and Illinois had no response to anything that Michigan was doing. It was a pretty impressive performance made even better because of the perseverance shown by a team in a must-win situation that had just survived a freaking plane crash.

Me, watching Ohio State basketball.

The problem is that while I applaud what Michigan was able to pull off yesterday, it also only serves to throw into sharp contrast how poorly Ohio State played against Rutgers, a bad team even by their standards. The Buckeyes had every reason to play their butts off; a run in the Big Ten tournament might've given them an outside chance at March Madness, and their seeding set them up very favorably for something potentially special.

Instead, we got... whatever this was. Thad Matta's crew got skunked in the second half by the worst team in the conference, and looked incredibly lethargic in the process. This .gif of Marc Loving half-assing a rebound in the closing seconds of the game pretty much perfectly encapsulates the entire season to this point. Loving draws a lot of ire from a lot of people, some of it justified, some of it not, but it's telling that that was his last play in an Ohio State game with any meaning. I'm not inclined to spill a lot of ink over the guy, but it's probably not a coincidence that the Buckeyes lost half of the top 10 scoring games of his career.

On a more macro level, the men's basketball team has been pretty bad all season in dealing with adversity or coming through in must-win games; after the requisite crappy early season schedule, the Buckeyes never won more than two games in a row for the rest of the regular season. They went 1-6 against ranked teams, had the Big Ten's easiest schedule outside of Rutgers, and really, losing to Rutgers in the Big Ten tournament is all that I really need to say so I'll just leave it at that.

So that's all pretty annoying, but maybe not as much as Matta's reaction to speculation about his future after the game, as told by our own Tim Shoemaker:

“Gene and I met a couple weeks ago and he asked me if I wanted to make a statement and I said no, we don’t have to do that. Today, he asked ‘Do we need to do this? People aren’t going to let this thing go.’ I said, ‘If you want to do it, you can do it.’ It blows my mind that sports is at this level. It’s amazing how something like that can become a focal point. But it is what it is and you just keep rolling with it.”

I love Thad Matta as a human being, but given that his team will miss the NCAA tournament for the second consecutive season after years of diminishing returns on the court, maybe acknowledge that the pressure that fans are placing you under is understandable and legitimate? Especially since, at this point, there are no wins that will help fans reverse course on how they feel about this season. An NIT bid might actually make things worse, because if they get bounced in the first or second round of the tournament, and they might, Matta might have even more questions to answer.

The first step in dealing with pressure isn't pretending that it doesn't exist, it's tackling it head on and dealing with it the best you can. As much as it makes the bile rise in my throat to whole-heartedly compliment a Michigan sports anything on their accomplishments, John Beilein's squad found something within them that the Buckeyes haven't been able to for the past five months or so.

That more than anything is what's causing pressure of Billy Joel proportions to land heavily on the shoulders of Thad Matta, and next season retaining his job through sheer will and determination will be the goal. It's going to take a lot of perseverance on his part and on the part of the team.