Let us gather around the virtual table, friends.
On Saturday night, there wasn't a ton to look forward to as a college football fan. Seemingly every game of significance had either been canceled or "postponed," which is a 2020 word for canceled, and that left the collective universe with the option of watching either a hapless Michigan team attempt to play football against a Wisconsin squad that hadn't played a game in like three weeks or... well, something else. Men In Black II was probably on, somewhere.
Those that chose to watch the Wolverines get ground into a fine powder by the Badgers spent the three and a half hours of the game gleefully tweeting about what frequent readers of the Threat Level already know: that Michigan football is stuck in a dank abyss of their own making, that they kind of like it there, and that they might not ever crawl out.
THREAT LEVEL
There have been approximately one billion postmortems written in the few days since Wisconsin dropped the Wolverines like a wet clump of tube socks down a garbage disposal. Posterity will benefit from the archival records of Michigan fans absolutely losing their shit, or a buzzed Kirk Herbstreit whispering a cuss word when talking about how bad football in Ann Arbor is right now.
And I guess, in a sense, you can throw this missive onto the pile. It's true: Michigan football is like the Little Giants except instead of Rick Moranis they're coached by a big dumb donkey who can't wear his freaking mask correctly.
But truthfully, I'm a little flabbergasted. I don't know what else to say about a team that is this freaking bad. On the first offensive play, Joe Milton threw an interception. The next time he attempted a pass, he also threw an interception. Then things got somehow worse for the Wolverines, who had all of one offensive yard in the first quarter and then strung together a 13 play drive that ended with a failed fourth down dive at the goal line for no points. Overall Michigan managed 219 yards of total offense, 150ish of which came from two drives.
The other thing is that Wisconsin quarterback Graham Mertz wasn't even that good on Saturday, but it didn't matter because the Badgers still racked up 341 yards rushing. By halftime the score was 28-0 and I was having a hard time making jokes that I hadn't already seen on the internet, and by the end of the game it was 49-11 (or so I've been told, I fell asleep during the 4th quarter).
Ultimately, that's what Michigan is right now as a football team. Their chief utility is to be a schadenfreude factory for the rest of us, which I'm a little conflicted about. Threat Level was originally intended to represent the inertia that comes with The Game; to calculate the ups and downs that's associated with keeping a wary eye on a storied rival while building momentum to the most hallowed event on the Ohio State football calendar. Instead, it's a catalogue of failure. Which is fine!
But, well...
That's a good question! Short term, I write this goofy thing. Long term, maybe I start making jokes about badgers or Medill? Who knows, but either way the Threat Level isn't just LOW, it's basically at China Syndrome status.
