Pretzel Logic

It’s been a fun week in Gopher fandom. Every day the Michigan message boards creep towards clarity. Michigan State’s athletics department capped off an impressive run of incompetence that started in 2018 by putting an Austrian on their jumbotron. Rutgers is bowl eligible. Oh, and Minnesota beat Iowa.

PJ Fleck and the Breaking of a Fan Base

I really hate Wisconsin. Like, an every-fiber-of-my being, diagnosable personality disorder level of hate. I get triggered when I see a Wisconsin license plate. I refuse to be anything more than minimally-friendly acquaintances with anyone who has ever supported that team. I won’t even accept a LinkedIn invite from a UWi grad, because fuck you. It’s pathological, really unhealthy, and mostly survived intact from what was otherwise a wholesale teardown of my thought patterns and coping mechanisms.

I’m mature enough to admit they broke me. Absolutely and totally. I simply couldn’t tolerate losing to our most-hated rival for over a decade, watching them win* the B1G, go to Rose Bowls, and get talked about as playoff contenders. Replace the running backs, quarterbacks, defensive coordinators, head coaches, walk-on linebackers from Minnesota, and our damned stadium and the results were still the same. We lose and I sink further into psychosis.

Overcoming the Seethe: A Helpful Guide for Iwoa Fans

 

Hello All,

 

I’m Douglas Fir.  Like many of you I watched the University of Minnesota defeat the University of Iowa in a football game on Saturday by the score of 12-10.  It was an exciting, extremely B1G West game that came down to the second-to-last possession. Before that fateful possession (in which the Iowa offense, needing just 20 yads to win the game went sack/throw to nobody/throw to somebody in a pretty gold helmet), there was a punt.  And on that punt, there was an infraction.

 

Despite the B1G and NCAA taking time out of their busy day (looking at you, Michigan) to patiently explain to the people that the call on said infraction was correct, there seem to be a lot of objections.  I am no great football mind, but I do have the ability to listen and learn, and in my real life, I am essentially a paid researcher and explainer. So, I am taking time out of my busy day (playing Civ VI while listening to Spoon) to put together a Frequently Asked Questions style explainer. Except you aren’t “just asking questions” (unless it’s about a certain ref, see below), you are shouting objections. So, please enjoy my Frequently Shouted Objections (FSOs), with explanations. Or don’t. I don’t care, my team won Floyd.

 

FSOs

 

1)      Cooper DeJean (CDJ) didn’t signal fair catch!!!

a.      Correct, that’s why it wasn’t called a fair catch.

2)      So what was called then?!

a.      Invalid Signal.  It’s a rule put in place to protect the ball carrier and to not allow punt returners to bait the kicking team into giving up on the play.  There’s a whole rulebook entry and everything, you can look it up or you can look up the Des Moines Register article I took this info from. I googled “Des Moines Punt”.

       Basically you can’t wave your arm, even below your shoulder.

3)      That’s not even a penalty!

a.      Correct again! That’s why Iowa wasn’t assessed penalty yardage. But, it does kill the play.

4)      But he was just waving his arm for balance!!!

a.      CDJ is one of the most athletically gifted players to ever set foot on the turf at Kinnick. I’ve watched that young man play for several years, he is a marvel. He does not run like a toddler trying to escape from a grasshopper that landed near him.

5)      If it IS a penalty, why weren’t the Gophers called for a late hit!?

a.      As an often-frustrated viewer of Gopher Football, I wish to god our special teams was capable of hitting him. But they weren’t. That’s how he scored the touchdown, you see.

6)      So why didn't the Gophers stop? They tried to tackle CDJ!!

a.      As mentioned above, they failed. And, as all of us who played 2 minutes of any sport know, you play through the whistle. The Gophers tried to tackle CDJ because the refs didn’t tell them to stop. Iowa did the same thing, a mark of a well-coached team.

7)      Well, if it is an infraction, its arbitrary!!

a.      It’s actually not! It’s a call designed to take the arbitrary away, and it did! We would be arguing for (more) years if the immediate “you wave your arm, its dead” call didn’t exist. The review would have taken hours, as referees called in mathematicians from Pittsburgh to determine the angle of CDJ’s shoulder. We would have had sports psychiatrists examining the complex emotions of 18-22 year olds, trying to determine if any of the 11 Gophers gave up on the play. What even is “giving up”?

8)      So why is it never called?

a.      It is, you just forgot cause we all watch a lot of football. It was called in 2015 against Wisconsin, you were probably watching and laughing. I bet you even tried to explain to your bored partner why they called it. It was called against the Gophers THIS YEAR against EMU. If you think CDJ’s hand wave is minor, wait till you see that one! And our guy might even be able to make the toddler-running argument (he is very small)!

9)      Well, it violates the “Spirit of the Rule”!!

a.      OK, first of all, that sounds like a boat a dictator would own. Like if someone told you that Peron ordered the Dirty War from a superyacht called “the Spirit of Rule”, you wouldn’t even question it. Hell, I’d believe it if you told me that Chris Doyle owned a Sea-Doo named that. Basically, I don’t know what that’s supposed to mean, the rule is the rule, and that’s also its spirit.

10)  They can’t even review that!

a.      They can (and should) if the guy almost runs out of bounds. (see point 18)

11)  It’s not even what the review was for!

a.      Doesn’t matter. Has never mattered. If you think that sucks, welcome to the party, the guest list is every sports fan.

12)  OK, let’s say CDJ does the same thing, but he fumbles and the Gophers recover, I bet it’s not reviewed then!

a.      I think it is? Would be a turnover play and I’m pretty sure those are always reviewed.  Also, historical fiction is best left to Robert Harris.

13)  OK, let’s say that CDJ is tackled on the 2, I bet it’s not reviewed then!!

a.      If he almost ran out of bounds in this fake play you made up, it would be. Seriously, Fatherland is a pretty interesting read. And he has more!

14)  Well I’ll wait until I hear from the league office!

a.      See I actually thought this was in play, like I said I am no great football mind and I’ve been wrong before. Boy, was I wrong about being wrong (and I am a big enough man to own that accidental correctness). Actually, they issued a…non apology? Reassertment? A Doubling-down? I’m not sure what you’d call it but they came out today (Monday) and said “not only did we get it right, here’s why” (see Point 2).

15)  But they told Kirk Ferentz it was a fair catch on the field!!

a.      I think a couple things are possible here. One is he misheard. Another, he chose to mishear (I cannot tell you how many people I’ve interacted with that still think point 1 is true). Third, it’s better to accuse the ref of lying (no penalty for him at all) than to accept that it was a mistake, a dead play, and his son’s offense moved the ball 12 YARDS (36 feet, 10.973 meters) in the second half of a rivalry game.

16)  I watched the clip, and it doesn’t even seem like PJ Fleck thought it was a penalty!!!

a.      Oh, if PJ Fleck thought it was a penalty you’d be good with it? Yeah? That’s how we decide penalties in Iowa City now, a man in capris you call “Phillip” gets to decide?

17)  The ref blew a call in a MAC/Big 12 game seven years ago, and we are supposed to trust this guy?!

a.      You got fired from a job in your 20s, how can I trust you?

18)  The ref blew a call in the Iowa-Minnesota game last year and we are supposed to trust this guy!?!? And he is from NEBRASKA!?! A little FISHY?!?! JUST ASKING QUESTIONS HERE!!!!!

a.      This is actually one of my favorites, because I am lazy and you already answered this one yourself! He DID mess up a call in the biggest play in the IA-MN game last year. For those that don’t remember, Iowa LB Jack Campbell picked off a tipped pass, raced to his right, hugged the sideline, cut back across to his left and scored what appeared to be the game-winning touchdown (I remember because I will never forget). Except he didn’t, because the ref said he stepped out AND BLEW THE PLAY DEAD! That’s a really big mistake, and one that made the result of the rest of the play non-reviewable! You (Iowa fans) were really upset that he blew the play dead from the moment that play happened until Saturday at like 6:30 pm when you suddenly became big “blow the play dead or it’s cheating” advocates. This time he didn’t blow the play dead, the review got the call right (See point 14). Also, lots of people are FROM Nebraska. Nebraska isn’t a place you end up in, it’s a place you leave.

19)  They told Kirk in a meeting before a game that CDJ could do that!

a.      They told him he could do what, exactly? They told him he could ran naturally like a toddler? They told him he could make an invalid fair catch signal? Or they spoke briefly about how he likes to signal fair catch and they moved on. Latter seems likely.

20)  They stole this moment from the fans!

a.      Nobody stole anything from anyone. You paid your money for 60 minutes of football, they played them. If it makes you feel better, the play never even happened. It was always dead, they just didn’t realize it yet.   

21)  They stole this moment from CDJ!!!

a.      I feel bad for CDJ, I do. I have a ton of respect for him, and I wish NBC would have shown us anything other than his sad face for 20 minutes. But he did the thing. He rolled through the stop sign, and even though he’s done it before he got caught this time. And it happened at the worst time. He wasn’t going to Kum and Go (Iowa reference), he was going to his wedding. And maybe the cop right there missed it and his boss behind him caught it so it feels even more unfair. And it made him late, and it was embarrassing, and you feel for the guy because maybe he didn’t even do it on purpose. But he did the thing, he broke the rule. It’s on tape and everything (IDK some sort of stop sign camera, stick with the analogy).

22)  Well, I still don’t feel like this was fair!

a.      Hey, been there boss. It gets better. Go beat Nebraska in a few weeks, that will get you through the long summer. Always works for me. Also, now you can tell yourself that it wasn’t fair, which is a super easy and fun way to cope.

 

Hope this helped.

 

-Doug

 

NIL and the Minnesota Psyche

Darius Taylor is pretty good, yeah? Hoo wee, watching him mash the [REDACTED] player at the line of scrimmage, then taking it outside to break that long tuddy in [REDACTED] was about as close as it gets to meeting god in this plane of existence. I love Mo like he is my only son, but he was never able to break those big touchdown runs. Destroy your soul at the point of contact and charge 20 yards downfield on 3^rd and 14, absolutely; but he just never had the speed to outrun the defensive backfield. Darius, as a true freshman, looks like the sort of dude who will not only steal your lunch money, he’ll also swing over and burn down your house after school. Absolute effing killer. The best parts of MBIII and Maroney.

Naturally, the proud representatives of the Gopher innernetz are ecstatic, crowing about how we’ve got a future Heisman contender, lording our successful recruitment of him over other suitors such as Michigan and Wisconsin, and generally throwing deuces to the rest of the college football world in recognition we might have the best running back in the nation in maroon and gold. A little over the top? Maybe. But we’re savvy enough to know when we’ve got something special and are not afraid to let other people know in the most condescending possible ways.

Same Old Gophers

 Same old Gophers, right?

I don’t know how long I’ve been on the Gopher boards – probably 15 years or so – but this week has been one of the most depressing. It may be the most depressing, recognizing there’s a lot of recency bias at play. Fleck has peaked, our OC/QB coach is an unmitigated disaster, our QB can’t pass gas, our superstar true-freshman running back is alternatively/both having the treads worn off of his tires and likely to leave for USC for one billion dollars in the offseason, and we’re never going to be able to compete in the new CFB world so we may as well accept our fate and start cheering for our MIAC schools of choice.

Such are message board narratives in the world of Gopher sports. What strikes me is how comfortably everyone slides back into old thought patters of “ah, shit, here we go again.” That we’re in the midst of the best Gopher football run in the last 60 years is immediately cast aside when we experience an event that reminds us of our collective trauma on October 10^th, 2003. The despair sets in, shields go up, we burn any optimism with hellfire, and begin the rites of eating our young.

Not very bright guys and things got out of hand

Yo. Been awhile. Let’s get weird.

So, you’re all certainly aware of the Jason Stahl AJ Perez piece(s) in Front Office Sports on the culture of Minnesota’s football program under Fleck. Just to get this out of the way: I don’t want bad shit happening in the program. Bad shit should be investigated. I don’t know what the threshold for investigation should be; but I’ve seen nothing in Stahl’s Perez’s reporting to suggest there’s a need for a broader, third-party investigation. If more details come to light, then I reserve the right to change my mind.

The whole thing is just extremely odd to me. Of all the programs to go after, why Minnesota? Fleck is an oddball, sure, but that’s not new. He was an oddball at Western Michigan and his unconventional approach was covered widely both nationally and locally when he was hired here. And while we’ve been on something of an upswing for the last five years, it’s not as if we’ve burst onto the national scene and are vying for national championships. We’re a slightly-above-average Power-5 program looking for a special season every few years. Much better than where we were 15 years ago, but not exactly the status that brings investigative journalists based in northern Virginia sniffing around to figure out how we achieved so much so fast.

The other odd element here is that a few Nebraska fans were, apparently, aware of this story before it was published. Now, yeah, it’s possible some Nubbers are super well connected to Perez and he was leaking some of the details; but we’re not talking about those sorts of Husker fans. The ones that knew are the type that live in the dank, sweaty, scrotal folds of the internet and have no room for independent thought in what can generously be referred to as their minds: PJ Fleck is a greedy slumlord in the blighted neighborhood that is Nebraska brains.

If

The Gophers lost a game at home that they were widely expected to win. Or as we call that in Minnesota, “Christmas for Vikings avatar guys who want you to know how little they care and how dumb YOU are for caring.” My employer gives me 2 flex PTO days for it every year as a religious observance.

The theme of the day from a lot of the fans I interact with was “if”, specifically how things might have been different if something else had happened.

2022: #TITTY or #TITAY

In 2015 we thought we were going to be pretty good. 2014 was a very solid season, where we beat Michigan and Nebraska, and played in a New Year’s Day bowl game for the first time since the Kennedy administration. The Gophers returned quite a bit from that squad and, despite knowing we’d be playing Michigan and Ohio State in successive weeks, we spent most of the offseason preening and looking up prices for hotels and cocaine in Pasadena.

Your friends at SGH even had t-shirts made. They said “This is Totally the Year.” They had #TITTY printed on the back. We sold a bunch of them. They were cursed. I remain convinced they are the reason Kill had to resign and why Claeys and Limegrover contemplated the void while the ball sat at the one yard line as the last seconds ticked off the clock against Michigan. [Yes, in retrospect I understand these things may have been blessings, but at the time they felt like eating a bowl of farts.]

I saw someone wearing one of those shirts while tailgating before the NMSU game and briefly entertained the idea of bringing them back for the 2022 season; but then decided I want no part in wearing that albatross around my neck if things went sideways again. Props to dude, though. The #TITTY shirts purposefully excluded any dates or references to specific teams, so maybe he was wearing it for this year’s volleyball team. Let’s just go with that.

Ghosts in the Narration Machine

 I’ve had a lot of therapy over the last few years. Like, a lot a lot of therapy. Four days a week, 50 weeks out of the year, Mecha-Freud lasering holes in the old brain box. Good experience. Highly recommended.

One of the cool parts about it was learning how my brain processes information. While the catalyst for starting was severe depression / suicidal thinking – from the time I was a pre-teen I had hundreds of intrusive thoughts every day, usually associated with hanging myself or some other mode of casting off my mortal coil (I promise the rest of the piece isn’t this dark; I’m just providing context that this wasn’t a generic case of being glum) – after a few months, my psychiatrist casually mentioned that she didn’t think I was depressed at all; rather, I had subconsciously used the intrusive thoughts to build an identity around being a depressed person. That I was essentially choosing to be depressed.

That really pissed me off. The idea that I would happily opt in to the kms lifestyle as some sort of choice was bizarre and I was big mad. I thought about quitting or finding a new therapist, but the notion of starting over was not terrifically appealing. So, I expressed my dissatisfaction at her customer service over the next few sessions, and we moved on.

Inception is a dangerous thing, though, even without sweet special effects and Tom Hardy. For the first time, I began to see my “thoughts” and my “self” as separate things. Prior to that, I was my thoughts and my thoughts were me – bad thoughts, bad person. Now, there was a … space, I guess, between the processes my brain did on its own and who I was as a conscious agent.

To go all trope up in here, the brain is a computer operating system, conducting background functions so applications – the conscious self in this case – can successfully run on top of it. They’re co-dependent, in that the applications would be unable to process all the inputs/outputs the operating system takes care of and the operating system would be pretty uninteresting to most people if there were no applications to run on it. But while applications are affected by the performance of the operating system, in most cases they can still run reasonably well even if the operating system is glitchy.

And I had a pretty glitchy operating system. It associated all sorts of things that I did/was/thought – all with the most profoundly negative interpretation possible - with who I was as person. The, whatever it is, that created my internal personal narrative was a filthy liar. Of course, prior to therapy, I had no idea any of this was happening and, left totally unchecked, my brain made for a pretty shit operational environment for my conscious experience. To paraphrase the great Mr. Meeseeks, existence was pain. Which brings us to Gopher football!

For most of my life I have been a rabid supporter of Gopher athletics. I wear Gopher gear most days, I’d post on all the message boards, I’d watch replays endlessly on YouTube, I blog(ged) about the Gophers, and would more or less plan my entire life around the football schedule. A big part of my identity – how I saw myself and how I perceived others saw me - was tied up in how the Gopher football team fared.

Of course, we weren’t very good for much of that time and, during the Wacker and Brew years, we were a lot worse than that. When we lost, which was often, and particularly if we lost to Wisconsin, which was an annual rite of sacrifice for half of my adult life, I was inconsolable for days. The ultimately meaningless losses of [INSERT PREFERRED SPORTS TEAM] manifested as despondency and hopelessness in my real life. I was the team, and their very public feats of ineptitude weren’t just a reflection on me; I was somehow personally responsible for that year-old, open can of salmon baking in a hot car.

We Gopher (and Vikings, Twins, Wild, and Wolves) fans often joke about the fact we’re in an abusive relationship with our teams, in that we love them and they always cause us nothing but misery. For me, this was absolutely true; only the pain was from an unhealthy relationship with my brain rather than a poor performance by my squad. The Gophers failures were just a heuristic for my glitchy operating system to interpret itself. Appreciate you, narrator!

This mindset only resolved after my psychiatrist challenged me over the state of my depression. I can’t change most of my operating system. That stuff is just biologically hard coded. You can push at it around the edges with therapy, medication, exercise, and meditation but reprogramming it is like training your eyes to see a basketball when you’re looking at a dumpster. And in a lot of ways, that’s a good thing. My brain’s default state is inwardly focused and hyper creative. I have a very, uh, rich inner experience, which has been critical in my schooling and work; when not appropriately occupied, though, it creates a lot of catastrophic fiction where I am the main character. It definitely has its downside, but it’s mostly a fun and useful partner to have around.

I think the thrust of my therapist’s challenge was the degree to which I was anchored to the distorted reality conveyed by my glitchy brain. I really was depressed, but I was in that state because I let an unreliable narrator tell my story to me. I can’t stop that narrator from telling the story; but, now that I know a choice exists, I can opt to give it a lot less power than I used to. And that’s changed my relationship with everything in my life for the better.

Including Gopher football. I wrapped up therapy in 2019 and, while I still care deeply, still wear Gopher gear most of the time, and still spend too much time on message boards, I keep our beloved rodents safely compartmentalized away from how I feel in real life. Sometimes it feels a bit muted - the lows after a loss aren’t nearly as bleak, while the highs after a win may be a little less frenzied than in the past – but I’m an Old now and that’s probably for the best, lest I stroke out during a game.

I will say, though, the brain compartment where the Gophers live is pretty fired up for this season. The narrator is telling me it’s the most complete team in my life and, while it may lack the star power of the 2019 team, is better across the board. It sees a January trip to Pasadena. Let’s hope it’s a reliable narrator for once.

Fail Better

All of old. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better. -Samuel Beckett, “Worstward Ho”

Minnesota will have a new offensive coordinator. It took some disappointment to get there, but perhaps we should be thankful for it rather than frustrated by the missed opportunities. There will be plenty of time to ruminate on those in the future, but my recommendation for you dear reader is not to waste your time fantasizing about what might have been. Because after a season of wondering whether P.J. Fleck had what it took to look in the mirror and make some tough choices, this weekend we were treated to the answer: yes.

What The Ostrich Sees in the Sand

Any fool can turn a blind eye but who knows what the ostrich sees in the sand. -Samuel Beckett, “Murphy”

The excitement of P.J. Fleck’s 7 year extension didn’t so much fade over the weekend as it was doused with bleach. I’ve tried hard to bury the fatalism I’ve lived with since the MicronPC.com Bowl. It’s getting harder to lie to myself; the big new paycheck combined with Brett Bielema’s return to Minneapolis gave this all the makings of a trap game, and it delivered. 

Nothing New

The sun shone, having no alternative, on nothing new. – Samuel Beckett, “Murphy”

In the early hours of what was for me August 30^th, 2019 I boarded a KLM flight in Abu Dhabi, planning to spend a good portion of my flight watching the Gophers mopping up South Dakota State. I had made all the preparations to live-stream the game on my tablet, with one exception: I forgot that the flight didn’t have WiFi. When I reached my layover in Amsterdam I was so confident in the result I found a restroom, coffee, a stroopwafel, and a comfortable seat before checking the score. 28-21 hit me with an intensity that belied by jet-lagged brain.