MEMO: TO MICHIGAN FANS
Dear Michigan fans,
We have no words of comfort. For comfort, go to mom, or better yet, Oprah. Or better yet, fire your motherfucking coach once the nadir turns into the midpoint when you lose to Michigan State by thirty, or (Jebus forbid!) Notre Dame next week, or to whomever else would snap the creaky back of the Carr Administration at this point. You’ll still suck, but you’ll have cut off someone’s head–and coachblood makes the wounded fan’s heart sing every time.
Instead of comfort, we focus on one seemingly cosmetic but terribly important thing. We watched the Oregon game, hoping to be that Oprah type person: rooting for the downtrodden, pulling for the wounded little meerkat, you know, falling prey to our national genetic predilection for the underdog/comeback kid. And for an instant we were there, until we saw this:
!!!!
This would be less appalling if it were alumni…but STUDENTS JINGLING KEYS? ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME? Young, healthy people with clean, fully-functioning lungs JINGLING KEYS TO MAKE NOISE!!!! My god, why don’t you hire Salvadorans to come yell for you? Or better still, they could just come in and cheer for you while you watch the game in the parking lot in peace and quiet and save you the trouble of screaming “DOWN IN FRONT!!!” (Because that would hurt your lungs, wouldn’t it?)
Yes, this is coming from a boorish, decorum-free SEC fan whose fellow fans bring cowbells to games and set off seismometers at the geology department during games in between handing out sociology and leisure management degrees to illiterate, well-muscled athletes. It is also directed at a school in a conference where some schools actually cheer their asses off and force teams into penalties with crowd noise. And some Michigan fans have been railing about this for way, way longer than we have.
Don’t blame the architecture either. Instead, scream. At this point, you should be screaming, anyway. Who cares if it’s at your coach? Notre Dame doesn’t have to know that. This is football. Blood. Screaming. Tribal violence. Bizarre rites and rituals. Put away the keys. Pick up the torches. Less Roman, more Vandal, dammit!
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PJ from NU in SF says:
That itching must be horrible, kid, because it’s making you dumber by the second. We’ve won a few Big 10+1 championships recently. I refer you to 1995, 1996 and 2000.
I don’t claim that we have the greatest team in the land this year, or the best team north of Louisville, or even a contender for a late December bowl (yet). I root for my alma mater because it’s alma mater. I’m proud of my school and if you have a problem with that, too damn bad.
If Northwestern’s irrelevant, why are you so upset? Think about that while I go feed your mascot a peanut.
September 11th, 2007 at 1:07 pm
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Pete says:
Clearly, this blog is extremely uneducated as to how anatomy works. It is very possible to still make noise with your vocal chords while wiggling your hand around to shake keys. It’s called a tradition, and does not preclude one from screaming.
Get off our jock.
September 11th, 2007 at 5:28 pm
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Anon says:
As a Buckeye fan (commenting on a Florida-fan run blog, oddly enough…. I’ll get to the I’m-not-worthies later.), I must mention that I’ve been to 7 different Big Ten stadiums, and 3 of them are some of the best venues in the country. I’m talking, of course, about Ohio Stadium, Camp Randall and Beaver Stadium. The Big House has never been what it’s cracked up to be, in large part because the student section is ridiculously apathetic consider the football program they have (or rather, once had). At Camp Randall, Ohio Stadium, and Beaver Stadium, the student sections are going absolutely nuts even when their team is down by forty. Though I’ll admit the teams playing in those stadiums rarely are, the student sections at perennial cellar dwellers like Indiana and Northwestern are just as crazy throughout most of the games. The student sections usually aren’t even half-empty until there are five minutes left in the game and there is literally no hope left. But at Michigan, it really doesn’t matter how the team is doing. It seems their fans want to keep the “tradition” of being “indifferent” to football success going because Michigan is such a “prestigious institution” that its “brilliant leaders of tomorrow” don’t get amped about college football the way those inbred imbeciles down at OSU, PSU, Wisky, Iowa, and every SEC school plus Texas, USC, Nebraska and Oklahoma do. Anyone that’s ever been to Ann Arbor knows that the snobbishness is ubiquitous whether you’re just visiting or you’re going to the football game.
Either way, I’ve been to three SEC stadiums: Jordan-Hare, Sanford Stadium, and Neyland Stadium, and the student sections there are superior to the Big Ten’s in every way. In the SEC, good football breeds great, if pompous, arrogant, and callous fans.
September 11th, 2007 at 10:45 pm