Sunday, September 11, 2005
Oh my goodness that sucked worse than something Denny Neagle would pay.
After the game Lloyd Carr said something along the lines of, "Some coaches are OK with losing games so long as the team plays well, and they don't like winning games if the team doesn't play well. Not me, though. I just want to win. I don't care how well we play if we don't win."
Which is a lovely and admirable sentiment, maybe, but which is a sentiment that has little or no bearing on this game. Because we neither won nor played particularly well.
I had art students leaving me messages on my phone and on AIM asking where our defense was. Art students! They barely know what shape a football is! They are more interested in the graphic design of the helmets than the actual game! They think 'hart' is a misspelling of the vital muscular organ! And even they can see that we have shit for defense.
No, that's not fair. Shit smells bad and would presumably form some sort of grotesque deterrent to opposing teams. We haven't even got that. We've got a small puff of colorless, odorless, and utterly harmless gas for defense. We have the most inert and thinly spread gas possible for defense.
Some of Henne's passes honestly looked like he wasn't even seeing the field past 5 or 6 yards. Did he forget to put his contacts in today or something? Did Matt Gutierrez steal them to play tiddlywinks with? Were his eyes scalded in horror by the tan-gold bland helmets of the Domers? Am I now critiquing the design of the helmets? Yes. Shut up. I may enjoy sports but I am still an art student.
Darius Walker (reluctantly captured on film memory card and displayed above) tried his darndest to remind us of last week's Garrett-Wolfe-containment debacle. When there's one guy, and we KNOW the ball is going to him, and we can't. do. a damned. thing. about it.... I can't take another game like that, I just can't. I can't go into the Eastern game next week and suddenly discover that Eastern has some amazing running back with a single-digit number who they're going to give at least 1 out of every 2 balls to in the first half and against whom we are going to be completely and utterly helpless. I'll break down sobbing in the stands or something equally out-of-character and disturbing.
Those overturned calls... oh boy. Look, that happens to you once in a game, you grind your teeth and chant "buuuuuullshit, buuuuuuullshit" along with the rest of the student section and accept that it's part of the game. When it happens to you more than once, you start to wonder if the umps are particularly devout Catholics or something. The guys behind us took it particularly hard, and I actually thought at one point that one of them was going to hurl himself down the stairs in despair. Since we're in row 47, that would be a considerable tumble.
The crowd eventually started expressing its displeasure by chucking bottles (plastic, you nutters) onto the field and, in some cases, at Notre Dame fans in the stands.
The fact that we had to watch this game in the brutal blistering heat in the Big House didn't really help either. I slathered on a ton of sunscreen, and still managed to get burnt, probably because the sunscreen got sweated off. It was even hotter than last time, and I hadn't thought that was possible. I can't freaking wait until this heat crap ends and we can start wearing sweatshirts and jackets to the games again.
I don't really want to talk about it anymore, except to say that Charlie Weis is not allowed to ever look Tom Brady in the eye again. Jerk.
Oh, yeah, and I did take photos. I don't think the lens hood made a whit of difference, except to make the camera look bigger and fancier than it is, therefore garnering me more comments on it.
I guess I'm happy to see that both the Sox and the Tigers won, because I kind of need something to make up for this... this travesty of a game. It must have been refreshing, for those who saw it, to watch Curt perform like something approximating his old self again, and to see Manny break his homerless streak, to see the Yankees commit a bevy of errors, and to see what I hear tell was a truly massive shot from Olerud.
It was nice to see the Tigers win because, uh, they hadn't won anything in the past twelve trillion weeks, and it was starting to get to the point where you wondered if they were actually capable of winning anymore, or if they even remembered how to spell the word 'win'.
Lions tomorrow (later today). Please, Blue Cats. Please please please.
2:55 AM
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