Putting the Past Behind Them

(Back so soon?  Yes, yes I am.  Sometimes you need to get all emotional without crowding the front page of a widely read blog.  This seems like as good a place as any to do that.)

The beginning of the end.

I couldn't think of any other picture to sum up the collapse of 2009 better than this.  There isn't a picture out there that would evoke as strong a memory as this one.  I almost want to look away.  Nothing could possibly hurt more than watching Roundtree tracked down from behind just like the Wolverine's bowl hopes.  The moment the 2009 season died.

God knows there were struggles before this moment.

Born Under Punches: 2010 and Beyond

The final installment of my 2010 preview of the upcoming season as a whole.  More than just the team itself, we need to understand the state of the program, and what this year means going forward.  I'll let David Byrne take it away:

Take a look at these hands.

Take a look at these hands!

Last night I pulled this song up on Youtube and listened to it for what seems like the thousandth time this week.  I have been a big fan of the Talking Heads for a while, but only recently come around to what might be their greatest album: Remain in Light.  It is beautiful and frenetic and dripping with the kind of paranoid energy that comforts you and sets you on edge simultaneously when the song blasts over your speakers and you cruse down the highway at well over the speed limit, pushed to drive faster by the building tension.  I could have picked pretty much any song from the album to begin this post:  Cross-eyed and Painless, Once in a Lifetime ("This is not my beautiful Big House!"), or Houses in Motion.  They all seem to fit.  All of them are chaotic   Byrne and producer Brian Eno were heavily influenced by band leader, saxophonist, and African revolutionary Fela Kuti during the making of Remain in Light   and this would hardly be the first time anyone referenced revolution or chaos when discussing the Rich Rodriguez experiment.

It's been a long, strange trip and for better or worse, we will know more about the program come December.  I just don't know if we will like what we hear.