College football championship thread: Atomic Dawgs

They're all ready for the SEC now.

 

Good for you, sticking with them all this time! Meijer seemed to be the headquarters for cheap UM stuff last time I was up there. Brad Keselowski was one of the good guys in NASCAR. And we'll just have to hope the Tigers do something before the End Times. I was a young man of 26 in 1984 and never imagined they'd be so bad for so long (with that blip of 2006-15).

 

Is the penalty excessive? Probably. Does it represent selective prosecution? More than probably.
It is spectacular? Undeniably.

 

I never liked the sobriquet of "Walmart Wolverine," mainly because you can rock merch of anyone and not be a fan, or you can be a fan and choose to NOT rock merch (understandable if you're in Ohio). It's a percentage on either end, but I'm guessing the fat lot in the middle are real fans of the team.

 

6 a.m. vocabulary lessons …

 

It's classist, but it's the sort of classism they come by honestly. A year's worth of expenses at U of M now runs you about $35,000, slightly more than double that for out of state students (of which more than half are at Michigan). Furthermore, U of M admits 18% of its applicants (admittedly about 40% of in-state applicants, but still less than half). It is, by some margin, the most selective public university in the Midwest if not the country.

And when your stadium has 100,000 people a weekend in it, there are going to be a significant portion whose only association with your school is watching the football team on TV. That's just kind of the way it is. Michigan is fucking expensive and hard to get into, and so when you see one of the most exciting forward-facing parts of that experience, I think there is some "free rider" jealousy baked in there. Now, when James Earl Jones (Michigan '55) says point blank in the football pre-game hype video "We are the best...university...in the world" that's kind of ridiculous (not to mention the whole "Michigan man" ethos), but the arrogance that State fans accuse them of as part of their raging inferiority complex is absolutely there. On the other hand, ain't nobody with an MSU degree ever got to the moon.

And for equal time,

 

Wait, did I just become a Sparty fan?

 

I don't consider "Walmart Alabama Fan" to be classist. It's rock hard truth. There are many thousands in Bryant-Denny every home game who couldn't find any of the three university libraries without a map.

Around here nursery school kids get asked "Are you Alabama or Auburn?", and it has nothing to do with going to school there.

 

God forbid the proletariat develop some form of affection for the state university.

 

It's not so much as it is that many of the most arrogant and obnoxious members of the fan base never took a single class at the university - whether it was Alabama, Michigan, or whoever. I know any number of Alabama grads who roll their eyes at some of the fan base there. Hell, I never went to UAB. My wife worked there for 29 years and my kid did, but I never did.

OTOH, I have been inside of both the Sterne and Lister-Hill libraries at UAB.

 

So I used it right!

 

And those are just the students.