Believe it or not, for a guy who claims to be rationalist, an empiricist, and does not believe in the supernatural in any form, I’m one of the more superstitious Michigan fans you’ll ever meet. I won’t post, read, or watch anything about the game, not sitting down in the same spot on my parent’s living room sectional wearing my lucky “Worst State Ever” outline of ohio shirt I got of the MgoBlog site before they turned into a strange elitist analytics cult that would attack anyone who wasn’t part of their inner church of probability percentages and happened to mention great defense and running the ball until the other team stops you is the most risk-averse and efficient way to win games against teams that, this was more than 2 decades before NIL and the transfer portal, were institutionalized pay-for-play programs. Think back to 1999 of the schools we all knew, everyone who was a fan, or reported on college football knew and didn’t have the guts to put it in print…were historically taking the unofficial motto of “if you ain’t cheatin’ you ain’t tryin’” that permeated every aspect of Southern Culture that began with the advent of organized thoroughbred horse racing in the agrarian south that became a game of ingenious cheaters of the first appearance of using the ancient Roman Chariot racers gave to horses to make them run faster called Hydromel, which was an alcoholic elixir made from honey and stimulants like strychnine to stave off fatigue beginning in the Colonial Era. With adolescents male thoroughbred colts, their breeders would feed them the testicles of bulls that were chock full of bovine testosterone to work as steroids did in several sports in the 70s and 80s. After the discovery of the secret of the cocca leaf in the antebellum era of the south, derby horses were commonly fed a cocca leaf mash before a race so they would run beyond their normal stamina and would greatly suppress the ability of the horse to feel pain.
Skip ahead to the birth of NASCAR racing from the professional drivers of the southern black market moonshine business, who often raced by day and continued their smuggling empire at night. Many drivers funded their NASCAR teams with illegal profits from the moonshine business, which I can assure you as of 2011, my last year in North Carolina, was so prevalent in the modern day that we have to be talking over a conservative estimate of a couple billion dollars went you estimate a common level of presence in mainstream society for the southern states east of the Mississippi River. In the early days of NASCAR, it was the most creative way to cheat that determined who won races, and even today, nascar winning drivers are disqualified for new ways their crews are taking a standardized race car and finding ways to carry extra fuel, produce extra downforce, making minute custom adjustments that give the drivers fractions of an advantage that make the difference between winning and losing..and it’s accepted practice as long as you don’t get caught.
So given that more than 300 years of cheating ingrained in southern culture, is it any surprise that, besides the occasional USC type team getting nailed for pay for play violations during their back to back championships, and a school so obsessed with beating it’s rival it resorted to selling its soul to the devil like OSU, almost all the cheating programs were in the ACC, SEC, and a few programs in the old Big 12 conference when Nebraska was a member and a dynasty created with very little homegrown or plains states talent. Those were the same cheating programs Michigan was competing against at an unfair disadvantage while I was in school that gave me these irrational beliefs in 25 yr old lucky shirts, wearing the same outfit for every game as long as they keep winning, and leaving to go watch the rest of the game alone in my loft apartment above the garage if Michigan is losing, which I swear has an over 95% success rate since 2015. I know that none of these superstitions have any effect upon the outcome of the game..yet I can’t shake the habits because I think if I stop, they’ll lose for sure.
So I‘m signing off until after the big win…see you guys Monday late night.
Go Blue! - Argus
michigan.rivals.com
