Michigan Football: Much more enjoyable the further away you are from it.

It’s the return of Wolverines on the Web, the usually-daily links post that I abandoned a while ago in favor of the del.icio.us sidebar. I ditched the sidebar for a few reasons: 1) It was clunky and cluttered the sidebar (2) I didn’t keep up with it very well and (3) Not many people were hitting the links. So, Wolverines on the Web is back, but will be in a more free-flowing format. Think MGoBlog’s “Unverified Voracity” except not as funny, good, or relevant.

Today’s Wolverines on the Web focuses on the reaction of the Michigan blogosphere to Saturday’s debacle (boy, have I typed the word “debacle” wayyyyyy too many times in the past month). It’s tough to overstate just how devastating that game was: Brian immediately compared it to getting hit in the dong (seriously), then went totally emo on us. MGoCommenter Misopogon then dropped probably the single-greatest diary in MGoBlog history, delving deep into the recruiting (and attrition) numbers to show us exactly why the defense sucks this much. The next couple years could get ugly:

For the rest of this year, I recommend, no matter who the opponent may be, the strategy we take into every game starts with a burned ship and ends with Tate Forcier throwing jump balls deep down-field. The offense has shown it is quite capable of awesome. No more Lloyd ball — not in 2009, not in 2010.

We are a team that can get torched by Illinois and Indiana and Eastern Michigan, thus our strategy must be to always torch more.

Can “torch more” be the team’s rallying cry for next season, please?

Michigan Against the World seems to be somewhat fed up with Rich Rodriguez, Michigan head coach, throwing out coaching candidates both viable and, well, inanimate. Also, 1000 points for this line:

[An inanimate carbon rod] also would probably be well-liked by the old-school Michigan Men, because of it’s demeanor.

Zing.

Over at Maize n Brew, SCM breaks down the game with all the excitement of a kid on Christmas, except the total opposite, and comes to this conclusion:

So here we are, I’m not happy, you’re not happy either, but there’s nothing we can do about it now.  This team has three opportunities to try to put a positive spin on a year that has been nothing if not completely up or completely down. Right now a bowl, ANY bowl, is the goal.  Accomplish that and move on.  I like Rodriguez, I think that he has the tools to succeed in a big way here, but I don’t have any idea how the people who matter are going to continue to view this thing if we keep dropping games like this.  He deserves no less than four years at the helm, a rash decision before that leaves us in no better shape and possibly sets us back even further.  If we are to garner anything out of these last three weeks the coaches are going to have to work their tails off to get this team in position to win games.  It starts with Purdue next week, get it done.

Genuinely Sarcastic is taking a break from steering the Rich Rod bandwagon, and needs a moment to reboot:

The parallel I am making is obvious. Michigan football is Microsoft Windows. And a system error has caused it to freeze, crash, and reboot. The problem is, stop errors aren’t random, flukey occurrences. They happen when something has become fundamentally broken or corrupted, and they continue to pop up until you go in, spend an eternity sifting through your computer and find what’s fucked up and fix it.

Brad over at Maize & Blue Nation is (rightfully) pissed about the complete imbalance of turnovers, but also wants the full support of the fans on Saturday, if for nothing else than to stand behind the student-athletes on the field. Agreed.

Maybe the best posts of the week were the two shortest, each simply a picture. The Hoover Street Rag invokes the great philosopher Watterson, while the WLA charts the large chasm between expectations and reality.

NOTE: You can find links to all the mainstream news stories on Michigan football, basketball, and hockey over at The Wolverine, where I put together the daily Michigan Newsstand.