I think this goes without saying, but in a twist of irony I’m going to anyway: it has been a tough year for Michigan football. I guess the depressed expectations and physical distance have dulled the pain for me—us—in particular, but no self-respecting Wolverine would say they haven’t come out of this season licking their wounds.

It certainly makes us look fondly on the past, as happened today when Katie ran across the New York Times review for Michael Rosenberg’s new book about Schembechler, Hayes, and Vietnam-era activism. Good ‘ol Bo:

[Michigan] defensive lineman Pete Newell skipped the momentous 1969 antiwar rally in Washington to make a road game in Iowa. After­ward, Schembechler praised him before the players for being “out there in Iowa City with the rest of the team, and not in Washington with the damn hippies where he really wanted to be.”

And as if Woody didn’t have reason enough to hate Ann Arbor:

[Hayes] once wrote scathingly about the permissive marijuana laws in a city that was home to “one Big Ten university.” As Rosenberg writes, “the town, of course, was Ann Arbor.”

So in passing Proposal 1, the voters of Michigan were really just trying to stick it to the Bucks in any way we could—it certainly didn’t happen on the gridiron this year.