A week ago, following Michigan’s unexpected loss at home to Appalachian State, I urged Michigan fans not to abandon the season:

So, with the ASU game in the past, I have a request to make of my temporarily irrational fellow Michigan fans: stop being a part of the hysteria problem. Drop the suicidal overreactions and the absurd calls for a mid-season coaching change; start getting ready for next Saturday, and the ten Saturdays after that. The mourning period is over, but the season isn’t.

Of course, the next Saturday saw Michigan lose badly to Oregon, and the fan base went from apoplectic to apathetic, from getting mad to giving up. Some who were in a rage after the ASU game became morose after the Oregon game, choosing simply to surrender the season in an effort to assuage any further pain they might feel as a result of further losses. As a result, the focus of some fans and blogs has started to turn to a new subject: the next coach. But while the change in focus is understandable in some ways, I think it is premature.

Believe me, I’m not going to try to sugarcoat the two previous losses, and I’m not going to try to force unrealistic optimism for the next ten games. The first two losses were bad, and right now, there is something broken inside this team; for Michigan football and its fans, this is not a pleasant happy time of smiles and kisses, and the potential basement for this season is not thrilling territory to explore. But bad or good, happy or unhappy, win or lose, it is still football season, and that still has meaning.

See, there’s something special about football Saturdays. In an email this week, Justin (Official Mindreader Legal Counsel) reminded me just how special these few Saturdays by describing his inability to read even in the quiet of the library on autumn Fridays because of the palpable excitement pervading the campus (which, I should probably note, isn’t Michigan’s campus):

On Friday afternoons, I cannot sit in the law school and read. … I remember one Friday, my first year, I was trying to read in the library, but I just couldn’t sit still. I couldn’t figure out what was going on – the library was quiet enough. So I decided to just take a quick walk. As soon as I opened the door, it was obvious that it was a home game weekend.

That undeniable atmosphere of excitement surrounding college football means that even though Michigan is 0-2, even though the offense is sluggish and the defense seems inept, even though there may be more losses this year, and even though the worst-case scenario hasn’t been this bad in years, I still care about this season, and I still look forward to football Saturdays. There are too few of them for me to spend them detached from my team and looking forward to the next coach; I want to spend them enjoying each victory and hating each loss, no matter which way the ratio swings. The offseason is long enough for everything else; the season is too short for anything but football.

Go ahead and talk about the next coach; it won’t kill me. But I’m a Michigan football fan, and there are ten more games. Ten more games for me to anticipate for a week, ten more games to win or lose, ten more games for me to care whether Michigan wins or loses, ten more games to complete the dose of college football that will help me endure the long cold offseason. There are just ten more games this year, and no matter what happens, I know they’ll be gone long before I’m ready for them to be gone. They always are. So after the season, I’ll be ready to talk about the program’s future, but for the next ten weeks, there is a present that demands my attention.

A recent comment on MGoBlog summed it up nicely:

All the recruiting details and stadium news and Big Ten Network mess is really only to tide us over until September. Now we all just forget about football because we lost two games? These Saturdays are the whole reason we care about any of the tangential pieces. I don’t care if we’re 0-11; all I’ll want is a break-down of the upcoming OSU game.

Go Blue; beat Notre Dame.

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Take note: The MZone reports that an email is circulating among former Michigan players, urging them to gather at the stadium tunnel to show their support for the current players as they exit the team bus. To strengthen that show of support, the MZone is urging fans to show up to let the players know that the fans are still behind them. I think this is an outstanding idea and a much-needed gesture right now.