State football fans getting over bleak weekend

Lynn Henning / The Detroit News

Someone should alert the Obama administration that Michigan needs a football stimulus package.

The past weekend of statewide setbacks and upsets amounted to a Gridiron Depression:

• Lions: They did a five-spiral nosedive Sunday into the Ford Field turf against a team that was presumed to be worse than the NFL's local chapter. Uh-uh. The Rams, who looked for a while this season as if they might next win a game in 2025, staggered past the still-lamentable Lions, 17-10.

• Michigan: The Wolverines proved conclusively they're a mess when they allowed the previously more messed-up Illini to slam them, 38-13.

• Michigan State: And the Spartans thought losing to the Hawkeyes on the last play of the previous Saturday's game was a creatively cruel way to lose their latest close game. This time, the Spartans allowed the Gophers to commit 17 penalties (tying the Spartans' 52-year Big Ten record) before expiring, 42-34, in a fabulously imaginative defeat for the Spartans.

• Central Michigan: It was a gnat's eyelash from cracking the Top 25 heading into Saturday's game against Boston College. Suddenly, after Boston College blasted Central, 31-10, national rankings can be seen in Mount Pleasant only with a good pair of binoculars.

• Western Michigan: This business of building a university's team into a steady winner is tough, as some of the above would attest. Bill Cubit and Western can relate after tumbling to Kent State, 26-14.

• Eastern Michigan: No one said the latest effort to reconstruct EMU football would be easy. And that was pretty much the message from Saturday's trip to Arkansas, which resulted in a 63-27 loss for EMU.

Weekend to forget

Amid a grinding financial crisis Michigan has been forced to bear in the extreme, it's not clear why the football gods decided they, too, must gang up on the Great Lakes State. Or why they could've been hit for unnecessary roughness for sadistic acts committed during the past forgettable weekend.

But facts are facts. And for most of the state's teams, 2009 has been a helmet-to-helmet hit. Nothing punctuated the carnage quite like the events of Saturday and Sunday.

"A lot of cussing," said Mandy Parker, a bartender at O'Malley's Bar & Grill in Livonia, when asked about the disposition of her football-loving customers during a weekend only the Marquis de Sade would have enjoyed. "Most of it was at the Lions."

Then again, the more Parker thought about it, the more she remembered Saturday's aches and groans as Michigan, MSU, CMU, WMU and EMU all bit the dust, most of them in gruesome fashion. That, too, was a day to forget. And some fans apparently attempted to do just that.

Parker said customers have a general remedy for acute pain football zealots experience.

"They pretty much drink more," she said, at least finding some commercial solace in the past weekend's carnage.

No question, the past Black Weekend was exceptional. Most of the aforementioned teams have at least been break-even bets on most weekends in 2009. The Lions, of course, aren't quite at that elevation yet, having won only once in their past 25 games.

It's why sheer percentages said there'd be good news, at one of the state's major universities, on some autumn-chilled football field somewhere in the land.

News wasn't all bad

Central was so red-hot (seven-game winning streak) and had at its helm a quarterback of such renown (Dan LeFevour) that it seemed a decent bet to topple Boston College.

Michigan and its under-the-gun coach, Rich Rodriguez, were all but a lock to spank Illinois, even at Champaign.

Michigan State appeared primed to pop Minnesota as retaliation for losing to Iowa in such heart-rending fashion a week earlier.

And then there were the Lions. Fresh from a victory -- well, for the Lions fresh is having beaten the Redskins on Sept. 27 -- and with hotshot rookie quarterback Matthew Stafford back from a knee injury and poised to do a bit more growing up courtesy of the Rams defense, the Lions appeared ready to pounce on a team that so resembled the Lions of a year ago.

Oh, it wasn't all bad news for the state's grid fans. That fabulous football machine at Grand Valley State won another game, which is sort of the habit at Allendale, the home to a multiple winner of NCAA Division II football championships.

But it was a remarkable commentary on just how much pain was doled out last weekend that even Grand Valley State's victory came with a flip side.

Grand Valley State chewed up Northern Michigan, 31-19, which seemed to say that even in a rare instance of victory, a grisly week of football in our homeland had to have its in-state victim.

lynn.henning@detnews.com