WILL ANYONE IN THE SPORTS MEDIA ASK JIM HARBAUGH IF HE'S ROOTING FOR OHIO STATE?

The Michigan fan-base is bubbling with anticipation over their last home game, the traditional season-ending clash with Ohio STATE. The Bluebloods have conferred with each other, and they have concluded that this is the year that UM will send Brutus home with cleat marks on his backside. That's right, they expect to watch a team that is 12-9 over the last two seasons knock off a team that is 24-0 over the same time span.

There is no explaining the "Michigan Mentality".

We can find a lot of things they do to be "amusing."

The fervor is so high that their friends in the sports media have calculated for them that it would be best if OSU would defeat MSU before heading to Ann Arbor. And so the sports reporters are slowly starting to float the idea around Shembechler Hall by asking some Michigan players if they would root for Ohio STATE to defeat Michigan State, on the grounds that it would help them. But only IF they beat OSU the next week.

These questions put Wolverine players in the funny position of having to answer an embedded question that wasn't stated, i.e., will they root for the Spartans over the Buckeyes? It is somewhat implied that if they don't root for one team, they will be rooting for the other. So they could ask the question either way, or just ask if any given player has a rooting interest in that game between those teams.

But it is so much more juicy to ask if they are rooting for a rival, right? So they are starting that up, only three weeks before their game against the league-leaders.

But when will the sports media

ask Jim Harbaugh the same question?

Who among the UM-flaks hiding behind

reporters badges will have the stone-cold nuts

to pose such a question to their Lord and Master?

That's when we would know things were changing, when Harbaugh is openly asked the same type of question that Mark Dantonio has been asked for the past several years. This represents a watermark test of the sports media love for Michigan. As long as they don't throw that hardball right down the middle of the plate to the Blue Guru, they're propagating that same double-standard of coverage that we've been seeing for decades.

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