Minnesota Links: Preview, The Podcast, FFFF Offense (chart), FFFF Defense (chart). Something's been missing from Michigan gamedays since the free programs ceased being economically viable: scientific gameday predictions that are not at all preordained by the strictures of a column in which one writer takes a positive tack and the other a negative one… something like Punt-Counterpunt. PUNT Bryan MacKenzie is out this week. Fortunately I know a guy. PUNT By Nick RouMelCounterpunt Emeritus A “Catch-22” has come to be understood as a paradoxical situation, one in which neither of two choices is either possible, or desirable. It comes from the eponymous 1961 novel by Joseph Heller, set in World War II. The protagonist, John Yossarian, pilots a B-25 bomber in Europe. After watching too many friends die, he wants to quit. He cannot wait to fly enough missions so that he can be reassigned. But every time he gets close to being finished, his megalomaniac commander keeps retroactively raising the requisite number of missions, ultimately to an impossible number—from 25, eventually to 80. Yossarian still has one way out. He can show his commander verification that he has had a mental breakdown, and then he would be excused. But when he sees the flight surgeon, the Doc explains the “Catch-22” the Army Air Force employs: an airman would have to be crazy to fly more missions, and if he were deemed crazy, he would be unfit to fly. Yet, if an airman were to refuse to fly more missions, this would also indicate that he is sane, which would mean that he is sufficiently fit to fly the missions. Thus the paradox—Yossarian’s “Catch-22.” After MSU was graciously allowed to join the conference in 1950, the Big Ten had, as its name suggests, ten members. This went on, mathematically correct, for forty years until Penn State joined in 1990. The conference, paradoxically, did not change its name, though the logo cleverly contained a hidden number 11: [After THE JUMP: Blockbusters and beepers.]