From Ann Arbor to Armageddon: How Michigan’s 2025 Football Schedule Explains the Entire World

The Michigan Wolverines’ freshly minted 2025 slate has dropped, and while the good citizens of Ann Arbor will spend the next 18 months debating the merits of a noon kickoff against East Lansin- sorry, “at Spartan Stadium” – the rest of the planet has already filed the document under “quaint American tribal ritual, see also: pumpkin spice diplomacy.” Still, for those of us condemned to watch the world burn in 4K, the schedule provides a surprisingly useful lens on geopolitics, late-stage capitalism, and humanity’s undying urge to paint its face and scream at strangers. Allow a jet-lagged correspondent to translate the parochial into the planetary.

First, the marquee collision: Michigan vs. Texas in Week 2 at a “neutral” JerryWorld, that $1.3 billion terrarium outside Dallas where the carbon footprint of a single halftime drone show could power Moldova for a week. The tilt is nominally about two blue-blood programs, but in reality it’s a soft-power proxy war. Texas, flush with petro-yuan from the SEC’s forthcoming ESPN deal, represents the new energy axis; Michigan, still clinging to the Big Ten’s fading academic pretensions, stands in for the post-industrial Midwest trying to sell itself as the Switzerland of the Great Lakes. Whoever wins, Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund gets the naming rights.

Week 4 sends the Wolverines to Lincoln to face Nebraska, a program whose greatest export this century is sadness. Memorial Stadium will once again attempt its weekly ritual of becoming the third-largest city in the state, an ambition rendered slightly tragic by the fact that neither Nebraska nor most of the world can reliably keep its rural hospitals open. Yet 90,000 souls will gather to watch 20-year-olds risk CTE for the glory of a state that hasn’t picked a president correctly since 1964. If that isn’t a metaphor for the democratic experiment, I don’t know what is.

The non-conference appetizer buffet includes Fresno State and New Mexico, two schools whose athletic departments are kept solvent by “guarantee games” – the polite euphemism for accepting ritual sacrifice in exchange for a wire transfer large enough to fund an entire year of Title IX compliance. It’s the same transactional spirit that allows European second-tier clubs to sell their best strikers to Saudi Arabia every January: the rich get highlight reels, the poor get mortgage payments, and everyone pretends it’s sport.

By November, Michigan hosts Penn State and Ohio State on consecutive Saturdays, a scheduling quirk the conference insists is coincidence, much like the World Bank insists structural adjustment is merely “technical assistance.” The winner likely books a ticket to the expanded 12-team playoff, which now resembles the G20: bloated, TV-driven, and guaranteed to include at least one participant whose inclusion is justified by market size rather than merit. The losers can console themselves with the knowledge that their alumni networks will still run several Fortune 500 companies and at least one shadowy defense contractor.

And then there’s the looming specter of 2027, when Michigan is contractually obligated to play Oklahoma in Norman, a date already being hyped as “Red River, but with lakes.” By then the Arctic summer sea ice may be gone, the Amazon could be down to a bonsai, and the NCAA might finally have admitted that athletes are employees. None of this will stop the caravan of RVs rolling south on I-35, because if existential dread were enough to cancel football, we’d have called the whole thing off after the 2016 election.

In the end, the 2025 Michigan schedule is less a roadmap to the CFP than a Rorschach test for a civilization that has chosen to medicate its decline with marching bands and tailgate queso. The rest of the world will keep stockpiling ventilators and sandbags, but on autumn Saturdays the heart still swells at the sight of 110,000 people voluntarily cramming into a giant bowl to argue about a coach’s fourth-down decision. Call it denial, call it pageantry, call it the last communal campfire before the batteries die. Just don’t call it trivial; somewhere in the global supply chain, a factory in Vietnam is already stitching those winged helmets for next year’s freshman class. The show, like the planet, must go on—only one of them has a two-deep chart.