Football: News roundup

First, the most relevant: Clayton Richard will return in the fall, according to the Detroit News. He's also sporting a 0.46 ERA so far for the baseball team, which I hear is good. Richard will almost definitely be the #3 QB since he has taken the spring off and Gutierrez has recovered enough throwing ability for the coaches to be confident enough to throw him out there.

And with the draft closing in this weekend, everyone is talking about it. Including Marlin Jackson, who had an extensive chat at ESPN.com. I usually skim these things since they don't contain any piercing questions about the defensive breakdowns at the end of last year, and when they do, they work out like this:

guenther(ann arbor): What happened to you guys in the Rose Bowl this year? It seems like you guys couldnt stop Vince Young

Marlin Jackson: You nailed it. We just couldn't contain him and he won the game by himself.

But if you're interested, it's here.

NBCSports, long the eeevil propaganda arm of the flagging Notre Dame football program, has listed Braylon Edwards as a top-5 bust candidate. The snippet on Edwards then damns him by comparing him to... Keyshawn Johnson? Um. The same Keyshawn Johnson with almost 9,000 recieving yards? Weird. It does not mention Edwards' tendency to drop routine balls, which should be the #1 negative mentioned by everybody. No research! Just like I said!

Stewart Mandel at CNNSI has come down on the other side of the coin about Ernest Shazor, labelling him underrated in his latest column. This I am not so sure about, since he's probably going to go in the second round, which is about as high as safeties ever go. One or two a year slip into the first but it's usually the late first. Shazor's valued about where I would take him.

Finally, the Ann Arbor News has an mgoblog-worthy brick of a story on the new trend for players to ship themselves off to specialized NFL-draft boot camps in the hopes of pushing their numbers in the right direction. It contains a quote sure to set some of the strength-and-conditioning doom-and-gloomers' heads afire:

NFL agent John Drana, who represents 2004 draft choices Navarre and former Michigan offensive lineman Tony Pape, said, "If my son was a University of Michigan football player looking at the prospect of being drafted, I would tell him to stay put, don't leave campus. (Michigan strength and conditioning coach) Mike Gittleson is one of the best, if not the best, in the country."

Now, he's an agent so there's no reason to believe he actually believes anything he says. But I like tweaking people who think that the reason Michigan hasn't won 10 straight national championships is Gittleson. The parade of offensive linemen who leave Michigan and immediately claim starting jobs in the NFL should make it clear that Michigan's S&C program is at least as good as the ones at comparable schools across the country. The S&C is not a pressing concern in light of the fact someone like Cato-friggin'-June is the leading tackler of the Colts. June couldn't tackle a dead goat at Michigan, and it wasn't because he was lifting weights differently than the guys at USC.

Fin.