Best Unverified Voracity Ever

Monday Recruitin' is Tuesday Recruitin' this week.

Oh, this is unwise. Yeah, pictures of yourself after getting battered by the sun and Stalin-era football are not good, but the serendipity of it all demands it. As my friends and I exited Ryan Field, we noticed a man walking ahead of us in a jersey that said "Mesko" on the back. Surely... surely these can't be common. I happened to be wearing a "Zoltan For Space Emperor (of Space)" T-shirt; friend Dave was sporting the "I, For One, Welcome Our New Romanian Punter Overlords." So, like, WTF, get busy livin' or get busy dyin': we approached him, said hi, showed him our shirts, and, well...


So there you go.

Depth chart bits: Massey is not listed; Butler and McLaurin are listed with an OR. Given the way he went down and the way they tended to him on the sideline, I think he might be shelved for a while. [Update: this is because he's out for the year per Carr's press conference.] Thompson and Graham are still your linebacker starters despite their injury problems; same for Jeremy Cuilla. Henne is back atop the QB depth chart; kicker is open again. It sounds like Wright is still way too inaccurate and KC Lopata will get a shot against Eastern.

The Chambers thing. Right, so apparently freshman Artis Chambers has been deemed ineligible by the Big Ten:

Under NCAA rules, Chambers was eligible to play this fall.

But Isaacs said he got a call from a Michigan assistant coach last week telling him that under Big Ten rules, summer school grades couldn't count toward eligibility for freshmen such as Chambers, who enrolled in the middle of a school year.

"I don't understand why these kids would be any different in their summer school GPA not being used," Isaacs said. "In one regard, they should be rewarded. They graduated from high school in seven semesters and met all the NCAA requirements."

This is a problem since he played on special teams against Penn State:

Martin said he expected resolution on the matter this week, but Chipman said the committee could take up to two weeks to decide on any penalties.

Chipman said he didn't know the range of disciplinary measures Michigan could face, but added - as Martin noted Saturday - that forfeiture of the win over Penn State was a possibility.

This "forfeiture" thing has been in every article about the situation but seems akin to giving a kid arrested for pot the chair. This violation appears to be a minor misunderstanding of a recent change to Big Ten rules and was self-reported. The player in question also covered a few kickoffs and that's all. IM (uneducated) O, the end result here will be a slap on the wrist and the media breathlessly reporting about a potential forfeiture is misleading given the severity, or lack thereof, of the situation.

Torrent spat. I don't want to get in the middle of this, but anyone looking for the Northwestern game can find it on Mininova. Here's the ~1.5 gig XVID; here is the ~4.2 gig DVD. If you pull down the XVID, you should watch it in VLC and manually change the aspect ratio to 4:3 -- it's square for arcane technical reasons. Unfortunate conflict in full detail here; hopefully this gets worked out soon.

Aaaand more. Michigan 27, Penn State 0, 1998 (Keith Jackson!):



Sportscenter's profile of the weird Crowe-Carr thing:



MGoInternets. There's a new Hart-centric blog dubbed "I Heart Hart" that's worth checking out for your full mancrush service needs. Also, Genuinely Sarcastic put together a very cool feature for the Penn State game that is a sort of niche-y UFR focused exclusively on Hart and the Michigan ground game called the Hart Chart. I've struggled for a couple years now to come up with a meaningful offensive line metric in the run game but never found one that I could do and still get UFR up, like, ever, so this is a pretty exciting addition. GS takes every Hart run and grades out relevant blocks as either "yay" or "nay" with irrelevant blocks given no grade; the results are as you might expect but still thoroughly interesting: Long crushes all comers and Boren shows very poorly after a tough day against Ollie Ogbu and Jared Odrick. Hopefully we get a Northwestern edition; this is an area of UFR I've always felt was lacking.

Etc: Braylon, you are killing me. And not with your eyes this time.