Unverified Voracity Not Charged With Felony

One night only. Rammer Jammer Yellow Hammer author Warren St. John will be signing books and such at Nicola's at 7 PM tonight; he's also the editor of a new Guide To Psycho Fan Behavior with contributions from Mssr. Swindle. So, like, go.

Nobody charged with anything. A bit odd to see this headline from the News...

Manningham not charged with felony

...as you could technically run that headline every day for every player on the team: "BJ Opong Owusu not charged with felony." But whatever. Within we finally get resolution on that mysterious traffic stop over the spring:

Manningham, 21, the Wolverines' leading pass catcher, could have been charged with a two-year felony because a few tablets prescribed to a teammate were found on him during a traffic stop in Monroe County last April 25.

Prosecutor William Nichols announced today he has decided no warrant against Manningham will be issued. Nichols did authorize misdemeanor charges for a small amount of marijuana found on two other people in the car, Johnny Sears, then a cornerback for U-M, and Deion White, 17, who apparently has no connection to the program.

Manningham's vicodin was borrowed from a teammate after his offseason surgery; he had a prescription for it but unwisely decided not to get it re-filled. So no big deal. A potentially larger deal is the obvious Driving While Black nature of the arrest:

In southern Monroe County, not far from the state line, an unmarked car pulled up behind the Cadillac. In it were at least two agents from OMNI, a coalition of city police, county sheriff's deputies and state police troopers aimed at interdicting drug trafficking. The agents, returning from an assignment in another county, just happened on the Cadillac.

Because the Cadillac had Mardi Gras beads dangling from the rearview mirror and may have been going 10 mph over the speed limit (the unmarked car wasn't equipped with radar), and one occupant wasn't wearing a seatbelt, the agents radioed ahead to the Monroe County Sheriff's Department to send a marked vehicle to make a stop.

For reasons that are unclear, the sheriff's deputy searched the three young men and the car. Sears and White had a small amount of marijuana secreted in their clothing, less than the amount found in one joint.

It gets even more awesomely civil-rightsy:

The three young men were arrested and transported to a nearby State Police post, where a decision was made to strip-search Manningham and Sears while White was handcuffed to a stair railing.

At the risk of allowing the political to intrude in a strict no-politics zone: outrageous. Black men + Cadillac == stop, obviously illegal search without probable cause followed by strip search. Wheee!

Hartbrownminorchart... is up at Genuinely Sarcastic. Improvement from Boren, tough days from Ciulla and Schilling. This was also my reaction to what looked like an honest-to-God zone read late:

The "WTF" on Carry #29: Um...it looks like a zone read. If Chad Henne ever runs the zone read play out of the shotgun again, Lloyd Carr and Mike DeBord should be institutionalized ASAP. I'm not kidding. Zone read?! Are you serious? GTFO with that garbage.

Seriously. Oddly enough, we've seen Purdue come out and run a zone stretch against us this year. I suspect what's happening here is that the scout team puts in all these plays to prep for an opponent and the head coach says "hey, why don't we use that in the game." The usual result: second and thirteen.

Brady porn.

Sans Gisele; still pretty good:



Demolition. Jon Chait eviscerates Weis at Slate; BGS -- cited by Chait as a representative slice of Irish nuttery -- responds with 3000 words that's mostly bluster and spin about how wonderful the first two years were under Weis. Just one thing:

However, I would like to see the naysayers point to another coach who, without any relevant previous head coaching or college coaching experience, lead an incredibly high-profile team to levels of comparable achievement.

Could this be because "incredibly high-profile" teams don't get shot down by their top choice and have to settle for someone who's never been a college coach at all? Naysayers can't point to another coach who has led someone to "levels of comparable achievement" -- two fradulent BCS bids in which they were as competitive as Air Force would have been -- because no high-profile team has been dumb enough to hire a total wildcard.

This is obviously the Irish nadir, as Weis has recruited well, but anyone arrogant and stubborn enough to make the "missteps" Weis has and run off the kids he has is unlikely to do anything but fail in the long term.

Etc.: Genarlow Wilson is free; MnB talks to a draft guru about Hart; Jerry Hinnen also hearts Hart.