Apologies. Most of this UV is old news; I've been having increasingly severe computer issues over the last few days that have taken up large blocks of my time. I think I'm going to have to send Laptop 1 in; Laptop 2 may or may not be dead, in which case posting would be sporadic whenever Laptop 1 is getting fixed. FYI.
Anyway...
Hey, Desmond said stuff! Last person on the internet to remark on Desmond's remarks on Kirk Herbstreit (a "seemingly intelligent" guy) and Justin Boren (a "complainer"). Oh snap to both. The full smackdown on Herbstreit:
[Herbstreit's report] was wrong on so many levels. As a former player, unless I spoke to that coach and he told me it was cool, I would never have done that because he was still coaching a team that's about to play in a (SEC) championship game. ... His team, the first thing they saw when they woke up was that report. It was not fair to him and not fair to the players.And on Boren:
At first, I was like, 'Wow, he's talking about family values.' And sometimes you use key words, and I read that, and I was like, 'Damn, this thing is just blowing up.' So I came up here (to Michigan) and I watched them practice. I was in the weight room working out, and two players started talking to me, and in general conversation they said, 'This guy, Desmond, was a complainer. He complained about workouts, he complained about practices.' And this is what they told me: 'Really, we're better without him.' I said, 'Wow, that's a different side of the story I hadn't even thought of.' I knew they were training in a way they've never trained before.Howard also referenced the "raggedy" search process, which is kind, IMO.So then he went to Ohio State, and I was like, 'Well, how loyal can this guy be? All the colleges available to him, and he goes to Ohio State?' I talked to Rich, and Rich told me he talked to him, and Rich said (Boren) never was really happy no matter what they did. And Rich said, 'Desmond, I've got to do things my way.'
The reaction here is, of course, "go Desmond." Rodriguez's lack of a family atmosphere has been so horrible it's run off exactly one player -- Mitchell, Ciulla, and Mallett all decided to pack it in before Barwis workouts even started. The manner and destination of his departure indicates a serious lack of character, and Michigan's not likely to miss him.
Hey! Gregg Easterbrook's a dummy! Remember this?
A preseason favorite for the BCS title, West Virginia was poised to qualify for the BCS Championship Game, needing only to beat 28-point underdog Pittsburgh in its final game, at home yet. The Mountaineers lost. We now know that in the days leading up to this huge upset, West Virginia coach Rich Rodriguez was negotiating for the Michigan job -- that is, was furiously engaged in stabbing his school in the back. The West Virginia team played very poorly in a game staged as the coach was working behind the scenes to shaft the school. Strange coincidence?Easterbrook wrote this in a huffy section of his interminable TMQ in January without providing one shred of evidence this was the case. MGoBlog duly called him a loser.
Now, thanks to the magic of West Virginia's we want more money, guy campaign, there is rock-solid proof Easterbrook is full of it:
As part of the ongoing lawsuit filed by WVU to collect Rodriguez’s $4 million buyout for leaving, the attorneys asked for all correspondence between Rodriguez, his representatives and Michigan regarding the position.December 11th, ten days after the Pitt game, was the first contact between Rodriguez and Michigan. But why care about common sense or facts when you can leer at cheerleaders? As I wrote in January:
A representative of Rodriguez’s contacted Michigan on Dec. 11, WVU attorney Jeffrey Wakefield said on Wednesday. The contact occurred three days before Rodriguez met with U-M president Mary Sue Coleman and athletic director Bill Martin in Toledo to interview for the position.
Scenario A: Rodriguez -- who doesn't care even a little bit about maybe winning a national title -- and Michigan secretly begin talks before the Pitt game. No insider gets wind of this and no one reports it during a period of time in which Michigan's athletic department was leaking like a sieve. He then spends every waking hour thinking about the Michigan job, thereby sabotaging WVU's preparations.Expecting an apology from TMQ in 3... 2... 1... never.
Scenario B: Michigan contacts Rodriguez in the thirteen days between the Pitt loss and the first meeting using a "telephone."
Scenario A is so unlikely that it would be dismissed by anyone except Easterbrook, who's the kind of pundit who will cram any available evidence into his extant theories no matter how square the peg and round the hole.
And it begins. Not the streak, but the Penn State-Michigan series:
Michigan would lose the next three before embarking on its current 650-year win streak, which started when Joe Paterno was only 6,000.
Quiz for the future. Clay Travis is a young, bearded man who writes for CBS Sportsline. His latest column tackles the Buzz Bissinger thing -- which I really meant to say something about but never got around to -- in a way I wish I had. It's one of those columns that crystallizes something you've been kicking around in your head for a long time but never managed to figure out how to say. Key section:
What none of this banal criticism recognizes is that sports blogs exist -- and find an audience -- as a natural reaction to the patently false athletic images sold by the professional sports leagues and the majority of the mainstream media who cover these athletes. We know that athletes aren't saints and that in real life, outside the locker room, they don't walk around spouting the same tired responses to the same tired questions night after night after night.I felt strongly about three things in the whole Bissinger meltdown:
Yet, athletes have become so coached in their responses to the media that it's the rare individual who is willing to step outside of the cliché and say something interesting or revelatory. I challenge you to read the write-up of any game and see any quote by any player that you haven't seen a thousand times before. We've all been down this path before. Welcome to the sportswriting matrix, where we're all in crypto-sleep waiting for something to change.
- It was completely disingenuous of Will Leitch to claim "they're just commenters" when Deadspin is a Gawker blog that specifically picks people out of the rabble to be approved commenters and cultivates an aura of snark-snark-snark that leads to things like "Salisbury is a penis" or whatever. It's one thing if your comments are largely unregulated. Deadspin's are carefully groomed.
- Further, Leitch does the entire sportsblogging community a disservice by being presented as The Voice of The Internet when his blog is only tenuously a sports blog at all. I think of Deadspin as a Gawker blog about sports, with all that entails, more than a sports blog run by Gawker. Next time, Will, say thanks but no thanks and let Orson or Alex Belth or anyone else do it.
- A much more convincing defense of the Matt Leinart pictures would have been that for the majority of young people, those pictures make Leinart more likable because they are not pre-packaged "they played hard" comments.
- (four... four things I felt strongly about!) I kind of agreed with Bissinger, if you can agree with spittle. The whole Big Daddy Balls-Kissing Suzy Kolber aesthetic is a nihilistic and depressing thing unrescued by the blind hope of fandom, and I'm kind of embarrassed those guys get as much play as they do. This is also pretty much Will Leitch's fault.
So... yeah, it's kind of awesome and kind of awkward that Clay Travis is trying to put together a five-on-five charity Quiz Bowl challenge with myself and Orson and Leitch and a couple of the KSK guys versus five blog-bashers. I was captain of the Quiz Bowl team in high school, you know. That's strictly Al Bundy small potatoes, though: one of the HSR guys won College Jeopardy(!), if Travis is looking for a ringer.
It's not me. Cris Carter wants to beat some Michigan blogger up because said blogger called him an asshole; this is not me. This a comprehensive list of all the people I've called assholes in this space:
- Mike Boren (indirectly)
- That guy who blocked that field goal during The Horror.
- Charlie Weis, which, in retrospect, is totally obvious
- Bret Bielema
- John Pollack, the hero of Tienanmen Square
- Terry Foster
- The ref who gave TJ a ten minute misconduct during the 2007 North Dakota game
- The universe
- yrs truly
- Coach K
- Alonzo Mourning ("our greatest asshole," according to Fictional Hubie Brown)
- Jason Whitlock
- Chris Webber
Sword located. A "where are they now" on former MLB Sam Sword:
Sam Sword, a city recreation supervisor who played football at the University of Michigan and in the NFL, said preregistration was slow early in the week but the number of participants nearly doubled when youngsters showed up with parents on the day of the meet.Sword lives in Palm Coast, Florida, and appears to be overcoming the indignities of his Michigan education quite nicely.
(Via Big House Blog.)
Etc.: Good piece in Slate related to Travis' "these guys are packaged and shiny" theory; Michigan has a German for next year or maybe the year after but he's six ten and can shoot. If you've got a hundred bucks you can sign up for Barwis' strength clinic and go "eeeeee" the whole time, or at least until he punches you in the trachea.
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