Unverified Voracity Pushes The Big Red Button

This will be the only post today. The new site launches Monday, and I'm spending the day porting all the posts over, and then the weekend making sure everything is ready. I know you didn't read the Zone Stretch article from yesterday, so go back and read that.

Viva!



Carry on.

Any ideas? Genuinely Sarcastic is looking for something to write:

My quest for some daily/semi-daily feature here at GS which isn't just some half-baked ripoff of MGoBlog's Unverified Voracity continues, without much luck, but I press on.

If you've got an idea burning a hole in your pocket, shoot them an email.

Hockey. The Big Ten network should be a great boon for hockey fans, but last year the only benefit for Michigan fans was having the College Hockey Showcase televised, and that was a haphazard affair with plenty of tape delay built in. They are working on more:

Silverman has been talking to Tom Anastos and Bruce McLeod, commissioners of the Central Collegiate Hockey Association and Western Collegiate Hockey Association, about trying to get more games on the air. ... Silverman said the most-sought-after games would be those involving one Big Ten school playing against another.

Michigan-Michigan State games are are all televised in some form or another, but that might mean trips to Columbus -- rarely provided full coverage -- are televised in the future.

Dude, right click. I didn't actually take the pictures of Michigan's hypothetical road jerseys so I'm only mildly pissed that Valenti & Foster's website posted them without attribution, but... like...

... if you're not going to attribute something you probably shouldn't take a screenshot of the blog. Attention, sports-talk-radio interns: you can right click on any picture and "save as". Also, your thumbs are opposable (probably) and can be used to open things like doors.

X is like Y. Credit to Grateful Blue for doing something I thought impossible: writing a surprising "X is like Y" post. This one is Big Ten teams as fictional movies from Seinfeld. Michigan:

"Cry, Cry Again" - Michigan
As referenced above, "Cry, Cry Again" is the arty movie that Jerry refused to bootleg for Brody, so Kramer does it himself - poorly, according to Jerry, who now thinks of himself of an expert in bootlegged movies. The end of the movie is taped over by Elaine, who filmed herself dancing to see how bad she really was. Michigan has lost five of the last six games to OSU, and their fans have cried and cried again over this development. The Wolverines are trying to get their mojo back with the hiring of Rich Rodriguez - not unlike the character in "Cry, Cry Again" who buys a loaf of bread.

Quote: "He's trying to buy a loaf of his soul."

Meet Rich Rodriguez - a loaf of soul.

Hokay. I'm out. Wish me luck.

Unverified Voracity, Delivered From Perdition By The Coke Fairy

'House. Jimmy Johns delivers coke so fast you'll freak*, and 'Bama is one scholarship closer to cramming everyone in the phone booth. Just like Saban planned. (Thanks to the dozen or so emailers on this... more email than I've received on a single topic in blog history, I think.)

I think I should revise my position here: Saban's managed to sluff off most of his roster deadweight on medical scholarships of dubious merit and it looks like there will be no outright cuts. So this is not PURE EVIL, as previously theorized. It is still KIND OF EVIL, a highly unethical way to game the system that makes Alabama hope something like 20 Fulmer Cup points happens. As the JCCW says:

...I doubt Lionel Mitchell probably thinks very much of the crunch. I have zero clue how severe his back injury might be, but either a) it's hella severe, career-threatening, painful as anything, and still even 'Bama fans are writing things like "If I had to wager, I would bet there's nothing wrong with his back" and believing he was just too crappy to keep his scholarship; b) it's not that severe, but rather than wait and see if he could come back from it and contribute, his coach has told him his career's over anyway. Neither seems like a scenario that would make Lionel Mitchell happy.

Second: I certainly don't blame 'Bama fans for not wanting to put the 2 of Lewis's surprise academic disqualification--which even OTS said was "dumbfound[ing]," "never made sense," and left him with "no clue"--and the 2 of "'Bama needs scholarships" together.

Word.

Also at the FanHouse: if you have Time Warner you may be getting good news about the Big Ten Network soon.

(HT: Pete Holiday.)

Vic Sprouse might want to buy a disguise kit. The West Virginia Record describes itself as "West Virginia's legal journal" and one Vic Sprouse comes down on Rich Rodriguez's side in the ongoing spat:

Looking at the RichRod saga now through the prism of knowledge of the utter disaster that is the Garrison administration, it is apparent that they ran Rich off.

I believe Rich is telling the truth when he said the entire relationship changed when Garrison took over. His relationship with Pastilong changed. His relationship with Garrison changed. And, before you know it, Garrison was wanting to show he was the new Sheriff in town and he wasn't going to accept ANY ADDITIONAL demands of Rich Rodriguez.

What a shame.

Michigan lucked out because West Virginia is the sort of backwards place where the governor can appoint an unqualified unversity president the entire faculty thinks is a dolt, and that president and his athletic director can poison their relationship with one of the best coaches in the country. Rodriguez fell into our laps just when we were going to start scraping the bottom of the barrel.

Tangent:

First, one thing I can't take is just how often Rich refers to himself in the third person. That is such a bad habit, someone needs to break him of it, it's tough to listen to him say "Rich Rodriguez" over and over.

Bob Palcic was in 'Nam!

I don't have as much revenue as the Big Ten, so I can only read a couple sentences from this Sports Business Journal article:

The Big Ten Conference generated more than $177 million in revenue during its 2006-07 fiscal year, according to documents filed this month with the Internal Revenue Service.

Anyone got the full monty on this? I assume it has interesting Big Ten Network details.

Worst. Comic. Ever. Andy Staples has an entertaining piece on the constant race to stay one step ahead of the NCAA's recruiting regulations. The real meat, though, is an honest-to-god recruiting tool used by Oregon to land Jonathan Stewart, who you may remember from such runs as "Aaargh," "Aaaargh not again," "I want to die," and "How many points do they have now?" It's a comic book. The worst comic book ever made. This is perhaps my favorite stupid part of many stupid parts:

Yes, son, at the moment of your glory the camera focuses on... Phil Knight!

The comic's "plot" consists of a kindly old grandfather telling his towheaded little brat all about the legend of "Snoop," AKA Jonathan Stewart. That grandfather is... familiar.

Ga na gon na ga that's right.

Follow up. Lake The Posts landed an interview with the Northwestern sign-stealing guy that's worth a read. There's this on Payne's tendencies -- the Luther Van Dam bit:

As I broke down the film of Michigan’s offense in '95 I thought there was a possible tendency with the center’s non-snapping hand. I went back and checked every snap and sure enough the tendency was about 95% that when his hand was on the ground it was run and when he had it on his thigh it was pass. This was not signal stealing, this was just a tendency found way before the game was even played. But it was a GREAT help for our defense. (As a GA I was in the coaching booth for games and was not stealing signals.) This is not exactly unfair tactics on our part but more of an error on their part. Either they coached the center to do the hand thing or the kid was doing it himself and their coaches never noticed. Either way it was their own fault.

That speaks to a certain complacency, I think. I wonder how many other teams noticed?

Etc.: normally I am a Michael Rosenberg fan but I have to agree with BSD and their fisking of his BTN-Comcast column. Said column made no sense. Vijay's trying to figure out if ESPN's any better at ranking players. Autumn Thunder makes a triumphant return. More pictures of stuff, this the football practice facility.

Unverified Voracity Ejects Bits

Note: lately, I've been dumping a lot of things into UV that could rightly stand on their own as posts, and I'm going to try to split those things out in the future. Often I'll hold something for a day or two until the next edition and by that time every Michigan blog has already said their piece and I feel stupid. Also, much of the time I end up throwing a bunch of disparate stuff together -- that's kind of the point -- and it mucks up the categories. If you click "baseball" or something on the right sidebar you get posts with baseball, but often leetle pieces of baseball in a larger post.

So, anything that's news or news-y I'll post ASAP, and anything program-related and longer than a few lines will also get split out.

House. I should probably start plugging Michigan-relevant stuff I post on the Fanhouse since every couple days I get an email asking why I haven't covered X when there's a post up over there. So: Want Michigan tickets? Cut your legs off.

(It's already happening!)

On a more serious note, yes, it's a little annoying that handicapped fans get to cut in the season ticket line and get their PSLs waived, but those were probably conditions of the settlement and in the long run said settlement saved Michigan some coin, and a lot of seats.

The point. It's fashionable, and somewhat accurate, to bash Bill Simmons these days. But everything you need to know about why sports columnists are thrashing around in their death throes can be found in his post-Celtics victory column, and it's all about his dad. I am a little sick of Simmons' schtick, incredibly sick of Boston teams winning championships, and was sort of annoyed at parts of the column, but...

Dad bought a single season ticket for the Celtics for the 1973-74 season and carried me into the Garden for the next four years, sitting me on his lap and even letting me sleep on him during the famous triple-OT game against Phoenix in 1976. When I became too big to sit on his lap, he bought a second ticket even though we really didn't have any money at the time. And we've had those two tickets ever since. How do you repay someone for a lifelong experience like that? You don't. You can't.

...this and the discussion that follows it is about the strange thing fandom is, something only a lifelong fan could communicate. Often, I think, we start pulling for a team by proxy. I wanted Michigan to win when I was a child so my dad would be happy. When Michigan was trailing by 21 in the Water Buffalo Stampede Minnesota game, my girlfriend at the time wanted Michigan to do well so I wouldn't accidentally shove her off the couch again in rage. Now that I'm friends with the sort of Auburn fan who involuntarily screams things like "GO LESTER" on every run longer than three yards, I want Auburn to win.

At some point a switch flips and the rooting is no longer by proxy and now you're just sort of infected with this thing. And it makes you do and think very strange things about completely irrelevant external events, and coping and dealing with this weird little disease of passion requires a sort of support group.

In general, newspapers have chosen to strip the passion out of their sports section in favor of objectivity. They've been so successful at it that Bill Simmons -- a "blogger" according to sneerin' Rick Reilly -- is the most famous and influential sportswriter* in the country.

*(writer. Wilbon, Kornheiser, etc... TV.)

Man down. Alabama cornerback Lionel Mitchell, he of the severe back problems that sort of held him out of spring practice, -- brutal! -- is yet another medical scholarship recipient. Will Alabama make it? This is exciting!

EEEEEE Barwis:



Via MVictors, which helpfully picks out this sentence:

“If you can’t make it intense, and make the environment an environment that elicits greatness, and get into that environment, coach, and make kids energetic about, and fired up about putting 500 pounds on their back and hittin’ reps and running sprints until they throw up and pushing themselves to the absolute limits of their mental and physical capabilities then you’re not doing anything, you’ve wasted your time with your science because they’re not going to grow if they’re not pushing themselves to those points…”

Dude, Faulkner just threw up in a bush.

Thin, thin. Antonio Henton, the dual-threat Ohio State backup quarterback who is not Terrelle Pryor, is transferring. Probably:

Ohio State quarterback Antonio Henton has reportedly told his Buckeye teammates he’s headed for GSU, an ESPN writer confirmed to the Statesboro Herald Wednesday. Georgia Southern’s B-term for summer classes begins next week, and second-year GSU coach Chris Hatcher said he couldn’t discuss transfers until then. Henton could not be reached for comment.

That leaves Ohio State with eh starter Todd Boeckman, Pryor, and thousand-year-old walk-on(? - I think) Joe Bauserman. They aren't much deeper than Michigan, though they are more experienced/hyped/diapered.

Dash. Wisconsin people say don't get your hopes up for Charter or Time Warner:

"I think they're going to be really, really lucky to get it done by football season," Prof. Barry Orton told The Capital Times. "It means they have to turn this around in a month and a half or so. That's tight. I would think we're safer to say (a deal will be done) probably by basketball season and maybe by the end of football season."

Yes, yes it does. NBC's extended their contract with Notre Dame another five years, and they're very proud of it:

“We are thrilled to continue this landmark partnership with Notre Dame," Ebersol said during a conference call. “Notre Dame defines who we at NBC Sports are: from the Olympics, to the U.S. Golf Open to Notre Dame.”

From the Olympics... to golf... to Notre Dame football! NBC sports: the home of soft-focus quasi sporting events that only appeal to white people!

Meanwhile, the Rock Report writes from an alternative universe:

Who kills the magic at Notre ame? Often times it's the very network that supports it... NBC has been a good partner, but it is time ND started demanding more from NBC.

Like ponies.

Past snark, the new NBC contract is lame for ND, the Big Ten, and college football in general. It guarantees seven home games and an eighth "neutral site" game that ND controls the gate and TV for. If you fit that into a conference framework, ND has four home games and four road games like any Big Ten team was, then three nonconference home games and a "neutral site" game... if a Big Ten team tried that their nonconference schedule would be Wisconsin's. And with home-and-home slots given over to USC, Navy (-ish), Michigan, and three Big East teams, Notre Dame is going to have to push out traditional rivals like Purdue and Michigan State to make it work.

To ND fans' credit, they loathe this state of affairs as much or more than Michigan fans hate the idea of the MAC-MAC-Utah at best-ND nonconference schedule that seems to be Michigan's fate for the next thousand years. Again, I say: the NCAA can stop this if they care to. Force five true road games a year. Limit commercial time in broadcasts. Stop trying to squeeze every nickel out of a supposedly nonprofit enterprise.

Chances of this happening: zero.

Etc.: New IU blog Cannot Falter highlights some interesting chatter from the Knight commission on APRs and infractions; here's a theory as to why Mendenhall hates Zook. 20 questions on M from the OZone... IMO, not up to Gerdeman's usual standard. Recruting notes from UMHoops.

(What a good job I did of cutting this down.)

Unverfied Voracity Points

EVENT! RBUAS posting!

Several helpful readers provided tricksy ways to unearth the pictures at the official site, so I can now provide you that super picture from the women's academy for those too lazy to dig it up themselves:


What's with the smiling chick in the upper right? Where's your intensity, lady? Barwis! Eat her!

But what about the SUPER-SUPERCONFERENCE? When the Wizard of Odds threw out a post on this a few days ago, I shrugged, but the Wiz has now linked to this nut from the Orlando Sentinel twice more and the disease has started to spread outward.

His name is Tim Stephens, and he is a very stupid man. He proposes that college football is moving inexorably towards four sixteen-team superconferences and a four-team playoff between the winners. Nevermind that the WAC was briefly a creaky sixteen-team "superconference" before all its members decided that was an incredibly stupid idea and broke off. Nevermind that it's just a matter of time before the creaky sixteen-team Big East basketball "superconference" splinters. Nevermind that he actually titles a post "could five dollar gas spur the playoff debate" (his answer: yes!) and then, like, in the very next post about his incredibly stupid idea puts Notre Dame in the Pac-10. Nevermind that every team past 12 dilutes the financial impact of a championship game.

These are all reasons that Tim Stephens is a man propounding a very stupid idea and wasting everyone's time, but the main thing is this: at the absolute most, teams will play nine conference games. When you have a "super conference" that's basically two eight-team divisions in which you play seven games and then two games against the other division, which is not a conference at all, really, and is the main reason the WAC exploded.

What a waste of time.

Precedented. A reader forwards along a Chronicle of Higher Education piece on new ADA regulations($) that would about halve the number of handicap-accessible seats stadiums are required to provide. How is this related to Michigan?

The new regulations, if unchanged after a public comment period, would be roughly comparable to the terms of a recent settlement between the federal government and the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. This spring, in response to a lawsuit over handicapped-accessible seating in its football stadium, the university agreed to provide 329 spots -- or a third of a percent of its 107,000 seats -- for fans in wheelchairs.

So even though this rough halving of the number would seem to put Michigan under the microscope again, apparently the settlement is being used as a model and we should be okay.

From the same article:

No Ferrets

Service animals are another focal point of the new regulations. The proposed rules distinguish service animals from "emotional-support animals," which they say are not covered by federal disability law. ...

Support animals, like ferrets and snakes, have been a sticking point for colleges, where students have asked to keep them in residence halls and take them to class.

That is all.

Defcon 4. Max Pacioretty is the only potential departure who hasn't publicly stated his intention to return. This is probably why:

Heard it from a very good source that he would like to sign and that Montreal wants him but the family will have none of it. At this point, put the chances of him returning for his sophomore year at about 80%.

That's the Wolverine's Mike Spath, so that's legit. I'll take 80% but the news that Patch wants to sign is unwelcome; he was telling teammates he'd be back a month or so ago. He'll be one to watch until September.

(Via Michigan Hockey Net.)

Aw, come on. Notre Dame/Halloween candy blog Rakes of Mallow is providing an overview of ND's oppnents and though they're advertised as "nearly prediction free" there is a little numerical difficulty number applied to each. North Carolina, 4-8 a year ago, warrants a 7. 4-9 Washington gets a 6. Purdue is a 5, Michigan State a 6.

Michigan? 3. The same as Stanford. I know every Notre Dame fan out there yearns for Michigan to have the same sort of Hindenberg season Notre Dame did a year ago, but... uh... not likely. Notre Dame had the second-worst offense of the decade, and outliers, probability, bell curves, binomial distributions, etc.: Michigan replicating that is highly, highly unlikely.

Etc.: I knew those fake-o new jerseys running around had boobs. Boiled Sports interviews yrs truly. Jemele Hill is sitting in timeout for comparing the Celtics to Hitler; shouldn't she be in timeout for not being interesting? Maize 'n' Brew takes issue with the preseason magazines... which is why you should by HTTV 2008!

Unverified Voracity Uses "Kudos" In A Sentence

Piled up. Kudos to the Daily's Dan Feldman, who ferreted out a ton of interesting factoids and quotes in his latest article. Remember the spread punt formation that cost Michigan the Iowa game and sent Jim Boccher into insurance or accounting or whatever? It's back:

The Wolverines will use a spread punt formation, and they will send six gunners as opposed to the two last year.

Redshirt junior Zoltan Mesko will roll out on some kicks, and said he will stretch the field as far as he needs to. And he will directional kick, which wasn't part of last year's punting plan but won't be a difficult adjustment.

"Point your body that way, and that's the way it's going," Mesko said. "It's not that difficult."

You know those rumors that Terrance Taylor wasn't buying into the system and had some issues with the coaches and conditioning? True, but maybe not a huge deal:

Taylor said his place on the depth chart was due to "clashing" between himself and the new coaches as they got used to each other's personalities.

"Situations happen, problems occur," Taylor said. "But as the (spring) season went on, things worked out. I'm going to go out there and play. No matter if I'm third, fourth, fifth team, I'm going to go out and play like I'm on the first team, so it wasn't a big deal."

You know those rumors that Darryl Stonum might not be happy? (I didn't, but a couple emailers indicate they've been scooting around message boards.) He seems to be settling in:

Sam McGuffie arrived at the airport during the clinic, and running backs coach Fred Jackson playfully scolded Stonum for signing autographs while stranding McGuffie.

Need Barwis porn?

Stonum was the only early enrollee this year. He said he arrived in Ann Arbor in January weighing about 170 pounds. He now weighs about 195 pounds and has gotten faster.

Need evidence that random middle-aged women ask way better questions than actual journalists?

When Rodriguez asked the participants in the Women's Football Academy if they had any questions, one woman asked which assistants would be on the field and which would be in the press box.

Rodriguez explained offensive coordinator Calvin Magee and quarterbacks coach Rod Smith would be upstairs so they could see the entire field.

Then he turned to Shafer to ask what his plans were. Because the staff had been so busy with recruiting and spring practice, they hadn't formalized that. Shafer said he and defensive line coach Bruce Tall would be in the press box. ...

"In my opinion, you can't see a thing on the sideline during the game," Shafer said. "Anybody that's watched a game on the sideline in between the 30-yard lines realizes that you don't know what just happened unless it's run right at your side."

Also, Terrance Robinson will get Henne's #7.

By this point I've excerpted almost half the article and seriously pushed the boundaries of fair use. There's more original information in this one article than the Free Press has published in the past week. Contrast their article on the women's football academy with the Daily's: you get all that relevant info in the Daily; in the Free Press you get to find out that Rod Smith compares passing to Tae Bo.

Dear Daily: a winner is you.

Speakin' of... did I freak you out about Stonum and then drop it? Sorry. I will attempt to repair the hurt. A reader forwarded along this message Stonum sent out to Myspace friends:

I got a comment today about me being unhappy at Michigan and wanting to possibly transfer. I just want to take the time to let everyone know it's all rumors. I'm very content with my situation in Ann Arbor and want to wait and see how things play out before I make that kind of decision. I hope all this gossip can stop so I can just go about my business and play football. I love the tradition and hope to live up to all of your expectations.

All due Myspace caution applies (though the Bryce McNeal stuff turned out to be basically correct, if premature); Stonum will be around in the fall but I think Rodriguez will have to pass a bit more to keep the receiving talent Michigan's collected happy.

I loathe MGoBlue's new picture gallery software, which doesn't allow you to save or even link to specific pictures, but there are some great ones in the academy gallery. #39 is a particular favorite.

Scoutin'. The hockey team recently acquired a recruited walk-on from the same school as 2009 D recruit Mac Bennett. Bob Miller took the opportunity to get a scouting report on one Luke Glendening from Bennett. Bennett's favorite thing about Glendening? He uses the point a ton in the offensive zone, naturally. Also:

He's in the gym day in a day out and you can tell that he wants to get better. He was told that he was going to be a "support" player, but with his work ethic and determination I wouldnt be surprised if he ended up being a fourth line player. He's definitely someone that you want on your team and someone you don't want to play against.

Meet the new JJ Swistak/Charlie Henderson/Danny Fardig?

Schedulin'. Michigan's just released the hockey schedule. Michigan State, Ohio State, and Miami are Michigan's clustermates, which should be fun. (In the CCHA, you play everyone twice and two extra games against three teams in your "cluster"; State is always in Michigan's cluster.)

The nonconference:

• two home games against St. Lawrence
• A Thursday(!) home game against Niagara, followed immediately by
• a Saturday game at BU
• Minnesota and Wisconsin on the road, and
• the GLI.

Michigan's opening GLI opponent will be Tech; North Dakota is the guest this year. There are no games at the Palace or in Fort Wayne or anything.

Does it seem like the schedule is short a couple games? Michigan trips to Alaska this year. Those games are exempted by the NCAA and should allow Michigan another couple nonconference matchups.

Etc.: This has to be the most unlikely thing that's ever shown up on youtube: a six-minute Johnny Sears highlight reel. No... seriously. Elsewhere, Dave Barry scouts Chad Henne and Jake Long, and Rodriguez blah blah blah West Virginia blah blah.

Unverified Voracity Debunks

Uh, no. I've gotten a couple worried emails recently about Michigan's new Adidas uniforms. This image is making the rounds, purporting to be the new duds:

For the record: this is an internet hoax. I don't know what those hideous things are but I assume they're from Walmart. I've seen downriver types wear gaudy "jerseys" sort of like this. I'm surprised anyone bought it, especially since the "away" jersey appears to have, like, boobs.

So maybe it's ironic that the first glimpse of the new jerseys comes from the Michigan women's football camp:

They are exactly the same as the old jerseys except the Nike logo has been replaced with an Adidas one. And, yes, these two are in the running to be starting offensive linemen this fall.

The away jerseys are yet to be revealed; I am on Piping Watch.

hhhhWHAT? Every preseason poll yet published has omitted Michigan from even the 20-25 range normally inhabited by the hot midmajor or, like, Purdue. This seems an entirely reasonable thing to do with Michigan transitioning to an entirely new offensive system without any seniors of note on that side of the ball. So... uh... what does Vegas see? National championship odds:

1. USC 3/1
2. Ohio State 6/1
2. Florida 6/1
2. Georgia 6/1
2. Oklahoma 6/1
6. LSU 12/1
7. Missouri 14/1
8. Clemson 22/1
9. WVU 25/1
10(t). Michigan 30/1
10(t). Texas 30/1

I don't know how much of this is Vegas actually pumping Michigan as a top ten team and how much is Vegas pumping gullible Michigan fans for cash, but... wow. If only you could short these bets.

Ragin'. Former Ohio State linebacker Robert Reynolds has been suspended by the NFL for a year after testing positive for steroids. He'll likely retire. Raise your hand if you're shocked that the guy who choked Jim Sorgi is on the juice. No one? Ok.

Etc.: SMQB tackles Wisconsin. Commentary withheld until my own Wisconsin preview, during which I'll no doubt crib from, cite, and argue with his piece plenty. Also:
Elliot Mealer fluff.

Unverified Voracity Consumes Human Flesh

Alcorn State, home of the epigram. Terry Bowden's latest column for Yahoo starts with this accurate, bizarre explanation of college football from a former Alcorn State head coach Marino Casem:

“In the East, college football is a cultural exercise.

On the West Coast, it is a tourist attraction.

In the Midwest, it is cannibalism.

But in the South, college football is a religion, and every Saturday is a holy day.”

Emphasis mine, because !?!?!?!. Mr. Casem's been spending too much time around Ohio State fans.

Tick tock. Michael Shaw is one of the Michigan recruits participating in the annual Big 33 game, a high-school all-star game played between Ohio and Pennsylvania. There has been some mild controversy (read: AAAARGH DESTROY MICHIGAN) about Shaw's last-second switch to the Wolverines after being a Penn State commit for about six months. PennLive talked to Shaw about what went down:

Michael Shaw heard the complaints over his last-minute change of heart to attend Michigan instead of Penn State.

Sometimes, the 18-year-old running back from Trotwood, Ohio wishes he hadn't.

"I just want to be 18," Shaw said during Thursday's Big 33 youth clinic. "It was probably the biggest decision of my life. I lost so much sleep, but at the same time, I mean, nothing is guaranteed. If it was guaranteed ... it would be signed on paper instead of a verbal commitment."

And how about yet another nail in the "snake oil" coffin? Sure, at this point the coffin is about 98% nails, but we've still got two percent left:

Michigan and Lloyd Carr stayed in contact with Shaw after he verbally committed to Penn State, inviting him to Ohio State-Michigan and a few other games.

THINK OF THE GENTLEMEN, LLOYD! THINK OF THE GENTLEMEN!

[don't read the next one if you don't want a Top Chef Spoiler. Weirdo.]

Good at things. The guy who's leading the US Open went to Michigan (via). And so did the most recent Top Chef winner. And so did Jesus.* Awesome!

Hail Toledo. Ever since the NCAA hockey tournament went to sixteen teams and four regionals, the CCHA has been perilously close to getting screwed by the committee; this year it happened when there were no acceptable bids in the conference's territory and, as a result, the top two seeds in the tournament got shipped to Albany and Madison. Lame. The problem is two-fold: though the NCAA apparently has no problem putting regionals on Colorado College's home ice -- an Olympic sheet at altitude -- Michigan's back-to-back Yost regionals caused a massive backlash and Michigan's been unable to host since. Other than Munn, which for some inexplicable reason MSU has been loathe to bid with, there are no appropriately sized rinks in the area save for Van Andel in Grand Rapids. Western hosts there about every other year, but the NCAA doesn't want it hosting all the time. Thus last year's fiasco.

Help is on the way. Western College Hockey points to the Lucas County Arena, which is being erected in Toledo as we speak and will be ready for 2009. Bowling Green has already submitted a regionals bid at the arena. It'll be brand new, it's centrally located, and relatively convenient to get to -- Toledo has an airport and NWA hub Detroit Metro is 45 minutes away. It should be a regular NCAA tourney host, and hopefully a regular stop for Michigan fans.

Speaking of: Michigan has bids in for Yost in the coming years, too... maybe they should bid at this place? You host, you get to stay home. It's silly for the CCHA to have Western and BG bid only to see those teams not make the field.

Etc.: Paul DePodesta has a blogspot blog and it's pretty smart; this post is about dissasociating outcome from process and it heavily reflects my worldview. There is a class action lawsuit pending against EA claiming they have unfairly monopolized licenses for football games; godspeed, lawsuit guys.

*(probably.)

Unverified Voracity Challenges You To A Duel

It is for quiz. Clay Travis throws down the gauntlet to blog-bashers in his latest CBS Sportsline piece:

Five bloggers that have agreed to participate will take on a team of five of the most talented, educated and intelligent mainstream sportswriters that are willing to compete against them. Hopefully the roster will feature at least a few of the recent blogger insulters (Bob Costas, Buzz Bissinger, Rick Reilly, Michael Wilbon) you name the mainstream media members who are willing and there's a blogging team ready to play them for charity.

And, as a bonus, we'll let the captain of the mainstream media team select a charity they would like to raise money for. So, for example, if he's willing to participate, we would be happy to send all the proceeds to fund more of Reilly's mosquito nets in Africa. In fact it would be ideal if Reilly, given his frequent and vituperative criticism of sports bloggers and his new boffo column deal, was willing to put together his own team. Even if Reilly's not a member of the mainstream media we'll be willing to let him join.

There's more, including a brief section on yrs truly, one of the distinguished panelists. If anyone who's taken a shot at blogs is reading this, 1) your father was a hamster and your mother smells of elderberries and 2) seriously, step up to the plate. Money goes to a good cause and I can't answer any questions except those about my mother's basement. (Example Q: who did you cut open during the Great Lego Battle of Thanksgiving 2005? A: Tom.) You will wipe the floor with us. I can barely spell.

O ZOMBIE RLY? Penn State fans are super-excited that they've raided Maryland something wicked in this recruiting cycle, but, uh...

COMMITTED	Pos	Stars	Ht	Wt	40	RR	Hometown
Eric Shrive	OL		6-7	285	5.1	6.0	Scranton, PA
Darrell Givens	DB		6-0	170	4.46	5.8	Indian Head, MD
Sean Stanley	DE		6-2	250	4.7	5.8	Gaithersburg, MD
Brandon Felder	WR		6-2	167	4.43	5.7	Oxon Hill, MD
Ty Howle	OL		6-2	290	-	5.7	Bunn, NC
Derrick Thomas	DB		6-0	176	4.49	5.7	Greenbelt, MD
Mark Arcidiacono	OL		6-4	289	-	5.5	Philadelphia, PA
Stephon Morris	DB		5-8	172	4.48	5.5	Greenbelt, MD
Stephen Obeng-Agyapong	DB		5-10	174	4.5	5.5	Bronx, NY
Malcolm Willis	DB		5-11	201	4.64	5.5	Indian Head, MD
Curtis Drake	QB		6-0	175	4.49	-	Philadelphia, PA
Frank Figueroa	OL		6-4	282	5.2	-	Alexandria, VA

...is this recruiting to be excited about? Dominating Maryland football recruiting is like doing a killer job finding hockey players in Ohio.

Shrive's their only top 100 recruit and of their 12 commits only three have four stars. This looks exactly like 2008, when they had one non-linebacker pick up four stars, or 2005, when the Justin King-Derrick Williams duo overshadowed a class long on signees (19) but short on talent (only four of them got more than three stars. Penn State has gone back to its recruiting style from the early portion of the decade, when they would lock up a host of marginal prospects -- "QB" recruit Curtis Drake's only other offer was from Northwestern -- early.

You can get away with that stuff here and there when you uncover a diamond in the rough -- talented if somewhat asshatted DT Chris Baker was a two-star, Braylon Edwards, all those anonymous guys from Ohio State's secondary -- but in general you either recruit like a national contender or you don't, and Penn State isn't.

If you believe recruiting rankings matter (and you should), Penn State's lining itself up for more of the same. This is a complete list of offensive skill position players with more than three stars acquired since 2006:

• Chris Bell (off the team after machete incident)
• Pat Devlin
• Andrew Quarless (hanging by a thread, their Carson Butler)
• Brent Carter
• Brandon Beachum
• Michael Shaw (snake oil enthusiast)
  

That's one QB, one TE, and two RBs in three and a half classes; Michigan has locked down that many four star skill position recruits in the 2009 class. I think I might harp on this a bit more than I should, but this article in the Inquirer set me off. It unrealistically portrays everything as hunky-dory in Penn State land, when I, and most other Michigan fans, would be freaking out given the last four years of results on the field and in the star realm. Hell, I'm still a little freaked out about this year's class, and it features seven four-stars amongst nine recruits so far.

Ohio State? Killing it. They are not going away, not like you expected them to.

Assistant to the. Fluff on Mike Debord has this paragraph embedded:

DeBord was a candidate to replace Lloyd Carr as the head coach at the University of Michigan, and when that did not pan out, he opted to take a job as assistant offensive line coach for the Seattle Seahawks.

I was also a candidate to replace Lloyd Carr but opted to not wear pants.

I drive a Benzing. Spectacularly named new MLive author "Philip Zaroo" provides a post detailing John Beilein's latest appearance on WTKA:

"Robin would only be an emergency center/big man type of kid," Beilein said. "He's a straight-out forward. He could play either the three or the four at 6-10 1/2.

The comparison always made is Dirk Nowitski, so expect him to hang out on the perimeter a bunch. Most expect Benzing will have to sit out 2008 after playing on a professional team (but not getting paid) in Germany.

Dude. Sporting News is relaunching, and amongst their new contributors:

Lloyd Carr and the Legends Football Coaching Association
See a different game with Michigan's Lloyd Carr, UCLA's Terry Donahue, Alabama's Gene Stallings and dozens of famous college football contributors.

Hopefully he writes a media-crit column.

Etc: UMTailgate takes a look back at Moellergate; Tim from VB 1) fell four stories, 2) isn't dead, 3) has a broken spine. But he's answering mailbag questions. Hardcore. (FYI: this QB we've offered is 2010.) Michigan has not one top 25 vote across ten preseason polls.

Unverified Voracity Is Sweaty

Dude? Dude:

Spartanburg quarterback Jones gets offer from Michigan

What about Beaver/Newsome? This Jones guy is a rising junior. And this is how he got his offer:

Cornelius Jones hasn’t played a down for the Spartanburg Vikings varsity football team yet, but Michigan has seen enough to offer him a scholarship.

The junior quarterback received his first offer Tuesday, after Vikings coach Freddie Brown sent the Big Ten school a five-minute video of Jones from a scrimmage.

That is a hell of a five-minute video. The article mentions that Jones hasn't played forSpartanburg in "a couple of years" because he "got in some trouble"... what kind of trouble can an eighth-grader get in? Don't answer that.

Burl Ives. The NHL draft approaches, and Red Line Report ranks incoming blueliner Brandon Burlon one of the top ten available. Okay, it's #10, but still:

Brandon Burlon rounds out Red Line's top 10 list. There's not much buzz about him, but we feel he'd be a solid choice anywhere after No. 20. He's got great feet and a mean edge. He's as fundamentally sound in his own end as any defender in the draft, and we think he's got some untapped offensive potential as well.

Yost Built has a little more on Burlon and notes Greg Pateryn is projected by one Sabres site as a potential fifth-round target. Not bad for a guy who was promised very little scholarship money.

Stones. Michigan's baseball team may have received some unexpected good news in the MLB draft, when two draft-eligible juniors fell to the fifth round. Jason Christian, rated at about the end of the third round, was picked by the As. He's widely expected to sign and the relatively small drop probably won't affect that.

Zach Putnam, however, has to be disappointed after he fell to the second-to-last pick of the fifth round after widely being projected as a sandwich pick or even a late first-rounder. Juniors usually sign because they lose their leverage if they return, but Putnam's drop might motivate him to return. Baseball America:

The Indians finally put Zach Putnam out of his misery, taking him with the penultimate pick of the fifth round. If the Indians put him in the bullpen, expect him to move quickly with his fastball-splitter mix. However, Putnam might prove to be a tough sign this low. Suffice it to say he’s had an enigmatic career when it comes to scouts, who seem to like him less than his performance would indicate.

A recent change in the draft rules allows teams that draft college juniors to retain their rights until a couple weeks before the next year's draft. (High schoolers have to be signed by August 15th.) If Putnam thinks he's been shorted, he could return to Michigan in the hopes he has a wicked pissah of a senior year and either forces the Indians to shell out considerably above slot or watch him re-enter the draft (and hopefully go much higher). His situation bears watching, which is more than you could say before the draft.

Meanwhile, the Indians went Michigan mad, drafting Adam Abraham with the 411th pick and Nate Recknagel with the 591st. Cislo and Fetter were not drafted; Mike Powers went in the 31st round to the Mets. We'll know about everyone's fate by August 15th.

Raise a glass to the NCAA hockey rules committee. In marked contrast to the constantly blundering football committee, they've made every effort to improve the game. To wit, the rules changes for this year:

No change after an icing. As per the NHL rule that everyone loves.

Limited-application shootout. When I heard college hockey might be considering the addition of a shootout, I was pretty leery. The Pairwise is so jittery and shootouts are so random that instituting them would add even more weirdness to the NCAA's selection criteria. But this seems okay:

In a release from the NCAA today, it says the rules committee has voted to maintain the current game structure of 60 minutes, followed by a five-minute overtime, but individual conferences are allowed to use a shootout at their discretion.

The shootout could be used to award points towards the league race, though any game decided by a shootout would go into the record book for NCAA Tournament qualifying purposes as a tie.

I'm still not a big fan of the idea -- seems gimmicky -- but if those are the rules any grumbling I have is minor.

All games have two referees now. This one I'm not so sure of. The CCHA had zero competent referees at last count and will now have twice as many incompetent ones. OTOH, cutting down an incompetent ref's responsibilities should edge him towards competence, or at least consistency. We'll see how it goes.

All faceoffs are held on faceoff dots. This is a minor change but a good one. Those faceoffs right inside the blue line have always bothered me. Your reward for winning one is the puck outside of the zone and a dump-in. Now those will be from the proper dots inside the zone, and winning one will lead to a scoring chance. More chances == always good.

Only in Ohio. Ha-ha:

A Cleveland-area principal says he's embarrassed his students got proof of their "educaiton" on their high school diplomas.

Westlake High School officials misspelled "education" on the diplomas distributed last weekend. It's been the subject of mockery on local radio.

(Via MATW.)

Etc.: You remember these?

Mike Barwis had one, and some wolves.

Unverified Voracity Reveals Shameful Past

Michigan Hockey Summers. All due caveats apply, but it looks like defenseman Chris Summers is sticking around for his junior year. There's a Wolverine article titled "Summers committed to future at Michigan"($) that teases he's "shown no signs of wanting to be anywhere but Ann Arbor next year" and has some direct quotes from Summers to that effect.

With Mark Mitera publicly stating an intent to return, the lone guy on the watchlist who hasn't made his intentions explicit is freshman forward Max Pacioretty. Most observers expect him to return.

Also, I am terribly sorry for the bad pun.

Metagame. This is either going to crush my standing in the eyes of readers or be perfectly obvious given my status as a computer engineer/blogger, but for a brief time I was kinda into the online version of Magic: The Gathering. I stress online here... no conventions wherein I wear a "VULCANS DO IT LOGICALLY... BUT ONLY ONCE EVERY SEVEN YEARS" tshirt. At least not since high school.


Anyway, during this brief period I read a number of articles about Magic tournaments, which are pretty interesting strategically. There are draft and sealed formats in which you attempt to make the best deck out of a random assortment of cards, but more interesting for our purposes are "constructed" tournaments wherein you can bring whatever you want from home.

Magic, like many games, has a distinct rock-paper-scissors aspect to it. If you have a Goblins deck it could tear through anything that's particularly slow but be weak against a "Control" deck designed to keep everything dead or immobile. And Magic, like many games, often inspires copycats when one strategy tends to win a number of tournaments in a row. Once Goblins start rampaging everywhere, everyone thinks that's the way to win and runs them, and it's at this point your lame-o Control deck can show up, lock everything down, and coast to victory. If this happens a bunch, the metagame starts getting split between Goblins and Control and a third thing that might do okay against both gets added in and so on and so forth. At any one time, there are usually two or three dominant archetypes and then scattered weirdos trying to invent a new one and almost always failing. When a weirdo breaks through, though...

The parallel to football is obvious. Rich Rodriguez and Urban Meyer and a few others were the breakthrough weirdos running a spread-option look; now the metagame has started to shift towards lots of little guys on the field at once. The Big Ten by offensive style:

• Spread Option: Minnesota, Illinois, Michigan, Penn State(? - probably), Northwestern, Indiana
• Passing Spread: Purdue.
• Three yards and a cloud of dust: Ohio State, Michigan State, Wisconsin, Iowa

This fall more than half the league will be running some form of Rodriguez's offense. With this in mind, some quotes from those coaches in Iraq. (Via.) Mark Richt:

If you've gonna play in a league where everybody's going to pound the ball down after down, you better have some big strong interior defensive linemen and your middle linebacker better be a big, thick joker that can take on a fullback and knock him back.

But if all of a sudden those guys get spread out and there are some really quick cats running around there, you want to have some defenders running around, too. I think people will even get to run more light defensive personnel, their quicker, faster guys that can keep up with that.

Once you put these great athletes out in space -- most coaches will say space is the enemy of a defender because it's tough to wrap up a guy where there so much space to deal with -- you better have a bunch of quick guys who can pursue and close in on those offensive players.

Jack Siedlicki (Yale's coach):

I'm the contrarian in the group. The last two years, we have the best tailback in the league. We gave him the ball 400 times last year. It's kind of worked to our advantage. What Mark's saying, defenses are standing more guys up, getting more guys with speed that can spread out and line up with all these teams. It's kind of worked to our advantage that we're at the other end of the spectrum right now. We're a conservative, by modern standards right now, running football team with the best back in the league. He was the player of the year in the league and we got him back next year. I think it's worked to our advantage that people have gotten smaller, quicker, lighter. We're going after them.

You can see an echo of this in the success of Michigan State and Ohio State last year despite having barely adequate quarterbacks.

My main concern with Rodriguez going forward is that Michigan missed the optimal window for the spread. Even if it remains effective, everyone's going to run it and Michigan's comparative advantage will again be based on talent and motivation. That's not exactly a downer given that Michigan now has the highest-paid S&C coach in the country and Rodriguez made a living off unearthing Pat White and Steve Slaton, but I do think the likelihood Michigan ever reaches the lofty YPC numbers West Virginia did is low.

Is it the "coming demise" of the spread, as predicted in the "via" link above? Not likely. The I-formation was just a fad for 40 years, and then West Coast passing games, etc. If you can effectively use all eleven players on a run, that's a lasting advantage all the 220-pound defensive ends in the world can't eliminate. Just ask Rutgers and their notoriously undersized, quick, and effective defensive line.

Etc.: UMHoops reviews Deshawn Sims' season.

Unverified Voracity Seeks Help

Banner contest reminder: Entries are due on Monday. Due to the large number of entries we'll have a two-stage polling process. Stage one will whittle down the entries to four or five, and stage two will pick a winner.

It begins. With Hail to the Victors 2008 mostly put to bed, attention now turns to the other major project of the offseason: getting MGoBlog off Blogger and onto a platform that supports a bunch of other features I've wanted forever-ever. After evaluating a bunch of blogging platforms and CMSes, I've settled on Drupal.

After a few days pounding away at MGoBlog 3.0, my initial reaction is: this is going to be so cool if I don't go insane and do something rash like challenge Charlie Weis to deep-fried-butter-eating contest or try to dunk on Jason Maxiell. If you've got mad Drupal chops and can answer questions like "Images: wtf?" and "WYSIWIG editors: wtf?" and "am I going to kill performance by enabling like 600 modules, wtf?" please drop me a line.

It's on. Michigan did get its regional, but the vagaries of the seeding were pretty harsh to their chances. After losing their first seventeen games of the year, Eastern Michigan ran through the MAC tournament to earn an autobid. They're still below .500; they're one of the worst teams in the tournament. They get Arizona in the first round. This is bad in two ways:

• Eastern's unlikely to do Michigan the favor of knocking off Arizona, and
• Arizona's likely to throw their #3 starter out against the Eagles in the hopes they can get their #1 and #2 in favorable matchups against Michigan or Kentucky.

The winner of this regional draws national #1 seed Miami's regional in the super-regional next weekend, which means Arizona is the last #1 and Michigan the top #2; unfortunately their relative paths are nowhere near equal. At least the Fish will have a vested interest in seeing EMU win in the early game.

Maloney talks smack:

"Everybody else is saying we don't have any chance," Maloney told the players in their locker room. "So we've got to go out and show them. ... They're crying because they have to come here."

Ticket information is here; if you're in town you should try to make it out.

Bring the barf bags. I probably shouldn't even link this since it will cause an eruption in the comments, but Jesus, man:



Yeeech.

A palate cleanser:

Unverified Voracity Lists Insultees

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.

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.'

Howard also referenced the "raggedy" search process, which is kind, IMO.

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.

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.

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:

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.

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.

Expecting an apology from TMQ in 3... 2... 1... never.

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.

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.

I felt strongly about three things in the whole Bissinger meltdown:

• 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.
  

This is not to say I don't like Leitch, a good writer with his heart in the right place, I just don't like Deadspin so much now that it's gone from the Leitch show to sometimes Leitch but quite often a bunch of other dudes who seem fundamentally meaner than him.

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

Other than Mourning and maybe Bielema and Boren, I feel pretty safe. The rest of them are either little dudes or so vastly out of shape I could just run away. (Chris Webber is neither but has no knees.)

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.

Unverified Voracity Defeats Tornadoes

Tom Harmon would be proud. In 1943, Tom Harmon's plane went down in a tropical storm over South America. Four days and fifty miles later, a half-dead Harmon stumbled into a clearing in French Guina, swearing eternal revenge against tornadoes, hurricanes, tropical depressions, cyclones, tsunamis, and those little swirling eddies you get on fall days. Anything that was wind moving in a vaguely circular direction was in for it.

Though Harmon pwned the Amazon, sired models, and singlehandedly defeated Tojo, he never defeated his nemesis. But you, the anonymous mass of Michigan internet people, did, raising over seven thousand dollars in three days, completely defeating severe weather events forever.

These are your just rewards:


I commend you. Some guy forwarded along his $500 confirmation letter to me and asked if that was worth an MGoWish: yes, it is. Anyone else with a similarly large heart can forward along their confirmation email and gently influence this blog's direction over the summer.

Michigan's total was

• over a third of the total amount,
• nearly three times that of runner-up Ohio State, and
  
• more than the next six teams combined.

Jesus. Orson's moral is "never get in a fundraising war with Michigan"; mine is "I really should be asking for more donations."

Excuse fatwa! Boiled Sports took the recent Weis yammering and dug up some more of Charlie's greatest hits. Of the listed, my favorite:

"What happened came as a surprise," Weis said. "But I'm not going to use it as an excuse and say our team was distracted."

No, clearly you're not going to say that. We've pointed this out before, but this is like saying, "Your sister's low-cut top and huge tits came as a surprise to me, but I'm not going to insult you and call her a whore."

Weis is inordinately fond of saying that he's not going to use this obviously valid thing he just said as an excuse. He just letting you know that despite the fact he's got an emu at quarterback and five narcoleptics on the offensive line, he's not using that as an excuse.

Ugh. Fanhouse post up on the percentage of BCS opponents each conference takes on, and guess what? The Big Ten is dead last at 29%. Seven of the thirteen games against BCS competition are versus Notre Dame (3), Syracuse (2), Iowa State, and Duke, teams that were a combined 9-39 last year. The entire slate of decent nonconference opposition:

• Missouri vs Illinois (neutral site game in St. Louis)
• Iowa @ Pitt
• MSU @ Cal
• OSU @ USC
• Oregon State @ PSU
• Oregon @ Purdue

It's probably not fair to completely dismiss the Notre Dame games since those are all long-standing rivalries scheduled with the idea Notre Dame won't be coming off the second-worst offensive performance of the millennium, but even if you count them that's nine games across eleven teams.

Minnesota, Northwestern, and Indiana didn't sign up anyone even slightly worthwhile, but Minnesota lost to North Dakota State and Northwestern to Duke so they had the choice between competitive games against Wofford or getting housed, I guess. Indiana is Indiana. Wisconsin, however, has no excuses for yet another nonconference schedule with zero BCS teams.

In a word: weak.

Landing places. There was a thread on Rivals asking where everyone from Carr's staff landed which was interesting enough to appropriate for use here:

Basically Comparable

• Ron English went from Michigan DC to Louisville DC.
• Vance Bedford went from secondary coach at Michigan to CBs coach at Florida.
• Steve Szabo went from Michigan LBs coach to DC at I-AA Colgate.
• Scot Loeffler went from Michigan QB coach to the Lions QB coach. (This would normally count as a step up, but it's the Lions.)
• Erik Campbell went from Michigan WR coach to Iowa WR coach.
• Fred Jackson is still at Michigan as the RBs coach.

All these folk landed on their feet. Even if Louisville and Iowa are steps down from Michigan, finding a comparable assistant position at a good BCS school a few months after you lose your job in a coaching changeover is tough. English and Campbell were amongst the top targets on the market. Bedford may have been, though his connection with Florida co-DC Greg Mattison helps. Lions jokes aside, Loeffler got a promotion and will probably be a college OC somewhere within five years. Szabo's an interesting case: is being DC at a I-AA program equal to being a position coach at Michigan? Probably not, but it's not far off and Colgate's pretty decent from appearances.

Uh, not so much.

• Andy Moeller went from OL coach at Michigan to assistant (to the) Ravens' OL coach.
• Mike Debord went from OC at Michigan to assistant (to the) Seahawks' OL coach.
  
• Steve Stripling appears to be unemployed.

Michigan guaranteed its coaches their 2008 salaries before the changeover, so it's possible Stripling is just waiting for the right opportunity or spending the year bathed in pudding or something.

Moeller and Debord, well... even Terry Malone got to be the Saints' tight ends coach, not assistant (to the) tight ends coach. Jim Herrmann is the Jets' linebackers coach. The only Michigan coach to meet a grislier fate was grad assistant Jim Boccher, who guided Michigan's special teams to devastating implosions against Oregon and Iowa in 2003 and immediately went into real estate or something.

All told, the landing spots roughly match up with fan opinion of the coaches, don't they? Debord and Moeller are poison, Loeffler is the best, the rest of the staff is solid but unspectacular with the possible exception of Ron English's untapped upside.

Yes! Yes! Yes! Brandon at Garnet and Black Attack must not read this blog, but I don't care, he can be Leibnitz:

PROPOSED: That college football fans support a six-team playoff format.

Why six teams? Because it maintains a good deal of the drama of the regular season. There would still be a lot on the line: Lose one game, and you might not get a first-week bye (see the bracket below). Lose two games, and you might not even make the tournament.

His BCS conference-champs only version will never fly -- not that my version would -- since the little guys and Notre Dame will block it, and I don't like it because sometimes it's clear two of the top six teams are in the same conference.

There were some protests lodged against the proposed system that I'll get to in whenever I do a mailbag, but I wanted to address this MOTSAG post:

Brian’s MGoPlayoff system (which, btw, was written right after OSU knocked UM out of contention for the 2006 title) is very typical of most playoff ideas, in that it doesn’t require nor ask for any changes to the poll system to be made. They’re largely just variations of the same flawed idea.

Bzzzt:

E. By committee. A dedicated team of people who do this year-round and are geographically distributed.

Polls are sucky, conflict-of-interest-laden things to determine a playoff field. The only way to do it is to get a half-dozen very serious people to pore over the records and statistics and opponent records and opponent's opponent's records and etc etc etc. I do appreciate MOTSAG's suggestion to actually use the Blogpoll to determine end-of-season things, except... wait. No I don't. People would kill me.

Etc.: Lake The Posts points to this Athlon study showing that recruiting rankings are excellent predictors of the NFL draft. Nothing new if you read SMQB, but more fuel for the fire.