Option 1: Socialism

The NCAA can do this -- they enforce letters of intent, game limits, sanction bowls, etc. They have the power to make teams honor the contracts they sign and even restrict the number of home games a team plays. Options:

• Restrict teams to two or (preferably) one guarantee games per year.
• Create a "letter of scheduling intent" that's binding. Teams can move games around, but they have to play 'em at some point, say five years after the game was originally scheduled.
• Put a hard limit on the number of home games... six or seven, likely seven.

Draconian measures all, but the NCAA has the power to make players sit out when they transfer and enforce binding letters of intent.

The inception of the LOI is a good model for what we're talking about here. Before the LOI, teams could poach players up until they showed up on campus. When a few teams started doing so, more teams followed in order to keep their programs on a level playing field, a situation directly analagous to some teams' attempts to schedule their way to fun and profit by lining up patsies. Once a few major contenders smoothed the path to the national championship game, everyone followed because it was in their interest. The NCAA finds themselves in a situation where each team's desire for individual profit hurts the overall product. The argument for scheduling restrictions is similar to that which compels professional leagues to implement salary caps: the main product of sports association is competition; maximizing that competition benefits everyone.

Note that any of these draconian measures will probably hurt a large number of low-level D-I football teams and possibly send a dozen or more down to I-AA, and we should be fine with that. There are no inalienable rights to D-I football. The Sun Belt should know better.

Option 2: Restructuring

Outside of a fairly unlikely NCAA smackdown the best chance for meaningful nonconference games is to make them... er... less meaningful. As of now any non-conference loss is almost a deathblow to one's national championship chances; at the very least it leaves no room for error. Short of making national championships unimportant, the only way to fix this is to expand the playoff system to more than two teams. Yes, "playoff." We've already established what the BCS is. Now we're just arguing quantity.

An eight team playoff -- one of the much-discussed topics of last offseason -- would hurt the unique tension of the regular season somewhat but would reduce the pressure to schedule nonconference games that appear to be easy wins, as there's always the conference championship escape hatch. That combined with increased demand for televisable games going forward could shift the nonconference equation enough to make competitive games the preferred option for power schools. As discussed before, the playoff should be structured to preserve the tension of the regular season as much as possible, which means major advantages bestowed upon the top teams: home games in the first and second round.

Pointless, all of this, but it's a long way to September.

Since there hasn't been an Unverified Voracity in a while, some of these links might fall under the category of Lincoln shot.

Feldman sure does talk about Michigan a lot, and this is probably why:

In truth, I get more e-mails from frustrated Michigan fans than any other.

And this is probably why that happens:

"Consistently, this is the most underachieving program in the country," says one NFL scout. "Although FSU seems to be closing the gap a little."

Yerk. Not so appealing. However, Feldman's next entry also provides an important bit of information that should reassure most:

The big break-through guy for him sounds like DE-OLB Tim Jamison. English must've used the word "explosive" five different times while talking about him. Between Jamison, LaMarr Woodley and Shawn Crable, the Wolverines have a ton of talent there that English should be able to shift all over the place and cause a lot of headaches for opposing QBs.

Steepled fingers: "exxxxcellent." Attempting to determine whether the defense will come together is a fruitless task, but at least we appear ready to put the best players out there. Also garnering praise from English are Branch (duh) and Charles Stewart, who has "has really matured and now has a better understanding of the defense."

One more item on Mallett: he is likely going to be a January enrollee (scroll down) a la Grady, Brown, and Boren.

Further evidence that Ohio State is a bit of a southern outlier. I mean, you got the cheatin', chewin', and cheerin' already. Now this...

...which must adorn rec-rooms all over rural Ohio. Deadspin has that story and also pictures of a Nugent action figure. Dios mio, man.

College hockey is the popular place to be of late, says the Grand Forks Herald... but the precarious status of the CHA conference threatens the further expansion of the Great Unknown Game and by proxy the 16-team tournament. Air Force is leaving the conference to join Atlantic Hockey (for some reason... AH does have Army), leaving the CHA one team short of the six required for autobid status. They can continue on for a couple years at reduced capacity, but college hockey has a problem that isn't going away any time soon.

There are four power conferences, and they're all essentially full. The CHA is a monstrosity cobbled together featuring teams from Alabama, Michigan, Minnesota, New York, and Pennsylvania that exists solely to house teams that have nowhere else to go. Any school looking to add hockey glances at the situation and backs out -- realignment is a requirement.

Ginorbous Etc: Maize 'n' Brew discusses the Graham Brown-as-TE theory; The Sun-Times profiles Jason Avant; Joey scouts Deshawn Sims (who has signed a letter of intent, people); Wheatley is back to finish his degree; Vijay takes apart the Weis made Brady theory of maximum annoyance.

All hail Vijay, for he is beneficient and wise, having figured out the proper way to make torrents of old Michigan games for the masses. He has posted a torrent for the Michigan-Auburn Citrus Bowl of 2001 here for your downloading pleasure.

Some of you may be asking "what is a torrent and how much spyware does it come with?" Happily the answers are "total awesomeness" and "zero." BitTorrent is a peer-to-peer networking protocol that drastically reduces load for servers by using the largely dormant upstream capacity of other downloaders. In short, everyone downloads from one originator and everyone else downloading at the same time.

To use Bittorrent, you need a client program -- I use Azureus* -- and a torrent to download. Download and install your client, click on the torrent link, and viola: extremely large file on your hard drive. The most important thing to do when you download a torrent is to stay on the line after the download is complete, thus allowing other downloaders to use your bandwidth. This is called seeding. The more seeds, the faster everyone gets the file and the more the love gets spread.

*(Azureus is written in Java, so you may need the Java runtime if you haven't installed it already.)

4/25/2006 - Edmonton 4-3 Detroit (2OT) - Edmonton leads 2-1

First perhaps I must explain something, having received a request or two to turn my attention Wings-ward during the collegiate-sports-free zone we have now entered: I hate the Red Wings. This came as a bit of a surprise when it first happened. I had never disassociated myself from a team solely because I found them distasteful, but after a long series of futile deadline deals and outlandish contracts for elderly stars I found that I could stands quite a lot but I could stands no more. The acquisition of Chris Chelios, who was a dirty hateful hack in Chicago and still is, was the powerful last straw that severed my last tie to the Winged Wheel.

Why? One theory is the baseball theory. I have long harbored no interest whatsoever for baseball except a violent hatred for the Yankees and everything they stand for. By the time I had divorced the Wings I had taken to calling them the New York Hockey Yankees. I know, it's weird, and you can probably defend a lot of things short of spending sixteen million dollars -- half Edmonton's entire payroll -- for Dominik Hasek and Curtis Joseph as wise moves that weren't out of whack with NHL pay scales, but then you'd have to ignore that $80 million total and stick your fingers in your ears and go "la la la can't hear you" whenever someone tried to explain basic concepts of economics to you. And you don't want to do that, do you?

However, I think that was probably just a cover. Fans, like extremely political people, can justify just about anything if they have a mind to. Rationality and balance have no place in sports fandom, so there must have been something emotional at the root. You can find that root in the fans. Consider, for a moment, the two arenas: the two games at the Joe were tepid affairs with a lower bowl just as half-empty as it is during the regular season. Lawyers chat on the phone with trophy wives. Real estate agents look bored, holding daiquiris. The biggest reaction from the crowd comes when an obese man named "Mo Cheese" pretends he's in a paint shaker for 30 seconds. Rexall Place is full to the brim with howling banshees attempting to scream the opponent to death.

Never ever would have happened without the lockout.
All hail the lockout. Long live the lockout.

One place -- the one with the half-empty lower bowl -- has the audacity to call itself Hockeytown and then studiously ignore all in-state hockey that is not the Wings despite having two of the top programs in college hockey. Meanwhile, in Minnesota they sell out the XCel center for high school games. One place is the northernmost city with a professional sports team in North America, a place that scrapped year after year to keep a team and the memory of Gretzky. The Oilers are owned by thirty-four Edmonton businessmen. Before the lockout, every year they were called up and asked to put in tens of thousands of dollars to keep the club going. Without that lockout there would be no hockey in Edmonton today, and no one would ever again wear a jersey that looked like Gretzky's. The profligate spending of the Red Wings and other teams of their ilk contributed greatly to that.

No other team, however, was as successful, as profligate, and as local to me as Detroit. So you'll forgive me if I find Red Wing fandom fundamentally shallow, false, and destructive. It obviously isn't. But it's hard to see that when Doug Weight gets traded for bits and pieces. The thing begins to grate on you after a while.

OMG I love the Wings!!! An' an' an' daquiris an' an' my lawyer husband. We go to nearly a third of the home games... well, we go to about half of a third of the home games.

Ma'am, I'm sorry, but you're going to have to eat this Dennis Dodd.

My hate waxes and wanes based on the current lineup on the ice -- I feel downright heelish about it when Yzerman is out there, but whenever Chelios or the ghost of Darien Hatcher is present my hate grows strong like bull -- but hate it is. And it just so happens that stripped of my NHL fandom, the wheel spun and landed in a strange place that happens to be the home of the team the Wings are currently down two games to one to: Edmonton, a place I have never been. At the time I had never been within 500 miles of it.

No doubt the primary reason for this affection was the presence of Mike Comrie, who was Michigan's star for my first two years at Yost Ice Arena. Comrie was an impossible whirling dervish of a collegiate player who, despite being small and slow, was an audacious stickhandler, passer, and shooter who almost won the Hobey Baker as a sophomore. The Mike Comrie experience was an overwhelming one for someone who had never seen hockey in person before, especially not seven rows from the ice. When Comrie bolted for the OHL for bargaining leverage, I was mildly upset, but knew that he would be in the NHL sooner rather than later.

By the time I had finally kicked the Wings to the curb, Comrie was the Oilers' second-line center mere months after signing a pro contract. College guys like Comrie, Weight, Poti, Horcoff, Grier, and Marchant littered the roster. The trap is still a dirty, controversial word in the city to this day. In the playoffs they faced Dallas, and easy target for transitional hatred as an ex-Wing fan. It was all lined up, and when the CBC announcers had to strain to make themselves heard over the crowd, well, I was sold. At the start I watched to see Comrie, but it mattered little that a couple years later he would hold out for buckets of money Edmonton didn't have and get traded. I was rooting for the jersey by then, because I felt it stood for something other than "we can pay these guys a buttload of money."

So. When Jarrett Stoll shoveled a rebound past Legace in the second overtime last night I had a series of involuntary spasms reminiscent of Elaine Benes attempting to dance. I know it's totally weird, but:

HA HA HA HA HA HA. HA.

We now return to blogging not designed to infuriate most readers.

Does not look at all like Billy Idol.

OMG. Shirtless. I can find no better way to summarize Ryan Mallet's assets than this from John Miller of the Dallas-Fort Worth Star-Telegram, which must have the nation's most unwieldly newspaper name:

Uncle Rico boasted he could once throw a football a quarter-mile and wanted to bet that he could throw the pigskin over a mountain in the movie Napoleon Dynamite.

No one's come anywhere close to that.

But give Ryan Mallett a few years, and who knows what could happen?

The article continues on in that vein: Mallet throws a ball 70 yards in the air, dislocated two fingers on one of his wideout's hands, can throw it "40-50 yards" on a line, shoots lasers from his eyes, etc. He's in Rivals' and (Lemming warning) Lemming's early top ten, is a sure bet for five-star status, and can fix back pain with well-placed throws from the next county.

Two Ts. Just FYI.

Active during the war. On August 4th, 1941, a U-boat sunk a critical shipment of gunpowder destined for the shipyards of London. Private First Class Ryan Mallett was enlisted to hurl flak at incoming bombers, downing six and preserving an orphanage full of strippers. Four years later, he killed Hitler with a well-placed fifteen-yard out.

Sort of like that one other giant white guy... whatshisface. But what about the supposedly-dread spectre of John Navarre? At first glance, the two quarterbacks seem... similar. Hell, this is the second sentence in ESPN's talent evaluation($) of Mallett:

He reminds us of former Michigan QB John Navarre in terms of build and physical tools.

Holy cats! We can look forward to another four years of a giant quarterback with no scrambling ability and a tendency to hurl passes into the kneecaps of onrushing linemen! Abort! Abort!

...or maybe not. This blog came into existence after the Navarre era ended, but had it been around then no doubt I would have pissed off 90 to 95 percent of potential readers with fervent defenses of the Water Buffalo Wonder. Hell, I'm the guy who wrote this article...

John Navarre Blamed For Offense, Defense, Kicking Game, Iraq, 9/11, Everything Else

...after the hilariously mishap-ful 2002 season. By the tail end of Navarre's junior year, he was a very good quarterback. I distinctly remember the 2002 OSU game's offense as two idiotic runs into the teeth of the defense followed by heroic, laser-accurate third-and-long conversions from Navarre. He wasn't Brady, but he was okay by me. The 2003 offense was a machine of epic destruction, and it was helmed by John Navarre. Not bad for a guy recruited as a defensive end by a lot of schools and possessing only one other quarterback offer, that from Northwestern.

So. Take the nonexistent hype surrounding Navarre and turn it up to 11. Turn Navarre from a guy two schools thought could play quarterback maybe to a guy who's going to get the precious fifth star from both recruiting services okay no problem. This... sounds appealing.

You may remember Mallett from such quarterbacks as: other than Navarre your two most cited names are Drew Bledsoe and Ben Roethlisberger, if those are more palatable.

This is not Ryan Mallett. Well, it is, but not that one.

A mysterious traveller. Little is known about Mallett's past -- he was found on the doorstep of Texas High three years ago, swaddled in (copious) rags, clutching a football and quietly muttering about a fusion reactor's backwards flux inhibitor. He asked if there were any games in town similar to the high-paced flarlax he knew and loved so well. After some discussion, it was determined that football was in many way analagous to flarlax... flarlax played by bleeble-babes! Mallett found the game piteously easy -- flarxlax stripped of flaming ninja hordes, roving black holes, and the dread joydlerox is hardly flarlax at all -- but it is the only thing that soothes his raging homesickness for his mysterious homeland... or is it -world?

"Mallett" antonym: "Vick." And he knows it. Mallett on his running ability:

"I can't run at all."

Sounds like we're going to have to radically change our offense to take advantage of his abilities yes this is sarcasm. Except we probably don't have any 70 yard routes in the playbook.

More on what mortals call an arm from that article:

"He's probably got the strongest arm in the history of Texas high school football," said Bobby Burton, Rivals.com recruiting expert.

Emphasis mine.

Coming relatively near relatively soon. Cincinnati-area readers with an obsessive urge can see Mallett play Findlay High at (hur hur) Nippert Stadium on September 15th. Any reports/pictures/video offered will be posted with all haste.

Committing to someone any time now. Who could it be?

Update: Done be us.

Notre Dame has their new golden boy, Jimmy Clausen:

No one with that hair can be good at football.

He's slated to win 5 national championships over the next four years, but there are Citrus Bowls to win, motherfucker, and Michigan needs a giant, immobile quarterback who can throw a football through three guys -- sort of like that scene in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade -- to do it. 6'7" Ryan Mallet appears to fit the bill and is deciding within the week according to Florida State's Scout site. The finalists are Michigan, Florida State, Alabama, and Oklahoma. How should you feel about this?

Um, good. Perhaps very good:

Florida State has been moving up his list but many feel Michigan is the team to beat because that's the school that he has visited in person.

"I don't need to take any more visits," he said. "I pretty much know about all the schools from talking to all of the coaches on the phone. Academics will be in important along with where I can see myself fitting in. Being able to gel with the coaches is a big-deal."

Strange hyphen in "big-deal" sic. This decision would appear to be analgous to that of Pittsburgh wide receiver Dorin Dickerson, who decided around this time last year between Pitt and Michigan without ever having visited Michigan. He chose Pitt. No one was surprised.

Tom Beaver of GBW spooked a bunch of message board denizens with an appearance on WTKA, but I would avoid picking up a case of residual panic from them. We're probably addressing need #1 in the 2007 recruting class with option A-1. Notre Dame's quarterback of the future has name with superior unflattering nickname potential ("Jimmah! JimmahJimmah!"), looks like a cross between Billy Idol and a kid playing with static electricity, and comes from a family of certified football retards. Good times.