So: revamped sidebar with a few additions, including two new Michigan blogs:

• Michigan Against The World, from a former student manager.
• Stadium & Main: check out Nick's review of the bizarre 2001 season.

There is also a promising new Badger blog in town @ Bucky Blog. Still on the lookout for MSU, Minnesota, Northwestern, and Iowa football blogs to complete the set. (Minus Indiana, of course.)

Also... don't click here. (audio)

Only the penitent wide receiver shall pass. A previous UV pointed out the sweet AC/BE video up at Braylon Edwards' site. As you likely know, Edwards is endowing a scholarship for the #1 jersey. You probably did not know that receiving the #1 is going to be a trial by ordeal:

"No freshman will be allowed to wear the No. 1," Edwards said. "The number holds too much significance and too much value. There are three criteria to receive it: first, no freshmen; second, the GPA (grade-point average); third, off-the-field conduct."

I assume there's an unspoken fourth requirement for total awesomeness. This takes away a recruiting inducement -- Lloyd would dangle the #1 in front of top WR prospects -- but the prospect of getting passed the #1 after earning it is kind of cool. Also of note:

Edwards, who plays for the Cleveland Browns, has created the largest endowment ever given by a former athlete at U-M.

Good on yer, BE.

We'll miss Friday nights in the Metrodome. Or perhaps we won't. But we're sure that there will no longer be any, as the Minnesota legislature has approved necessary funding for an on-campus, outdoor stadium for Gopher football. Three things of note:

• It's only 50,000 seats, which seems small for a Big Ten team not named Northwestern or Indiana.
• In exchange for a piddling $35 million, TCF gets to call the thing "TCF Bank Stadium," which would make it the only stadium in the league whored out to a corporation.
• It's a good thing that Minnesota president Robert Bruininks doesn't live in MGoBlog's America, where tortured sports metaphors like this...
  

  He said the House action "gets us to the 50-yard line. Now we're looking to the Senate to get us into the end zone."

... are firing-squad offenses.

The stadium is supposed to be ready for the 2009 season.

And in this week's edition of "Video because I can": YouTube brings us what the Syracuse area simply refers to as "The Run," featuring one Mike Hart:

My favorite part is the 150-pound tailback who's like "yeah! yeah! I am so awesome. I sort-of-blocked half a person on a play where Mike Hart schooled each member of the defense twice."

This is your cue to go "mmmmmm... Mike Hart's healthy ankle."

...and by "light posting" I mean "I didn't think this would get finished today."

Alex Legion's mother lives in Inkster, Michigan. Alex Legion does not. Legion lives in Southfield with a man named Tim Green, who is his AAU basketball coach. Green is applying for legal guardianship of Legion.

Take the previous five sentences, mix them with the vapors of dozens of similarly creepy stories involving young men with unusual basketball ability and their assorted hangers-on, and you have world-class agar for investigative journalism to bloom in. Perhaps Alex Legion's situation is on the up-and-up. Perhaps Tim Green's motivations for taking Legion under his wing are totally altruistic. But unless stunning ability with a basketball goes hand-in-hand with a level of charm so absolute that total strangers nationwide are taking in basketball non-orphans simply to be charitable, there is a class of men somewhere between agents and parasites attaching themselves to every prospective NBA player in the country. Shoe wars have turned high school basketball entirely upside down: nowadays your AAU team is more important than your high school one. Where, then, is "Game Of Shadows: College Basketball Edition"?

Don't expect that question to be answered with a "coming right up" any time soon. As Mark Jurkowitz recently detailed in The Phoenix, a Boston alt-weekly, when it comes to muckraking, sportswriters have a rich history of sitting on their ass eating donuts. "Game of Shadows" itself was penned by Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams, men who

are not the kind of reporters found walking around post-game clubhouses armed with microphones and notebooks. Fainaru-Wada, a former sportswriter, was working on a campaign-finance project for the Chronicle's investigative unit when the BALCO (Bay Area Laboratory Co-operative) drug story broke. Williams, a traditional courts-and-cops reporter, is a long-time investigative journalist.

While Jurkowitz's article has an odd concept of stories of import -- he cites work done that showed that certain pro athletes' charitable contributions were not as charitable as all that -- it stands as a damning testament against the sportswriter's feeble plea that their access to athletes and coaches can serve as their aegis against the unwashed blogging hordes. It took ten years, a federal investigation, and two non-sportswriters to break the "news" that Bonds was on 'roids, something that had been conventional wisdom for a half-dozen years. In the interim, sportswriters asked Bonds

• if he liked winning,
• if he liked hitting lots of home runs,
• if he thought home runs were fun to hit,
• and if winning and hitting home runs was kind of like being tickled by ponies.

"Squandered" doesn't seem to cover the totality of the failure here.

Meanwhile in college basketball, the conventional wisdom is not that a few coaches are bending, breaking, or flaunting the rules -- it's that all of them are. At least, everyone who isn't Tommy Amaker is. Even not-a-coach-but-a-leader Mike Kryzwesksisetc,etc,etc ended up entangled with Brett Bearup via Corey Maggette. The coach of your 2006 national champion Florida Gators was publicly accused of being an ATM with Eddie Munster hair by then-Stanford coach Mike Montgomery (though the uproar over those comments caused an epic CYA backtrack by Montomgery in their wake). The NCAA had to rejigger its rules because Jim Calhoun was funnelling thousands of dollars to AAU programs via sham exhibition games. That's just the tip; the iceberg is composed of recruit after recruit ending up at a funny destination for no reason in particular. There's nothing you can say about each individual case -- kids do indeed choose schools for a lot of funny reasons -- but taken together they compose a black mass lurking just under the Greg-Gumbelized surface of college basketball.

And this has been going on for not ten but thirty years (at least!), to the detriment of many but most importantly me Michigan. It's just our luck that basketball's unspoken reptilian tail has smashed Michigan both coming (Ed Martin sinks the program) and going (Crawford, Hairston, Horford, Legion leave before even coming). We swing back and forth from a program not clean enough to one that seems too clean to do the bending that teams far below the corruption median are willing to do: Tory Jackson's scholarship was pulled, so he took off for noted nest of corruption Notre Dame. (That was sarcastic, Irish fans.) We sit idly by, wondering if there are tournaments other than the NIT. We suck, waiting for that one guy with stunning basketball skills to suck the suck away.

Yesterday, that guy was Alex Legion. Now that seems doubtful despite his mother's assertions that she fully expects him to end up at Michigan eventually. When Legion tells Scout that...

"We decided to open it up," Legion told Scout.com. "I'm going to Oak Hill and I'm starting over so we opened it up.

... but tells his mom different...

"Like he told Amaker today, 'I'll be away from Mr. Green and my mom and get a chance to think things over,' " Williams said of her son, referring to his guardian Tim Green. " 'I'll think about my own self and my own choices.'

...it's hard to go with mom over he person he lives with -- and what an odd sentence that is. It's hard to be the kind of person who makes his own choices when you've never done so before. Is it "we" or "I"? And will Legion pick a place his mother wants him to go, or a place that might make Tim Green some money? No one knows right now, but I've got a nickel on green, capitalized and un-.

That's not to say I know Tim Green from Adam. As noted, this could all be completely legit and Legion will call Tommy Amaker to recommit and go where his mom wants him to go... but you'll forgive my cynicism. Occam's Razor and all that.

Meanwhile, we're left with sports journalists that Ball Four author Jim Bouton describes in the Phoenix article as "fans" who are "in it because it's fun" -- an assertion that any actual fan is taken aback by, since most sportswriters are about as fun as a bag of tacks to the face. For that matter, sportswriters seem to recoil from the term "fan" as if it was three letters of hydrochloric acid. As Colby Cosh noted when Bob McKenzie said that the "fan in [him] died long ago":

McKenzie certainly doesn't mean that he no longer gets pleasure from hockey: he's using the word "fan" as a pejorative, the way Nietzsche used "human." McK's saying he has transcended, attained a higher state. The fan had to die to make way for the expert. It's kind of like a political columnist describing himself as no longer a mere voter.

It should be noted that McKenzie is an MGoBlog favorite and all-around good (seeming) guy, but Cosh is right. Anyone who's read Drew Sharp or any of his legion of crabbed clones across the country knows they're no good at fun or fandom. But they do have that precious access, and so I ask: if you'd like to prove your vast superiority to blogs, why don't you do college basketball a favor and rake some muck? We'll save the bearclaws until you get back.

(Cosh's pith via Offwing)

Posting will be light today...

...but content yourself with enigmatic basketball insider DOTMAN's trademark : ) -- generally indicative of a commitment or damn near close to one -- in re: Patrick Beverly, a guy who enigmatic Adidas honcho Sonny Vaccaro says nice things about:

Beverley was not even on the top 100 list for McDonald's,'' Vaccaro said. "He was one of those non-entity guys who didn't get a big-time name in the summer. He was good last year, and his high school was good. But the kid was still a mystery. This is a kid from Chicago, not from rural Tennessee or Mississippi. The only one I can think of to compare him to is Dwyane Wade.

"Beverley is the best-kept secret in the country. All over America, he is the singular guy who has put himself in an all-star game. All these guys that people recruit and he was going to [Toledo], and now he has a list of major schools after him.''

I'm pretty sure that quote is recycled from an earlier article about this game, but the dateline on this one says April 4th.

Of course, the whole Alex Legion fiasco puts a damper on basketball recruiting news. Maize 'n' Brew has an appropriately resigned take for your edification.

So I subscribe to the RSS feed of Scout but do not subscribe to Scout. This little gem of a headline trickled across Bloglines mere moments ago:

Legion Transfers, Re-Opens Commitment

Legion = Alex Legion, 2007 shooting guard and one of the top 20 players in his class at this juncture. Transfer = consummation of previous assertion that he's going to transfer from Detroit Country Day to Oak Hill Academy in Virginia.

Re-Opens Commitment... well, that doesn't sound good, does it? If I hadn't had my basketball will to live beaten out of me already, this would probably spur some "aaargh." As it is: looks like Crawford/Horford redux.

Update 4/5: Added OLs Lee Ziemba (AR) and Jaivorio Burkes (AZ). Linked to article on Brandon Saine's track exploits. Linked to Scout article on IN RB Darren Evans that claims a leader... Mississippi State? Uh, okay. Michigan still in it; no offer. Linked to note on SC LB Scotty Cooper that says he is going to make an unofficial visit to Michigan over spring break and brief Scout article on IN WR Adrien Robinson. Moved Ryan VanBergen to committed.

Editorial Opinion: Ziemba and Burkes both have offers but haven't had much written on them to this point.

Brandon Saine is fast. Like, very very fast:

Saine is a throwback to the days when it wasn't unusual for sprinters to focus on all three races. And at 6-foot-1, 215 pounds, he sheds the rail-thin sprinter image. He's getting faster, stronger (a 285-pound bench press and 415-pound squat) and bigger (by one inch and 10 pounds from '05).

"In 27 years, I've not seen anybody close to him," said longtime Piqua coach Ron Pearson. "The irony is, I don't think he realizes just how good he can be."

Saine's 2005 bests were impressive: a 10.69 in the 100 (at Wayne), 21.64 in the 200 (at Wittenberg) and 47.68 in the 400 (at state). ... He recently won the 60 meters at the National Scholastic Indoor Championship in New York City (6.79). ...

Saine seems equally strong at every distance. The 60 meters is little more than a great start. He won that title by a body, which in the world of fractions of seconds is like a weekend. His finishes in the 200 and 400 are even more remarkable because the distance he puts on the field is so much greater.

That? Fast. Especially at 215 -- none of this "I'm 156 pounds yayyayyayyyyy" stuff. If Saine's vision and cutting are up to... er... speed, look out.

Saine's strong resemblance to a jet engine with a helmet and his lifelong Michigan fandom are probably among the reasons that Michigan hasn't offered Indiana running back Darren Evans. Saine, Chicago's Robert Hughes, and possibly Wisconsin's John Clay appear to be Michigan's main targets at running back. Evans has an array of offers from mid-level BCS schools but is still listing non-offerers OSU, Michigan, and Iowa amongst his favorites. Evans' teammate Adrien Robinson does not have an offer, probably because he had all of 11 catches in Warren Central's 90% run offense. He'll probably have to come to camp to get one.

Scotty Cooper's intention to take an unofficial over spring break indicates serious interest, but it's hard to get kids from the south, etc, etc, etc.