Diaries

Water Polo

The Women’s Water Polo team earned a sixth place finish at the NCAA tournament.  The team opened with a 12-8 loss to California, then defeated Pomona-Pitzer 11-3 before falling to UCLA 9-6 in the fifth place game.

Michigan concludes the 2010 season with a program-record .805 winning percentage and a record-low eight losses. U-M claimed its ninth consecutive CWPA Western Division title, fifth CWPA Eastern Championship crown and made its third straight appearance at the NCAA Championship. 

In its ten seasons of existence, the team has one fourth, one fifth and three sixth place NCAA tournament finishes.

USC defeated Stanford 10-9 in the championship game.  California defeated Loyola-Marymount in the third place game and Pomona-Pitzer defeated Marist in the seventh place game.

Lauren Colton

Women’s Tennis

The Women’s Tennis team defeated Ohio State in the second round of the NCAA Championships 4-0 sending them to the Sweet 16 against Tennessee.  That match is scheduled for 3 pm EDT, Thu 20 May in Athens, GA.

Denise Muresan

Men’s Tennis

The Men’s Tennis team fell to Ohio State 4-1 in the second round of the NCAA Championships.

Senior Jason Jung (Torrance, Calif./West Torrance) and freshman Evan King (Chicago, Ill./Kaplan) will now prepare for the NCAA Individual Championships, beginning Wednesday, May 26, in Athens, Ga. Jung received one of the 48 at-large berths in the singles bracket and will also team with King in doubles play. Match times and pairings will be announced at a later date.

Chris Cha

Women’s Rowing

The Women’s Rowing team placed fourth at the Central/South Region Sprints on 16 May.  The first and second varsity eights both finished fourth in their respective A finals.  The first varsity four finished fifth in its A final, the novice eight finished fourth in its A final and the open four finished first in its B final. 

[Edit - National Championship selections were announced May 18.]

The No. 13 ranked University of Michigan women's rowing team has received a bid to compete at the 2010 NCAA Championships... The Wolverines will be making their 11th appearance at the national championship in the program's 14-year history. This year's events will be held Friday, May 28, through Sunday, May 30, on Lake Natoma in Gold River, Calif.

"We're really excited to qualify for the National Championship," said U-M head coach Mark Rothstein. "We're very excited to race against the best crews in the country and see where we stack up. We've already started our preparation and it is my expectation that we'll have great preparation and we'll race our best at NCAAs."

In Division I, 16 teams are awarded team bids, which include a first varsity eight, second varsity eight and a first varsity four. The three boats from each school will compete for individual national titles and will earn points towards the team title.

Other teams earning a bid to this year's national championship include: California, Southern California, Michigan State, Washington, Washington State, Yale, Stanford, Brown, Wisconsin, Virginia, Princeton, UCLA, Clemson, Tennessee and Ohio State.

Michigan is looking for its first national title. In 2001, U-M's second varsity eight won an individual boat title, helping the squad to a runner-up team finish. In 2003, the first varsity eight took home a silver medal en route to leading the Maize and Blue to a fourth-place team standing. Michigan's other national finishes include fifth place in 1998, 1999 and 2000, eighth place in 2002 and 2005 and a ninth place finish last season.

Women’s Track & Field

At the Big Ten Outdoor Championships held last weekend, Women’s Track & Field finished in eighth place.  Penn State finished in first place. 

Freshman Erin Pendleton (Lindsey, Ohio/Woodmore) picked up [the team’s] lone Big Ten title, winning the discus throw…with a Big Ten Championships record throw of 56.31 meters (184-09). Junior Emily Pendleton (Lindsey, Ohio/Woodmore) took runner-up, throwing 54.57 meters (179-00)…

The Wolverines will take a weekend off before going to the NCAA Preliminary Round (Thu-Sat., May 27-29), hosted by North Carolina A&T University. The qualifying format for the NCAA Championships changed this year, with only two sites -- East and West. Michigan will participate in the East Region, hoping to grab qualifications for the NCAA Championships (June 9-12).

Erin Pendleton

Men’s Track & Field

At the Big Ten Outdoor Championships held last weekend, Men’s Track & Field finished in tenth (and last) place.  Minnesota finished in first place.

Junior tri-captain Frank Shotwell (Medina, Ohio/Medina) was Michigan's lone representative on the All-Big Ten team, earning a second team nomination following his second-place finish in the decathlon on Saturday (May 15). His 7,379-point performance is a new University of Michigan record, breaking the old mark of 7,362 points, which Shotwell set almost two years ago to the day. Shotwell, the 2008 Big Ten Champion in the decathlon, missed out on first place by just two points to R.J. McGinnis (Minnesota), who had 7,381 points.

Select University of Michigan track and field athletes will head to the NCAA Preliminaries for the East Region, held in Greensboro, N.C., beginning on Thursday, May 27.

Frank Shotwell

Congratulations to all of these outstanding student-athletes and good luck to those participating at the next level of NCAA competition.

Oh Captains, My Captains

That just happened. Michigan wins the series 2-1 on the most stunning senior day in recent memory. This series has it all - A pitcher's duel, a stunning heart breaker, a come-from-behind win on senior day featuring the two co-captains completing a walk off. If you have ever been a baseball fan, this was the series for you.

Game One

W – Gerbe (2-0)… Save – Burgoon (9)

Game one was the pitchers' duel. Michigan managed the early lead thanks to a leadoff walk of Patrick Biondi. After going to third on a perfectly placed hit and run by Toth, going right through the hole vacated by the second baseman, LaMarre would knock him in on a would-be double play, but Northwestern's second baseman double clutched, giving LaMarre just enough time to beat out the throw. After Berset's single, Crank would line out deep to left, gaining an easy sacrifice fly, and Michigan led 2-0.

Alan Oaks was on the mound for Michigan and had a pretty good game. In his 6 innings of work, he gave up 7 hits and 3 runs. Two of those came in the form of solo home runs by Northwestern's third baseman Chris Lashmet. The third run also involved Lashmet. In the 6th, he would single and score on a Zach Morton double that screamed past a diving Lorenz and took a strange hop off the wall, evading Ryan LaMarre in left.

LaMarre would lead the response for Michigan, knocking a triple off the center field wall. This set up Chris Berset up for an easy RBI single.

Oaks would open the 7th with a hard hit double, and the bullpen would take over for Oaks after that, with the game tied at 3 a piece. Gerbe would give up a sac bunt to move the runner to third, but Mike Dufek made a great play on a slow roller by the next batter to gun the runner trying to score and preserve the tie.

In the bottom of the 7th, Biondi got the offense started on a two-out rally. His walk was followed by back-to-back singles by Toth and LaMarre to bring in a run. With the lead, 4-3, it was all Burgoon from here on out.

Notable Stars

• The Pen – 3 IP, 2 H, 1 BB, 1 K, W, Save
• Anthony Toth – 3/4
• Ryan LaMarre – 2/4, 2 R, 2 RBI, 3B
• Game Time: 2 hours 35 minutes
• Attendance: 1385

Notable Goats

• Coley Crank – 0/3 RBI, 3 LOB, SACF

The rest of the series, including the THRILLING CONCLUSION, after the jump.

Just a little bit of change since last week, but ESPN did tweak their ratings a bit. Action since last rankings:

NONE. I think for the first time since I've been doing this, there were no commits in the Big Ten this week. Scout did drop a couple guys down from 3-stars to unranked, which happens to push Wisconsin past Minnesota. Michigan will hopefully have a couple new commits by next Sunday.

I'll only make charts for the teams that currently have commits. Rivals 250 means that a given prospect is on the Rivals 250 to Watch, and ESPN 150 means that a prospect is on the Watch List for the ESPNU 150. Scout ratings are on the 5-star scale.

ESPN now deems DE Chase Farris worthy of being on the ESPN150 watch list.

Nothing new for the Irish.

Brennen Beyer goes back on the ESPN150 watchlist.

No change.

Teams are going to start passing the Hoosiers once they get more commits.

No change for Wisconsin.

ESPN finally acknowledges that Calvin Phillips isn't committed to the Gophers (which he hasn't been for at least a couple months now).

Iowa picks up a decent offensive lineman. They're right on the heels of Minnesota and Wisconsin, passing Northwestern and Illinois.

Both of NU's commits are unranked to the services.

Still just two for the Illini.

Introduction

Summer is upon is, and with it, a bit of a lull in our mgoblogging fervor - there are simply not as many sports to talk about. The great wait for the football season begins.

With this in mind, what better time to celebrate this very blog in some bizarre and uniquely mgobloggish way? Hence I present: MGoStats, a statistical look at this blog over the years since its inception.

It began on December 4th, 2004, with the following post at 6:30am by some guy named Brian:

GoBlog()
{
HelloWorld
}

An inauspicious beginning, to say the least, but thus mgoblog was born. In the years since, we have all come here for a multitude of reasons: to celebrate the highs, commiserate during the lows, but mostly for one single reason, which is to hear what one Brian Cook has to say about all matters Michigan Football (and occasionally other sports).

So I found myself wondering: how much has Brian said over the years? A couple of python scripts later, I had some answers. I wrote a trivial script to download the entire blog (old pages are available through links of the form http://www.mgoblog.com/?page=X, where higher X values link to older pages), and then a less trivial script to parse the downloaded content into a more manageable form. The python SGML parser is amazing, for those of you who care about such things.

What I found follows below. Note: there may be some errors, but I believe the results to be in the right ballpark.

Overall Results

Perhaps the single most amazing fact is that Brian himself has written something on the order of 3 million words (or typed about 17 million characters) over about 3600 articles. Wow! That's a lot of content, from his hands to our eyeballs.

The table shows these sums, as well as the sums across all contributed articles (including ones from Tim, TomVH, formerlyanonymous, and anyone else who has made the front page). It might be interesting to see how these counts (number of articles, number of words, number of comments made by users) play out on a week-by-week basis. So interesting one could even make a ... chart? Chart. Or actually, Charts.

Charts

The first chart I present is the number of articles published per week over the entire existence of mgoblog.

From the chart, one can observe some interesting facts. First, from mgoblog we should expect about 14 articles per week on average over the course of a year. Second, that number is notably higher in the fall (no surprise), and lower in the spring. Finally, and perhaps most interestingly, one can see the growth of the mgoblog community in the orange bars, which represent articles written by somebody other than Brian; this content, which now represents a significant portion of mgoblog, picked up halfway through last year and has continued to get stronger. Brian's efforts at making the blog more than just himself are clearly having an impact.

The second chart just shows the number of words on a per week basis:

The graph reflects the same trends seen above, but in word counts. Even early on, Brian was producing above 10,000 words per week during football season, and last year during the same season, we were spoiled with over 30,000 words per week about the sport and team we love.

Finally, I show the number of comments per article:

The big effect in this graph is the lack of comments before the switch to the new blog infrastructure (e.g., the Haloscan era). The other effect is the growth of the community: the difference in the number of comments in Fall '08 and Fall '09 is likely a sign of the increased importance of this site as a place for the broad UM football community. Aside: the one early outlier which has a large number of comments (Fall '06) is just full of a bunch of comment spam: Unverified Voracity 99 Bonus Guest. Who knows why it's there, but Brian should probably remove those comments.

Longest Articles

I was also interested in what the longest articles were, but that should have been obvious: UFRs. Here are the ten longest articles (by number of letters in the article):

• 10. Upon Further Review: Defense vs Notre Dame (by Brian on September/16/2009, 48949 letters long)
• 9. Upon Further Review: Defense vs Iowa (by Brian on October/14/2009, 49477 letters long)
• 8. Upon Further Review: Defense vs Indiana (by Brian on September/30/2009, 49913 letters long)
• 7. Upon Further Review: Offense vs Iowa (by Brian on October/15/2009, 50279 letters long)
• 6. Upon Further Review: Offense vs Illinois (by Brian on November/5/2009, 50421 letters long)
• 5. Upon Further Review: Defense vs Purdue (by Brian on November/11/2009, 51002 letters long)
• 4. Upon Further Review: Offense vs Purdue (by Brian on November/12/2009, 51279 letters long)
• 3. Upon Further Review: Offense vs Notre Dame (by Brian on September/17/2009, 51572 letters long)
• 2. Upon Further Review: Offense vs Western Michigan (by Brian on September/10/2009, 51616 letters long)
• 1. Upon Further Review: Offense vs Indiana (by Brian on October/1/2009, 51721 letters long)

If you remove the UFRs from the list, these ten get the longest billing. A number of previews and various other summaries show up:

• 10. Michigan 2007, Part II: Defense (by Brian on August/31/2007, 28513 letters long)
• 9. Michigan State: Sometimes The Bar Eats You (by Brian on August/13/2007, 28636 letters long)
• 8. Purdue 2007: You're Killing Your Father, Larry (by Brian on August/23/2007, 29656 letters long)
• 7. Purdue 2008: Tiller On A Treadmill (by Brian on July/31/2008, 29964 letters long)
• 6. Illinois Preview: Redact This (by Brian on August/9/2007, 30014 letters long)
• 5. Michigan Preview 2005: A Tale Of Two Units, Part I (by Brian on August/30/2005, 30163 letters long)
• 4. Offense Unit By Unit, 2008 (by Brian on August/26/2008, 33989 letters long)
• 3. Michigan Preview Part I: Offense (by Brian on August/29/2006, 34844 letters long)
• 2. Penn State Preview: Stupefying (by Brian on July/20/2007, 35006 letters long)
• 1. Michigan 2007, Part I: Offense (by Brian on August/30/2007, 38809 letters long)

Most-Commented Upon Articles

I was also interested in the most commented-on articles. They were:

Nothing gets people rev'd up like the Offense's Units, or RAWK MUSIC, I guess.

Word Usage

Finally, I was generally curious as to what words show up in the blog. Sounds like a case for a ... chart? Nope. But close, a wordle:

The word cloud here shows a list of the most popular words used in this blog, with some editing done by y.t. to remove words like "the" (actually the most popular word on the site) and so forth.

Anyhow, that's all for now. An amazing amount of content, built up over the years on the backs of UFRs and other regular features we all know and love. Thanks Brian for all the hard work - it is truly staggering to see the sheer verbiage that has powered the site over the years.

This is an offer that I was expecting to happen sooner, rather than later. QB Brett Hundley out of Chandler High School, in Arizona, received an offer from Michigan today. "They called my coach, Coach Ewan, and then he told me they had offered," said Hundley.

This one is exciting for me, because it's another Michigan recruit in my home state. I saw Brett play this past season, and he's the real deal. He's a 6-foot-4, 210-pound athletic dual threat quarterback. He says his strengths are, "Leadership, mobility, I'm coachable, and I have a pretty strong arm. I do think I need to work on my footwork, though." I would add that academics are a strong point for Brett, since he carries a 3.9 GPA. 

Hundley holds offers now from Arizona, ASU, LSU, Oregon, Nebraska, Stanford, UCLA, Washington, and Michigan just to name a few. He hasn't started to focus on recruiting yet, and told me, "No one's in the lead right now. Everything is wide open for me. I'm going to start taking trips in June, or July. After that I'll start all my officials, when I'm allowed to." When asked if Michigan will receive one of those visits, he said, "I'm definitely going to talk to my dad about that one."

Chandler High is in spring practice right now, and I will be heading out to watch this coming week. I'll have some practice footage, and possibly a video interview sometime later this week. 

Game starts at 9:30 on Fox College Sports (UPDATE: It'll be later, because there was a weather delay for the first game), chat should get started shortly after 9. Here's an excerpt from the preview,

Friday May 14, 7:30PM MDT, Dick's Sporting Goods Park (Main Stadium), Denver CO.
TV: Fox College Sports.
Record: 14-2 (5-0 Southwestern Lacrosse Conference).
Rankings: #4 MCLA LaxMag, #3 Prodigy, #4 LaxPower.
Common Opponents: BYU (W 12-11), Colorado (W 13-8), Oregon (L 11-14), Simon Fraser (W 11-8), Arizona State (L 11-12), Minnesota-Duluth (W 15-8)
Previous Meetings: 2008 National Championship Game (Michigan W 14-11), 2009 Regular Season (Michigan W 13-10), 2009 National Championship Game (Michigan W 12-11) Official Site Recap/VB Recap/VB Liveblog.

Depending on which poll you use, Chapman is the #4 (MCLA LaxMag/LaxPower) or #3 (Prodigy only) team in the country. As a testament to Michigan's strength of schedule, they're the only squad in the top 7 (LaxMag) or 9 (LaxPower/Prodigy), that Michigan hasn't faced yet this year. The men from SoCal went 14-2 on the year, with the only losses coming to Oregon (11-14 on the road) and Arizona State (11-12 in the SLC playoffs at Chapman).

, but to read the whole thing, click here.