I saw the news in a tweet from ESPN's Trey Wingo @wingoz that Jason Babin, a nominal starter for the Eagles at DE has been released. As someone who has football on the TV in the background often, I noticed that BG was getting a lot of playing time last night, and in key situations too. You'd have to think he's going to get the majority of the reps going forward as the tire fire that is the Eagles (can I even say especially the Eagles' D?) turns into job auditions for next year.

Here's hoping BG can win himself a starting job for next year.

http://www.nj.com/eagles/index.ssf/2012/11/eagles_release_jason_babin.html

Babin has seen his playing time decrease as the season as gone on. After playing close to every snap in the season opener, Babin saw just a little over half of the snaps against the Carolina Panthers last night. Brandon Graham, the team's former 1st round pick, has started to take snaps from Babin.

Michigan Football 101

Welcome to Michigan Football 101

! We are now counting down the days until Michigan and Alabama throw down in Dallas at the Cowboys Classic! What an experience it is going to be! Until that day, we will take a look at why Michigan Football is so good. In this series, similar to College Football 101, there will be:

• Top 40 current players
• Top 10 coaches
• Top 15 games
• Top 25 players
• Top 10 Miscellaneous

Here we go...

101. Brandon Graham

(25^th Player)

Brandon Graham went to Crockett Vocational Tech (Detroit) in high school. He started on the defensive line as a sophomore and made honorable mention that year. As a junior, he was a linebacker, offensive guard, kicker and punter. He led his team to the state championship but fell up short. Not only did Brandon have 91 tackles, 20 tackles for loss and made the All-State team, but he had a 3.8 GPA. As a senior, he had a similar year leading his team to the championship but losing once again. Graham was a captain in the U.S. Army All-American Bowl and won Player of the Year in the state of Michigan. The next year, he played for the University of Michigan!

Although Brandon Graham was recruited as a linebacker, he switched to defensive end where he backed up a certain someone whom we might read about later in Michigan Football 101-- LaMarr Woodley. Graham played a little defensive tackle as well. Before the 2007 season, he got in a little bit of trouble with the law. Once he cleared all of that out, and sadly after the loss to you know who and Oregon, he became the starter. He recorded 3.5 sacks against Notre Dame in his first game as a starter. By the end of his sophomore year, he finished 7^th in the Big Ten in sacks and forced fumbles.

Unfortunately, Brandon had to deal with Rich Rod. Even though Michigan had a terrible record both years, Brandon Graham did everything he could in his junior an senior seasons at Michigan. Even though it was a bad year, there was one bright game-- or bright 2^nd half I should say-- in 2008. I will say it was the best game I attended in the Rich Rod era. Michigan was down by 19 at halftime and came back to win thanks to 3 sacks and 2 forced fumbles from Graham. By the end of his junior year, Brandon had 10 sacks and 20 TFL, which led the Big Ten. In his senior season, Brandon Graham had 26 tackles for loss and won the Big Ten Player of the Year. To top his career off at Michigan, he was a first team All-American. He also won the MVP in the Senior Bowl with 5 tackles, 2 sacks, and a forces fumble.

Currently, Graham is playing for the Philadelphia Eagles. He was drafted 13^th overall in the 2010 Draft. He recorded his first NFL sack against the Lions and hurt his knee against the Cowboys late in his rookie season. He underwent surgery and played a bit towards the end of last season. He should be good to go this year.

Brandon Graham was stuck in an unfortunate time at Michigan, but still came out a Michigan Man. He was recruited and coached by Lloyd Carr and learned a lot in his career. He was the leader of the Michigan defense and has carried on his talents to the NFL. Best of luck to him, and GO BLUE Brandon!

Here are a few video links of Brandon Graham to check out:

Brandon Graham Big Hit against State

Brandon Graham Touchdown

Brandon Graham 2009 Highlights

Check back in tomorrow to see what #100 is. Only 101 days until we BEAT BAMA!

Okay, we'll do the disclaimers first.

• Yes, this has spoilers.  If you haven't finished 3&O, close this tab now.
• Yes, I realize 3&O has been out for awhile.  I wanted to sit on it for a bit and gain perspective though.  3&O carries a rather heavy emotional payload, so I read it.  Set it aside, watched us win 10 games, and then reread it.  I was less suicidal the second time I read it.  If you want to complain about this kind of diary reopening old wounds, close this tab now.  
• I'm not going to cite things with page numbers or whatever.  If I miss use a quote, call me on it.  Consider 3&O to be a heavily cited work that gets the credit for most facts.
• It's long and doesn't have any pictures.  I'm sorry.

Now then, why am I writing this.  Because we're not entirely over RR.  We have people who still are up in their caves, wearing their turbans and engaging in the Freep Jihad.  We have people who scour every word written on the blog's mainpage and ranting at anything that might be critical of Hoke.  We have people who take praise of Hoke to be an attack on RR.  So I want to talk about the three years of sadness.  If you feel an angry rant coming on, last chance to close the tab.

Right before Bo passed he said that once he died, we'd find out whole the real Michigan Men were.  We did and it was damn ugly.

In the wake of Bo passing and RR being hired, we had three major players in Michigan football.  Lloyd Carr, Bill Martin, and Rich Rodriguez.  It would expand to 4 after MSC got involved and later Dave Brandon would replace Martin.   However the tone of the era was set by the actions of the first three.  

Lloyd Carr is the engima here.  He was successful at Michigan.  The only two coaches who had his number, Tressel and Caroll, ended up fleeing to the NFL one step ahead of the NCAA sanctions committee.  He also won a NCAA title and 78% of his B1G games.  He never lost more than 3 B1G games in a season and only finished below 3rd in the conference once.  At the same time he took a lot of heat form the fans.  Claims that he only won his ring with Moeller's players.  Heat over his Rose Bowl issues and issues handling the spread.  I still remember walking into the stadium one game and seeing an anti-Carr fan holding a sign.  It read "Osama Bin-Lloyden is destroying Michigan football".  The dude had a megaphone and was ranting.  I just had to shake my head.  Every year Tressel took him down, the fanbase got bitchier.  

Since Carr has been silent (no comments in 3&O or anywhere else for the most part since he retired) it's hard to know what he felt at retirement.  The evidence suggest he was burned out in 2006, but Martin had no replacement plan so he stayed on.  The Horror happened and the heat on Carr was turned up.  At the end of the day the best insight I have into Carr's mind comes from Bacon, who writes that Carr wanted to name his successor.  

Here I'm going to make a leap.  Carr felt like he'd accomplished a lot here and he definitely had.  However the fanbase was pretty bitchy by this point and a lot of people were happy to see Carr retire.  Basically it was a "Thanks for your service, here's your award, door is to your left" kind of retirement.  No one exactly went into mourning when Carr hung it up.  I see a potential situation where Carr felt bitter, underappreciated and not properly compensated in terms of legacy for his work.  In 3&O, Carr tells Martin that someday a MAC team was going to beat us.  Basically saying college football was getting tougher, more parity, and yet Michigan fans want to see the 100-0 scores that we'd manage in the early 1900s and when we didn't, we got bitchy.  Carr did a lot for us and we photoshopped his face on Bin Laden's body.  I can understand why the man might be bitter.  Carr ends his career wanting DeBord or English to replace him, but after his last few seasons the fanbase would go nuclear if either of them did.  Martin wisely says no to that.  Carr's legacy ends him him kind of coming close to getting run out of town, despite his body of work.  We all laugh at Minnesota for firing Mason despite his body of work, but we were dicks to Carr desite his.  (As a side note I'm using we here because we're all part of the fanbase, even the retards).  

So Carr is retired.  Burned out, but not going since he was an Assoc. AD.  Martin comes forward and coaching search begins.  Miles is ruled out early (Carr says "Hell No" and MSC backs him on it, insert various rumors about why here).  Martin screws up on a bunch of offers, Miles kind of becomes a hail mary option, Martin goes sailing and can't work his damn phone.  Carr meanwhile reaches out to RR as kind of an end around on Miles and so he is kind of naming his own successor.  Suddenly we have one of the top offensive minds in the country, a guy who won BCS games with WVU (while we lost ours), and a hot, young name in coaching.  

We also have a problem.  Carr is going off the reservation here and making first contact and from Bacon's work it carries the implication Carr did so on his own, at at the behest of Martin or MSC.  In the Bo era if you went behind Bo's back, you paid.  We're now at the point where a future Assoc AD is sneaking around behind his boss's back.  

Martin's cluelessness with personnel decisions continued.  When he interviews RR he tries to tell RR he has to keep Lloyd's entire staff.  MSC though is now taking a role in the process (post Miles clusterfuck) and shuts him down.  I want to break this down a bit though.  Martin asks RR to keep the entire staff in a meeting with RR and MSC jumps on him.  This wasn't something that Martin and MSC privately talked about on the way to the meeting.  This was the President having to slap the AD down in front of a potential new employee.  Way to plan ahead for interviews...

It also means something even worse.  Think about what Martin said.  "We love your spread and shred offense and want to hire you, by the way we want to you to keep DeBord on staff as the OC."  Think about that for a minute.  Bang your head into your desk.  Later in the meeting when RR says it will take him awhile to install his system and Martin says that's not a problem, you really have to wonder if Martin had any clue what RR's system was.  If Martin had any clue what he was getting into.  

Martin of course then lowballs RR's assistants and fails to secure Casteel.  So we arguably whiff on the second most assistant of RR's machine (I'd argue since RR is offensively minded, DC is more important than OC.  Coordinators of course are clearly more important  than posistion coaches).  We also screw up the whole firing of Carr's staff.  RR makes them wait in the hall and people like Gittelson (30 years here) are fired.  

This is a failure for everyone.  For Carr, for RR, and for Martin.  Carr's about to become the Assoc AD for football operations.  If he's so worried about his assistants getting treated fairly he should take a greater role in the process.  Martin should be finding jobs for people like Gittelson (there has to be come kind of generic title we can give him, keep him on the Michigan payroll, and reward his loyalty.  Barwis is now the man for football, we have dozens of weightrooms on the campus, we could have found Gittelson a place.  Same with the others, stuff them in some AD job until they find coaching work.  We're Michigan, we're supposed to be loyal.).  RR of course really fails at handling the firings well.  Carr of course ends up unhappy, somewhat openly advocating transfers, and the whole RR-Carr relationship goes sour.  

We know how it goes from there.  Freep columnists are harsh on RR, Carr era players attack RR in the media.  Martin does nothing public,  Carr does nothing public.  RR says the wrong things, loses games, and finally Grobans himself out of a job.  Plus of course getting bombed in the bowl didn't help.  

My reason for rehashing this 3&O content was to show the actions of people and compare them to Bo.  There was no "The Team, The Team, The Team". No concern for the players.

First off Martin flushed his legacy with the RR hire.  The man put us in the black, he built a beautiful athletic campus.  He set us up with the stadium suites that generate an amazing amount of revenue.  We have the world's largest indoor practice facility because of him.  Crisler doesn't look like shit anymore because of him (DB did it with his revenue).  We could afford to offer Harbaugh 5 million a year because of him.  We could pry Mattison out of the pros because of him.  We have a massive bank account, a massive revenue stream, and top shelf facilities because of him.  We also had the NCAA investigate us and a civil war because of his poor personal management.  If we had a comptroller hall of fame, he goes in the first round.  As it stands though he is remembered for going boating during a coaching search with a cellphone he could not operate.

I love Carr and anyone who bothers to read my posts knows I'm in the Carr defender category.  Carr has done a lot for this University.  On the field and off the field (namely his fundraising for Motts is really his greatest achievement as a human being since sick kids are a million times more important than kicking around an inflated pig's bladder).  Yet when the time came he wasn't a Michigan Man.  RR's teams were loaded with Carr's recruits.  Yet he turned down 8 chances to speak to RR's teams.  It's fine if Carr wanted to dislike RR.  RR did fire all his friends and talk a lot in public, the antithesis of Carr.  However when our fanbase errupted into a civil war it was the players, the players that Carr recruited who suffered as the program was ripped apart.  Carr must have promised these kids B1G rings when he recruited them.  Yet he shut up and didn't do anything when the program collapsed around them.  It's almost as if he told them "transfer, because I'm cutting all ties and won't be around to help you after the Bowl".  Bo was known for walking into people's offices and telling them "You need to shut up".  Bo would have been defending the kids and the program.  Carr was silent.  At best he did nothing, at worst he was using his players and contacts to undermine RR instead of help him.  I have no idea what Carr did during those three years, but he wasn't a Michigan Man because he definitely wasn't using his power to support the team.    

I'm going to be brief on RR since we've dissecting him a million times on this board.  He made a lot of mistakes on the field in terms of the defense.  Off the field he really failed to win the political battle that comes with being the head coach at a name brand football school.  Yes the deck was stacked against him, but even so he tended to make things worse, not better.  For example RR played under Nehlen, a Bo assistant.  He learned about "Those Who Stay Will Be Champions" from Nehlen and used it himself when he coached at Glenville State.  Yet he never told those stories despite the fact they instantly put him on the Bo tree and made him more acceptable.  More importantly is how quickly he broke down.  His locker room destroying rage, this "fuck you" ridden tirades over his headset when Tate made a bad play.  Yes it is projection, but you have to wonder if in year 4 or 5 he goes all Woody Hayes on a DB or Bob Knight on someone.  I don't believe RR as a person would ever do that, but people do snap.  At some level when you read how broken down RR was as Year 3 went from 5 and 0 to 2 and 5, you have to wonder if it was a mercy firing.  

What we see there are three people who aren't bad people.  Martin made us rich, Carr did a lot for the program and the school, RR wanted to make this his destination school and cared for his kids, and he did install the offense we hired him to install.  Yet everyone had their flaws.  Blindess with personnel hirings, a failure to support RR the way Bump supported Bo, and the inability to properly adopted Michigan mannerisms/fix the damn defense.  No one is the devil here or an incompetent, but no one is Bo either.

Then there is the fanbase, us.  That member of our fanbase who called a regent to complain that RR used "ain't" in a press conference (seriously, fuck you whoever that was).  The fanbase who the minute Bo died, demanded someone else become Bo.  Then when everyone showed they were mortal, not Bo, and could make mistakes we devolved into armed "Old Guard" and "New Guard" camps.  Communist football vs primitive saurian Llloydball.  We all agreed Martin was a moron who couldn't work a cell phone, picked a coach (RR or Carr) and tried to crown him as the new center of Michigan football.  We also didn't exactly cover ourselves in glory.

That's what we need to take away from the RR era.  Our dad died.  Uncle Lloyd turned out be a distant and cold paternal figure.  Uncle Rodriguez went through a rough time and had a melt down.  Uncle Martin was busy clicking buttons in excel.  So a lot of the fanbase regressed from Michigan Men into bitchy children who said mean things on the radio or wrote them, despite the negative impact they had on The Team.  

As we enter the new era, 10-2, now willing to pay top dollar for top coordinators, with a guy who gets Michigan, and RR has a new job in a BCS conference, I think it may be time to let it go.  At the end of the day we don't have a good guy and we don't have a bad guy.  Martin, Carr, and RR all did a lot for this school and they all failed it.  Any debate where you try to annoint one guy as the devil and one guy as the angel in this era is just going to generate a flamefest because each side has plenty of material to cite.  The actors here were all humans who were successful in some areas, but unlike Bo they weren't successful in every area.  No one was bad, they just weren't Bo and that is fine because being Bo is a high standard to live up to.  As we go forward we need to stop looking for a new Bo.  Bo's dead.  But a new one will emerge.  Just as it flowed from Yost to Crisler to Bo.  Don't try and place someone on that throne by force though.

We should also remember how a house divided cannot stand against itself and more importantly how we hurt the players on the field with the whole civil war.  We owe people like Graham and Moundros something.  They gave it all on the field on Saturday while the fanbase was busy having a flamewar.  

Oh and always remember Sharp and Rosenberg suck.  

If we're going to keep one thing in our mind as we move forward, it should be that comment from Bo about how we'd find out who the real Michigan Men were when he died.  We did and we need to remember what that cost us.  It's up to us to keep it together now, because we won't have Bo to walk into our lives and tell us "You need to shut up now".  

Per Twitter, Brandon Graham is coming off the PUP list tonight to play against Chicago for his 2011 season debut after his bigtime knee injury last year.  A lot has been expected of him since he was chosen 13th overall last year, but hopefully this year he'll ease back into the game after fully recovering and set himself up for a breakout 2012 season.

The game, as usual, will be on at 8:30 EST on ESPN.  Make sure to watch and root for one of the best guys from the 2009 team along with teammate Jason Avant. (But hopefully not Tacopants.)

NFL Game Center Link

So i'm bored watching the World Series Game 6 and the Cardinals making all these errors and I can't help but remember the Tigers making all those errors in 2006 and giving away the series.  

So I came across this article about Brandon Graham and how he gained all this weight while he was injured eating Philly Cheesesteaks.  Here's the link:

http://www.thepostgame.com/blog/chompions/201110/eagles-defensive-end-br...

It doesn't help that i'm starving right now either.  

 Somethings to consider in the discussions of moving Mario to OLB.

First - For his high school career he has played with his hand on the ground as a defensive tackle or a defensive end.  According to the "Hello" post he is a monster coming off the line:

The 6-3, 215-pounder is undersized in the trenches, but his power and quickness mitigates that disadvantage. So, too, does his relentless aggression. "Mario is unstoppable," said Burbridge. "You never seen him blocked. Mario is a beast." Funchess agreed: "(Ojemudia) is just an animal. He just gets the job done."

Ojemudia made 127 tackles on the season from his defensive end spot, including 12 sacks and 3 forced fumbles. Ojemudia was a driving force behind Harrison winning their 13th championship in 2010. He was also one of only three underclassmen to be named to the Detroit Free Press Dream Team.

Second - He is only a Junior in high school at 6'2 and 220 lbs.  He may add inches and weight over the next year and arrive on campus at 6'3 or 6'4 and 230 or 240.  Compare his size and stats as a junior to two Michigan greats when they were high school seniors: 

While I realize that it's unfair to expect Mario to measure up to these all-time greats, I thought it was reasonable to remind the many posters who claim he won't play DE that a lot of growing can happen between age 17 and 20.  Since we all hope he has that much time to mature he could be 6'3 265 by then and a pass rushing monster.

Isn't it nice to dream about the potential of this 2012 class?