beilein

just read a book and never come back on the internet -all coaches

"BAWTITABAW, KEMOSABE, DO YOU SPEAK IT?" Beilein said.

[NOTE: in transit to DC today for Q&A thing Thursday, so light day from me.]

We need some elephants with adamantium blades coming from their hands. This exists:

The enemy of my enemy is my friend, and I need some lambchop-possessing awful cartoon unholy wolverine-elephant combinations stat.

On your TV! Black and Blue, the Willis Ward documentary, will be on your television if you're in Detroit. Channel 7, 1 PM, Saturday. Yes, this is unfortunately timed with the Arkansas basketball game overlapping. Set your DVRs.

Where many coaches just show up from the MAC. The Big Ten has pants and pants of money. Leg-sleeves stuffed with cash. And…

Purdue Football Coaching Search: Butch Jones Leaning Towards Colorado

…that about says it all. I know that Purdue is maybe not the best example but the current Big Ten coaches are:

MAC OR MAC-ISH HEAD COACHES: Beckman, Kill, Hoke
NOT EVEN MAC: Hope (fired)
BIG EAST HEAD COACHES: Dantonio
COORDINATORS: Wilson, Bielema, O'Brien, Pelini
POSITION COACH: Fitzgerald (thrust into the job early by tragedy), Ferentz
URBAN MEYER: Urban Meyer

People, stop hiring MAC coaches who get hot for a couple seasons. Anyone can get good in the MAC (except Eastern why do you have football Eastern), and the MACtion nature of the league means that whoever is good is good because of chaos. Hoke at least had a couple years of turnaround at SDSU to his credit.

Also, there is one coach in the league who came in with BCS-level bonafides, Meyer, and he had extenuating circumstances that removed him from his previous job. This year is not a great example because I can't think of anyone who leaps off the page as an excellent coach Purdue should try to poach, but in the past five to ten years no midlevel Big Ten school has even approached a decent hire. I mean, yeah what about Sonny Dykes: 

Sonny Dykes- Where art thou?

Sonny Dykes, my number one choice, seems to be staying pretty quiet during this whole process.  I haven’t heard his name mentioned for Tennessee or Arksans or even NC State despite early murmurs those were his preferences.  His team turned down a bowl game because they were hoping for a better offer.  If that’s any indication of how Dykes negotiates someone may get a bargain of a coach. Cal seems to be the front runner for him at this point but with the coaching carousel you never know. I’d still like to see Burke take a shot at him and use the extra money for a hot shot defensive coordinator.

Is Cal going to outspend a Big Ten team for Dykes? Adding Rutgers and Maryland will change that. Sure.

Next up for Purdue: maybe Darrell Hazell because Hazell has one year in which his team came out on top of MACtion and two as a head coach. Conference, I roll my eyes at you.

Burnin' the shirt, burnin' the shirt. Well so much for Caris Levert the redshirting guy. Michigan put him out there against Bradley and will continue playing him. This means bad news for Matt Vogrich, who went from a starting, if minor, role to a few minutes late:

"(The plan is to play him) six to eight or six to 10 (minutes per game)," Beilein said Monday. "I don't know if that's always going to happen, it depends on what's going on late in the game.

"That was our intention, that's why we made the move to put him in the top eight -- we're still going to stay with a top eight or nine (guys in a rotation), and he's in there."

With Albrecht and McGary definitely part of that rotation, Levert's addition just about kicks Vogrich out of meaningful PT.

How do we feel about this? Vogrich was off to a poor start this season, but he has been able to provide sporadic gritty grit off the bench in past years and knows how to work a back-door cut. I'm less incensed about burning redshirts in basketball, where the really good players don't stick around four years, let alone five, and anyone on the floor is contributing in a way Sione Houma wasn't when he covered kickoffs that were going into the endzone anyway.

If Levert is worth a couple points a game, I'd say go for it. We haven't seen much to indicate that he is yet, but the buzz has been consistent. If they can really use him as a "defensive stopper," I'll be surprised but that's what Beilein says and Beilein draws a lot of water in this town.

Everyone was injured and now it can be told. Taylor Lewan's shoulder you didn't know was hurt is fine now, which hurrah because Clowney. Gardner's ankle you didn't know was hurt will be fine by the time bowl practice starts. Denard's elbow you knew was injured is still coming along:

Robinson was asked Monday if he's been throwing at all.

"I'm not throwing how I want to throw," he said. "I'll get there eventually."

He didn't indicate what has kept him from throwing the way he'd like.

"I don't know right now," he said. "Got to keep going, keep trying and keep getting treatment."

Nate Brink is not returning and this is apparently still news despite the fact that he walked on senior day. Stood, really, but you know what I mean.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA lolerbee($)

The discussion: Which team is the nation's most talented?

Ford: …the team that may have the most talent in the country, in my book, is Michigan. The Wolverines currently have five players ranked in our Top 100. Kentucky is the only other team to have as many Top 100 players.

Right now, point guard Trey Burke is the only Michigan player ranked in our top 30, but Glenn Robinson III and Tim Hardaway Jr. both have the ability to crack the first round of the NBA draft. Freshmen Mitch McGary and Nik Stauskas are further down the list, but both have a real shot at getting drafted down the road.

That's in part why I believe Michigan is a Final Four team and may give Indiana a run for the No. 1 spot by the end of the season.

/spins in chair whistling strangely

Adopt-a-Bundesliga. I mentioned this on the podcast a few weeks ago and I am still kicking the idea around: I kind of want to adopt a Bundesliga team, because the Bundesliga is a place where people think like this:

Among Germany's well-organised supporter groups is Kein Zwanni (Not Twenty), a campaign to keep tickets cheap. Its spokesman, Dortmund fan Marc Quambusch, said: "You have to keep tickets affordable so poorer and young people can have the experience of being football supporters. German football has a special relationship with supporters because we are the owners of the clubs; people do feel that very emotional sense of belonging and the clubs do listen to the fans. I feel we need to really value what we have."

Watzke is a confirmed adherent to the Bundesliga rule that its clubs, with the historic exceptions of Bayer Leverkusen, Wolfsburg and more recently Hoffenheim, must be controlled "50% plus one" by their members. The other 33 of the 36 clubs, including Bayern Munich, which is 82% owned by its member-supporters, cannot be bought by a single person from outside, like the Premier League clubs, but instead are democratically answerable to their members.

An indication of an "emotional sense of belonging" is what the Big Ten's leadership got from fans once they announced they'd be adding Maryland and Rutgers, and is what they are busy throwing away right now in pursuit of ever-greater dollars without bothering to ask first. Ask anyone. They just did it.

That article is on Dortmund*. Dortmund fell in to debt and is coming off consecutive league championships by digging out and buying young players and building something. The entire league is organized like the Packers with exceptions grandfathered in; meanwhile the Packers setup is banned by the NFL with Green Bay grandfathered in. One gives you Dan Snyder. The other does not.

*[Dortmund pros: successful, opportunity to root against Jermaine Jones. Yellow overlaps with Michigan somewhat. Cons: somewhat of a carpetbagging thing to root for defending league champion, their yellow seems a little off. ]

Meanwhile your business models are unsustainable. Fact: if you do not like sports cable is a huge ripoff. Via Get The Picture:

The average household already spends about $90 a month for cable or satellite TV, and nearly half of that amount pays for the sports channels packaged into most services. [Emphasis added.]  Massive deals for marquee sports franchises like the Dodgers and Lakers are driving those costs even higher. Over the next three years, monthly cable and satellite bills are expected to rise an average of nearly 40%, to $125, according to the market research company NPD Group.

So far, people seem willing to pay. But the escalating costs are triggering worries that, at some point, consumers will begin ditching their cable and satellite subscriptions.

“We’ve got runaway sports rights, runaway sports salaries and what is essentially a high tax on a lot of households that don’t have a lot of interest in sports,” said John Malone, the cable industry pioneer and chairman of Liberty Media. “The consumer is really getting squeezed, as is the cable operator.”

That is an unsustainable model that will erode. The Big Ten has hitched its entire wagon to that instead of things without an immediate return like, oh I don't know, an emotional sense of belonging. They are following the lead of newspapers, most of whom have abandoned any long-term strategy for slowly milking what profits can be made—except newspapers did not have a choice.

At this point I just don't care about the Big Ten expanding. I had my rage, and now I don't care what happens. That's where I am, and that's dangerous for the pointy-haired bosses. I'll watch, I'm committed to that, but there's a continuum here.

Here is a libertarian-flavored argument from Mother Jones's Kevin Drum about this whole business that GTP linked and I agree with, no polo.

No link just a thing I am thinking. The best example of the milking behavior is the Big Ten ruining things by making more of them. The two examples I'm thinking of:

• Splitting Michigan and Ohio State in the hopes of getting a rematch the next week.
• Cramming four Big Ten bowls onto New Year's Day, cheapening the accomplishment.

Instead of NYD being a litmus test for a  good season it is now highly likely 8 and 7 win teams get there annually, and then who cares.

Yes, I am thinking about living under a highway overpass. Let's think about something happier.

STAUSKAS. Stauskas.

Also other key plays. I love how on the last one you can hear the entire arena moan disgustedly before Stauskas even gets the ball. They know it's going in.

Etc.: Nebrasketball beats USC to give the Big Ten a little bit of a schedule bump. I watched the first 15 minutes or so and came away amazed at how bad the Trojans were. They have a guy with above-average usage (Jio Fontan) shooting 24% from 2!

Hagerup profiled. Baumgardner on the Bradley game, which I was fine with them playing. I'd rather have Michigan go to MVC schools for RPI and competitive purposes than beat up on the SWAC. Beard on the freshmen. MGoUser club_med looks at overtime games and eventually concludes that how you get to overtime—by blowing a lead or coming back—does not affect your chance of winning.

Late fades after being up big are the best problem to have but I would prefer it if they were fixed.

The only way we'll ever see FSU at Michigan again: a playoff

Playoff stuff. CBS anonymously surveyed conference commissioners and came back with indications as to where they're leaning if (when) a four-team playoff gets implemented. The most important bit from the Big Ten perspective:

CBSSports.com survey says: The commissioners that responded favored playing the semifinal games on campus and holding the title game at a neutral site -- either an existing BCS bowl or letting cities bid for the title game. There was not much support for holding the semifinal games at neutral sites.

I predict in 2014: Semifinal games will end up being played on campus sites with the current BCS bowls hosting the championship game on a rotating basis. Although, don't count out the BCS allowing other cities to bid for the game -- similar to the Super Bowl. Also it's a stone cold lock that the double-hosting format by the BCS bowls (Fiesta, Orange, Sugar and Rose) will be eliminated when the new cycle begins.

That is the way it should be. Cut out the middlemen and provide home atmospheres. Brett McMurphy also reports that commissioners are split down the middle about restricting the field to conference champions, that semifinals will be played sometime around Christmas, and the final will be "as close to January 1 as possible." Oddly, the actual plus one—just another game after the bowls without a bracket—is still on the table.

Amazing how we've instantly flipped from never happen to definitely happening on this. Once Delany was proposing stuff in newspapers this was inevitable, I guess. Still a jarring shift in the landscape.

Burying the lead. David Stern got snippy when asked about the NBA's one-and-done rule recently, which got the headline and the attention. I think this is more significant, though:

“Years ago, I said to the NCAA, I’ve got a great idea,” he said. ‘We’ll insure a select group of basketball players. And that will make them more likely to stay in school, because they won’t feel the loss of a big contract. We’ll designate a pool, and those that are lucky enough to be drafted and make money will pay us back, and those that don’t, it’s our expense. The NCAA I think took it to a committee, that takes it to a census, that took it to a conference, then they have a congress and they came back to me and they said, well, it will only work under our rules if we do that for all sports. And I said, I don’t think that’ll work.”

NBA: Would you like some free money?
NCAA, thanks to the Indiana States of the world: No.

The NCAA is a lot like CONCACAF these days, dominated by a bunch of insignificant islands who have voting power out of all proportion to their relevance. This is D-I. Indiana State wants it to be intramurals. A split is necessary.

As far as the one-and-done model goes, the reason Stern gets snippy is because every time he has a press conference someone asks him about the one and done being ridiculous. This is because it is. John Gasaway was talking about this on twitter recently and I chimed in to agree: the NBA should move to the NHL model where everyone's eligible out of high school whether they opt in or not. NBA teams could then draft players without having to sign them, and sign them when they thought they could be a useful addition to the roster. You could expand the draft to five rounds and give NBA fans another reason to watch college basketball. The kids who aren't ready but keep declaring for the draft willy-nilly would evaporate. It would be a win for everyone.

Della Valle items. I'm watching his weird Findlay Prep team* club a high school that's actually a high school in a made-for-ESPN high school showcase. It's dififcult to judge Della Valle's offense since he's an afterthought amongst the mega-touted guys around him, but he plays probably 80% of Findlay's minutes so he's doing something right.

He's a scrappy, high-effort player who's doing pretty well defensively against other guys going to high majors, and it seems like he's making smart cuts to get open. These cuts are almost universally ignored by his teammates; the one time he did get a dump-down in the post he took a couple of back-to-the-basket dribbles before hitting a teammate flashing down the lane. The resulting thunder-dunk was aborted by a foul. He looks like a Beilein player out there amongst the athletes and whatnot. Findlay claims he's hitting 55% of his threes on the year, which… like… if that's true he's not shooting nearly enough.

His ballhandling is okay. You could get away with him as a backup point but wouldn't want to start him there. He'd be able to play at the two and three easily. I'd take him without blinking.

It would be a great help for Michigan if Arizona's troubled Josiah Turner returned. Survey says…

"I won't elaborate beyond that just because when our season ends we will be able to take the next step and get on the same page with Josiah moving forward. That shouldn't be interpreted as he will never play at Arizona again, but I know he won't play this season again."

This is Turner's second suspension. He did not travel with the team to Florida on Dec. 7, and Miller also held him out during the third game of the season to send something of an attitude adjustment message.

Miller wouldn't comment on the chances of Turner -- rated the 10th-best recruit in the country last season by Rivals.com -- being with Arizona next season

Hmmm. Make this work, Sean Miller. Arizona currently has one scholarship available and is after Duquense transfer TJ McConnell, a PG (who can't play next year, settle down) who fits a bigger need for them. Without someone else leaving they would not have room for Della Valle. Root for McConnell to Arizona and Turner to zen meditation.

Della Valle visits Arizona the 13th and Michigan shortly after. Vibes have been good so far but not so good that it would be a shock to see him at Arizona. It seems to be down to M and the Wildcats, though.

*[The only students at the school are the guys on the basketball roster. It's a school in a very technical sense. The academics seem fine, as the kids go to a tony private school across the street.]

Beilein offense in detail. It's been like four days so it's time for another Massive Daily Profile. This one is on Beilein's offense:

Beilein rapidly moves the five pins around the board, showing the wide variety of offensive looks he uses. The only thing moving faster than his fingers is his mouth, as he breathlessly details what would be overly complex to most.

You realize Beilein is in complete control of this offense, and for good reason — it’s all his. Some may have similar principles in their system, but the minutiae, terminology and endless reads Beilein employs are unique to him. Though the basics come from some ancestral systems, he has morphed and twisted his attack into something all his own.

Ever wonder why you don’t see other teams running the Beilein system? It’d be impossible. The only man who truly knows its detailed intricacies is Beilein.

Etc.: Five high points of the basketball season. Craig Roh interviewed, seems to be adopting the shaggy hair required of Michigan SDEs.

2/21/2012 – Michigan 67, Northwestern 55 (OT) – 21-7, 11-4 Big Ten

LEFT: A fateful moment in which our brave comrade fouled the opponent's forearm in the eyes of corrupt capitalist lackeys. RIGHT: The imperialists were forced into illegal measures in their failed attempts to deal with Comrade Morgan.

Dustin Johnston/UMHoops; AnnArbor.com

Let the reign of Beilein be long and glorious. He is our sun and star and moons. He has brought basketball back to Ann Arbor long after we had ceded our land to the imperialists of East Lansing and set about hoping we would not be Northwestern forever. The bubble is banished and all loyal Wolverines are required to have Mao-style paintings of not one but two Dear Leaders. This is right and just.

But we have to talk about something, Oh Great Back Cut of Heaven. That thing is what to do when Michigan's glorious but thin frontcourt, sabotaged by foreigners who broke Comrade Horford's foot—we have executed the traitors or at least given people who probably know the traitors harsh looks—is brought low by the machinations of imperialist pig-dogs with whistles.

Oh Thousand Shining Arcs From Behind The Line, your response in the Northwestern game was to bench Comrades Morgan and Smotrycz in favor of Comrades McLimans and Christian. They are a good loyalists who contribute all they can to the cause. Unfortunately for the Glorious Revolution, that is zero shot attempts and zero rebounds in fourteen minutes. "From each according to their ability, to each according to their need" suggests that Comrades McLimans and Christian are most needed in the towel-waving collectives of Ukraine, where they can fan our team to greatness.

When they are placed on the court, starvation ensues. Michigan led 11-3 when McLimans entered the game; Northwestern led 31-24 by halftime, when Comrades Morgan and Smotrycz returned to the floor. In that span of time, Northwestern had six offensive rebounds in eight opportunities*. In the other 31 minutes they had five in 24. Northwestern scored more points in the fourteen minutes without Morgan and Smotrycz (28) than they did in the other thirty-one(27).

Upon their return Morgan and Smotrycz promptly led a glorious charge into a lead foreordained by your divinity, Great Leveler. Unfortunately, rebel conspiracy sabotaged the bridge between Tim Hardaway Jr. and free throw makes, forcing the revolution into overtime. The people rose up and slew their purple oppressors with a thousand swords, as you decreed would always be the case.

Some of our less faithful comrades may have momentarily lost confidence, however. While the will of the people can never be defeated, it should be pointed out that basketball teams can and putting in comrades who are not very good at basketball could lead to a (temporary, meaningless) setback in Michigan's five-year plan.

When comrades Morgan and Smotrycz returned it took 12 minutes for one of them to pick up a third foul. If they were allowed to continue playing in the first half it is true they would be in danger of fouling out early. But what would the consequences be in that situation? In the worst vaguely plausible scenario, both Morgan and Smotrycz foul out five or six minutes into the second half, forcing the Striped Orange Sun to… play McLimans and Christian for 14 minutes. The wisdom of the Shining Beacon of Halftime Adjustments is unquestioned, but in this one situation it seems like it is not infinite.

Earlier in the year, a similar substitution pattern saw Comrade Burke confined to the bench for a long stretch against Iowa. Burke left with Michigan down four and returned with them down twelve. Nefarious play by oppressors made Michigan play poorly throughout, so this did not make an impact on the outcome, but it didn't help matters much.

I submit that with Burke averaging 1.8 fouls per 40 minutes at the time of his transgression and six additional calls available to a two-headed center playing a team without any size, it would benefit Michigan greatly to roll the dice on players in foul trouble instead of willingly accepting the worst-case scenario of doing so. Oh sun and moon and stars.

*[It was actually 7 of 9 but one was a OREB credited to Northwestern's team after McLimans blocked a shot out of bounds. I don't think that shows up on the box score I'm using.]

Media

Photos from AnnArbor.com and UMHoops. This one demonstrates Burke's powers of telekinesis:

Dustin Johnston

Highlights from BTN and mgovideo:

Bullets that get dust on them

Defense! Zounds. UMHoops says Michigan had Morgan and/or Smotrycz for 40 possessions. On those possessions Northwestern scored 27 points, or 0.68 points per possession. That's outstanding. Northwestern has the country's 15th-best offense and the league's fourth-best; when Michigan wasn't going to the deep bench because of the aforementioned rigidity they annihilated the Wildcats.

The primary way they did this was by switching everything. IIRC there was a single breakdown for an open layup in the first half, then nothing the rest of the game. Everything else was contested. John Shurna was 2 of 5 from three and 4 of 11 from two with a couple of those twos ridiculous circus things; after the game Bill Carmody kind of called out his leading scorer for passivity:

"It just seemed the whole game that he was reluctant to do anything," Carmody said. "He had some pretty good looks and he passed them up to go to the next thing. It was a game he had to take over."

Northwestern never tried to punish Michigan for switching players as small as Trey Burke onto Shurna. That's either blind luck or great scouting.

Threes? Michigan hit 37% on 38 threes for 1.1 points per attempt. Are we happy with that? I have no idea. On the one hand, a lot of those were wide open when opponents sagged off Burke or left a corner three open in the 1-3-1. On the other hand, 38 threes. I'm guessing we would have had a much different opinion than confusion if Burke and Hardaway didn't put down back-to-back triples after Michigan found itself down four late. Those makes opened the door for the rat-tat-tat at the beginning of overtime. Before that the numbers were ugly.

1.1 points is not great. It sounds good as a shooting percentage but you have to take into account that way more twos than threes end up getting erased in favor of free throws. On the other hand, being willing to launch from deep really cut down on Michigan's turnovers (six to an uncharacteristic 14 for Northwestern) and would have led to some additional possessions via Morgan offensive rebounds if the refs hadn't gone from suck to blow in the second half. In the end, it worked. Worked authoritatively when Morgan/Smotrycz were in.

1-3-1 response. When Michigan's 1-3-1 was getting shredded early in the disappointing Harris/Sims post-tourney year it seemed like opponents were attacking it diagonally and getting to the basket. Michigan was hesitant to put the ball on the floor at all and ended up shooting over it on a large majority of possessions. When they did dump it in low, Morgan had a couple opportunities but didn't go up strong, as they say, and we got the obligatory missed bunny or two*. I wonder if Northwestern just runs the 1-3-1 a lot better than Michigan ever has in the Beilein era.

*[This should be less of a problem with McGary. When people are asking Morgan to go up strong they believe he can dunk a ball from a standing start under the basket, which I don't think he can. This should be no problem for McGary as long as he can catch cleanly—always an issue with big men.]

Hardaway. Yerg. Back to the salt mines: 2 of 9 from three, 4 of 10 from the line. Two of three from two… against a team that has no shot blocking. I don't think those distributions are going to get fixed this year; we can only hope the shots go down when Michigan really needs them to.

Elsewhere

Rodger Sherman is not dead:

How. in the HELL. do we lose two games to the same ranked team in overtime? HOW? Why does this happen? THIS IS JUST THE WORST.

Northwestern has now played about 8000 close games this season and lost all of them. Here are my questions, and I am furious about each and every one.

You get the ball witha bout 50 seconds and a full shot clock. Instead of opting to go two-for-one and take the last shot, which ANYBODY WITH ANY SORT OF BASKETBALL SENSE IN THE WORLD would have done, Northwestern held for 35 seconds and had a possession end with a JerShon Cobb three, a shot which is about as efficient as repeatedly stabbing yourself in the face. YOU DON'T WANT TO PLAY ANOTHER FIVE MINUTES AGAINST A RANKED TEAM WITH ALL THE MOMENTUM. YOU WANT TO END THE GAME IN REGULATION. YOU HAVE A BETTER CHANCE OF BEATING A BETTER TEAM IN THREE POSSESSIONS (TWO OF WHICH ARE YOURS) THAN FIVE MORE MINUTES. This is inexplicable.

We will root for Northwestern from here on out. We have hurt them more than they deserve. AnnArbor.com on Vogrich:

"He's been a big part of this little surge we're having right now," Michigan coach John Beilein said of Vogrich. "You've seen all year long that we've struggled with our bench play.

"And we need that. He's done a good job."

During Michigan's current four-game winning streak, Vogrich has gone 9-for-13 from 3-point range, providing a spark off the bench that hasn't been there for most of the season.

Known as a 3-point specialist, Vogrich entered the Nebraska game on Feb. 8 shooting just 21.2 percent from behind the arc. But thanks to his recent hot streak, he's jumped up to a more respectable 33.3 percent on the year.

UMHoops recap.

I still can't believe it's called "The Journey," which should by rights be a Hallmark Channel series about entering puberty. But it's talking Michigan-Michigan State. Cazzie Russell gets his eyebrow on and Novak rains threes in Breslin:

The Aneurysm of Leadership is discussed. 

It's the… uh… economy? This is unbelievable:

Once regularly an asylum for 1,200 Crazies, Section 17 at Cameron Indoor Stadium now rarely plays host to a student-only crowd.

Student attendance at men’s basketball games has fallen consistently over the last five years, even dropping after Duke won its fourth national championship in 2010. This season, approximately 650 undergraduates have attended each game, 150 fewer than during the 2008-09 season. As a result, Duke Athletics has begun to sell an increasing number of general admission tickets in the student section on a regular basis.

“It has nothing to do with the revenue. We just want it to be full,” Director of Marketing and Relations Mike Forman said. “If there were 1,200 students every game we would love it.”

I've given Michigan students crap for late/spotty attendance at football and hockey (basketball seems immune for some reason) but, like… Jebus. If Duke can't sell out their student tickets it is a nationwide epidemic.

The article goes on to describe a couple of reasons for the decline: the prevalence of online streaming (which seems ludicrous since I'm sure all Duke games are televised in Durham) and "the students' misconception of the time commitment involved." Apparently it's first-come, first-serve and you show up for a game sans ticket and hope to get in. That's a little nuts.

Even if Duke is too far at one end of the scale, Michigan could slide closer to them without incurring the same effect. Offer incentives for having your tickets scanned on time or early and revoke student ticket privileges for people who don't bother to show up.

Attacking the symptom. Bowls are out of control but this does not attack the matter at its heart:

There is "growing support" among conference commissioners, athletic directors and bowl officials to increase the difficulty of becoming bowl eligible by requiring teams to have seven victories, or a winning record, when the new BCS cycle begins in 2014, multiple sources have told CBSSports.com. The seven-win requirement would also mean a handful of bowls likely would be discontinued because there would not be enough eligible teams to fill all of the current 70 berths. In the past two years alone, 27 teams with 6-6 records were needed to fill all the bowl slots, meaning nearly 20 percent of the bowl field didn't have a winning record.

That would hack out about seven of the existing bowls, none of which would be missed in the slightest. It would still allow a dozen or more bowls that are net negatives to exist. The way to fix the current system is to get rid of ticket and hotel guarantees and let the bowls, not the schools, assume the risk of a crappy matchup.

Slicing out the bottom of the barrel is better than nothing, I guess. And at least athletic directors and presidents are getting wise to the scam:

"The 7-5 proposal is getting serious support," a non-BCS bowl official said. "They're telling a coach [that] 6-6 doesn't cut it, but then the coach gets a $50,000 or $100,000 bonus for a bowl game that none of the fan base wants to see. Athletic directors feel like they're pouring money down a hole and they're getting frustrated with it. The only people making out on 6-6 bowl games are the coaches."

…and the dudes in blazers, of course.

Burn. The Daily profiles Brian Wiseman by featuring his ridiculous peewee campaign:

You’ve probably heard about Michigan hockey coach Red Berenson’s phenomenal six-goal game with the St. Louis Blues in 1968. But what about the record-breaking season of one of his assistants, who averaged over five goals per game en route to a 413-goal campaign?

“They didn’t even keep those stats when I was a kid,” Berenson said.

Alex Guptill says no sale.

@_BrianWiseman I've seen this guys wrist shot, there is no way he scored 413 goals... #allstar

Wiseman can only say "keep scoring" at the moment, but don't find yourself in a drought, Alex.

I'll take f-bombs for 1000. David Molk is interviewed by Kyle Mienke:

He's certain of one thing, though: He has doubters. And he knows exactly where they can go.

"It's just, stuff like that pisses me off," Molk said, voice rising. "Any scout who denies me pisses me off. 'Oh, this is what you got. You’re not good enough.'

"Well, (to hell with) you, let me show you what I got."

For the record, I have never doubted Molk and move around constantly so my location cannot be pinned down. Also, Molk's Sugar Bowl injury was a severed tendon. Competition for center of the 2010s is now closed.

Surprise unwarranted. After the Purdue game I noted that Michigan's bench was a nonfactor this year. A UMHoops mailbag points out that is no outlier:

Here are the statistics for the percentage of minutes played by the bench (Bench Minutes/Total minutes) under John Beilein since 2005:

Year	Bench %	Rk
2012	22.3%	327
2011	19.3%	337
2010	22.1%	327
2009	35.6%	66
2008	31.6%	147
2007	24.7%	282
2006	20.0%	n/a
2005	31.2%	n/a
Average	25.9%

Beilein has high expectations and he’s going to play who he trusts at any given time.

The last three years Michigan has been incredibly thin. I'm hoping that changes next year. Michigan's not going to shoot up into Arkansas territory but if they can get into the middle of the pack injuries get a lot less frightening and players having off nights can spend more of them on the bench.

Etc.: Martin pwns Brewster at the Senior Bowl. Penn State flips a QB commit from… Rice. Scout folks say Diamond, Grant to M, Garnett to Stanford, Kozan to Iowa, and punt on Reeves.