meta

the ripple effect keeps rippling at TWB

The offseason. This gif doesn't have LSUFreek's swag but the reference is golden:

I loled. Via Gaknar of the EDSBS commentariat. I'm not sure why the Navy Ram is getting shot, though. That is the Navy Ram, isn't it? UPDATE: It's the UNC Ram, which okay.

No offense, Fred Jackson. The countdown to the Hartening has begun in earnest now that he's out of the NFL and acting as a quality control assistant for Ron English and your Eastern Michigan Eagles:

"I'm definitely moving on to the next chapter of my life," said Hart, now married and a father. "Everyone stops playing. I'm done. I know what I want to do. I know where I want to be in the next 10-15 years. I'm happy now. I'm committed to Eastern, I'm committed to helping them, I'm committed to coach E." …

English offered Hart a job as a quality control coach, essentially a graduate assistant, who would have an opportunity for on-field coaching since English's staff was down a coach.

"Even though he's a quality control coach, technically, legally he's been out coaching with assistant coach Doug Downing with the running backs," said English, in his third year at Eastern. "He's been working with our special teams and coaching all the scout teams. So he's had a great impact."

Hart has to work on his hyperbole before he's ready for the Michigan job, but it's just a matter of time unless Ty Wheatley beats him to it.

Bonus awful. Fear The Hat picked up the ESPN post from last night and added a couple of sites that kind of think the Miami thing is important. More importantly, he screencapped the college football page:

The college football page! Aaaigh!

Someone's lying, and that someone is everyone. Terrelle Pryor is ineligible at Ohio State and has been banned from associating with the program for five years. Why? No one knows. Ohio State claims that it's because Pryor won't talk to the NCAA. What won't he talk to the NCAA about? Certainly not violations he committed.

The NFL doesn't appear to be buying this. That forces different, far more plausible stories to come to the forefront:

"Terrelle was fully forthcoming and subsequently provided the documents that were requested to support the disclosure," Cornwell told ESPN. "The NCAA has a procedure where they can automatically audit bank accounts of student-athletes who are on financial aid. If those bank statements add up to a substantial amount more than what has been provided through financial aid, they ask why. Terrelle provided them with those answers and, as I said, the documents the NCAA requested."

ESPN has obtained documents showing Pryor gave bank records to the NCAA at the meeting in May.

Ohio State is still under NCAA investigation, and Sarniak's payments have not been addressed publicly.

"What we provided for NFL Security (on Aug. 5) was a road map, a timeline and the documentation," Cornwell said. "Terrelle cooperated, and the violations occurred during a period well before the (April) draft. That's the key. Those disclosures and documents would have made Terrelle ineligible for the entire 2011 season, and once he made those disclosures to the NCAA, he withdrew from school."

Yeah, you read that name right: Sarniak. Ted Sarniak, the guy who everyone knew was the Nevin Shapiro of Jeanette, PA, gave money to Pryor after his enrollment at OSU. The NCAA had previously, inexplicably, and frustratingly given what happened to Jamal Crawford declared Sarniak's previous creepy gifts okay as long as he never did it again. Ohio State monitored this so hard that instead of disassociating from him, Jim Tressel ran to him for help.

Ohio State is of course denying this, because the NCAA can't even add when they look at a bank statement. The Dispatch reports there's also an investigation going on with a Marvin Austin-like trip to Miami sponsored by Sarniak. There's probably another NOA on the way, whereupon the NCAA will force the OSU athletic department to give away one tenth of one percent of its annual income to a dog shelter. That'll show 'em.

Navel-gazing. Concentrate Media has profiled yours truly. If you like meta, that's your jam. There is already a full and luscious thread discussing my hair if you'd like to participate. Yes, I did take one million points away from the guy who said I look like the lead singer of Nickelback. No, I'm not sorry*.

BTW, I don't think MGoBlog is the future of sports media. It might be a future, but there are going to be several different models that persist over the next ten years. The article is almost entirely accurate except in one small regard: beveled guilt is no joke.

*[Points will expire in two days. I'm not a monster.]

Etc.: The Blade profiles Kovacs and Koger. Mikoyan and the M-Zone team up for a post on the gravesites of Bo Schembechler, Fielding Yost, and Bob Ufer. Maize Pages says brace for mediocrity.

not relevant except in a tiny meta way insofar as Dwarf Fortress is also an indie labor of love, but dude... Dwarf Fortress in the NYT.

Internet: frighteningly comprehensive. Don't ask about Rule 54 here.

Update on a deceased fellow. I made some offhanded reference to Horace Prettyman, how ridiculous a name that was, and how it was obviously a few guys on the football team having a laugh a couple days ago, but a reader points out one Horace Greely Prettyman has his own extensively researched wikipedia article detailing a life full of accomplishments. Specifically, he scored the first-ever touchdown in Ann Arbor:

In 1883, Michigan resumed a schedule of intercollegiate football, and Prettyman played "forward" for the team. The team played its first ever home game at the Ann Arbor Fairgrounds in March 1883, a 40-5 win over the Detroit Independents. Prettyman scored the first touchdown at the Fairgrounds at the 14-minute mark of the "first inning" and went on to score a second touchdown before the end of the inning.

The team played its remaining games as part of an Eastern trip in November 1883. The trip consisted of four road games in eight days at Wesleyan and Yale in Connecticut, Harvard in Massachusetts, and Stevens Institute in Hoboken, New Jersey.

The trip cost $3,000 and was arranged "to both represent and advertise the college among the Eastern cities and universities."Prettyman was placed in charge of the trip, and The Michigan Argonaut praised his management: "All the boys are most hearty in their commendation of Prettyman's excellent management of the financial interests of the trip and his success is seen by the fact that every expense of the trip has been paid to the last cent."

If Prettyman hadn't died in 1945 there's a good chance he would have tracked me down—he was the local postmaster for a long time—and strangled me.

And as long as we're looking up very old photographs of football players, here's Yost with a killer mustache in 1896:

Mustache Wednesday? Come on, baby.

Er, well then. Yesterday's post on Full Cost Of Attendance—apparently this year's conference expansion— made a large assumption: the change would be localizable to certain athletes. Adam Rittenberg says this is wrong:

If the proposal is adopted at the NCAA level (more on this later), it would affect every athlete on a full scholarship. A women's soccer goalie would have the same scholarship structure as a quarterback. "What we're talking about is not limited to football and men's basketball," Hawley said. The proposal wouldn't impact athletes on partial scholarships.

Or is it? The only "headcount" sports—no dividing scholarships—are basketball, football, women's tennis, women's gymnastics, and women's volleyball. Schools that don't wish to put the world on FCOA could just offer partial scholarships in sports that aren't the above.

But that still increases the burden of FCOA considerably, especially at football schools that almost universally feature volleyball for Title IX purposes. Jim Delany Machiavelli Rating: incremented.

Happening? Happening. Mike Slive is on board with this, by the way. SEC + Big Ten equals probably happening.

Good advice for anyone. Nate Silver is an interesting guy, and here's a speech he gave to a bunch of prospective journalists about what they should do in This Environment. The Big Lead contrasts this with Rick Reilly's "don't write for free" speech. The former is useful, the latter clueless.

This is good advice for anyone:

Learn how to make an argument. This is something that came naturally
to me as a former high school debater. One of the things that distinguishes (quote unquote) "new journalism" from some of its more traditional forms is that the reader is really going to be looking for analysis, meaning, context, argument. Unless you come across some really fresh and proprietary information ‐‐ it's great to get a scoop, but it won't happen very often ‐‐ it's not enough just to present the information verbatim.

One of the flaws of political journalism, in fact, is that a lot of what amounts to spin is given authority by being reported at face value.

Instead, the reader is going to be asking you to develop a hypothesis, weigh the evidence, and come to some conclusion about it ‐‐ it's really very much analogous to the scientific method. Good journalism has always done this ‐‐ but now it needs to be done more explicitly.

If you don't know how to make an argument you spend a large amount of time putting together statistics on how many college athletes get arrested only to find yourself widely ridiculed for not even bothering to provide context. In the past you could just say something and the worst that would happen would be a nasty letter to the editor from a crotchety old guy; now your arguments have to be bulletproof (or at least, you know, try a little) lest you get eviscerated.

Silver also suggests journalists learn what to do with numbers, which is something I harp on consistently.

APR bite. While football APR penalties have generally been restricted to the San Jose States of the world, small squad sizes and NBA departures have made the APR an actual toothy thing in college basketball. A couple years ago Indiana, Purdue, and Ohio State all got hit in the offseason. This year UConn feels the wrath:

The national champion Connecticut men's basketball program will lose two scholarships for the upcoming season as a result of a poor Academic Performance Rating from the NCAA. …

The rating puts the basketball program's four-year rating at 893, below the NCAA minimum score of 925. The score for the 2009-10 academic year is 826.

The NCAA's real minimum is 900 but it's interesting that UConn is failing where Kentucky is apparently succeeding. I wonder what they're doing differently in Lexington. The Huskies won't be getting off the mat any time soon, either: their score from last year is 844. Barring a miracle their APR is going to be under 900 for the next few years.

The full report is supposed to come out today; I'll get Michigan's scores up ASAP but probably not as quickly as the guy with the fastest trigger finger on the message board.

What's this oh those are my multiple defense hives welcome back hives I hate you I hate you I hate you aaaah. You may have noticed that Michigan has recruited a lot of linebackers. Farmington Hill Harrison's Mario Ojemudia, a high school defensive tackle who people are projecting as a WDE, wasn't supposed to be one of them but showed up at the recently completed Columbus Nike camp looking like a linebacker, and not one of those linebackers you can turn into a WDE. This may be the cause for another round of "are we moving to a 3-4" last featured in a mailbag here; this time it's a post at Maize N Brew detailing the various teams that moved to the 3-4 and how they mostly got a bunch better.

I don't think this is happening. As I mentioned in that mailbag post, moving to a 3-4 does not reduce your linebacker overage because a well-stocked spot—WDE—becomes a linebacker spot filled by—surprise—those WDEs. I think Mattison has explicitly stated he will run a 4-3 under at Michigan and only a 4-3 under even if I can't find the quote right now, and GOOD LORD LET'S JUST DO ONE THING FAIRLY WELL BEFORE WE START CHANGING AGAIN AAAAAAH—

Etc.: Yost Built profiles new defenseman Mike Chiasson, who does mean no Burlon next year. Unusually for Michigan, Chiasson is 20 now and will be one of those 24-year old seniors popular amongst teams that don't have a lot of NHL draft picks on their rosters. Chad Langlais was the most recent example at Michigan and that worked out well.

subtitle probably unnecessary but co-signed all the same

It's no Nuge but it's something. Also: Daily.

So it seems a lot of people, including you, I believe, have resisted the "Denard Robinson 2011 = Michael Vick 2010" path to blind hope for the upcoming football season. I'm as hopeful as anyone else because duh, but I'm also aware that Robinson is probably too small and inaccurate at this point in his development for this to be a realistic possibility.

But what about Troy Smith? I believe that kid was around Robinson's size, but probably a little slower and had an arm that was probably a bit more accurate but not quite as strong. Do you agree that Smith (against anyone other than Michigan, against which he was a planet-devouring demigod regardless of the season you want to talk about) is a realistic/optimistic benchmark we can have in mind when projecting Robinson in 2011?

This isn't to say Robinson will be as good as Smith, only that their skill sets are comparable, as are the coaching philosophies under which they operated, and that getting some mixed bag of 2005 and 2006 Troy Smith out of the QB position would be a positive.

-Anon

Troy Smith's career does give some hope that a hopeless n00b of a quarterback can develop into a lethal gunslinger. When Justin Zwick was injured midway through 2004 he was pressed into the lineup as redshirt sophomore and was somewhere between Sheridan and Forcier until he played Michigan. You don't need to be told he was insane against M: 18 rushes for 145 yards, 13 of 23 passing for 241 yards, three total touchdowns, no turnovers.

Without that game his numbers were turrible: 3.0 YPC, 6.6 YPA, 56% completion percentage. With it—and as much as we hate to admit it, that happened—his redshirt sophomore numbers were about on par with Tate Forcier as a freshman except with fewer turnovers. With the exception of TD-INT ratio, Denard was actually well ahead of him as a true sophomore, averaging almost nine yards per attempt and running for a billion yards at 6.6 yards a pop.

So if he can improve as much as Smith we're in business. The next year he blew up, completing 63% of his passes for 9.3 yards an attempt with 16 TDs and 4 INTs. He also rushed for around 600 yards on 12 carries a game.

Problem? Yes:

• Smith was handing off and throwing to Santonio Holmes (first round pick), Ted Ginn (first round pick), Antonio Pittman (fourth round pick), and Anthony Gonzalez (first round pick). You can see Stonum and Roundtree getting drafted but probably not until late; Smith had a ton more talent at his disposal than Robinson will.
• Smith had the same coaches for the duration of his career.
• Smith's improvement was standard deviations above the mean, so while it's an optimistic benchmark for Denard it's not one it's reasonable to expect he'll reach.
• Smith's running ability may have opened up some passing lanes for him but nowhere near as many as Robinson's did. If you're going to de-emphasize Robinson's legs that should make it tougher to pass and easier to run.

If Smith provides an optimistic benchmark for Robinson he also provides one for Michigan's coaches: as Smith developed Ohio State's offense gradually morphed into a passing spread reminiscent of Purdue at its absolute apex. This is generally out of character for Tressel—he only brings out the spread option for Pryor in times of great need—but as Smith developed he earned enough trust from his coaches for them to play to his strengths.

Have a question for you, Sir. This is all hypothetical but I was wondering what would you think at the end of it all?

April 2011 - Coach Hoke receives email concerning Player X selling comp tickets (nevermind everyone does it, it is still illegal), Coach Hoke emails back, says he'll check into it. Now...what does Coach Hoke do? What do you hope he does? Go to Compliance? Or handle it internally?

So, he decides to handle it internally
April 2011 - Coach Hoke asks player, player denies selling tickets.
April 2011 - Send email to parents of Player X reminding them that selling comp tickets is illegal.
April 2011 - Has meeting with team reminding that comp tickets can't be sold.
June 2011 - Sends email to person who sent first email verifying that Player X did indeed sell tickets (so, he doesn't get tickets for upcoming season)
Dec 2011 - Michigan Compliance Office gets documentation that Player X did indeed sell tickets.
Dec 2011 - Player X confesses to selling tickets...Michigan self-reports and recommends 5 games for the following season (since that is the normal recommended punishment for this type of violation and the fact that the player didn't come forward).
Dec 2011 - Coach Hoke signs document that no other information was available (giving him the benefit of the doubt, since he gets several hundred emails a day and the fact that he's gone through an entire football season)
Jan 2011 - Michigan Compliance office finds emails related to ticket incident while searching for something else.
Feb 2011 - Michigan Compliance Office interviews Coach Hoke and self-reports information. Recommends 2 games hoping that Player X's suspension is reduced.
March 2011 - Player X's suspension is upheld, Coach Hoke changes his suspension to match Player X.

So, what should Michigan do with Coach Hoke? What do you want to happen to Coach Hoke if he got caught up in something he thought that he could handle internally?

I know it is all hypothetical in nature though Player X could be anyone and I imagine this event could easily come to pass, but everyday coaches make decisions, some good and some bad...but I would be interested in hearing what you would want to happen if this particular event were to go down that way.

Really enjoy your site even though I'm an Ohio State fan...as we don't quite have anything like it.

I'm not sure if that exact scenario rises to the level of a firing—which I'm guessing is the aim of the email—but that part at the top where you get a credible email from someone known to you about guys getting illegal benefits and do not immediately notify compliance is a huge deal. Maybe this is just me speaking as a Michigan fan who has lived through the great annoyance arising from a lack of communication with compliance, but I don't think so. Your compliance department is still "internal." It's not the NCAA. It's essentially on your side unless it really shouldn't be, and they need to know exactly these kinds of things. You can handle a bar fight internally. You cannot handle extra benefits internally.

There are also some key differences between the above scenario and what appears to have transpired at OSU. The hypothesized investigation-type substance where Hoke asks the player about selling tickets and gets a "no" is not sufficient in OSU's case—the original email broke lawyerly confidence to reveal a federal investigation had turned this up. The lawyer is a former OSU walk-on who has defended OSU players in court; he followed up his concern with a second credible email. That's a situation in which you can't just say "did you do this?" and be satisfied with the answer. Though we're not 100% sure on the details yet it seems like the information relayed should have been easy to confirm and only wasn't because there was strong motive not to.

I agree the form Tressel signed a few months later is one of those things that runs across your desk and you sign it because it's boilerplate. But once the investigation is underway, not telling the U or NCAA about some funny emails you responded to and even forwarded to Terrelle Pryor's sketchy "mentor" is far less plausibly innocent.

In the end, Ohio State got to and won a BCS bowl because of Tressel's actions that kept five ineligible players on the field; the alternative was likely indefinite suspensions until the investigation was completed. It looks like a breathtakingly cynical act, and it's not just Michigan fans saying this. What's described above can plausibly be described as "mistake"—and that is what separates it from Tressel's deliberate cover-up.

Brian,

I got into a conversation with one of my close friends from Michigan about something you wrote in a blog post two days ago:  "There's no reason any women's basketball coach not at UConn or Tennessee should be making more than 100k. What's going to happen? Are the empty seats going to stop coming?"

My friend had forwarded it to me because he thought your comment was hilarious.  It ended up leading into a much more detailed discussion on coaching salaries.  Have you by chance seen the athletic department salaries?  It is very interesting. 

Three things stand out:

1. dominated by the football staff (though not surprising)

2. the sheer number of women's sport coaches (regardless of gender) who make over $100,000 (softball, soccer, etc.)

*3. how many comparable sports where the women's coach makes significantly more than the men's coach.  for example, consider tennis (women's coach: $115k.   men's coach: $94K),  soccer (women's: $152K.  men's: $72.5K), track (women's: $122K.  men's: $82K), gymnastics (women's: $156K.  men's: $91K), and cross country (women's: $103K.  men's: $75K).    Any thoughts as to the reason for the discrepancies?  As far as I know, TItle 9 does not regulate coaching salaries.  Is it explainable by length of service?  Or perhaps that the men's coaches are making more through other avenues (i.e., camps, sponsorships, etc.)? 

Mike
BBA '01, Lifelong Michigan Fan

A number of the discrepancies are obvious: the women's soccer coach used to run the national team; the men's coach used to run Michigan's club team. Carol Hutchins has established Michigan as a softball superpower. She's the equivalent of women's basketball coaches at UConn and Tennessee. The women's track coach is in his 27th year while the men's coach is in his second; the cross-country coaches are in year 19 and 1, respectively.

While I don't get why there's such a gap in the gymnastics salaries—women's gymnastics is consistently very good but the men won the national title last year—most of those are easily explainable by seniority or other obvious factors. My main thing is that all these salaries grate when the NCAA claims poverty prevents them from doing more for the guys who bring in the money by risking what now seems to be quite a lot. The only environment in which a gymnastics program drawing 1500 people per meet can afford to pay their head coach 100 dollars for every head in the stands is one in which administrators are like "good God, what do we do with all this money?"

Um.

your next UV title most definitely needs to come from this site: http://yes.thatcan.be/my/next/tweet/

I put in mgoblog and got this sample tweet:

MGoPost: TomVH: An Interview with the board can't get any head explodes.

I am very sorry, board, but yes.thatcan.be/my/next/tweet/ does not lie. Not that it's making a huge leap in suggesting that about a sports message board.