notre dame

Now pretend it's a lot darker

It's been rumored over the past couple days that the Michigan v. Notre Dame game in Ann Arbor on September 10, 2011 would take place under lights in the Big House, but the real serious smoke came this afternoon from the official Athletic Department twitter account:

HUGE Michigan football scheduling announcement today at 2:30pm. Check MGoBlue.com for details later this afternoon.

So, now we know: there will be a night game in The Big House within the next two years. Here's how Michigan has fared in night games, including those against the Irish:

• Michigan is 22-11 all-time in night games. They are 19-5 in away night games, 3-6 in neutral site night games. This will be the first home night game in Michigan history.
• The Wolverines are 0-3 in night games against Notre Dame. They lost 17-23 in 1982, 17-19 in 1988, and 24-28 in 1990. All three games took place in South Bend.
• The first Michigan night game took part in was a 14-0 victory over MArquette on September 23, 1944.

Notes from the announcement press conference:

Coach Rich Rodriguez

Prepared Statement: "Our players have always enjoyed playing night games, and I think it's something that our fans will truly enjoy and embrace. I expect the atmosphere will be electric for this match-up at the Big House."

Night games provide great exposure for the players and the program. Players really like night games. Playing in front of a lot of people both in person and on television is exciting. National TV is great for the University, since games are like a 3.5-hour commercial for the school.

AD David Brandon

Prepared Statement: "This will be an unprecedented game day atmosphere that ours fans have not experienced at Michigan Stadium. It's a great opportunity to showcase out program, University, and Ann Arbor to a primetime viewing audience. This also adds a new chapter to the storied rivalry between our two great programs."

Brandon has been working on logistics for a couple weeks. We know how to string lights, work traffic, etc. The operations team has over a year to prepare to do this at night.Brandon didn't have to touch base with the city.

Michigan is familiar with the concept of playing under the lights (for 3:30 starts, and they've seen how other schools have handled night games. If this goes well, there will probably be one night game per year at Michigan Stadium.

Night games are part of what create a big exciting atmosphere in college football. Of the night game, Bo would say "That Brandon guy believes that change is good and I'm gonna support him."

Programming note. Since the basketball team has definitively disproven the idea that a liveblog around these parts is some kind of curse—the curse obviously exists, mind you, but goes wider than just this here blog—we're going to do one for the Iowa game today. Why? I don't really know.

Weekend note. Michigan State is desperately trying to sell CCHA playoff tickets:

To purchase tickets for groups of 15 or more, click here to receive discount pricing!

Let's help them out!

Deford and the Dream of Horses. Frank Deford sits down to briefly address this Ed O'Bannon thing before dozing off and dreaming of horses…

…and the headline goes for the gusto: "lawsuit threatens NCAA amateurism." That seems akin to those headlines about a 16-team Big Ten with outposts in Nagasaki and Atlantis, but Deford does a pretty good job of justifying it, all things considered:

So here's the nub for the NCAA: Explain the exemption that absolves the organization from compensating players for their labor.

So far, the NCAA, whose office is in Indianapolis, has spent a great deal of pretrial energy trying desperately to get the case shifted from San Francisco to its home court in Indiana. However, its effort did not pay off, as Federal Judge Claudia Wilken denied the request. Now, the discovery phase begins.

The outlook is bleak. The 2009 decision to award retired NFL players compensation for the use of their likeness in video games must surely hang over the NCAA's head. If old pros should be paid for the appropriation of their personages, why shouldn't old collegians?

I'm coming up empty even when I approach the problem from the perspective of a slick-haired guy in a suit attempting to argue an obviously untenable position because that's how daddy gets a luxury car. I'm all for the collegiate spirit, but I'm also all for the vague semblance of fairness.

Remember how I used to rail about the ridiculous increase in head coaches' salaries? Good times. Also outdated times:

The trend of rapidly accelerating pay for major-college head football coaches is being replicated — and then some — for their top assistants.

With many contracts being negotiated or finalized, nearly a dozen schools in the NCAA's 120-school Football Bowl Subdivision have made deals under which they will be spending at least 38% more on their offensive or defensive coordinator in 2010 than they did in 2009.

This, like everything else in college football, is Lane Kiffin's fault.

Even so, every time a coordinator breaks a million dollars it's another blow to the idea that big time college sports programs can't afford to provide something to their players. If a BCS university's athletic department isn't profitable, it's because the university doesn't want it to be profitable. Period. You could hire a high school coach and fly coach and laugh as your terrible team gets a million billion dollars in TV revenue. You could drop the crew teams. You could become Donald Sterling, and laugh all the way to the bank. There is an unbelievable amount of money that could go to the players.

I can understand the point of view that you'd rather give someone else a scholarship and have another team or draw less from the general fund than offer something resembling fair compensation to football and basketball players, but that's not where the extra money goes, does it?

Conference du Gump. The Big Ten, as always, is slowwwww. John Gasaway gets a brief window to promulgate tempo-free whatnot in the Wall Street Journal and supplies a chart (chart):

The Tempo Index

Here are the fastest and slowest major-conference teams, based on their number of possessions per 40 minutes of conference play.

	THE TORTOISES		THE HARES
1	Wisconsin (57.6)	1	Providence (72.8)
2	Michigan (59.7)	2	Arkansas (72.3)
3	Iowa (61)	3	Texas Tech (72)
4	Penn State (61.3)	4	Villanova (71.6)
5	Northwestern (61.8)	5	Washington (71.4)
6	Pittsburgh (62)	6	Texas (71.4)
7	USC (62.1)	7	Kansas State (71.3)

Holy cold potatoes: Big Ten teams comprise the bottom five and Michigan is second only to Wisconsin.

Gasaway, by the way, confirmed for me that my previous instinct about Michigan's conference defense vis a vis its offense was correct. Tempo-free aerials are usually centered on 1.00 point per trip, and Michigan both averaged and provided just about one point per trip during conference play. Average at everything? Not so much. This was a twitter message, in case you're wondering about the terseness:

Assumption confirmed. In-conf defense 0.31 standard deviations better than Big Ten avg. Offense half an sd (.49) worse than avg. Zowie.

That latter won't surprise anyone given the Taj Mahal Michigan shooters have assembled over the past few months. The former, though, is one of the enduring mysteries of the Big Ten season. It may be one of the enduring mysteries of John Beilein's career: Michigan is currently 47th in the adjusted efficiency ratings at Kenpom. Barring John Lickliter going 12/12 from three in a couple hours, this will be the best defense Beilein has ever had according to Kenpom.

How in the hell is a team with basically one player over 6'5" (Sims and Gibson hardly ever play together) actually good at defense? Kenpom says it's a lot of forced turnovers and a Wisconsin-like aversion to giving up free throws making up for bleah eFG% defense and rebounding. That turnovers without fouling thing is a neat trick.

The thing is: that fingerprint is characteristic of the 1-3-1 zone Beilein is known for… and Michigan had to abandon midway through the nonconference schedule because mediocrities like Boston College and Alabama were treating it like a layup line. By the Big Ten portion of the schedule, Michigan had morphed into an almost exclusively man-to-man team.

This isn't like football where a terrible offense can sometimes make that team's defense look better than it is as opponents get their three point lead and play keep-away. The opponent's offense, or lack thereof, is of no relevance once you suck tempo out of the equation. So this appears to be a real positive that could last into next year. If anyone on the team can throw a ball into Lake Michigan, it could be relevant.

Default Big Ten expansion bits. Notre Dame rumbled a couple days ago, spawning panic across the Subway alums. I was doubtful that the "easy to construct" scenario in which Notre Dame is forced into a conference comes to pass—had a hard time constructing one at all—and this makes it even more doubtful:

A source within the Big Ten told the Tribune last month that given what transpired in 2003, when Notre Dame all but accepted an invitation to join the Big Ten before pulling back, "the only way they will be offered is if they first accept. The Big Ten went down that road and got burned. Fool me once, fool me twice."

Fat chance of that. Nothing to see here, move along, etc. At least ND Nation's reaction has been the usual wildly entertaining mix of garment-rending, arrogance and delusion.

Elsewhere, Bleed Scarlet digs up a bunch of things that went down 15 years ago when Rutgers was apparently a major Big Ten target. Here's life on the other side of the Rutgers/Big Ten divide:

On the flipside of that, Rutgers fans were almost nonchalant (which, certainly owed much to how frequently the topic has been debated to death on our side in recent years) and completely self-assured about it. ”Of course Rutgers was the most desirable option. How could anyone possibly think otherwise?”

Er… well, you see… it's just… nah. Never mind.

I said another piece on this in a Sporting Blog article yesterday and remain skeptical that Rutgers moves the needle enough in New York for the local cable companies to shell out for the BTN, but on WTKA today Ira made a good point: with a zillion Big Ten alums in the city, their combined might could be Captain Planet to Pollutin' Time Warner. Rutgers gets to be the fey South American kid whose special power is "heart".

Etc.: Jim Mandich has cancer, but it is apparently treatable. TOC puts together Big Ten efficiency graphs that show two things: holy God is the offense bad against teams not named Minnesota, and holy crap are they inconsistent.

Red versus the fly. Oilers blogger Lowetide usually kicks off his posts with some old-timey pictures and a comparison between then and now. The latest one is a shot, of all possible things, of Red Berenson taking on the LA Kings:

Appparently their goalie at the time was The Fly. Somehow Red managed to not score here, by the way.

Iowa takes the lead. I'm claiming Demon Bear II for Michigan since he blows up Michigan's three primary rivals. Even so, Iowa has surged back into the lead when it comes to absurd, awesome internet memeage:

(Stanzi the Americanzi was Iowa's first point in this battle.)

Biographical note: when I was in college one of the things we carved out unassailable TV time for was a K-pop video show called "MVH"—for reasons unknown we called it "Mein Video Hitten"—that was a combination of this, ridiculous Korean hip-hop by groups like "Highfive of Teenagers" (or "HOT"), and terrible six-minute ballads in which someone was definitely going to die of a wasting disease. The tension was palpable whenever a new video would come on and we didn't know if it was going to be smokin' chicks in bathtubs or something painfully earnest. I am intensely jealous of Iowa for this. I have definitely not been watching the video most of today.

The sudden relevance of tricorn hats. I wasn't going into Signing Day thinking that musketeers would have any relevance but two separate incidents are taking us back to 1776. One is Bucknell—of the Patriot League—raiding Rutgers for a head coach:

LEWISBURG, Pa. — Bucknell hired Joe Susan to take over as head football coach Wednesday, luring back a former Bison assistant to lead a program coming off three straight losing seasons.

Why do you care? Susan is also the recruiting coordinator for Rutgers and his departure might have an impact on FL S Rashad Knight's final decision. Schiano says it won't impact recruiting but it can't help. Bleed Scarlet thinks he was an important guy, FWIW.

The other is a reminder that recruiting could always be worse:

Now all Bruce Heggie has to do is "seal the deal." Heggie, a 6-foot-6, 240-pound TE/DE at Mount Dora High, was mired in a dilemma since December. He was looking for a place to play college football and kept striking out.

"Last week FAMU backed out of their offer and said there wasn't going to be an official visit this weekend," Heggie said. "There was William & Mary, [ed: of the Colonial Athletic Association!] but other than that there weren't really anymore options."

Heggie's taking a visit to… yes… Notre Dame this weekend. It'll be interesting to see how the recruiting rivalry between Michigan and ND develops now that Weis is gone. Weis flat-out killed Michigan head to head even in the waning days of his administration; about the only folks who had a short list with both schools on it that chose Michigan were Mike Williams and Mike Schofield. Things can only get better for Michigan with Kelly there.

DANCE DANCE DANCE TILL WE RUN THIS TOWN.

More Graham. AnnArbor.com was in on a Todd McShay conference call in which the torrent of Brandon Graham praise continued:

“There wasn’t a guy here this week that hustled more, that had better technique, that picked up schemes and did things as quickly as anyone at the defensive-line position or outside-linebacker position,” McShay said. “He’s just a Bill Belichick-type of guy. He’s going to come in and love playing the game and play it better than his measurables and his skill set would lead you to believe.”

I'm hoping he lands somewhere Michigan-heavy so I can have a proxy NFL team. Also, I think we can exclude Bruce Tall from any diagnoses of what ails Michigan's defense.

Historian. This one is seriously obscure: the 1971 Michigan-OSU game, which wasn't even on TV. No audio, of course, just coaches tapes:

There's also a two-parter on the 1988 Michigan-Ohio State game (part 1, part 2)

Etc.: Weird twitter spat between a couple of reporters about Tommy Amaker. BHGP reviews the Iowa-Michigan series in the aughts.

We will carry him through the city of God on a golden palanquin, crying out "oh child of wonder, share with us your one true vision." If you're like me—a shiftless loner who can watch TV during the day and really likes the national soccer team—you no doubt remember the searing vision from last year's Italy-Brazil Confederations Cup matchup. Someone made an animated gif of it.

I know you will never stop watching that, and I'm sorry.

Holy cow. This will mark the second time in a week something interesting has been said by a West Virginia newspaper that had nothing to do with Rich Rodriguez. (Floating an apparently legit rumor that Chuck Heater is a potential Jay Hopson replacement was the other.) Imagine this alternate history as told by Mike Brey:

“Four or five years ago my athletic director called me in for a meeting and told me to be prepared. We’re going to the Big Ten,” Brey said, so matter-of-factly that you figured everyone knew about it.
But that really wasn’t the case.

No one knew that Notre Dame stood on the doorstep of jumping to the Big Ten a few years back. They knew they had the chance to go, that the Big Ten wanted them, but that were close enough that the Irish athletic director was calling coaches in and telling them to prepare for the move, that it was a sure thing … well, can you say Miami, Virginia Tech and Boston College.

“It changed at the midnight hour,” Brey said, “but he was preparing me for that.”

I have no penetrating insights here. Just… wow. This will prompt even more Mike White shrines across ND Nation.

Another departure? Probably not. USF fired Jim Leavitt after he went Woody Hayes on one of his players and then lied about it extensively. This led to a number of articles floating Calvin Magee as a possible replacement, in which he'd "expressed an interest," albeit not publicly.

It looks like South Florida is going another direction, however:

Nothing could be confirmed late Monday, but speculation was heavy that the Bulls could be a match for Holtz, the son of a coaching great who has guided the Pirates to back-to-back Conference USA championships.

That's a non-entity of a statement there, but there's an article in the competing paper that says Holtz has been contacted by USF:

"I have gotten a call to find out if I had interest in talking to them,'' he said. "Obviously, there is interest from a standpoint of the league they play in, the Big East, and my parents live here in Orlando, my wife is from Port Charlotte. We would have four grandparents right there. There are a lot of positives to it. I think it's definitely an up-and-coming program so, yeah, there would be interest.''

It's rare to see a guy with a job make a public statement of interest and not get the gig. Michigan looks like it will hold on to Magee, then.

(HT: Orson as Spencer.)

Midterms. The NHL's Central Scouting Board has released their midterm rankings. Players of note for Michigan:

20. Jon Merrill, D, USA U18
50. Jacob Fallon, F, USA U18
75. Luke Moffatt, F, USA U18
98. Alex Guptill, F, Orangeville (2010 or 2011)
132. Kevin Clare, D, USA U18
170. Derek Deblois, F, Cedar Rapids, USHL (2010 or 2011)

(About Guptill and Deblois: It's uncertain whether or not they'll be on campus next year. They are eligible for this draft and usually that means they'll be on campus the season after they get drafted, but when they committed they were expected to be members of the 2011 class. Robbie Czarnik leaving opens up a spot for one, and it's possible they'll bring the other in early with the money they'd earmarked for (argh) Jack Campbell.)

Items of note other than "argh Jack Campbell": Merrill and Moffatt have dropped, Moffatt considerably. These are just North American skater rankings. Add in Euros and goalies and Merrill projects as a late first or early second rounder, Fallon a third-rounder, and Moffatt somewhere in rounds three to five. Moffatt was getting hyped as a possible top ten pick and a definite first rounder. That might be bad for their instant impact but better for the long term future of the program if they decide to stick around longer. Also a possibility: the CSB rankings, which can be wack, are a little wack.

On the other hand, Fallon keeps moving up and Clare is in a nice sweet spot for a stay-at-home defenseman who will be around for three or four years. The above-listed players and USHL D Mac Bennett are the entire class. Since Bennett went in the second round last year, that's impressive. Every player Michigan is bringing in next year is expected to be or has been drafted, and it seems likely the majority of the class will be off the board when the fourth round rolls around. If it makes you feel any better about this year, no one in State's current class is even on the list.

The timing on this is fantastic. So, yes, John Beilein got an extension after one of the most disappointing losses of his Michigan career, one that finally closed the door on all but the most insane Michigan fan's NCAA tourney hopes. Predictably, people were outraged on the radio. Predictably, Mike Rosenberg rushed to write an article that reads like "a Goofus and Gallant article with Goofus (RR) mostly standing just outside the frame" according to zingy MGoBoard poster wolverine1987.

Assorted e-pinions that, in retrospect, are directed at people who won't listen anyway:

• This was not decided after the season started.
• Yes, obviously David Brandon knew this was happening. Conspiracy theories about Bill Martin dropping a nasty present in Brandon's lap are transparently silly.
• The buyout is the thing that matters and I doubt that it increased significantly, if at all, should Beilein's tenure go the same direction Amaker's did. I think that point is moot—the NCAA bid will buy him enough time to get a full roster of his guys in and his history indicates that he'll be successful enough in the long run that he will likely retire a Wolverine. If it's not, though, a few hundred K here or there is not going to prevent Michigan from making a move.
• Short of massacring an entire village of Vietnamese peasants, Beilein is here for a long time, extension or no.

Etc.: Rivals recognizes the Big Ten's bowl season as basically on par with the SEC's and far better than anyone else's. CMU hires Michigan State assistant Dan Enos; Enos is regarded as Dantonio's primary recruiter guy. Should be some small help with in-state recruiting. Charles Woodson, your NFL defensive player of the year, extensively profiled by the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel.

In which I defend Notre Dame. Seriously!

Gregg Easterbrook first came in for a lashing around these parts when he claimed Rich Rodriguez had been in contact with Michigan before West Virginia's game against Pitt without a shred of evidence and used this in a tiresome broadside at the idea that a college coach would take a better job. When this was totally disproven by actual court records, Easterbrook—who loves to complain about New York Times errors being on page one and corrections on page 37—did not deign to notice, instead launching tiresome broadside after tiresome broadside at "weasel" coaches.

It's December again and a major program has just hired a coach, so it's time for yet another tiresome broadside:

Charlie Weis and Bobby Bowden had to go -- Notre Dame and Florida State weren't winning every game! Get rid of the bums! All we heard from sports commentators, and from alums and boosters, was get rid of the bums, we gotta win, win, win. Sorry to interject, but why? Why does Notre Dame or Florida State or any university need to win every game? Is it now official that big colleges care more about sports than education?

You'd think a guy like Easterbrook, who is paid to be a political pundit, would have at least a tenuous grasp on economics: Florida State and Notre Dame would like to win because if they do not win they get less money for their athletic departments. If they continue to stick with coaches who are not performing, fan enthusiasm will crater and they'll be faced with the dissolution of a tradition treasured by thousands. Why am I explaining this to you? You understand this because it is obvious. Nevermind. I'll stop treating you like you are a simpleton.

Easterbrook, on the other hand, seems determined to display his ignorance at every opportunity. In previous columns he's claimed Michigan Stadium's renovations are being paid for by "public funds," which if true is only true in an extremely technical sense since the athletic department is and remains self-sufficient*, and that Michigan "surprised" Notre Dame by running the no-huddle style of offense Rich Rodriguez has been deploying for almost a decade at big important newsworthy schools.

In this column his impression of Notre Dame's recruiting under Weis is totally wrong:

Notre Dame was among the few prominent holdouts, insisting its football players be students too. This generated a recruiting disadvantage -- and a recruiting disadvantage caused by high standards, not Weis suddenly forgetting how to coach, is the reason for the recent records of Notre Dame football. Notre Dame alums and boosters should have been proud that high standards keep the school from going 12-0!

According to Rivals, ND's recruiting classes under Weis: 8, 8, 2, 21. (The 2005 class was technically signed by Weis but was almost entirely the (lame) creation of Tyrone Willingham.) Every class at Notre Dame except redshirt seniors and freshmen was part of a top ten recruiting class.

Easterbrook also suggests that the past two decades have seen a "race to the bottom," providing no evidence other than Florida State's recent cheating scandal. He places Nebraska in a list of "academics-first colleges where football players are more likely to attend class"…

Lawrence Phillips

…which is a hilarious juxtaposition of concepts. He dubs Notre Dame athletic director Jack Swarbrick's desire to not go 6-6 a "bizarre notion." In his attempt to make a case that big time division I-A football can be won by nerds he cites playoffs at lower levels all the way down to Division III and Director's Cup standings heavily biased towards nonrevenue sports. When he returns to the "weasel" coaching meme—which appears to be any coach who takes a job anywhere else and thus includes some 80% of I-A coaches—he cites Brian Kelly "misleading" his players when Kelly, more than any other coach in recent history, was publicly open to a move. He freakin' tweeted about it.

Reality is just something that gets in the way of Easterbrook's arguments.

The worst thing is that buried in yet another Easterbrook-patented tiresome broadside is a concern I share for the players who play college football and end up coming out the other end with little except some memories and a concussion or two. He's not wrong that the way the NCAA is constructed is increasingly silly. Money gets poured in and ends up going to coaches because it can't go to players and has to go somewhere. The result is yet more ridiculous salaries at top schools. The first million-dollar coordinator isn't far off.

But Easterbrook eschews anything resembling a useful suggestion in favor of calling people weasels when they're just acting rationally given the situation. Here's my suggestion to help divert some of the torrent of cash to the players that has more than a snowball's chance in hell of being approved: allow programs to offer players in revenue sports two free additional years of scholarship after their eligibility expires as long as they enroll within five years. At that point it should be clear if you have a serious professional future and those who want to buckle down and make it in the real world will have an opportunity to get a degree that will help them do that.

*(You might note that part of that link is a complaint about the tax-deductibility of athletic department contributions, but that's not the only part that decries "public" funding; the issue is explicitly framed as "and on top of the public funding of the stadium renovations, here's this problem with donations."

As long as I'm in a footnote, let me mention how breathtakingly stupid that argument is: Easterbrook and his emailer are whining about Michigan spending money that will convince extremely rich people to give them more money.)

Well, damn. BREAKING NEWS(!!!): Brian Kelly is indeed the guy at Notre Dame. Notre Dame fans of the insane variety are hilariously opposed to the move on the grounds that Kelly isn't Bob Stoops, Bill Belichick, or one of the ND Nation moderators; everyone else is terrified that Notre Dame has now acquired a coach with a track record of doing anything at all.

This is probably going to go poorly. Kelly is the most competent coach Notre Dame has hired since Holtz and at the very least should turn Weis's excellent recruiting classes into a genuinely good team in short order. Smart Football says so.

Next year might be meh since his one option at quarterback is going to miss spring practice and large chunks of summer conditioning with an ACL tear, but expecting an implosion similar to the Michigan one is foolhardy: for one he'll have a five-star quarterback throwing to Michael Floyd and plenty of talent on defense if he can get a defensive coordinator to manage it. Something thematically similar to Michigan's 2004 Rose Bowl season might go down. Michigan had to get clutch drives from a freshman quarterback and an onside kick to get to 9-4 that year. A Gator Bowl or something with incredible expectations in 2011 seems the most likely outcome.

This makes the next two years against Notre Dame pivotal for Rich Rodriguez. If Michigan loses to Notre Dame next year against Kelly when he's finally got a quarterback experience edge over someone, anyone, it'll look like a rough year and possibly the end of everything.

There are some minor plusses in the hire: I assume Kelly won't keep Corwin Brown around, which should help Michigan recruit against ND. Also for whatever reason Weis just killed Michigan head-to-head and Kelly can't possibly do better. I've heard conflicting things about what high school coaches in the state think about him, FWIW. I imagine that's something you could say about any coach.

We are so terrible. The basketball… it is not good anymore. I don't really know why, but holy crap:

• Michigan’s defensive rebounding percentage of 60.7% ranks last among all Division 1 major conference teams.
• Michigan’s three point percentage of 28.3% is better than only two major conference teams (Oregon St. and UCLA) yet only two major conference teams (Iowa and Northwestern) shoot more threes than Michigan (3FGA/FGA).
• Michigan is allowing opponents to shoot 52.2% on 2 point field goal attempts, the worst percentage allowed by any major conference program.

Dylan has a few more numbers that look more like Indiana last year than a team with any tourney aspirations. They add up to "ugh."

This season is even worse than what went down in football. Everyone knew this wasn't the #15 team in the country but it shouldn't be a team that will be lucky to make the NIT. (No, seriously. You have to get to .500 and Michigan is going to come out of the nonconference 6-6 unless they beat UConn or Kansas, so then they have to go 9-9 in the Big Ten despite showing no ability to hang with mediocre teams from mid-major-ish conferences.) This is stunning underachievement. And what happens next year when Manny is gone and the only big guys on the roster are Ben Cronin, who may or may not still be broken, Blake McLimans, and Jordan Morgan? Morgan and McLimans are redshirting; Cronin almost literally can't jump.

I know I shouldn't be surprised about anything nasty happening to Michigan sports these days, but seriously… what the hell. There can be no place underachieving expectations across the board like Michigan is these days.

PREWB! Also BREAKING(!!!) is that nine MSU players got tagged with multiple misdemeanor charges based on the video evidence of the frat beat-down. Three more kids ended up suspended, including the other Chris Rucker on the team. Don't recruit guys named Chris Rucker no matter what their middle initial is.

I only mention was seems like a formality because the crack MSU reporters at the Free Press immediately came out with an article arguing that most of the charges would get dropped as various members of the team agree to testify against the ex-members of the team.

Meanwhile, the News gets clarification from Winston's initial victim on what, exactly, happened…

Montgomery, a student at Schoolcraft College, was hanging with friends near the Michigan State campus on Oct. 19, 2008, when Winston approached him and MSU hockey player A.J. Sturges and dropped them both, each with one punch, police said. Montgomery's fractured jaw was wired for six weeks, and Sturges' skull was fractured. …

"I was attacked for no reason. I was not in a fight. I was with a friend, and Glenn Winston came and hit me for no reason at all."

…in a story that has the fantastic lead "Ian Montgomery has an intimate familiarity with Glenn Winston's fist." They also reveal that Jenrette's mysterious redshirt was because of a robbery that happened August 1st of 2008, literally days before Jenrette arrived on Michigan State's campus. Jenrette was already sporting a 2005 offense. Michael Rosenberg's column awaits him.

Again, this is not really about Dantonio, whose public image has taken a hit but will recover in time as long as these things don't keep happening, but the rampant bias at the Free Press that would be funnier every day if it wasn't having a material impact on the local/national perception of Michigan.

Etc.: WVU fans, prompted by bubble pipe professor Matt Zemek's assertion that he'd rather have "integrity and humanity" in the form of Bill Stewart instead of whatever Rodriguez is, debate whether they'd rather have their current coach or our current coach. Opinion is split. CATS 4 GOLD. Sun-Times asserts that Harbaugh actually met with ND officials; tomorrow they announce that Bob Stoops is back in the picture!