notre dame

Precedent. Matt Marc Precedent. So I'm idling along watching some Wolverine Historian videos, as I am wont to do from time to time, and am watching the '91 Notre Dame game. In it we may see a hint of what Michigan will do with the Terrencible Talbott brothers when they hit campus: Michigan had Marc and Matt Elliott on the team that year and just said "screw it, this will look ridiculous but the fans must be informed":

I look forward to "TERRENCE TALBOTT" stretching down to said Talbott's armpit. Should have named the bigger one Terrence. Also, check out this guy in the endzone when Desmond makes his famous diving fourth-and-one catch:

1991, everyone!

Numbers 0, Old-Timey Hockey Wisdom 0… But Driving. The NCAA hockey rules committee is thinking about dumping full facemasks in favor of half-shields. This would seem to be an obviously less safe setup unless you're a hockey coach, at which point you resort to the old canards about respect and people getting their sticks up and so forth and so on that are similar to the old-timey complaints about how dumping the two-line pass would somehow clog up the game. Both objections are so counterintuitive that they say more about the person offering the explanation than the rule in question.

I was thinking to myself "it's too bad no one's actually done a study about this" at the same time Western College Hockey was busy finding the studies people have actually done about this. Results:

CONCLUSIONS: The use of a full face shield compared with half face shield by intercollegiate ice hockey players significantly reduced the playing time lost because of concussion, suggesting that concussion severity may be reduced by the use of a full face shield.

Er… that would be the exact opposite finding, one echoed by a second study by the same U of Calgary team and a third by the Mayo Clinic. It is possible that college hockey is less likely to feature severe goonery, but that just blows up the lack of respect argument. Half-shields don't seem to prevent vicious hits that result in season-long suspensions and potential criminal charges. (Fight unsupported anecdotes with unsupported anecdotes, I always say.)

Even if the hockey committee recommends it it's hard to imagine anyone outside the community looking at the available evidence and approving the change. The NCAA is not going to make a pointless move that all available evidence suggests will see more athletes injured.

Q: why is anyone pushing for this change? The only rationale I can see is that it's a way to mitigate junior teams playing up their "NHL style" of play. Moving to half-shields would remove the primary visual differentiator between CHL and NCAA hockey.

Mott content explosion. The WTKA Mott-a-thon and the weekend's Brian Griese-sponsored Mott golf outing have collectively raised a ton of money for the children's hospital—maybe this year fewer than three bucket people will accost me before every hockey game*—and produced a flood of what passes for news in May.

Lloyd Carr on booing kids:

Carr has long held the stance that players should never be booed.

"We all love the University of Michigan and to me, that's where it begins and that's where it ends," Carr said. "I always felt that (in) college football, the players should be treated differently than they are in the NFL because they're going to school every day, they're trying to get degrees.

"Very few percentage-wise are going to play in the NFL. The criticism of the players, the pressure on the players has been dramatically increased because of the price of tickets, (and) all of the salaries we're able to provide coaches. All of that pressure is, I think, not a positive for the game. We have to rememvber, those are 18-, 19-, 20-to 21-year-old kids down there, and a lot of people don't want to hear it."

I hope you heard that, guy I threw an empty water bottle at after the Toledo game.

David Terrell sporting a the beginnings of a crazy Kimbo Slice beard (and Braylon Edwards not sporting a crazy Kimbo Slice beard):

David Brandon on his involvement with Michigan's recruiting:

"I love it. When I was here as a student-athlete, the coaches used me a lot. I love the place and I think I'm a pretty good sales guy, particularly when the product is great. And the product here is great. ... When I'm called upon, if I can convince student-athletes and/or their parents why this is a great place to come and be a part of this tradition, by God I'm going to do it."

Rodriguez on David Molk's status:

“I don’t know where he’s at running wise or anything like that, but I saw him the other day, he walked by the office, and he looks great,” Rodriguez said. “I think he was anxious to do more in the spring but obviously for precautionary reasons we held him out but I think he’ll be 100 percent certainly for August stuff.”

Q.

A. "I have only the vaguest recollection of what David Molk looks like since I haven't laid eyes on him since the Penn State game and will not see him until midway through the second quarter of the UConn game, but a complicated information relay involving at least sixteen different intermediaries who were in no way directed to discover information about Molk—one of them, in fact, is a Canadian—has, by happenstance, provided me a hazy outline of his recovery prognosis, which has a 10% chance of being extremely good and a 90% chance of being completely unknowable by me, Rich Rodriguez, for reasons of NCAA regulations and quantum."

Q.

A. "As you know, as the University of Michigan's head football coach I only take a minimal interest in the on-going progress of the football team, for reasons of NCAA violations, quantum, and AMC's Breaking Bad."

Q.

A. "Devin Gardner is somewhere between 4'1"" and 8'2". So rumor has it, at least. I have no direct knowledge of the situation."

*(Seriously. I just went past two bucket people, third bucket person. Whatever spare change I am going to put in a bucket has been spoken for.)

Another year, another home regional in which you are heavily favored. Michigan was given the #2 overall seed in the softball tournament—Alabama is #1—and will host a regional against Notre Dame, Wright State, and Illinois State this weekend. If you are wondering, yes, geography plays a major role in who goes where. Carol Hutchins:

“It’s why I coach because it makes you feel alive. It’s exciting, that’s what it is. It’s exciting.”

There's a joke in there somewhere, but I can't find it. Illinois and Ohio State are the only other Big Ten teams to make the field; neither are seeds.

Etc.: The Mountain West takes a concrete step towards inviting Boise State. This is happening.

Write a python script to parse mgoblog back unto the dawn on history, get a front page link even if you diss kicking the blog off with a "hello world" post. C syntax ENRAGE python user. Graagh. FYI: apparently about three million words have appeared in posts by yours truly. I won't say I wrote them all given the prevalence of blockquotes on the site, but I probably wrote half of them.

Marvin in. There were some rumblings that incoming S recruit Marvin Robinson might have some academic issues after his plan to enroll early didn't come off. As seen on the board, these appear to have been false. Robinson just told Rivals he will be on campus June 1st($), whereupon he will try to take Jordan Kovacs's spot at bandit.

The More You Know, As Presented By Lil Wayne.

repeat after us: that's not my weed no matter how much my hat implies it is.

Notre Dame tight end Mike Ragone is the earthly avatar of New Jersey. Also he is a backup Notre Dame tight end, so he will get in minor trouble with recreational substances and get hellaciously disproportionate justice in return. The minor trouble with recreational substances:

The trooper making the stop smelled marijuana, searched the car and found two baggies of a leafy substance in the purse of Ragone’s girlfriend. A field test indicated it was marijuana.

According to probable cause affidavits filed by Trooper Tony LoMonaco, Ragone gave the baggies to his girlfriend to hide in her purse as they were being pulled over. LoMonaco said Ragone waived his right to remain silent and said the marijuana belonged to him.

Someone is not familiar with the concept of a weed carrier.

If precedent holds, Ragone is likely to be suspended for a year because the institution of Notre Dame has just finished watching Reefer Madness for the third time this week, finding nothing even mildly humorous therein. This would make him the third second-string Notre Dame tight end to feel ND's boot on his neck for typical student hijinks: Will Yeatman got booted in 2008 for moped DUI (seriously: moped DUI) and Joseph Fauria transferred to UCLA after he got suspended for something undisclosed; he dropped some bombs on the way out.

Q: Why is it always the backup tight end? Why can't it be the quarterback?

Colton, Cullen. Cullen, Colton. Rothstein has some more on Colton Christian, Michigan's newest basketball commitment. His role, as envisioned by Beilein, is Petway with a decent jumper:

Christian said Beilein told him his role as a freshman could be to guard an opponent’s forwards, rebound, box out and offensively play around the high post.

His high school coach (Bellvue, not Hargrave) provides some additional information that suggests things by omitting them:

“Really athletic,” O’Connor said. “6-foot-6, long. Fills the lanes really well, rebounds really well, can defend people on the interior and out on the perimeter. He can defend inside and out.”

Mention of offensive skills: nonexistent. Even so, if Christian can be a 6-6 all-purpose defensive stopper and rebounder that's something unique on the team. His addition seems worthwhile as long as it doesn't impact Michigan's ability to take two more players in the 2011 class (which already features Carlton Brundidge). This would require a transfer or Laval Lucas-Perry not getting a fifth year.

Define "fair." The welcome news that the NCAA hockey committee is seriously considering dumping the failed regionals format for home series was covered on Friday. It's a move that makes sense on multiple levels. One of them is that going to less random format than one-and-done hockey properly rewards teams that have suggested they are amongst the best in the country. This is an asset in a sport that's so much of a random number generator that this year's NHL playoffs saw exactly one team of each seed advance to the second round.

So this is a supremely annoying argument:

Going to a 16-team four-regional format in 2003 was a signature moment for the sport. It eliminated byes, and at the same time, portended the move away from on-campus regionals as much as possible, eliminating a sore spot and unfair advantage. …

In Brad Schlossman's Grand Forks Herald report, he noted that from 1988-91, top seeds — which had a bye AND a best-of-3 quarterfinal home series — reached the Frozen Four 87.5 percent of the time. After the NCAA went away from best-of-3 series, starting in 1992, until the tournament expanded to 16 teams, the No. 1 seeds — which had a first-round bye only — reached the Frozen Four 65.9 percent of the time. Since then, needing to play two games, like everyone else, and not getting to play them at home as often, it's only 46.9 percent of the time.

But why is that bad? The whole point was to remove the unfair advantage of the top seed. This is what so many people clamored for. This would seem like a step backwards.

Argh. It is only an "unfair advantage" if the top seeds had not, you know, earned them by virtue of their play. You might as well say it's unfair that Michigan gets all those recruits. Honestly, if a four seed has no chance of winning a best two-of-three series on the road against a good team it shouldn't be in the tournament at all. In the NHL, the road team wins 45% of the time. If you want to make it fairer, the "road" team can get last change and the various other small advantages given the home team in game two.

Hockey's just too random to make any determination about a team's strength relative to another in sixty minutes. Over the course of a whole season, however, teams certainly distance themselves from others. The current tournament format tries as hard as it can to discard all that information about who is the best team in favor of weighted plinko, which yields tournaments so chaotic that they render regular season results virtually meaningless. This is "fair" according to the above argument.

Moving to home best-of-three regionals is more profitable, more exciting, provides fans a better experience, creates a tournament that is less likely to be the functional equivalent of a blender, and makes the regular season more meaningful. Protests that the Pairwise system is not precise enough to distinguish between 8 and 9 (or 7 and 10 and maybe even 6 and 11) are accurate, which is why the committee should move to a PWR system that is less stupid. If changing the tournament forces the powers that be to consider the many ways in which the Pairwise is flawed, it's a double win.

Define "rules." Literally. Also in the realm of college hockey changes, the committee is meeting for their bi-annual review. There is the usual fretting about player safety that will result in some vague redefinition of things that are already penalties. Other than that, though, there are some meaningful changes being discussed:

• Going to half-shields instead of full cages.
• Reducing ties by modifying the overtime session without resorting to the shootout: "There seemed to be more interest in reducing the number of tie games. In other words, not finishing the game with a shootout, but maybe tweaking the overtime rules that we have in place so more games end in overtime.” The proposals on the table are a mishmash of lengthening overtime to ten minutes and playing OT 4-on-4.

  I think that's the right track. Shootouts are random and they're only acceptable in the CCHA because they don't count for the pairwise.

• The CCHA is the only league against the two-ref, two-linesman system, so at least they know they're icing some confused mofos.
• They're considering tweaking icing with weird  rules about imaginary lines (to reduce whistles) or eliminating the wave-off if an attacking player misses a pass (to increase whistles) or removing the ability of a shorthanded team to ice it on a power play. The first two are dumb, but the latter is interesting to me: I bet they added the icing exception way back in the day because tired teams on the penalty kill were just going to ice it anyway and it was a way to not have ten of them in a two-minute span. Now that they've removed the ability to change after an icing, teams on the PK would have to legitimately attempt to clear the zone.
• It seems like they're going to get the d-zone dump over the boards right: "It looked like from the survey results that over half of the people would like to see something, but not a penalty. They’d like to make it so that they can’t change their players." This is right on. Make it icing, basically. Remove the incentive to do it without implementing the Dumbest Penalty In Sports.
• ARGH ARGH ARGH: "Requiring a team that has a delayed penalty in effect to clear the puck out of its defensive zone to get the whistle instead of merely gaining possession. That’s another topic that didn’t garner much in the way of support." Guessing one Red Berenson brought this up—it's something I suggested after the Miami debacle. There is no reason not to implement this immediately.
• They're also considering making all goals off skates legit, which they should do. Skate on ice: legit goal.

It sounds like at least a few of these will get implemented, and I like virtually all of them. (There is a goofy proposal to ban people from diving on the ice to block a shot, but there's no way that gets passed.)

Excited To See You Tom Hammond is no longer the most terrifying Notre Dame-related thing on the internet. I know this is hard to comprehend.

But never has a school been so ably summarized in four emasculating minutes:

You have to watch it. It will be the most conflicted four minutes of your life. It will be so horrible, but it will be awesome because it will be more horrible for the people this abortion ironically purports to represent. That guy redefining maximum levels of whiteness goes by "Freekbass," by the way, and has won an award. It is a sexy lamp sort of award, but it's an award. Soon he will have another award.

Explains the last 20 years, doesn't it? The people in charge of Notre Dame thought this was a good idea. They  got poor Brian Kelly to show up in this thing. They deployed the school's cheerleaders as a hearty midwestern dance backdrop. They spent a lot of money and time to aim very carefully at their own testicles with a shotgun and pulled the trigger on their official youtube channel.

Of course they hired Bob Davie, George O'Leary, Ty Willingham, and Charlie Weis. Maybe they will end up in the Big Ten after all.

UPDATE: Reader Nick Gorski provides the perfect comparison: this is the exact opposite of Hockeybear blowing up Earth.

Baraka Obama-a. Remember Kelly Baraka? Unless you're an old-school M recruitnik probably not. If you don't: he was supposed to  be a total ninja RB before a number of high school pot arrests saw him lose his shot at an M scholarship. He never made it anywhere else and has regularly featured in "where are they now?" features end up with the Kalamazoo Xplosion, a minor league football team. Not that you needed me to tell you that with a name like "Xplosion."

Yeah… anyway. About that ninja bit:

LeGarrette Blount ain't got nothing on Kelly Baraka.

Video revamp. Inside Michigan Football sans browser-crippling software:

Schilling's beard is a confidence-building one.

Slings and arrows. The Mathlete takes a look at luck over the past two years in the Big Ten and nationally, re-running last season based on performance-adjusted PPG metrics and slicing out some of the huge swings from random plays like fumbles (he leaves in interceptions). Unsurprisingly, Michigan hasn't been on the kind end of things:

I had some questions about whether this "luck" factor was really luck, but there doesn't appear to be any correlation between excellent teams and good fortune. OSU and Penn State average out to be basically even. Iowa nets out around –2. Michigan State's 9-3 2008 team was the second most-fortunate in the country that year, something that checks out in the statistics. It passes a cursory sanity check.

So, then: Northwestern is your official Big Ten lucksack with Minnesota a distant second. If I'm reading the graph right, the Wildcats have been the luckiest team in the country two years running. The negative outlier for 2009—that dot sitting right at –3.0 on the y axis—is Oklahoma, by the way. Not that you needed to be told that a seven-win Stoops outfit suffered its share of outrageous fortune even beyond the Bradford injury.

One stop scouting. The NTDP moved to the USHL this year, which the NHL scouting community loves. Previously, the development team had puttered along in the NAHL, in which draftable prospects are few and far between. Now they're in the USA's premiere junior league and scouts are going "eeee":

"The whole design of the program has given us the selfish benefactor of comparing the Under-18 team on one weekend against the University of Michigan and older players, and then watching them against their group peers the following weekend. But because this is such a select team, an elite team, we think that the elite 18-year-olds should be able to compete against the 21- and 22-year-olds who were not selected in the draft. Those players are older and more savvy but for some reason were passed over."

This should help the NTDP hold on to some of the elite Americans they've lost in recent years. (Example: Stefan Matteau, son of longtime NHLer Stephane Matteau, has accepted a slot according to Michigan Hockey Net.) The 2011 NTDP is a relatively motley bunch. Michigan hasn't recruited anyone from it, a rarity these days. That will change for 2012, as Michigan will have at least two on next years U17s. Boo Nieves is a holy lock for the team and Heisenberg says Connor Carrick has already accepted an invite.

Anything that helps the USHL get on even footing with major junior—something that point equivalencies and NHL alumni suggest is in the process of happening—is good for college hockey.

More Brandon panting. David Brandon loves America:

“Expanding the tournament, I believe is a bad idea … there are certain things that if they are not broke, don’t try to fix ‘em. If there is a better, more outstanding platform out there than the NCAA Final Four and basketball tournament, you have to tell me what that is.”

Not that this matters as the 96-team tournament becomes a foregone conclusion. I can't wait for that 9-24 matchup that will determine who has the right to face at eight seed. Guh.

While I'm on Brandon, contrast Michigan's hiring process with the fiasco that went down in Eugene after Mike Bellotti was presented a $2.3 million going-away present after accepting a job with ESPN:

[Oregon president Richard] Lariviere made two things clear: that he initiated the change in leadership and that university officials made missteps in dealing with Bellotti’s contract that no longer will be tolerated.

“This institution did not follow acceptable business practices in the past,” Lariviere said. “That will not be repeated by my administration.”

Makes the hundred grand or whatever Michigan spent vetting candidates seem like the chump change it is.

Lariviere fired Bellotti because of an "increasing need for strong financial and business management"; the ESPN job was a late development that seemed to allow all parties to save face. (Then it blew up in their face, but it was a nice try.) The trend in athletic directors is clear: CEO types.

Walk it back. Notre Dame AD Jack Swarbrick has read enough livid emails about Notre Dame's national cachet and the potential damage to Catholicism that would result from Our Lady joining up with those secular hooligans and is now changing tack on Notre Dame's role in Big Ten expansion:

That, Swarbrick insists now, was not a signal that Notre Dame is more open to finding a home for football in the Big Ten or any other league.

"The only things that could make it happen are the sorts of radical change in the industry that would cause upheaval and impact a lot more (schools) than Notre Dame," he says. "You wind up with only three conferences. You wind up with two tiers of conferences. Now, all of a sudden, it's not three divisions in college; it's four. It's the big change.

"I don't see that happening."

Please reduce your ND-to-B10 DEFCON to 85. Swarbrick adds:

"I really do believe strongly that we're sort of uniquely positioned to continue to chart our own course."

Sort of uniquely positioned? DEFCON back to 84!

In other Big Ten expansion news, Barnhardt writes about a 16 team Big Ten, spurring another round of PANIC duly shot down by DocSat, resurrected by the St Louis Post-Dispatch and OSU athletic director Gene Smith:

"I believe that if we expand, you probably ought to look at more than (just adding a 12th school)," Ohio State athletics director Gene Smith said.

Stressing that was his opinion and may not be shared by some colleagues, Smith added that he believed the impact "would be pretty massive."

A sixteen team Big Ten is stupid. I complained earlier that an expansion to 14 would see Michigan play Penn State 29% of the time; going to 16 would drop that to 12% (eight conference games) or 25% (nine). That's not a conference any more. The only way it could work would be to adopt promotion and relegation. Whenever I bring this up people point out that the radical swings in team quality characteristic of college football could doom very good teams to irrelevance, and they're right. But it makes more sense than pretending to be in a conference with a team you play once every eight years.

If you're going to expand like that, I think 15 is the number. My completely bats proposal for a 14-team Big Ten is mathematically unworkable, but if you add a 15th team you can break the conference into three divisions of five that play each other and two (or possibly three) opponents in each of the other divisions, and then you can have relegation/promotion crazytimes at the end of the season. This will never, ever happen.

I'm hoping this is all a game of chicken to convince Notre Dame to sign on the dotted line. Expansion of the Big Ten past twelve teams is an idea on par with a 96 team NCAA tournament.

Reviews of a mixed variety. Local scouting service "Best of the Best" returns from the MSHAA playoffs with impressions of a number of players, three of them relevant to your interests. Isaiah Sykes:

He doesn't have a jump shot to save his life, but you'd be hard pressed to find a better finisher and slasher in the 2010 class statewide. Also drop dimes like a 5'9 PG. Terrific rebounder, and is great at getting the defensive board and starting the fast break and making something positive happen with the basketball. High majors are recruiting him, and it's warranted, would be a good late pick up for any up-tempo college team.

Carlton Brundidge:

He's already committed to Michigan, but I don't know if he'll be successful in that system. In order to succeed at the highest level, picking the right system will be a absolute necessity for him. At the end of the day, he's a SG, and that's the bottom line. He produces and gets the job done, at that's what every team needs. He's a very good finisher for his size at the high school level and he can score in bunches when he gets rolling. All in all, his upside is limited in my opinion.

Decidedly negative, that. Hopefully he can develop a jumper over the next year and a half. Finally, Amir Williams:

A defensive phenom no matter the game because of his length, size, and timing, his effect on the game will be felt no matter what. He is also a hungry rebounder, who attacks the glass. Those are two big positives that you'd like every big man to have in their game, once the offensive part of his game becomes more consistent, we could be looking at another McDonald's All American out of the Country Day program.

Etc.: Rich Rodriguez's most recent presser in youtube form: part one, and part two. TSB unbreaks One Shining Moment. Dienhart surveys the explosion in assistant coaches' salaries.

Take the women and the mead; I'm not coming out of the basement. If Michigan's hockey team just died like Vikings, FL TE Carlos Carvajal is living like one:

He emerged from a local ten-year-old's He-Man rerun last Wednesday and is in the midst of a series of hilarious foibles in which he adapts to the modern world. He will master his strength, get the girl, and go to college. There will be a short-lived spinoff show at Purdue, Louisville, Tennessee, or another place that looks kindly on men wielding swords longer than themselves.

No, Michigan is not involved, but who cares? Carvajal's hair should be in the running for Name of the Year.

Good work there. You know that vandalism that took place in Michigan Stadium? Yeah…

It's not exactly earth-shattering. The turf should be fixed for the spring game, at which point it's getting replaced anyway. It did give Orson a chance to continue his campaign against the area media, at least.

Guh. 96 team NCAA tournament reaches DEFCON 2:

"I said from Day 1 that I would support the decision that came out of the (NCAA's) Board of Directors, which ostensibly is linked back to the presidents (in) the conferences," Delany said. "And if that's where it ends up, I support that."

Asked how he expects the expansion issue to play out, he said, "It's probable."

Won't someone think about the children? Is anyone going to care about any first round game at this point? What is the point of folding the NIT into the NCAA tournament? What is the NCAA's problem with a reasonable playoff field in either basketball or football? Is this the most roundly-despised inevitable idea in history?

The latest from spring. Inside Michigan Football translated into a non-browser-crippling format by anonymous heroes of the internet:

Maybe? No. But you keep waving your gums around. Jack Swarbrick had to open his mouth about conference affiliation. Hubbub ensued, and I pretty much dismissed it. But he keeps talking about it and every time he drops something it seems slightly more plausible than before. The latest tiny step towards plausibility comes from a KC Star article in which the Notre Dame AD elaborates on his previous comments:

“The traditional model, where a conference had a fixed fee media rights deal, if you added somebody you sliced the pie a little thinner,” Swarbrick said. “When you’re dealing with equity in a network ... it’s a situation we haven’t had before.”

At this rate he will elaborate ND right into the Big Ten by the 23rd century. He also said stuff about the Big East being an "extraordinary" partner and so forth and so on. I peg the chances of ND joining the Big Ten in the near future at 1.5%, up from 1%. Points to Mike Dearmond, the author, for deploying "tizzy" in his article.

The worst Final Four ever… and Butler. I guess it would have been more frustrating if Ekpe Udoh and Baylor had made it, but Michigan State, West Virginia, and Duke suck pretty hard because they are Michigan's primary rival, the school that Michigan yoinked its current coach from, and Duke.

Here's where I point out that Udoh's coach hired John Wall's AAU coach in the hopes of landing him and falls on the Calipari end of the dirtiness scale.

Etc.: UMHoops scouts Cody Zeller and Yogi Farrell. Georgia president Michael Adams is the guy who attempted to kill the "World's Largest Outdoor Cocktail Party" nickname and appears to be spectacularly corrupt to boot. Naturally, the NCAA is considering him in their search to find Myles Brand's replacement.

SOMEONE HIRED TIM FLOYD. IT MAKES A GREGG DOYEL COLUMN LOOK SANE. RUN.

At least there's that. Darren Everson has a great piece on Michigan's recent malaise and the hockey team's bounce-back that won't have much news for anyone who's lived through this year but is a great summary if you need to explain why you're sitting in the bathtub clutching yourself to someone who's not a Michigan fan.

Mary Sue Coleman shows up at the end to provide a throwaway quote, prompting a complaint from Dave Birkett about her tendency to show up in the WSJ but turn down local requests. This is probably because the WSJ asks her questions like "Do you like to win?" and local papers are more likely to ask eleven questions in a row about the threat Demar Dorsey poses to local schoolchildren. You must lie in the bed you have made.

Give me back that filet of goalie. Give me that goalie. If you've been watching the NCAA tournament you, like me, must have the bizarre Filet o' Fish jingle stuck in your head. There is but one thing as persistent this day:

Shawn Hunwick had a decision to make:

Go to Albion and become the school's first goaltender, or ...

Walk-on at Michigan. [ed: this story manages to spread one sentence over three(!) paragraphs, which must be a record.]

For the few moments the blinding television lights remained locked in on him, Shawn Hunwick played it cool.

In almost three years at Michigan, Hunwick played exactly 18 minutes of college hockey. But he never complained, never skipped, and never asked for playing time. He just kept his mouth shut, and did his job.

There is also an article from [NEWSPAPER REDACTED]. It covers exactly the same ground as the 37 other articles about Shawn Hunwick. Give me that fish.

Berenson's locked Hunwick in an electrical closet since the CCHA finals in a desperate attempt to keep his head on straight. We'll see if it works. Hunwick finds the electrical closet roomy, by the way, and thinks it's an honor to be in an electrical closet at Michigan.

Meanwhile, Louie Caporusso on avoiding that Air Force thing again:

But according to Caporusso, the formula for avoiding an early exit like last year is simply “shooting the puck on net with a purpose.”

“If we give him a lot of confidence and start building him up in our head, then it’s only going to make it harder on us,” Caporusso said. “I find if you brainwash yourself to believe that they don’t have a good goalie, you’re better off putting the puck in the net.”

The final countdown. Center Jon Horford just signed on, replacing Ben Cronin's wonky hip with a rail-thin post with some touch near the basket and good passing skills.

I don't want to steal too much of UMHoops's thunder as Michigan approaches what will be a critical couple weeks for the basketball program, but a high level overview: Michigan has two scholarships open and they may fill both of those slots despite the jam that would cause in the class of 2011. The candidates:

• Mount Pleasant SF Trey Zeigler. Ziegler is similar to Manny Harris, but higher rated on average. He is down to a top five of Michigan, Central, State, Arizona State, and UCLA. Complicating factor: his father is the head coach at Central Michigan. Zeigler could sign up to help his dad, whose job security is shaky.
• Detroit Denby SF Isaiah Sykes. Sykes can't shoot but he can get to the rack at will and is in the 6'5" range with long arms and a feverish desire to rebound. He has no offers after a high school career that saw three transfers; he didn't even play the first half of this season.

Michigan will obviously take Zeigler if they can get him. Sykes is the wildcard. Beilein's been to a number of his games recently, spurring both UMHoops and AnnArbor.com to get video and scouting reports on the guy. If Zeigler ends up going elsewhere—the tenuous conventional wisdom is that it's probably CMU or M—I can't imagine Beilein won't offer Sykes and end up with him.

Would Michigan take Sykes if it got Zeigler, though? Maybe. Michigan could free up another scholarship in 2011 for a post if they did not offer Laval Lucas-Perry a fifth year, and it's possible they wouldn't have to do that if someone transferred because of a lack of playing time in the aftermath of Zeigler, Sykes, Hardaway, and Smotrycz (who will push Novak from the four to the two and three) arriving. If I was Beilein I'd make my decision on Sykes independent of Zeigler.

The spring signing period starts in two weeks.

And fin. There was some hubbub in the comments when Michigan State reinstated a number of players who participated in the PREWB. Included were BJ Cunningham and Mark Dell, the highest profile participants not immediately booted. This set Dantonio up for a buffeting.

Why I can't figure. State has lost eight(!) players as a result of the PREWB, and six of them hadn't had previous run-ins with the law. This is not like Glenn Winston's reinstatement. None of the guys who are back on the team got any jail time; just about every program in the country would have done the same thing.

You can hammer Dantonio for two things here: letting Winston back on the team after months in jail after an unprovoked attack on a pair of innocent bystanders, lying about Roderick Jenrette's freshman year suspension. The actual handling of the aftermath here seems appropriate. Both guys who played in the Alamo Bowl, by the way, are gone. That wasn't on Dantonio.

While we're on Michigan State: they've got a goofily named quasi linebacker on their depth chart too. They've got a "STAR" listed and might be moving to a 3-4, or some other defense with three dedicated down lineman and an array of hybrids.

Happy trails. The Blue Gray Sky is packing it in. This site's relationship with those guys fell off a cliff after we did an article exchange before the '05 M-ND game. Mine was a description of my experience after the painful 2002 loss, after which a young child came up to me and literally said "good game, mister" as if I had fallen into Pleasantville. I added in some stuff about Notre Dame's program not being very good, which was basically true, and how this made Michigan's rivalry with them frustrating because they did things like lose two of three to Ty Willingham.

Theirs deployed "Skunkbears" and actually featured these two sentences:

Yost was but the first in a litany of men of low character to hold the reins at UM. ... Gary Moeller was frustrated that he couldn't pick Notre Dame up, drink it, and then drive into a ditch.

It was kind of like punching your brother in the arm and getting a baseball bat to the head in return. Suffice it to say there were no more article exchanges.

Even so, BGS was one of the first blogs to materialize out of the ether and when they weren't dredging up apocryphal stories about people who have been dead for 70 years, they were drafting incredibly research-heavy pieces I was jealous of. It must have been nice to have a blog with eight or so contributors; one of them could just hole up for months and come out with a precise breakdown of formations organized by down and distance. I can't find that in particular, but I did find their "Four Plays" series, which was a 2006 version of Picture Pages on steroids. They were good. They were Notre Dame fans who posted on ND Nation, but they were also good.

Etc.: Dennis Dodd says "if there were ever a coach to root for, it's Rich Rod." Is that a good thing?