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Yo: I was on The Solid Verbal's podcast the other day, talking for an extensive length of time about Michigan, the Big Ten, Mister Simpson, and NCAA 10. Podcast lives here.

Rich text editing, yo. After far too long wandering in the wilderness on this, I've finally restored the rich text editing that was intermittently available in the early days of MGoBlog 3.0. If you're posting a diary you've now got convenient options to create headers, bold and italic text, links, blockquotes, and display offsite images. I'm still tinkering with allowing users to upload images to the MGoServer. In an attempt not to slow down other pages I've omitted it from comments and message board posts.

Social media, yo. I've also restored easy access to various ways to propagate the MGoGospel throughout the internet in the form of a "ShareThis" button. I killed the last iteration because it was cluttery; this one is one button and a nice popup.

It also has reporting, so I can see if anyone's using it. If it's not getting any use after a couple months I'll kill it again.

Buy or throw at, your choice. Attention State College persons/bloggers: I'm going to be in your neck of the woods next weekend, as the GF attends a food studies conference. (The last one was in New Orleans, which seemed more logical, no offense.) She is going to busy talking about Foucault and whatnot; I am going to be bored and possibly forbidden from doing any sort of daytime activities. This is your opportunity to discuss Big Ten refereeing with an actual Michigan fan.

Correction. Yesterday I asserted that club varsity teams had it made. Unfortunately, this was so vastly wrong I received two responses that explained just how vastly wrong I was. Picking the first to arrive in the inbox:

Hi Brian,

I thought you might want to know a little info about our team and I can clear up the term "varsity-club" a little bit. For our team, each player pays dues of $3,500 per year.  Our annual budget is over $500,000, this is more than almost all of the big time Division 1 programs (much more when you consider we don't provide scholarships). The University provides $20,000 a year to us. The rest is made up through our dues, fundraising, and sponsorships. I can't give specifics in regards to the other varsity-club teams here, but I know that they pay dues and not much is free.

Go Blue!
-David Reinhard, #20

These are men who love their lacrosse. For more on the club varsity status and what it takes to remove "club" from it, see this Daily article from a couple years ago that focuses on the lacrosse team. I assume they're on top of the list for addition given their success and the sudden, permanent availability of Oosterbaan, but that any varsity additions will be put off until the stadium renovation starts gushing cash.

1) The site is enduring some server issues that occasionally result in the White Screen of Death. This is… well… it's white. And there's nothing else. If this happens it is not your fault. Hopefully the server issues are resolved in the next couple days.

2) I have a new home at The Sporting Blog, which is where This Week In Schadenfreude will go; I've been tasked with (mostly) daily posts on a variety of subjects. First post is here; author page is here; I'm hoping to get a feed up a la AOL on the right sidebar.

TSB has also just added LSUFreek and Oops Pow Surprise—and already has Shoals, McErlain, and Orson—which, like, awesome. I can now suggest things to the Freek, if anyone has ideas.

More fixening. So I'm starting to make small tweaks to the website—you'll notice that mgolicious is less ugly—with an eye on implementing a couple features for fall. On the list:

1. Some variety of mobile support.
2. Adding subscriptions. (No content will go premium, but a few people have inquired about murdering the ads while still supporting the blog. Subscriptions would basically be no ads + increased power to moderate things. Speaking of…)
3. Implementing some form of user moderation to cut down on things the majority of people think are wastes of time.

There might be some other things but they're not new features, they'd be new ways of dealing with things on my end that would cut out some of the annoying robotic tasks I have to do. Upshot: over the next couple months you may get a friendly Drupal maintenance screen if you visit after 10PM. There's no reason to be alarmed.

Now we need Javon Ringer to get a Leonidas tattoo so large and realistic he ceases to be Javon Ringer. EDSBS posts some picture of Terrelle Pryor showing off an extremely complicated hand sign and his massive Ohio State forearm tattoo, but Lamarr Woodley sees that and raises:

I think Lamarr Woodley's arm is bigger than my leg. I think his tattoo is bigger than Hugh Jackman. It is definitely bigger than Hugh Grant. Lamarr Woodley's watch could cover Andorra in eternal night if placed in the appropriate geosynchronous orbit.

Also, I ask about the Pryor picture again: what's with the fey lumberjack shirts?

Blowin' up. Basketball recruiting again, but not Evan Smotrycz this time. It's someone sporting a name familiar to Michigan fans:

The hottest player in the state of Michigan right now is Patrick Lucas-Perry, from Flint Powers. The 5'10 PG has blew up to the point, where he is a legit candidate for the #1 player in 2011 in Michigan. Lucas-Perry was the #1 ranked PG in Michigan in my updated rankings for college coaches and subscribers.

Yes, that's LLP's kid brother. Lucas-Perry the younger joins a crowded field of 2011 Michigan guards with significant recruiting hype; Brandan Kearney and Carlton Brundidge are the other big names. Michigan has strong interest in all of them, but only Kearney has the sort of height (6'4") usually associated with Beilein guards. (Brundidge is listed around six foot.) Though it's too early to tell which of the three will be the top priority and which Michigan State will target, the 2011 basketball class is looking a lot like this year's instate quarterback crop: there's enough talent to go around.

We still noticed. Someone in the Minnesota AD must have worked in a senate office before, because the Gohers released this information Friday at 5 PM hoping to mitigate whatever TRY FIGHT BEST damage it might WIN DO TRY TEETH do to Tim Brewster's reputation:

Minnesota's football team lost three scholarships after its Academic Progress Rate dropped during the 2007-08 reporting period. The Gophers' APR fell from 927 to 887, and their multiyear APR dropped to 915, which is below the scholarship-reduction cutline of 925.

Whee! Minnesota will be operating with 82 scholarships next year. This is another BCS program, albeit a second-tier one, struck down by the APR and is further evidence it's not completely useless.

I was momentarily taken aback by the timing of this—May is pretty late to find out you don't get three scholarships, especially if you've signed a Minnesota LOI—but it appears the Gophers knew about this for a while:

Football factored in its penalty by signing three fewer players to scholarships this spring, meaning the program will have a maximum of 82 players on scholarship this season. If the Gophers are above 925 next year, which appears likely based on the fall semester team APR of 957, the scholarships will be restored.

(Thanks to the Daily Gopher for the link.) There's no kid out there who just found out he's getting a grayshirt, sparing me a somewhat self-important gavel-pounding rant.

Minnesota's APR troubles are likely to be mirrored by Michigan over the next couple falls, as the Gophers suffered from a lot of attrition when Brewster came in. The APR deducts one point for anyone leaving your program, no matter their academic status, so Michigan's array of transfers will see their gaudy numbers fall to meh levels. Michigan's starting out from a much higher spot than Minnesota was, though, and scholarship reductions are unlikely.

FRIENDLY TIP. Here's a handy tip for Eleven Warriors. Don't write this…

A lack of communication could have something to do with the Cameron Wright decommit though another school of thought says Matta and company grew disinterested.

…when there is a quote from Cameron Wright saying this…

"I was definitely going to stick with Ohio State," said Wright.

…because then you look like a stupid fanboi attempting to downplay the 100% fact that Wright's scholarship was yanked. Cameron Wright did not "decommit." The internet has links, and you're chucking credibility out the window when you blatantly misrepresent reality.

Etc.: The JCCW on Deadspin and how it's pretty much the ESPN of sports blogs: "You want clutter? You want something that is not, in fact, about sports, but is about the useless, "funny" sideshows that surround sports? I give you Deadspin."

Some time ago I mentioned that the site's ability to email you registration information was erratic. It turns out there was some population behind aggressive ISP-level spam filtering that would scythe down MGoEmails before they reached people in this group.

An effort was made to fix this, and given the results of a group of test cases it appears to have succeeded. So: if you tried to register at any point in the past and were unable to get login information you can try again and this time it should work. If it doesn't, please email me.