unverified voracity

Liveblog/chat event! The Big Ten Network is going to cover a Michigan practice tonight at 9PM EST, with a replay of last year's "Little Brother" game preceding the festivities at 7.  MGoBlog will take the opportunity to spin out the Cover It Live software as a test run for a new feature this season. The tentative plan: have members of the Wolverine Liberation Army and some select others moderate CIL chats that will replace the chaotic free-for-all of the haloscan open threads. (If you've got a Michigan blog and will be available for home games there might be a spot or two open; drop me an email.) I won't be around since I'm going to 8 to 10 games this year and prefer my Ohio State games to be consumed in an atmosphere of solitary panic, but the WLA guys are pretty all right.

As far as tonight goes, we tried this once before when Sam McGuffie had his national TV debut and discussion quickly shifted from McGuffie to any and all things, which is fine. There will probably be some trenchant commentary on the event itself, but this will end up being more of a Q&A session with some good jokes/answers from the peanut gallery sprinkled in. A reminder: these are moderated chats so I have to approve anything that gets posted before it'll show up.

ESPN’s helmet clash was a stupid exercise designed to garner cheap hits and was unworthy of anyone’s attention. But this is pretty cool:

I think we know who the true winner is.

Cut like a razor blade so fast other DJs go damn. The Morgan Trent 4.13 forty is sadly, dead. Varsity Blue got some pictures from Media Day:

You can clearly see that "40" has no winners and the 413 was put up in the pro agility drill. You can also see that the fastest quarterback in that drill was... aww... goddammit... David Cone.

Moooooooo. Yeah, you know those enormous metal girders? You can’t walk through them. As a result, moooooving (ha! I kill me!) around Michigan Stadium this fall is going to be even more of a fiasco than it usually is:

Officials thought about opening the gates more than two hours before kickoff, but a review of scanned tickets shows the majority of fans wait until the last hour to enter anyway.

"Nobody likes to miss kick-off," Rademacher said. "If they don't get here early, there's a good chance they'll miss it."

Get to the stadium early and use the gate closest to your seat and avoid Main Street. If you show up late-ish things will be even more difficult than they've been in the past:

To help funnel fans who approach the stadium from the south around to the northern side of the stadium, one of the northbound lanes of South Main Street, from Stadium Boulevard to Keech Avenue, will be closed to vehicular traffic and open only to pedestrians.

A barrier closing off that lane to vehicular traffic will be installed before game day, said Ann Arbor Police Sgt. Brad Hill. "Officers there will be encouraging people to use that," Hill said.

Rademacher says it'll be quicker to walk around the stadium to the correct gate than to enter the stadium and fight the crowds through the concourses.

The traffic issues should be resolved by 2010, when a second concourse will be added for the plebes in the nosebleeds.

Sad? Funny? Both! Details of Kevin Grady's DUI arrest have been released. Going over them is sad and horrible and all that, but also... well... kind of funny. I'm sorry if this makes me a horrible person, but:

Thompson said he asked for a number between 12 and 14, and Grady answered "15." And when asked whether Mickey Mouse is a dog or a cat, he answered "dog."

That's comedy. Not comedy: the officer finding Grady passed out with the car running but his foot miraculously pressing the brake. Grady, BTW, has been seeing scanty first-team snaps even in the absence of Minor and Brown.

Sidenote: during my brief dalliance with college-level quiz bowl I attended a "trash tournament," in which the questions are all pop culture blah blah. At one point one of the bonus questions asked a player on the other team to execute a number of sobriety tests, one of which he failed. It was not "is Mickey Mouse a dog or a cat?"

Fun with names. Everyone loves a funny names roundup, and Grateful Blue has a good one focusing on the SEC. Some of them verge on child abuse:

Best Porn Name - For a Woman
Foxy Foxworth, South Carolina TE
This is strictly a soft-core porn name, since hardcore would be something like "Honey Titsworth."

Also, there is a man named "T-Bob" who is the son of a former NFL quarterback. If you guessed "Louisiana," give yourself a nickel.

Etc.: Carty relates Fred Jackson's insane ravings about the two freshman backs; Adam Rittenberg takes a look at Rodriguez's history with two quarterbacks. The first Blogpoll Roundtable is up and kicking at Hey Jenny Slater.

Uncle. The thing with the massive season previews that are a summer trademark of MGoBlog is this: they take a buttload of time. This is the point. They're supposed to be the bar-none definitive preview, relatively error-free and more penetrating than your generic "X starters return" item. But I sunk two months into the new site this summer instead of, like, anything else, and have two previews up three weeks before the season starts. The rest are obviously not going to get done, and this is a Michigan blog at a time when Michigan is entering a new era of its program. So, like, screw the rest of the league.

The deal:

• Purdue and Penn State are done.
• Michigan State is already half-done so I'll finish that one.
• I'll try to do Wisconsin and Illinois since they're interesting.
• Indiana, Iowa, Minnesota, Northwestern and Ohio State will get vague overviews, but not the full treatment. (Four meh-ish teams, two of whom are off the schedule... and Ohio State? Well, what is there to say about OSU that's interesting? Obvious favorite in the league, potential issues at DT and QB. End.)
• Michigan gets the usual.

A stranger could have loved that town. File under "Only In Ohio":

A teenage employee celebrated his birthday by taking a bath in the utility sink at the Burger King in Xenia. Greene County Health Commissioner Mark McDonnell was emailed the video that appeared on MySpace.com and is now using it as evidence. ...

In the video, the employee dumps water on himself using a bucket marked with the words, "sanitary solution." But McDonnell said the sink is used to clean utensils and there is nothing sanitary about what the teenager did.

Video? Video.

If you're in the Xenia Burger King you've already died and are in hell, so feel free to eat whatever you want.

If you missed it, I wrote a Deadspin-ish preview of Michigan for Deadspin. The commenters were unimpressed because they are Deadspin commenters and if they were to actually enjoy anything that wasn't a dick joke they would burst into flame. This inscrutable comment was my favorite:

Was this article turned down by Slate?

Is that compliment? I like Slate. What does it mean to be an article turned down by it?

Rings and stuff. I've gotten a couple requests for Olympics coverage. This is not happening. As mentioned I'm kind of all like "F*** ITS THREE WEEKS TO FOOTBALL" -- which is a weird feeling, let me tell you -- and the Olympics... well... meh. I enjoyed the 56kg weightlifting competition because watching tiny men lift Charlie Weis-equivalents is always fun, and seeing Middle Kingdom on national TV was pretty surreal, and Bela Karoyli says things like this:

"they're on the better place than to be in the first place right now. they are under UMBRELLA. UMBRELLA of PROTECTION -- PROTECTIVE UMBRELLA."

And that is awesome. But I'm not going to cover it. I suggest checking out MGoSwim for all your Michigan-related swim Olympics stuff.

We will use it for good. Lake The Posts highlights an particularly relevant section of an SI article on the spread offense:

...there was a great nugget in the piece on the fact RichRod and Walker were good friends. RichRod taught Walker the spread and as RichRod claims in the article, we took it and ran with it without even changing the signals.

This is particularly relevant because of the delightful table I constructed in the process of writing the "Holy Hand Grenade" article for Hail To The Victors 2008 that showed Northwestern smoking Michigan in YPC until Walker's death a couple years ago. Here it is, live in memorex:

I've seen a lot of Northwestern's offense over the years and was confident it was similar to the Rodriguez spread 'n' shred; I didn't think it was the exact same thing.

That sounds like a battle tested guy. The AP inadvertantly summarizes everything about how Jimmy Clausen was the platonic ideal of an overrated recruit:

Jimmy Clausen figures he got hit a total of five times while his teams went 42-0 in high school. At Notre Dame, he was sacked six times in his first start and was so beat up after seven games he missed the next two.

A smallish quarterback two years older than his competion playing for a small-school power surrounded by major D-I talent who never so much as saw a rusher or, like, coverage is not "the Lebron James of football," as he was dubbed.

Just what they needed. Adam Rittenberg's Big Ten blog on ESPN has been invaluable in my previewing, but I wonder which Michigan State he's been watching the past thirty or so years:

"All the time," linebacker Adam Decker said when asked how much the players discuss Michigan. "Coach Dantonio came in here and made that game a point of emphasis. As a player, that's great because I'm from the state of Michigan [Rochester Hills]. As a Michigan State player, you want to beat Michigan. It's emphasized every day."

This is thought to be a good thing despite Rittenberg noting that the "sleeping giant" Michigan State program has a history of October collapses. Until recently, the annual October collapse was always because they'd shot their wad against Michigan and felt free to descend into an orgy of incompetence.

Etc.: The thing that is not Michigan Replay debuts August 28th; the huddle is on the way out(?).

The latest and greatest. Mysterious Michigan insider-guy Maizeman has been offering inside bits on Michigan practices since the internet's paleolithic era, mostly over email to a select group of Chosen Ones. Now he's doing it on Go Blue Michigan Wolverine, a blog open to the public. He must not fear silent ninja reprisals from Rodriguez like he did from Carr.

I have no way to check the veracity of these things and no idea who this guy is or how he survived the regime change with super-powerful insider mojo intact, but at the very least his posts are interesting. They may even be accurate. Some snippets follow; there's a lot of [sic] in here, just deal. Post the first:

Dorrestein vs. O'Neill:


Who would be first Offensive Tackle in game in case of injury? As of now Dorrenstein. O'Neill will put increased pressure on him as camp continues. O'Neill is simply a better athlete and could possibly play both Offensive Tackle spots although both Dorrestein and O'Neill seem better suited for Right Tackle. In Coach Rod's system, the only Offensive Line position that seems to have its special needs is Left Tackle and that makes Ortmann a very important player to stay healthy.

Sagesse and Kates:


Have been getting snaps at Defensive Tackle sometimes with second group and sometimes Sagesse is with third group. Both seem to be in good shape and are going multiple snaps when they are in the scrimmage. Martin has been with third group and has had some good battles with Khoury and Barnum.

And on the QBs:

Another problem that I saw in spring and continues in fall is Michigan's new version of the "check down" pass. What they do is take one of the slots and he will run a flare toward the sideline (which means does not take steps down the field, but "drifts" to the sidelines. When Quarterbacks feel pressure they are told to get rid of the ball which more times than not is just throwing a short pass to the slot who has run the flare toward the sideline.




This is why Coach Rod is recruiting those elusive slot type players because they will be asked to get about five-six yards out of virtually nothing. So far, our Quarterbacks are throwing this pass excessively often and think it is due to lack of confidence.

At least the checkdown route is no longer a drag that takes six seconds to open up. There's considerably more on GBMW; click through if you're tantalized.

Tacopants explained. Dr. Z gets to the bottom of Chad Henne's occasional passes to Jason Avant's eleven-foot-tall imaginary friend:

The third observation, who might be No. 1 by the end of the season, is second-round draft pick Chad Henne, a big arm from Michigan. Sometimes the ball flies on him, and I asked Dolphins' offensive coordinator Dan Henning to please give me a technical critique of the flight of his passes. I can ask the 66-year old Henning questions like that because ... listen to how far back we go. About a century ago I selected him as my All-Met High School quarterback for St. Francis Prep in Brooklyn.

"When he's wild, he's either wild high left or wild low right," Henning said. Noticing my idiot look, he elaborated. "You're serving in tennis. Serving to the ad court, you'll probably be wide low right, and in the deuce court, wild high left, so what we're trying to get him to do is open his body, pretending he's in the deuce court, to get the ball on target." I got so excited with this analogy I tried it myself and served an ashtray through a pane of glass, but the point is young Henne has one of the great quarterback technicians in the game to work with him.

I think my problem in Chicago was that I never selected anyone for a high school all star team in 1945.

Just because he's skinny does not mean he can't play DE. I can't remember where the first couple instances of the idea that Michigan played a 3-4 last year came from, but the disease has now struck a third person and can be officially denoted a trend:

Ezeh is the Wolverines' top returning tackler and the team's only starting linebacker retained from last season. He had 68 tackles from his spot at inside linebacker in UM's 3-4 defense and contributed four tackles for loss, two sacks, and an interception.

This is followed by a note that Michigan is "now" running a 4-3.

Wherever this idea originated, it's wrong. The only time last year Michigan had a fourth linebacker on the field it was in certain short-yardage situations and walk-on Max Pollock was the extra strongside linebacker. This was very rare. The confusion probably stems from the frequent deployment of nominal linebacker Shawn Crable as a defensive end, but this only happened against spread teams and on passing downs in Michigan's nickel package. And even if you want to claim that as some weird variety of the 3-4, Crable was usually playing with his hand down as a member of a four-man line. Michigan would line up in a 3-3-5 from time to time, but this was an exotic and not a base defense.

Wheeeee! High amongst the quotes that make Michigan fans want to punch a wall is "Michigan is straightforward" or "has no surprises" or "just lines up and runs directly at you again and again and it makes me, a USC Trojan, so bored after we crush them into dust." This era has apparently ended:

"Especially with the speed of the game and special formations," said Minor, a front-runner along with Carlos Brown to replace Mike Hart at tailback. "Last year, it was basically almost the same one formation, the I-set form. Now, there's no telling where we'll line up. We can do so much, and it's real good. I love it, because the defense doesn't know what to expect."

Just watching 30 minutes of practice Monday made it easy to see exactly what he was talking about. The Michigan offense never seemed to show the same formation on back-to-back plays.There were two tailbacks in the backfield, an empty backfield, wide receivers motioning into an empty backfield to become tailbacks, slotbacks turning into quarterbacks, quarterbacks turning into wide receivers, tight ends lining up in the slot and so forth.

There were more looks on display in 15 minutes than an entire season under the previous coaching regime.

Too bad the A11 is probably illegal.

Por ejemplo. Wild-something-or-other a la Darren McFadden is in the house:

Don't be surprised to see tailbacks Brandon Minor and Carlos Brown in the backfield at the same time.

"It's a lot," Minor said, when asked how often the two are lined up in the backfield.

I have no idea what's going to happen this fall, but I am sure that Rodriguez will throw the kitchen sink at opposing defenses.

If that city is New York: I am going to be in your vicinity on August 26th at the behest of the UM Club of NYC. There will be drinks and such, and then I'll give a half-hour-ish presentation on the 2008 edition of the Michigan Wolverines.

Details here. It's at a bar called Metro 53.

Pre-registration is encouraged; it's $5 for folks who aren't already members of the alumni chapter. If you bring me an infant I will do a Heisman pose with it.

Hey, this is awesome. Former Michigan defensive end Rondell Biggs got caught with steroids, said they were "post-workout" pills, and he was assisting with Michgian's S&C program. Awesome! Let's throw ourselves in a lake of fire!

It's probably not that bad, though:

U-M football spokesperson Dave Ablauf said this morning that Biggs was employed as an hourly worker by U-M's football staff under former head coach Lloyd Carr, but was not retained when coach Rich Rodriguez and conditioning coach Mike Barwis took over the program after U-M's bowl game on Jan. 1.

Biggs had ten pills of a supply of 50, an amount that suggests personal use only, and had been working out with Barwis like many other former Michigan players. Hopefully this is just a fringe pro trying to make the NFL or AFL or whatever, and nothing more. Carty mentions that Carr was not exactly Barry Switzer when it came to the 'roids:

Whatever your opinion of former coach Lloyd Carr's won-loss record, he made it crystal clear where he stood on steroids, bringing in FBI agent Greg Stejskal annually to speak to the team about the risks involved with performance-enhancing drugs, gambling and other issues. Carr was absolutely no nonsense on these issues, and is probably heartbroken over Biggs, a player he held great affection for.

Chances this is anything other than the proverbial isolated incident: low.

Awesome. The "countdown to kickoff" videos posted at MGoBlue are, of course, super-fluffy but fluffy is good sometimes. In this one the defensive line guys all come off as nice kids who are ready to croosh silly foe like bug:

(strong possibility firefox users will not be able to watch this; direct link for the affected.)

This spurred Johnny into action:

Terrance Taylor threw up after the team's first practice, lost 22 pounds, and needed a night of intense reflection to keep him from quitting football. Will Johnson is bald, can reputedly bench press a sedan as many as three times, but approaches his final season quite aware - almost annoyed - that Michigan's offense is far from good, not close to adequate, and at quarterback could just as likely feature a naïve true-freshman that asks a lot of questions and throws more out of obligation than instinct as it could a transfer from Georgia Tech that's never taken a college snap.

There is a rest of it, and I hardly have to tell you you should read it.

Uh oh? The assumption was that once a Comcast deal fell into place the other major cable providers in the BTN footprint would quickly fall into lockstep. This has not so much happened. Talks with Time Warner were promising at first. Now not so much:

''We're a little concerned that the pace of negotiations with Time Warner may not allow us to reach an agreement in time,'' Big Ten Network spokeswoman Elizabeth Conlisk said.

Time Warner man, for his part:

''The serious talking doesn't start until the 11th hour,'' he said, ''and we're in the 11th hour.''

Jasso remained optimistic that a deal could get done.

Read those tea leaves as you will.

By the way, the BTN blasted out a press release on the second season of "Big Ten's Greatest Games"; it's in a diary if you want to find out when Michigan gets its turn. Braylonfest included!

Etc.: Rodriguez does a radio interview in Alabama.

By multiple, persistent request. Some time back the Hoover Street Rag pled for assistance, asking if anyone out in MGoBlog land had a copy of "The Victors" by a jazz singer named Pat Suzuki. Several people offered versions of this weird piece of Michigan apocrypha, the HSR's request was met, and I got a file containing the audio. At the time, however, the laptop's soundcard was on the fritz and I had no idea what was actually in my possession.

One thankfully persistent reader, however, has not let it drop. It turns out that the item in question is surreal. Its closest analogue in my experience is Marylin Monroe's infamous rendition of "Happy Birthday" directed at JFK; both are utterly transformative. And weird. And were undoubtedly undertaken in cocktail dresses.

Anyway, here it is. Click the play icon next to the link for a swanky javascript player; right click and "save as" to download.

Pat Suzuki SINGS(!) "Hail To The Victors"

Seriously. I was pretty annoyed by Josh Jarboe's sudden dismissal from Oklahoma for -- gasp! -- rapping, more annoyed when I read Bob Stoops' pre-dismissal quote to the effect of "sticks and stones," and just plain angry when the bitter old men at the Oklahoman smarmily applauded the about-face. So I wrote something to that effect.

I probably wouldn't have bothered, though, if I knew that SMQ was going to kick off his final week of amateur wordsmithery by dropping a bomb on the Typical White Middle-Aged Sportswriter villians referenced above:

Was it "the Internet culture" that asked him to act swiftly, with the full weight of his position? Every Day Should Be Saturday, the most widely-read college football blog on the Web, linked to the video with no call for discipline. The very mainstream-leaning Wizard of Odds, which broke the video's existence and posted the version that drew tens of thousands of hits last week, made no call for discipline. None called Jarboe a "thug" or described his freestyle efforts as "jabber." Who, then, is Stoops actually frustrated with?

The finger points squarely at the old men who don't understand the internet but feel free to blame it for all ills, real or imagined.

Maybe they need someone to degrade them. West Virginia has leapt up the Fulmer Cup scoreboard with a series of crimes spectacular and petty:

• Three players are caught with felonious, drug-dealing amounts of weed.
• Noel Devine and four other players got in a nightclub fight.
• Charles Pugh pulls a Kevin Quick and goes on a stolen credit-card spree.
• Evan Rodriguez beats up a girl.
• Kendall Washington breaks into a home, steals some stuff, and shoots a guy. He wasn't actually on the team at the time, FWIW.

When I initially noted this apparrent explosion of bad behavior, Washington was believed to still be on the team and his nine points brought the 'Eers into a tie for the lead. It turns out he was dismissed after spring practice. The points go away but this is a kid who had some major issues in high school; Rodriguez pursued and acquired him.

So, like... WTF? As I've noted before, West Virginia was not a big mover in the first couple years of the Fulmer Cup, scoring nine points total. Michigan racked up 15 points, all of them coming last year when Lloyd Carr's retirement was impending. Driven by the realities of recruiting players to West Virginia, Rodriguez brought in his fair share of... uh... characters but he largely kept them in check. Even Pacman Jones had but one incident, that as a freshman. From there on he was off the police blotter.

"Coach Stew" -- West Virginia fans are constitutionally incapable of using their coach's full last name -- has not had similar fortune. Why?

It's tough to scare the hell out of your players when you're obviously thinking "I can't believe I'm a Division I head coach. How much are they playing me? I get a whistle!"

I foresee this ending badly.

(Sidenote: in searching for Stewart pictures I came across this engineering dork LOL page:

Fatal error: Call to undefined function: graceful_fail() in /web2/dmblogs/docs/wp-content/blogs.php on line 77

Snicker.)

Back to the future. Wolverine Historian has assembled Rick Leach highlights for your edification.

Site note: I've added the Depth Chart by Class to the "useful stuff" navigation item and updated it to reflect the current situation.

Ladies. Hello. We would like to talk to you. No, we don't ever take these off.

Can anyone ID these gents? The guy on the left looks a little like Boren, but AFAIK the only guy on the team with dreads is Martavious Odoms, a freshman who never crossed paths with the family values maven. Don't bother with the one on the right, who's obviously John Travolta from Saturday Night Fever.

(Via EDSBS.)

I read this thing called SEOmoz, which is a horribly named but quite good blog on search engine optimization and related things. Before Friday, if you had asked me what the chances are I'd ever mention it in this space I would have told you "zero point zero," but I'm wrong:

Fluent Simplicity compiled a list of brands who are on Twitter. The list is pretty comprehensive and is broken down into sector. It's interesting to see which major companies have a Twitter account. (I was especially amused to see that Michigan State has one. I imagine their tweets to consist of either "won the game. students rioting" or "lost the game. students rioting.")

Zing!

Etiquette advice from a caveman. A couple people have emailed noting that newspapers have used quotes from the response to "my question" about tight ends from media day. It's really nice that there are people out there who act as defenders of the MGoFaith, but the question was asked in an open forum with a dozen people listening. Responses in that situation are fair game, as if it was a press confernece. It's not like I had an exclusive interview with Rodriguez or anything.

Also, Angelique Chengelis is really nice, continually got information no one else did during the Carr era, and helped Johnny land the Carr interview that features in Hail To The Victors 2008; she's the last media person anyone should be criticizing.

Yes, your math's wrong. By request of Dennis Dodd, who titles his latest blog post "please someone tell me my math is wrong": your math is wrong. This is your math:

According to my math (always a dicey proposition but hang with me, it's only a blog [SCREW YOU GOLLUM -ed]), the average college team ran 72 plays per game last season. Fine, great. The average NFL team ran 62.76 plays per game. That's with the 40/25 rule. That's also a difference of 9.14 plays per game. Multiplied by two teams thats more than 18 plays per game difference. ...

It looks to me like the NCAA rules committee is about to bastardize the game like it did two years ago when its misguided timing rules slashed something like 13 plays per game. The rules were adjusted last season and once again we had reasonable college football.

Your math completely ignores the biggest timing difference between college football and the NFL: on a first down, the clock stops until the chains are set and the ball is ready for play. This takes somewhere between 10 and 15 seconds -- looks like 12 is a good average -- and last year the average Big Ten game had 40.6 first downs. Approximately eight minutes runs of an NFL game clock that does not run off an NCAA game clock because of this rule change, which means a college game is 15% longer than an NFL game because of this rule's effect*. 72 is 115% of 62.76: virtually the entire difference the length of pro and college games is explained here.

Also, during the bastardized clock season you wrote an article proclaiming the Return of Defense, citing an amazing 10% decrease in scoring offense in a year when games were 10% shorter. You should probably not write things about the game clock.

Games will probably be a bit shorter because out of bounds plays will now have the clock wound after the ball is marked ready for play; the effect will be considerably smaller than 2005.

*(I think. I'm not sure whether I should be dividing 60 by 52 or 68 by 60. Statistician help? The latter would be 13%, FWIW.)

Coin. More dollars for the program:

The University of Michigan became the latest elite college athletic program to sell off a package of its media rights, bringing in $86 million through a 12-year deal with IMG College.

The deal, which runs through June 2020, marks the first time Michigan has bundled all of its media rights into one package and marks the continuation of a trend where colleges are hiring companies, such as IMG College, to maximize revenue from those rights.

That's about $7.2 million per year on top of the reported $5-7 million they're making from the Big Ten Network. Since Florida just signed over a similar suite of rights (that is: all the stuff Michigan is signing over to IMG plus the TV rights to everything except most football and some basketball games) to the same company for $10 million per, that seems like a pretty good deal. And it's not going to compromise Michigan stadium's zealous purity:

Throughout the negotiations, IMG College had to convince the school that it would protect the integrity of the game-day experience inside Michigan Stadium, known as "The Big House."

"We can increase the revenue and value of corporate sponsorships by doing things outside the stadium," Stultz said. "The more we talked about that, the more excited they got about it."

Etc.: Michigan is running a video countdown to the season; they're super fluffy but where else can you see images of guys doing hang cleans to rawkin' 80s guitar solos? Don't answer that question. Soon-to-be-ex AJC sportswriter Tony Barnhart has Auburn spread junkie Tony Franklin give key bullet points on why it, like 80s guitar solos, rawks. (Sidenote: the problem with newspapers offering voluntary buyouts is that often the guys with options -- the ones who aren't reprehensible -- say "okay" and the Terence Moores of the world cling to the lifeboat.) The Hoosier Report has old video of a 50s-era Michigan-IU game. The stands, they are not so full.