1982 illinois

The last walkoff goal line stand. Via Wolverine Historian, Illinois 1982:

Health bits. Rudock should play Saturday. Smith's having issues, he will continue to have issues, he has an injury you can play through but always hurts and won't stop hurting until the offseason.

Excellent, responsive, transparent. The athletic department surveyed 4,500 season ticket holders and is releasing that information over the next couple weeks. I love that. It shows the department is listening to fans and allowing us to talk about the data they gathered in public. That is something I've wanted them to do for a long time. So:

Question 4: Did you enjoy the balance of piped-in music and band during the game (not including pregame or halftime)?

• It was a perfect balance (43%)
• Would prefer a lot more band, a lot less piped-in music (20%)
• Would prefer a little more band, a little less piped-in music (28%)
• Would prefer a little more piped-in music, a little less band (6%)
• Would prefer a lot more piped-in music, a lot less band (1%)
• Didn't care (3%)

That's about a 50/50 split between people who think the music is fine and those who want it toned down. (I am obviously in the 20% group.)

I'm disappointed with this answer:

Question 3: How would you rate the overall video board presentation (highlight videos, replays, prompts, information, etc.)?

• Excellent (49%)
• Good (44%)
• Fair (6%)
• Poor (1%)

Alas! Have I not yelled about pore-o-vision sufficiently to move the mass of public opinion?

I'll say this much for Dave Brandon. He didn't land Michigan in a congressional report about how many of the military patriotism events at sport events are bought and paid for. The NFL, of course, is the biggest offender here, but Wisconsin, Indiana, and Purdue are the college programs that managed to show up. In those teams' case they seem to be selling a bunch of game tickets to their local National Guard units, which 1) is not a good use of taxpayer dollars and 2) in the case of Indiana-Purdue football is just not nice to our military reservists.

But mostly it's just NFL teams taking millions of dollars to pretend like they care about anything other than millions of dollars. Which is the best! It is infinite NFL.

Speaking of things we aren't getting paid for. Flyover this weekend:

A B-17 & B-25 will conduct the flyover for the @umichfootball Military Appreciation game on Sat. #GoBlue #MGoTroops pic.twitter.com/viisURhBJn

— Michigan Athletics (@UMichAthletics) November 5, 2015

The answer is "most deserving." Chris Brown asks what the goal of playoff rankings should be:

What criteria should we use to determine who gets the title?

One answer is that the champion should be the season’s “best team,” possibly defined as the best overall team or the team we think would be favored to beat every other team on a neutral field. Another answer is the “most deserving team,” loosely defined as the team that produced the best overall season. These two things are not always the same. It’s perfectly possible for the best team — i.e., the most formidable — to lose a close game or even two on a bad kick or a fluke play, while another team runs the table by winning close games.

Alabama lost a game to Ole Miss in which they had an avalanche of fluky turnovers and this happen to them:

That doesn't really impact my opinion about how good Alabama is. I think they're better than Ole Miss, probably a lot better. But that is just, like, my opinion, man. Once you start talking about "best" because team X has fancy S&P stats or a bunch of NFL first rounders you lose the reason we even play the damn fluky thing that is football. You play to win the game. Bama didn't win.

Now, in a sport like college football you can't just add up wins and losses and call it a day. Schedules are imbalanced and short. Style points have to come into play because a lot of teams will have similar records. A 58-0 blowout of a team should matter more than a 21-20 win. But once you start looking at the why you start eroding the fundamental reason I should care about, say, a one in a million punt drop disaster.

Moving the game to a Vegas-style "eh, don't care about results" model is not good for the sport and is fundamentally a guess that football keeps proving us wrong about, and thus we should dump why and how from playoff rankings in favor of a deeply researched take on what.

I demand a Drake Johnson television show. He killed it at his press availability oh and also

@DRAKEington So does this mean you can Fus Roh Dah opposing linebackers?

— Helios Eusebio (@MGoPhoenix) November 3, 2015

Skyrim bartering is bad but I'll allow it.

On that one site with all the liars. Hey. So Chatsports just lies about things, all the time, in search of traffic. Don't pay attention to them. This was Georgia QB commit Jacob Eason's dad in the aftermath of another Chatsports fiction piece:

The “story” that came out yesterday about him contacting multiple schools really struck a nerve.

Tony Eason called me on Wednesday morning and he was not happy about it.

“Who the h$#** is Marc F&%*% and where did he get that Bull Sh$%$# story at?”

Marc Furballson is the updated nom de plume of Ace Williams. If you post a chatsports link to the message board we will delete all your points. AND THEN WHAT WILL YOU DO

They won't listen. Mike Freeman on Harbaugh availability:

I asked one general manager about Jim Harbaugh returning to the NFL. His response: "He's going to have at least six teams come after him. He'd be able to have any open job he wants." The GM didn't name the teams, but it's not hard to figure out who some of them will be.

Then, the general manager said some NFL teams have already reached out to Harbaugh's camp to see if he'd be available once the season ends. Those teams, the GM explained, weren't told just "no." They were basically told "no freaking way."

Harbaugh isn't going anywhere.

Not that you needed to be told that.

I get it. Bruce Feldman on the Minnesota job:

Hearing more & more this week that there is a lot of key support for interim HC Tracy Claeys is keep the #Minnesota job full-time.

— Bruce Feldman (@BruceFeldmanCFB) November 5, 2015

For one, they don't even have an AD right now. Getting a new coach without a permanent AD is going to be very hard unless you have a Harbaugh; Minnesota doesn't. For two, cheap. For three, this is not a job market Minnesota particularly wants to be in, and you can make a long-term decision on Claeys after a year or two since there should be staff continuity.

Heavier now. MVictors went back and found the average weight of Michigan's starters since the beginning. After a plateau to start weights have crept upwards at a near-constant rate for around 100 years:

Things have leveled off a little bit since the 1990s.

Etc.: Rainman previewed. Dylan Larkin is good at hockey /weeps about last season. Exit Frank Beamer, real good dude. Bill Daley remembered. Rutgers blog is doing a 68-coach bracket to determine who their next dude should be and John Baxter makes a play-in game. Spike profiled. Blake O'Neill and a small child. More of a medium child, actually.

Nebraska's athletic director is… working on extension? That's one way to approach things. Things are going down at Georgia. Chaos there helps Michigan with Isaac Nauta and Mecole Hardman. OSU/M tickets next year will be expensive, still under demand.