2011 ncaa tournament

Hello. What with hockey and dissertation and everything it was a tired, panicked last few days but go to bed at a reasonable hour and stay there for a good while and hey the sun's shining and there's a baseball game tonight. I've also got all these tabs; they're increasingly elderly but oh well.

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Jake Fromm/Daily

Elsewhere in getting hammered in the temple. A roundup of post-championship reacts on the Michigan blogosphere. HSR:

The hardest part about the National Championship game last night was that there's no new lesson to glean from it. When you take penalties, you're going to have a hard time winning. When you can't get the puck into the opponent's zone, you're going to have a hard time winning. When you can't get a change in overtime, it's going to be almost impossible to win.

TWB:

The Sun rose on Sunday in Ann Arbor. It was a beautiful, 80-degree day, the first such day after another long Midwestern winter. Normally I’d be pleased, but yesterday a picturesque spring day felt like a cruel joke.

Red himself:

"I think right now it's pretty tough to reflect on the season when you just lost a national championship game in overtime. If you're a competitor, you're going to be devastated," he said.

"You know the seniors aren't going to get another chance, and they've been the nuts and bolts of this team. Our young guys, they might think they'll get the chance every year, but it doesn't work that way."

So… yeah… if you were in the comments yesterday complaining that I was too down you don't follow the hockey team closely enough. This could be your reaction every spring, too! Season tickets! Get them!

Also in enragement. This is uncharacteristic of Berenson:

“Were they good penalties?” Berenson asked. “I can’t tell you what I really think. I mean, you can’t talk about refereeing and penalties, but when one team gets nine (power plays) and the other four, it doesn’t add up.”

He wasn’t done.

“We’re not out there to take penalties,” he said. “So every time a player falls down, it shouldn’t be a penalty, not in NCAA championship hockey.”

FWIW, it was only the third-period calls that I thought were terrible. The other stuff was either unfortunate, undisciplined, or plain necessary. Michigan took like three straight in the second and didn't call the ref a troglodyte who should be shot into the sun, so… yeah.

That last "boarding" call was some kind of awful, though.

The enlightenment comes. Notre Dame WR Michael Floyd won't be suspended for the season, or placed in stocks in the middle of campus, or forced to wear a hairshirt for picking up a DUI. While that's not so good for Michigan's laser night game throwback spectacular it's closer to sane. Rakes of Mallow somewhat defensively posted a list of recent DUI offenses and their consequences and the consensus is one game unless you play for OSU. [Ed-M: My list is better.] Doctor Saturday:

If anything, Res Life's scorched-earth verdicts against former basketball players Will Yeatman and Joseph Fauria and basketball player Kyle McAlarney — all of whom were booted from school for an entire semester for arguably lesser charges than the trio of alcohol-related offenses on Floyd's record — were evidence of a policy far out of step with the mainstream. As McAlarney wrote the Tribune, the office showed "no compassion, no consideration for me, no feelings whatsoever." Yeatman and his parents also publicly objected to his suspension before his transfer to Maryland.

I'm with him even if I was pulling for a two-game suspension.

Feature thing. ESPN's spring feature on Michigan:

It's so bizarre seeing Urban Meyer try to be part of the media. I expect him to kick himself out of this interview. Also there's actually a lot of interesting* technique stuff in there if you ever wanted to find out what a DL coach does.

*[for a given definition of interesting, which is mine but probably not yards.]

Too cool to live. Free Darko is no more. Amongst the huge list of tributes posted I think Will Leitch is the one who gets it rightest:

Free Darko made me see athletes not as heroes, not as villains, not as humans, but as mythic, god-like creatures, comic and tragic. I don't mean God in a big man in the clouds with a beard sense; I mean in a "release the kraken!" sense.

They were perfectly suited for the NBA. I talked to Shoals a bit when we were both writing for The Sporting Blog; he was disappointed in his traffic numbers and disappointed in the weirdly disjoined TSB and seemed like a guy who was losing faith, getting ready to move on. TSB duly imploded and now FD is scattering to fancy magazine pages of the world.

Random insane NCAA decision of the week. Colleges can no longer subscribe to Rivals and Scout because they provide recruiting information not freely available to the public. The Bylaw Blog is kinda sorta incensed by the unintended consequences of what started as an attempt to reign in AAU coaches in men's basketball:

But it’s the reason Rivals is not a permissible service that shows the deeper underlying problem with the current recruiting regulations. It is not permissible to subscribe to a recruiting or scouting service that provides videos of prospects in non-scholastic competition, unless the videos are free and available to the general public.

The NCAA and its members have fought the growth of non-scholastic youth sports vigorously. Subscribing to video of non-scholastic contests is prohibited. In basketball, going to watch AAU events is tightly restricted. In football, coaches are prohibited from going to any non-scholastic event.

This has resulted in two things: the steady, continued growth of AAU basketball, 7-on-7 football, and all other club sports, and diminished NCAA influence in this area. By removing college coaches from many AAU gyms and football camps, it has become the lawless wild west that the restrictions sought to avoid.

According to Infante, the NCAA should "let go" of high school sports and reorganize around the principle that non-scholastic sports are primary. That sounds radical, but Infante makes a persuasive point: you have no control over something you have completely banned and lots of control over something you are working with. If two rival AAU tourneys are competing for players, the one with college coaches in the house is going to win hands-down.

Meanwhile, Rivals and company should expect a surge in subscriptions from coaches' wives.

Side note: Banning Rivals based on video of "non-scholastic competition" is a weird situation when a lot of newspapers are covering recruiting in more detail these days. The occasional camp highlight video hardly registers on why people subscribe to Rivals—if anyone actually watches video it's of, you know, football—and it would be interesting to see if one of the sites tests the NCAA by cutting camp stuff. Most of it's "Christian Cullen" running a shuttle.

Foot… ball? Yes, they still play it. No, there is no running back. A Daily article on the situation recycles some of Borges' quotes from his recent press availability…

“To say we have a frontline back, a guy we’re saying, ‘This guy’s the guy’ — we’ve had flashes of excellence from all of them and that’s not a decision we have to make today,” Borges said. “But I like those kids.”

…and alarmingly references Vincent Smith and Michael Cox without so much as mentioning Dramatic Cupcake Hopkins. Practice chatter has been silent on him even as guys like Cox, who has never seen the field for a reason, get unearthed and evaluated. Meaningfulosity? About as much as the rest of spring practice, but if you forgot what happens this time of year because you were paying attention to basketball and hockey, we get very very bored and therefore try to parse anything we can out of the faint whisper of the ghost of a tiny fraction of tea leaf that wasn't very large to start with.

Etc.: Vada Murray memorial is set for 11 AM Thursday at Cliff Keen. Don't expect Jim Nantz to ever get bumped out of his Final Four spot. Hope you enjoyed your four years at Michigan, seniors!

A brief set of links before the moment of truth.

locker-room

via

Burlon will not play; line chart is the same as it's been all tournament.

Ten Things from Yost Built:

In reading up about Duluth, it sounds like they're scary offensively, but are largely a one-line team. Michigan will have last change in this game, which is a good sign as we can get Rust's line out there against the Connollys. The defensemen don't activate often, but Faulk is as good as it gets at both ends of the ice. He's got a killer shot on the power play, and that opens things up for the Connollys and Fontaine down low.

I forgot to put that some guy named Tim would look up "sieve" in whatever language was needed to communicate with a goalie who needed to be informed that he was one.

Hunwick hits the NYT:

“A year ago, I would have told you there was no chance this would be happening,” Berenson said. “And yet he nearly got us to the Frozen Four last year when he had to come in in the late season as an emergency. He had never started a Division I game.”

“And even this year, when he was competing for the starting job and Hogan was healthy, it looked like Hogan was going to take over. Then Hogan got hurt again, Hunwick came in, got a shot, and he’s played every game since. And here we are.”

His dad was puzzled by his decision:

"That's all he's ever done, is play goalie," his dad said. "I don't think he's probably ever played 12 games out. … I can't imagine why you'd want somebody to shoot the puck at you."

Red on Glendening, the other consistent member of the Annihilation Co:

“It seems like a lot of the younger generation, they feel entitled, and not as willing to work,” Berenson said to media before practice Friday. “But I tell you what, the kid sitting at the end of the table here, Luke Glendening, he came to Michigan like (senior goaltender) Shawn Hunwick — with no expectations. I didn’t know if he would ever play a game, and when I saw him on the ice, I realized that this kid has something special.“

Hagelin took the last one hard last night:

His postgame obligations complete, Carl Hagelin limped his way back down the hallway underneath the Xcel Energy Center on Thursday night and slowly made his way to the Michigan dressing room.

A large bag of ice was taped around his left ankle and foot, altering his gait.

Others: Spath on Red's legacy. Nesbitt drafted by AnnArbor.com to write on the final. Burns on seniors/team stuff that seems like the truth instead of a cliché this time around.

Let's go blue.

Comment Count

74

YostIceArena

In my first or second season at Yost we sat maybe a section over from a guy who really wanted to be funny but mostly yelled things like "I want a piece of you, Ham." You see, it's funny because his last name is "Ham," and ham is also a lunchmeat so you could take a piece of him because he would be salty and delicious. And then you would put him in your mouth. Do you like where this is going? Check Y or N.

A few years later there was this lady in the endzone with a cowbell. She rang it with a ruthless military efficiency at the appropriate times. She was perhaps the best person with cowbell I have experienced, but she played with such intensity she came off as slightly insane. Someone once told me she had failed when she tried out for the hockey band. Ah: she had spent her time at Chateau d'If pounding out the insistent rhythm of "Go Blue" on the dungeon wall.

Maybe around the same time, maybe earlier, there was a generation of supremely vile screamers who sat in the heart of the student section and launched largely incomprehensible rants at whoever was an opportune target. I know they were supremely vile because at that point the visiting parents were seated right behind the visitor's bench—right in front of the vile generation—and screaming matches between them were a common occurrence. Meatheaded fathers trundling up the aisle in search of someone to fight weren't common occurrences, but they weren't exactly uncommon. I remember one particular UNO parent climbing the stairs with death in his eyes.

A few years after that they'd moved the parents and a couple guys who wore costumes to the game closest to Halloween decided they'd just start wearing them all the time, so you'd look over in the student section and see a penguin or Frankenberry or guys dressed up like knights for no apparent reason. This year there's a guy in a dog costume who screams so loud I can hear him across the ice.

yost-ez

There is a man who wears a "666" jersey that says "heckler from hell" on the back. He has always been there.

Hockey crowds invented "can't read, can't write" and, when Bobby Williams was running things into the ground and virtually everyone on Michigan State's team had been arrested or rumored to be having serious life problems with drugs, "snort green, smoke white." When Boston U and future NHLer Brandon Yip came to town someone started going "yip yip yip yip" like the aliens on Sesame Street and soon everyone was doing it and that's probably where the bizarre penalty kill hooting comes from. We used to chant "goalie, sieve" fairly generically until some guy came up with the version that goes from slow to fast to slow again, and now everyone does that.

At some point in the middle of the last decade there was a weird old man who started showing up in the student section. Whenever there was the vaguest impression of a penalty on the other team he would exclaim "HEY!" When the penalty impression was fairly strong he would continue saying "HEY!" for a solid minute. He did this flatly, without affect, just "HEY" repeated over and over with the same intonation. After a few games of this it was a little annoying but when someone started doing it with him to mock him everyone started doing it and it was just this mass of people screaming "HEY" like they are endeavoring to be a hockey metronome. Once it lasted for five solid minutes after a particularly egregious no call.

The student section's favorite name ever was "Cockburn," even though it was pronounced "coburn." This did not matter to them in the slightest.

There was also a comically long edition of If You Can't Get Into College Go To Blank directed at… oh, I don't know… Western or LSSU or Northern or something. Before each verse Superfan's sidekick would call out the next school you should apply to before Western or Lake State or wherever—"Schoolcraft!"

yost

The band director used to dance. When Michigan was winning people would start screaming "dance" at him. There was specific dancing song, and often it was preceded by false starts that would draw boos and chants of "overrated." When the students were baying at their peak the director would finally relent and the dancing music would play and the director would dance and everyone would point at him and chant "Disco Nix," or other appropriate naming device that follows "Disco." Afterwards the noun-sieve cheer was "dancer, sieve."

At some point in the awkward transition period between Jack Johnson's dad dances to everyone dances there were three or four competing dancers, many of whom were just… wow. One of them was the spiritual descendent of Ham Guy and would not be dissuaded from dancing no matter how much you told him he should not do so. He probably had Asperger's even if that doesn't exist anymore.

There is one guy in my fogey section who is awesome. He is a big dude who brings the paper and when he is incensed he does not care he is around very many people who do not care quite as much as he does, he stands and bellows something or other I can't hear because I'm behind him. A few years ago when I was on the other side of the ice there was a guy who got so mad he'd leap up in his seat and lean over the boards so he could scream at the refs good and loud. I don't think he ever got booted out because he looked like an accountant.

Every time I go to the Joe I see one of the ushers from the student section there in civilian clothes, looking so happy he can face the ice the whole time and not kick anyone out for saying something naughty.

Some kid got his mom to make a giant Swedish flag so whenever Carl Hagelin scores it can cover an entire section, and everyone signed it and gave it to him on Senior Night and everyone hopes it's not an NCAA violation so he can keep it. There was a group of guys with vuvuzelas last year who were not annoying.

I was there the first time a kid on the zamboni took his shoe off, and the first time the kid on the zamboni who'd taken his shoe off threw it into the student section. The kid looked delighted he'd done this.