2014 minnesota

still fast [Patrick Barron]

Sponsor note. Trivia time! Leaderboard is here. Congrats to AdamW and BenT for leading the way with 22 each. Round 3 is here. Complete by 5 PM Friday to make the leaderboard.

Jake Butt and Blake Corum_Digital Event_option1

If you've participated in rounds one or two you're invited to an Autograph event with Jake Butt and Blake Corum on Sunday, September 10 at 12pm ET. This event is a live documentary experience going into the story of Blake’s childhood, his journey to Ann Arbor, his experience as a Michigan Wolverine, and his expectations for the 2023 season. There will also be a Q&A portion for VIP Pass holders. Details of the three levels:

  • Stadium Pass: Join the event for a private hangout with Blake and Jake.
  • Field Pass: Stadium Pass + you will be invited to stay on after the show with 20 fans for a special post experience with Blake.
  • Locker Room Pass: Field Pass + you will get the opportunity to interact with Blake and Jake and ask a question during the hangout.

It's an opportunity to provide some NIL and ask Blake Corum whatever you need to get off your chest. Don't be weird. If you are weird we will disavow you.

For everyone else, get in the game by playing the trivia. This is how we point the money cannon.

"Stanford? Never heard of it." Any questions about whether Michigan's transfer process is insane or not have been definitively answered. Myles Hinton:

“Right now I’m in General Studies because the credits kind of messed up. I was Human Biology at Stanford. And then, for some reason, they didn’t take a lot of the credits,” Hinton said on Monday. “All my bio credits just dropped. I don't know. It's crazy.”

A reporter replied with the question everyone in the room was thinking: Michigan really didn’t accept credits from Stanford?

“I was like, ‘What in the world?’ I took an intro writing class last semester, and I was like, ‘What’s going on? What’s going on? I took this class freshman year.’ It was crazy,” Hinton explained.

Alejandro Zuniga speculates about why that may be the case, bolding this section of the admissions rules:

Additionally, departmental credit cannot be used to satisfy distribution requirements or major/minor requirements without the permission of an academic or major advisor within the school/college.

This means if you transfer into Michigan all of your non-major classes are garbage and have to be retaken, resulting in a senior transferring in from Stanford re-taking an intro to writing class. So the score here:

  • If you have a degree from anywhere, even Michigan State, you can pop on over into a grad program no problem.
  • If you're a first-year transfer you can make it work because you haven't taken enough college credits to start capping out. So Michigan can bring in Ernest Hausmann without much difficulty.
  • Second and especially third-year players are likely to get Terrance Shannon'd if they can't slog through the rest of their degree over the summer.

This goes beyond sports at this point and is another symptom of a sclerotic bureaucracy at Michigan that seems unassailable at this point. AAPS and Michigan are Spidermans Pointing at this point.

[After THE JUMP: …but fast!]

keeping wildlife, um... an amphibious rodent, for... um, ya know domestic... within the city... that ain't legal either [Bryan Fuller]

Previously in this series covering the 2010s: Favorite BlocksQB-RB-WRTE-FB-OLDefensive LineLinebackerSecondary, Worst Calls.

We were in the midst of assembling our list of best and worst plays from the last decade of Michigan football when someone suggested that a particular incident wasn't really bad or good, but was spectacularly dumb. Someone suggested a list of smartest and dumbest plays of the decade.

It will not shock the reader that assembling the list of the most stupefying things was far easier than best, worst, or smartest. Our top ten has 11 plays in it because we remembered something halfway through. It was that kind of decade. A stupid, stupid, stupid decade.

11. Any Play Against A Service Academy, Let's Pick This One

2019 ARMY

This was an RPS -2 play that set up a touchdown for Army but it's the vibe, man. The vibe.

Michigan did this three times! They signed up to play a bunch of maniacal option fanatics three times over the past decade so they could do a bunch of military frippery pre-game. I hope those dudes parachuting into the stadium was worth three hours of bowel-clenching terror, because that's what every one of these games was.

Last year's Army game noses ahead of the two Air Force outings because it was significantly more terrifying, a game that went to overtime even with the aid of Don Brown's "MOVE" false start. Also this was the year after Army took Oklahoma—Kyler Murray Oklahoma!—to overtime, and happened mere weeks before Michigan cancelled a home and home series against UCLA.

The Black Knights had embraced the tao of option fully by going for it on any plausible fourth down. This happened four times in regulation, each of them another twist of the knife. Michigan spent the game running basic inside zone and never running the split zone play their QB ground game was built on. Michigan scored 14 points in regulation; a few weeks later Tulane would put up 42 on Army.

Every single second this was happening every Michigan fan was thinking "why are we doing this again?"

-Brian

[After THE JUMP: a journey into the heart of dorfness]

81brQCbEIUL[1]Hello. This is an excerpt from "ENDZONE: The Rise, Fall, And Return of Michigan Football" that John Bacon allowed us to run if I would once more refer to the book by its actual name instead of "Brandon's Lasting Lessons." I have now discharged that obligation.

We pick up the story the day after the Minnesota game. Shane Morris has been hit on the head, Devin Gardner lost his helmet and Morris re-entered, and the world waits for an explanation of what's going on…

---------------------------------------------

At 11 a.m. Sunday, after every football game, the medical staff completes its routine postgame interactions with the coaching staff, including Brady Hoke, to apprise them of the status of all the players—something I’ve witnessed dozens of times. In addition, head trainer Paul Schmidt talked with Hoke once on Saturday, three times on Sunday, and once on Monday, giving him the complete information Dr. Kutcher and the staff had gathered on Shane Morris’s condition at each stage.

In short, there was no lack of communication between the medical staff and the coaching staff—nor within the medical staff itself, a group I’ve seen exhibit mutual respect, personally and professionally.

The Big Ten also called Michigan Sunday morning to let the coaching staff know the referee who had told Hoke, after Devin Gardner’s helmet had popped off, that calling a time-out would not allow him to put Gardner back on the field was, in fact, incorrect, and Hoke was right. It’s not that often the Big Ten office admits it was wrong, but they told the staff, not the media, so no one outside Schembechler Hall knew about it.

Finally sensing that a national story was rising around them, the department sent out a press release from Brady Hoke Sunday evening. It said, in part, “. . . Shane Morris was removed from yesterday’s game against Minnesota after further aggravating an injury to his leg that he sustained earlier in the contest . . . The University of Michigan has a distinguished group of Certified Athletic Trainers and team physicians who are responsible for determining whether or not a player is physically able to play. Our coaches have no influence or authority to make determinations if or when an injured player returns to competition . . .”

The release addressed some important points—that Morris had been pulled for his ankle, not the hit to his helmet, and that the coaches have no authority over the medical staff—but failed to answer the most pressing question: Did Morris have a concussion or not? If he did, why did he go back in the game?

Needless to say, instead of bringing closure to the story, this half-baked attempt would only raise more questions.

Marathon Monday

To withstand these slings and arrows, Brandon needed the Michigan family to band together like never before: the students, the alumni, the fans, faculty and lettermen, not to mention his own staff. But when he looked up, he found the family had already scattered. They had resigned, they’d been fired, they’d been angered, they’d been estranged. Some had simply become fed up with the whole thing, and walked away from something they thought they would love their whole lives.

Brandon would be on his own.

When the athletic director, his leadership team, his coaches, and the players woke up Monday morning, they found a pile of bad news on their doorstep. The football team was off to a disastrous 2–3 start. The department was still getting lambasted for the Cokes-for-tickets “retail activation,” and the stadium was showing large bands of empty seats—and that was all topped by the op-ed headline in the Michigan Daily: “Brady Hoke Must Be Fired.”

[After THE JUMP: nothing good happens in a 17 hour meeting]