colorado

[Marc-Gregor Campredon]

Sponsor note.

WolverineWeekend_MGoBlog

Hey folks, Wolverine Weekend is back at Grand Traverse Resort and Spa from June 9 – 11. The weekend includes:

  • Meet-and-greets with Donovan Edwards, Will Johnson, Colston Loveland and Junior Colson,
  • Dinner featuring John U. Bacon, Devin Gardner, Sam Webb and football players,
  • Golf Outing on The Wolverine, and
  • a Woodson Whiskey Tasting Event.

Great opportunity to get your Michigan on and support some NIL initiatives.

Harbaugh gonna Harbaugh. Pat Forde profiles Harbaugh, and his world champion dad status never wavers:

If Harbaugh hadn’t gone to Michigan and become a famous football player and coach, what skilled trade would he have undertaken?

“A lawnsman!” Harbaugh enthusiastically responds. “That’s what I do. Mowing the lawn is one of the great feelings I have in life.”

I don’t think this will work and I don’t think it should. Deion Sanders has detonated the Colorado roster:

Colorado recently updated its 2023 football roster. All of the names of players who are departing via the portal have been deleted. The revised roster lists 76 players: 12 returning scholarship players, 21 incoming transfers, 17 new freshmen and 26 walk-ons. Not listed are 17 more transfers who have verbally committed. …

A total of 53 scholarship players have left the program since Sanders was hired in December.

A large number of them were told to hit the bricks after spring practice, which is really doubling down on the idea that you can import a roster from whole cloth. Folks are skeptical:

“It is just absolutely unreasonable to think you can sign 25 players out of the spring transfer portal and make your team better,” the Big 12 DPP said.

There’s a reason the NFL sees far less in-season trade activity than any other major sport. In hockey, soccer, baseball, and basketball you can kind of just go play even if there’s some transition costs moving from system to system. In football one busted assignment is a touchdown. And we’ve seen transfer-heavy teams fail to live up to expectations. MSU, which recently aspired to become Portal U, seems to be cratering. Adding a few guys here and there to plug holes is reasonable. Getting a whole football team on closeout from TJ Maxx? Maybe not so much.

[After THE JUMP: how this makes me feel]

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[Upchurch]

Kyle [Kalis] last night was saying people shouldn’t panic about the run game after Saturday.

“No! You know, I was truly flattered, to tell you the truth. When you load the box like that and you send that many pressures it means you’ve done something. You’re doing something that’s making people take notice. Most defensive coordinators, hell or high water, they will not let you beat them running the ball. It’s a demoralizing feeling to be beat up front in the run game, so most people say, ‘If you’re going to beat us, beat us in the pass game.’

“Like I told my backs, I said, ‘Look, don’t look at the numbers on the board. Look at what they did to take this away, and take that in pride and [to] heart. The offensive line is blocking like madmen up front for us and we’re taking holes and making them into big gains. Take that to heart. Feel good about that.’ Hey, when a team comes in saying ‘we want to stop the run,’ that means you’re doing something. So the run game, not worried about it.”

You spread the carries around; no one had more than 10. Was that just to see if anyone had a different take on it and could do something, or was that--

“No, that was just something Coach Harbaugh came up with and just wanted to keep the guys rolling, keep them fresh. No more than that.”

Were there things that you saw that they did that maybe we couldn’t notice in terms of what they did? I guess De’Veon breaking the tackles was significant, but--

“Each guy kind of—Chris [Evans] is quick. He gets in there, made a couple of moves. Been able to use his ability in terms of quickness to make some guys miss [and] create some separation. Ty [Isaac] is a guy that can lean on some people and push the pile. But anything or one thing in particular that separated them? Not really. It was just a game where we just needed to get the tough yards. There was going to be some creases in there where if it was three it was going to be a tough three. The old three yards and a cloud of dust, that’s basically what it was. Or a cloud of rubber, rather, as a matter of fact. That’s what it was.”

What do you see from the rest of the room when you put the tape on and De’Veon, he’s breaking seven tackles and getting a first down on that one run. Do you tell the guys ‘This is it, right here’?

“In terms of what?”

[Hit THE JUMP to resolve this cliffhanger, as well as more on the Four Horsemen or Four-Headed Monster or whatever you prefer calling Michigan’s stable of RBs]

The rumored Utah series is now official:

180px-Utah_Utes_logo.svg[1]Utah will host Michigan in Rice-Eccles Stadium in the 2015 season opener as a part of a home-and-home series that begins with a 2014 game in Ann Arbor. Michigan will make its first Salt Lake City appearance on Sept. 3, 2015 in a rare weekday game for the Wolverines, who have never played on a Thursday. The first game of the series is scheduled for Sept. 20, 2014 in Michigan Stadium.

Michigan becomes just the second Big Ten team ever to play in Salt Lake City. The Utes knocked off Indiana 40-13 in Rice-Eccles Stadium in 2002.

"A home-and-home series with Michigan is the kind of opportunity that comes with membership in the Pac-12 Conference," said Utah Director of Athletics Dr. Chris Hill. "I greatly appreciate Coach Whittingham's willingness to add college football's winningest program to his already difficult 2014 schedule, which will also feature five Pac-12 road games."

You'll note that the Wow Factor has been factor'd by playing in the Thursday night slot usually occupied by Mississippi State's latest flailing interception machine.

But wait, there's more! Michigan has released the entire 2015 nonconference schedule, which is as follows…

2015

Sept. 3 at Utah

Sept. 12 Notre Dame

Sept. 19 Oregon State

Sept. 26 UNLV

…and bits of the 2016 schedule, featuring ND, a home game against Colorado on September 17th and two TBAs likely to be punching bags. The Pac-12 agreement is tentatively scheduled to start the year after, so Michigan's eliminated ND-and-three-dwarves nonconference scheduling for the foreseeable future. That's a positive even if none of the teams incoming has much sex appeal.

But wait, there's more!

In addition, Michigan and Notre Dame will take a two-year hiatus in their long-standing rivalry during the 2018 and 2019 seasons. Both schools intend to resume the rivalry in the years following.

That may be "less," actually. We'll see if Michigan fills that slot with a quality opponent when the time comes.

 

Questions

Are those Oregon State and Colorado games one-offs? Or are they home and homes with return dates set for the distant future? (If one-offs: coup. If not, okay.)

If so can we expect the Oregon State and Colorado games to slot into that 2018 and 2019 ND hiatus along with the Pac-12 agreement? (If so: meh.)

When was the last time Michigan played three BCS-ish teams in a nonconference schedule, as they will in 2015? (A: 1997, when they played Baylor, Colorado, and ND. They also did so in 1996 (Colorado, BC, UCLA) and 1994 (BC, ND, Colorado).)

What is our deal with playing Utah? (Seriously.)