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Well, we're going to do stuff anyway. The number of Michigan prospects who will commit on signing day: zero. This makes our annual signing day chat spectacular kind of pointless, but we'll do it anyway. It'll boot up an hour or two before Brady Hoke's 1 PM press conference and wind down after that. Also scheduled: a podcast, a 2013 reset, and a look at what other teams in the conference did (spoiler: not much). I look forward to answering the same question about whether there will be any surprise recruits two dozen times.

Ace has an ill-timed but unavoidable absence the next couple days and will by around as much as possible but not constantly.

McGary, Robinson, Stauskas

I'm not even mad. Scout updates its 2012 basketball rankings in much the same way Rivals did, dropping McGary to #20, raising GRIII to #27, and inserting Stauskas at #83. I don't mind McGary falling like that since it seemed like he was not quite on the same level as various other centers this fall.

Even better from the "keep McGary around some" POV: there are a whopping eight centers in front of him in the Scout rankings. He might want to cool his heels a little to clear out that logjam. Meanwhile, Robinson is two spots off a fifth star and Stauskas has converted just about everyone into a believer at this point.

The numbers are pretty good. Via UMHoops, Michigan's tourney profile:

• Record: 15-6 (6-3 Big Ten) [Div. 1 Only]
• RPI: 16
• SOS: 14
• Home Record: 11-0
• Away Record: 2-5
• Neutral Record: 2-1
• vs. RPI Top 50: 6-4
• vs. RPI Top 100: 7-5

That Wisconsin win is rounding into form, giving Michigan two victories over elite-ish competition. I'm pleasantly surprised the RPI is that high; I would have guessed they were ten or so spots lower. Michigan's lack of blowouts does not hurt them here, though. Thus that.

Also thus: Michigan is homing in on a 5 seed according to bracketology folks. Lunardi has us a 4, Crashing the Dance a 6, and three other sources say 5. Michigan is tracking slightly better than my expectation at the beginning of the season, which was a 6.

All the outdoor games. The outside GLI thing is steadily moving from rumor to reality. A Windsor Star columnist is now saying that it will be officially official "next week." By the time that tourney's done Michigan will have played 5 outdoor games in four years. The novelty is officially worn off.

Loons. The SEC version of Thought Equity Motion is blowing out the youtube accounts of anyone with the temerity to post clips of decade-old games. Keep your old projects handy, WH.

The correct solution here is the same one that some music companies have started executing when they find their audio on youtube: leave it and take the ad revenue. No one who's putting these games up is doing so for the money. They just want to share the history of their programs with the world at large. And no one's going to pay to see the 1999 Wisconsin game, no matter how much you want to try:

I can no longer share my clips with the Bulldog Nation, but am forced to watch them by my lonesome (and I mean all alone -- strangely, my wife doesn't enjoy reliving the 1976 Florida game with me).  However, if the Bulldogs were a member of the Big Ten, for example, the videos would remain on my blog and up at YouTube for the few viewers that actually wanted to watch them. …

One quick look at the SEC's site and I notice it has one of my favorite old Bulldog classics "on demand" -- the 1980 Georgia-South Carolina game.  Before you could go to YouTube, or my blog, and view clips from this game.  Now, you still can view the clips from the very same game via the SEC Digital Network, but it's gonna cost you: $3.99 to rent, $6.99 to own.

I bet the 1980 UGA-South Carolina game has brought in far less revenue than XOS has spent DMCAing clips of it. Work out a deal where you get the ad revenue and leave the old games alone.

These people are actually doing free work for you. They are not your enemies.

SEC rule update. Via Blutarsky, the new SEC rule on oversigning clarified:

“If a player signs, he counts without regard to whether or not he actually enrolls,” SEC spokesman Charles Bloom said in an e-mail Monday. “ ‘Back counting’ is only permitted for mid-year enrollees who are able to be included as an initial counter for the academic year in which they enroll. ‘Back counting’ is an artificial term for this discussion and not accurate as the question is about the signing limit.”

So a team that signed 22 last year could still sign 28 this year as long as three were in early. A team that signed 25 (or 28) last year is limited to 25. Signees that don't make it in still count.

I wonder if we'll see certain SEC schools hold off on signing prospects until it is clear they're in. Despite all the hoopla a LOI is totally unnecessary. If a school wanted they could just enroll a kid and give him a scholarship. The current SEC rule will go national next year, affecting Big Ten schools not one whit.

BONUS: Here's an unintended side effect: these make JUCOs more expensive since you have a limited number of LOIs and they usually have just half the available eligibility. Taking those guys reduces your margin of error with high school kids. Since that margin is still roomy I don't think it'll have a major impact.

Etc.: ESPN's NHL insider projects($) Trouba #21, Di Giuseppe #30, and Boo Nieves #41 in his draft rankings. That is significantly lower on Trouba than most. UMHoops looks at Michigan halfway through the conference. Tight ends are becoming more important everywhere. Beilein hops on the "Ohio" train, further infuriating OSU fans who use "TSUN" reflexively.

Where the great plains begin. It will not be news to anyone that Ernie Harwell died yesterday. I'm sure most have youtubed a tribute or three in the aftermath; there are plenty. A year-long bout with cancer gives people time to prepare. I think the best, tribute, though, was an improptu one: Dan Dickerson relaying the news on the radio. Clearly heartbroken, Dickerson provides a few seconds of dead air, then gets out a few tear-stained words before managing to interject "Hudson takes a pitch high." Jim Price hops in at this point and the two talk about Harwell as Hudson takes a five-pitch walk. That's baseball.

Here's some of Harwell in his own words:

The Detroit Tigers Weblog has a roundup of other tributes. Also, I wrote something for The Sporting News when news of Harwell's cancer broke.

Chicago, my nemesis, we meet again. After standing outside Hugging Harold Reynold's room with a boombox for months they've finally relented and allowed me to be on one of the panels at Blogs With Balls 3.0. The title of our panel is "Democratizing Sports Media: How Blogging Players, Fans & Leagues Are Changing the Game," and like a good engineer I'll be frantically attempting to make that less vague over email in the next month. Joining me will be Henry Abbott of True Hoop fame, Kevin Kaduk of Yahoo's Big League Stew, Valli Hilaire of The Fast and The Fabulous, which is not New York's gay and lesbian bike club even if Google thinks it is but rather a NASCAR blog, and Robert Littal of Black Sports Online.

Some cursory googling reveals that Littal is an Ohio State grad and Kaduk went to Wisconsin and roots for Notre Dame, so if things get boring I we'll just have a triple threat match for bragging rights. If you want to witness rough country justice firsthand, you can get tickets. They're 50 bucks off until May 15th. 

Zoltan, one last time. I read a lot of other college football blogs, so I state this with authority: we are living through a golden age in Michigan-football-related bizarre Youtube projects. There is not a school on the planet that can compete with Mike Cox getting it YGM style, Coner 2000 dropping mad rhymes (THAT'S FEBREZE PEOPLE) or killing some rich guy, Jack Kennedy auditioning for American Idol, O'Neill Depriest Swanson III pumping Vitamin Water, and Zoltan Mesko burning Meijer so hard:

Yea, truly we are the leaders and best.

JT Floyd would like to make cliches. Sometimes I feel deeply for beatwriters. This is one of those times:

J.T. Floyd’s motto as cornerback is simple.

“Make plays,” Floyd said last month after the Michigan football team's spring game. “That’s all you got to do to be successful out here.”

It's May. Football isn't until August. And you've got to publish something, so you grab an old quote in which a football player says "making plays" is the key to success. That article does have a couple encouraging quotes from teammates and coaches on Floyd, but… man. It's rough out there in May.

Other articles in this genre: Cam Gordon is a safety, Roy Roundtree is a receiver, and Obi Ezeh… actually, the Ezeh one has an admission from the man himself that last year was sub-optimal:

“It wasn’t my best year, obviously,” Ezeh said after the Wolverines’ April 17 spring game. “That’s in the past and try to move on and build a better future. I got to prove to people that last year was kind of a fluke and this is the (real) Obi.”

So there's that. Good luck in June, everyone.

Fightin' with facts. I don't believe I've mentioned the strange entity that is College Hockey, Inc. in this space, so here goes: USA Hockey finally got the same sort of giant developmental payment that the NHL has been forking over to the CHL for years. They spend some on the NTDP, some on the USHL, and some forming what can only be described as a propaganda organization called College Hockey, Inc. Its head is Paul Kelly and he's spent the year wandering around the country, advocating college hockey and pointing out that unless you're Patrick Kane the CHL is a rube's game. Kelly:

Our most important mission is to be an education and information resource to elite young players and their families on the many benefits of playing college hockey and why, if they're good enough and faced with the option to play for one of the junior teams in Canada or an NCAA Division I program, the option to play NCAA hockey is in most instances, the smarter and better course of action.

I love that there is an organization that causes CHL teams to complain about being "unfairly targeted" for pointing out relative graduation rates. Targeted, yes. Unfair… not so much.

Kelly also talks about future expansion of the USHL to a whopping 24 teams—Muskegon's picking one up this fall—and possible new markets for the college game. The great white sasquatch of the Big Ten is broached:

FTR:  Penn State has been kicking that arena idea around for awhile now, and they also have a very good club program.  Could they be next?

Kelly:  They have been talking about the arena project and if you could ever get one other school from the Big Ten, you could create a Big Ten Hockey Conference.  We'd have to shuffle the deck a bit, and reconfigure the WCHA and CCHA a bit.

I don't know how realistic any of these candidates are but if Penn State adds hockey I can't imagine it won't be at least revenue-neutral, especially if the Big Ten Network gets involved. Unfortunately, Title IX means a revenue-neutral men's sport can't be added without a women's sport that will be a money pit, and the economy and etc.

Kelly also suggests an Alaska-like exemption to keep Huntsville viable, something that I support.

Politics exception. There is one exception I will make to the otherwise iron-clad no politics law: copyright law is broken and stupid. Latest example is Google allowing the Downfall parodies to get yanked off Youtube when they could not be clearer instances of fair use. The precedent is worrying to me since I regularly post small snippets of a larger product I do not own for transformative purposes—ie, I employ fair use extensively. Here Google has failed to not be evil.

Etc.: I showed up on a podcast at Bucknuts. Warning: it looks like you have to register (but not subscribe) to get access to it. Also they make me state my opinion of Tressel, which I regret to inform you is respectful. Thus you are warned doubly. The hockey media's treatment of Alexander Ovechkin in the aftermath of the Caps' unceremonious first-round ouster is laughably inaccurate and totally predictable.