Hoke's Glorious Kingdom, Which is His / Angela Cesere|AnnArbor.com

Dear Diary,

April in the D is overrated, but I can't complain about May in Michigan. As I write this I'm sunburned from the year's first sail, half-comatose from the first grilled burger, and spamming F5 on the MGoBlog home page so I don't miss another victorious recruiting battle. This being Michigan of course the week came with one rain storm, one frost, and two fuuuuuuuuuuu's, but today the sun is shining, the uber alleles are replicating, the warring has ended, and general sentiment feels our winter of discontent can be made glorious by this son of Hoke.

Last week's Diary of the Week made the state of Michigan football analogous to morning; maybe spring's more like it.

The week has also seen a few hands take their turns at analyzing recruiting rankings. Before they came out I was goofing with my own attempt at such but…yeah, lots of work, that. What I do have however is a comprehensive Big Ten recruiting database started. First comparable,

Percentage of recruits from in-state from 2002-2011:

Some of these are thrown off by the few schools that sign a substantial amount of JUCOs (Minnesota, Purdue, MSU) but if you pull them it doesn't change much of anything above.

Percent of players from source:

Are you surprised? The Ohio State homegrown number really stands out. What struck me was that the numbers are so low across the conference. This makes sense if you think about the relative populations of these states, kind of. Less populous Iowa had to leave the corn fields, while Ohio State can run a McKinley-style front porch recruiting campaign. What it doesn't gel with are the general perceptions of teams that "win with homegrown talent." Ohio State can say that but Wisconsin – even after dominating on the home front – still must travel abroad for most of its players.

Like this but with free cars

As for Michigan State, their hypothesis is that John L. Smith went out of state while Dantonio "got it." Let's test that:

• JLS (2003-'06): 23.36% recruits from Michigan (M: 27.16% in that time)
• Dantonio (2007-'11): 44.55% recruits from Michigan (M 21.24% in that time)

Seems to be right. The classes:

* Morris Watts was interim H.C. for the last three games of '02 after Bobby Williams was fired. JLS arrived right after the bowls. The '03 class was mostly Bobby's.

** The Michigan recruiting was mostly done by Carr; Rodriguez added five players, all from out-of-state.

There's nothing substantially different about Michigan from late-Carr to RR, except the huge in-state recruiting year in '02. If there was a "he cares" meme going up it was based on disparity. Dantonio's 2011 class looks like it went "national" but really he moved even more heavily into Ohio. So let's see that:

Percent of Recruits from Any Big Ten State:

And Michigan's regional recruiting by year (with how M finished the previous season):

Recruiting is a perception game, not just numbers, but you can clearly see how perception has affected Michigan's out-of-state recruiting. However the top chart seems to equate winning periods with success and vice versa. Look at Purdue in the Orton/Kirsch era as opposed to after. See Minnesota under Mason as opposed to KILL FIGHT WIN! See the Dantonio Effect at MSU. But I don't think you can take this and declare "Big Ten recruiting wins championships." Take Indiana: they got over 40% from elsewhere when they sucked in the early 2000s, and just 20% from elsewhere today.

What you see is two years of DiNardo riding post-Randel El fame until his teams were so bad the XFL wouldn't take him back had they still existed. Indiana recruits locally because few people outside of the footprint would consider going to Indiana when they can sign with a Mid-Major and win some football games once in awhile. Ohio's in-region numbers are driven by their ridiculous in-state rate. Penn State's is low because they exist outside the Midwest and use Maryland, Jersey, and the D.C. area like we use Ohio. All this chart really shows, without knowing the context for each team, is possible evidence of strategy:

• Looks like they took it outside: Zook, Brewster, JLS, Rodriguez?
• Looks like they focused inside: Dantonio, Tressel

The evidence isn't strong enough to claim either as fact. So one last chart:

Percent of Big Ten-Bound In-State Recruits Who Chose School X: (numbers are for that school's own state):

Here strategies become slightly apparent. Ferentz may fill his roster with non-Iowans but only after he makes sure virtually every Iowan who can play for a Big Ten team will play for his. Wisconsin and Minnesota also stand out for keeping talent home. Most of the Minnesotans who weren't Gophers were Badgers. Of the 28% of Big Ten cheeseheads who don't end up at Wisconsin, 9% went to rival and neighbor Minnesota, 6% went to Indiana, which probably means they didn't have an offer, and 5% went to Northwestern, which is close to Wis. population centers and a better school and also probably a place for kids Wisconsin didn't want.

Indiana takes what it can. Penn State accesses the Atlantic States but can't protect its West from hemorrhaging talent all around the conference. Michigan State since '06 is heavy into the 3-stars Michigan didn't want (and the 4- and 5-stars Michigan did want). Ohio State and Illinois are homebodies because they are state schools for very populous states. Purdue and Northwestern draw from all over, though the Boilermakers have seemingly shifted away from bothering with their home state in favor of being players in Chicagoland and all around the conference.

Then there's Michigan. Big school in a shared state, we get only a quarter of the in-state talent. It's apparent from this why it's so important to compete in Ohio and around the country: the presence of a sibling makes the Iowa/Wisconsin home-first strategy impractical. I leave the rest of the conclusions to you; on to the diaries.

Geography

Whatever your boss wants you to be doing right now, it can wait while you check out this Diary of the Week-winning set of recruiting maps, updated by Rescue_Dawn. This time he broke up the maps into commits, (red), Offense offers (maize) and Defense offers (blue). The bigger the circle, the higher profile the recruit according to the services. It went up before Standifer got his offer but otherwise it's up to date.

But wait, there's more: Thanks to Deep Under Cover you can now contribute to a Google version of this, a sort of Google Wiki Mappy Thing (Internet, it's time for new words; we used up your words):

It is an empty slate, so get cracking.

Statistics

Bumped from the boards to the diaries, and then from there to the front page this week was Gopherine's piece on Recruiting Bias and Accuracy, who got the Black Heart Gold Pants guy to pony up the data from the recruiting to NFL study* to check out whether under-scouted players outperformed their recruiting rankings.

Of course, the chart doesn't disprove my mildly paranoid belief that Midwesterners are consistently being slighted by the jerks on the coasts, so let's call this a win.

Note that the Midwestern 5 star recruits underperform the mean. This has no impact on the claim (5 star recruits can't be underrated), but it's interesting nonetheless. Really small samples for 5 stars is all the explanation I need.

Economics

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: Dammit. by Zone Left.

Classical Philosophy

I'm more an old comedy man myself, but even Philosopher Kings are down for puffin' up the pillows, breaking out the good Grechetto, and getting into a good ol' fashioned seminar on Why do we watch football? Plato, according to WatersDemos:

Football is our way of observing our own ideal cities in speech.  It engages all three elements of the soul, and teaches us that only proper ordering of the soul can lead to success.  In this case, the reason element is represented by the head coach, who (hopefully) is akin to a football philosopher king.  Second, you have the courageous/spirited element, i.e., the players, who hopefully are akin to football warriors.  Finally, you have the desire element, represented by the fans, whose generally unrealistic and limitless demands really belong on the bottom of this pyramid (with some exceptions of course).

Read, and become a better man for it.

Divination

Eye of the Tiger read some tea leaves and described four plausible scenarios for the 2011 season, revealing the fears and hopes of this great unknown.

• 10-2: A weakened Big Ten sees Michigan return to the Rose Bowl, though he admits this is unlikely.
• 9-3/8-4: Progressive improvement over the season, maybe with a win over reeling Buckeyes?
• 7-5/6-6: A different kind of mediocrity, which is one or two injuries to the O-line away.
• 5-7 or worse: It takes years to build up from one of the worst defenses in the country, but ruining one of the best offenses can happen much faster.

Hi Mom!

My Mom is the only other family member to go to Michigan. On State week she puts on maize and blue and ribs my MSU siblings about had they only studied harder. Without her I never would have pursued my career, gone to my school, met my friends or my wife. She has read (and unsolicitedly copy edited) almost anything I've ever written. In the words of Mr. Slocum: i love her i think she da realest bitch alive.

Dear Diary,

Here's people dressed in grad gowns dancing in the Diag to Rusted Root:

The cards at the end made me think it's an elaborate advertisement for the sponsor. But I have questions: did they use real grads? Did we go to blue gowns this year, or did they just figure we use Duke's tailor? All I can find out on the inter-webs is that musical theater major Erik Heitz was involved with it.

Anyway it's a nice segue into saying so long to last week's graduates. I thought I had it bad, showing up the year immediately following football and hockey national championships to have Brian Cook's class be all like "Ha Ha, You Missed It!"* Well these cats started classes the week of The Horror, and leave with the taste of the "okay now we have to fire him" blowout to Mississippi State. In the process they survived three losses to Michigan State, four losses to Ohio State, an Ultimate Test of Fandom Endurance, and the punch to the dong that turned Corey Liuget's life around.** However they did witness two comebacks versus Notre Dame, Illinois in OT, postseason runs from eminently likeable hockey and basketball squads, and apparently more flash mobs than any class in history.

So here's to the Class of 2011. You got pretty hosed seeing just the carcass of Bo's Empire, and then having to suffer three years of rebuilding just so we could knock down and declaim the whole damn edifice. Yet there you were, every week, boozed up in the student section with all the optimism of a Denard smile, and all the un-canned coordination of a flash mob. You should all get avatar badges or something.

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* This was literally the front page headline of our Daily freshman orientation issue.

** Bonus: Article written by "Tim Sullivan" (NTTS).

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Those Who Will Never See This Day

About a month ago I promised a Part II to revisiting the Decimated Defense series. I got all the research done, down to making images of the charts, and planned to get it out the following week. But then I got early winds of the Cullen transfer (and learned I was seriously depressing my only follower on Twitter), so I put it off, and put it off, and put it off. With some fallout coming down the line from Tat-gate, Michigan State's Third Annual Assault and Potluck, and whatever Saban has to do to get down to 85 again (they're at +11 according to oversigning.com), maybe it's best we wait 'till at least fall practice for the whole reveal.

Still, with sincere apologies to DosLeches, Cullen's transfer to Pitt leaves the pool of defensive backs in the same perilous state it's been in for Class of '11's entire collegiate career. Observe (UPDATE: sorted by position, and where you'd expect them to be on the depth chart given projection as recruit and time in program):

Cornerbacks:

Safeties:

Here's the talent distribution versus the field, with incoming freshmen not counted because they're freshmen:

Take where you were right before Woolfolk went down last year, remove James Rogers, and add a year of experience to everybody, and that's Michigan's 2011 defensive backfield. As you can see the closest thing after Troy to an upperclassman with any kind of recruiting hype is Marvin Robinson, a true sophomore who doesn't seem likely to displace Kovacs and may move to linebacker in the future. Unless the new staff works miracles and/or some of these guys were very underrated, please keep expectations low. Best case scenario is nobody gets hurt, Carvin as a sophomore is the second competent free safety at Michigan since 1997, and the unit performs like a poor man's Notre Dame.

Sorry DosLeches. It depresses me too, but a Ngata/Mattison face-mash can always cheer me up.

Flash Diaries

There were two this week not counting TomVH and Tim (YTTS).

First, stubob put up Part II of his Gauging Team Effectiveness blog, this time with San Diego State broken down. It's not a very tight comparison since there's a huge difference in schedule strength but the results show some competency. Inspired by the exercise, the_white_tiger posted a long and detailed response on his blog Maize-Colored Glasses. Takeaway from the latter is that Hoke inherited a thing that was worse than we thought it was, and left it a thing better than we thought it was. There may be something to those uber alleles after all.

As for your Diarist of the Week, that goes to Captain, who ran with a theme from the alma mater to give us a fitting metaphor for the state of the program:

Although his success may still lurk in the realm of our collective optimism, Brady Hoke is already bringing something palpable to this team.  It's light materialized into rote sound bytes about "toughness" and "fundamentals."  It's identity.  It's the dawn that ends the night.

It's morning in Michigan.

Dear Diary,

Happy Easter, and Chag Sameach. While the bulk of you are eating chocolate and painting/finding eggs, my tribe has Passover. Aside from eating matzah and the related constipation the holiday has a traditional dinner, or "seder." The dinner has a script: symbolism of the various traditional dishes, four questions of the "gee, I wonder why we're eating matzah…" variety recited by a kid, followed by the story of how Pharaoh was smart for being long wheat in the ancient futures market but was unsuccessful in labor issues.

In recent years our family has been adding fiancés, wives, etc., who grew up with slightly different traditions and very different views on what makes an appropriate Seder. The big argument's over the orange. This is a thing we started doing like 10 years ago which I love and some people completely despise. The parable for this goes that one day an orthodox rabbi said there would be a woman rabbi (actually "woman on the bimah") when there's on orange on the Seder plate. So: plop.

In January MVictors and Hoover Street wrote their epic "The Clans. The Factions. Defined," which brilliantly defined the various sub-groups of Michigan fandom. The party lines haven't gone away in three months. There's always that one topic that…

: Oh G-d, not again.

Um, can I help you…?

: I am MisoBOgon. The only true Michigan fan. And I'm only stopping by to tell you how sick I am of hearing you people whine about "The Process." And I can tell from your intro that's exactly what you're about to do.

Actually, no, I was…

: Let it go. It's over. Move on.

Who…?

: Misopocatur, the one true Michigan fan. We have our coach. We have Mattison. We have Denard's smile. Let it go.

: Plussed for mentioning Denard's smile.

Look, I don't know where you people are coming from…

: 'From where you people are coming,' you mean, assuredly. Real Michigan fans, e.g. myself, Misopuroy Jacket Patch, do not end sentences with prepositions.

…from whence you people have come but really I was just going to write a Dear Diary about how ridiculous all of this Internet bickering is becoming.

: So quit bitching and it'll stop.

: RRRRrrrraaaaaaa

Oh come on.

: RRRRrrrrooddd. Ninja Slot UFR +12. Decimated DefenseRRRRRRRRRR

: You obviously don't know what you're talking about. I, for one, am glad to be back to normal.

               : Negged!

               : Negged! Ban this man!

Guys, guys, what the hell…?

: Isn't it obvious? I've been tracking user data pretty closely and it seems the various fan factions who were scattered by the last three years' events are coming back together for some Michigan football talk and encountering…each other.

: Negged!

: Agree. I don't have enough points to make a new thread but I just wanted to say my daughter's starting U-M in the fall! Go Blue!

Ah. Well that explains all the bickering this week. Anyway what I was gonna…

: 'going to'

… say is welcome back to anyone who left us over the last few years. As Decaturogon or whatever above mentioned, it's probably high time for the Michigan fan base to come back together. You know what we need for that?

: Easy: stop bitching.

: You should talk! Let me tell you what they just wrote in the Freep about RR…

: They'll never admit they were wrong.

                     : Negged! Mods, clean this up!

: He just didn't get the wins. It's that simple. Let's move on.

:

                             

: If they can't admit that they can't see anything.

PEOPLE: !

… … … …
… … … …
(smug)…

If all of these be-hatted folks can co-exist in my head* we can all exist together in a room that seats 115,000.

At the risk of making this post sound any more Maize & Brewish, in honor of Passover, here's a list of what I consider sufficient to be classified a Michigan fan:

1. Rooting for another team as well. (Dayenu)
2. Rooting for M now, but used to not be (Dayenu)
3. Rooting for M, but not having gone to the University of Michigan (only State fans care about this, and that's because few people will root for State if they didn't go there or have another close connection to the program.) (Dayenu)
4. Rooting for M, but not supporting the current staff or individual members of the program. (Dayenu)
5. Rooting for M, but not supporting former staff or members of the program. (Dayenu)
6. Rooting for M, but not reading/watching the right material. (Dayenu)
7. Rooting for M, but representing the university or the program badly. (Dayenu)
8. Rooting only for Michigan in one sport. (Dayenu)
9. Being able to experience long periods of ambivalence when Michigan's not winning. (Dayenu)

As for ranking who's a good fan and who's a worse fan – the topic of a removed board post this week – I think peoples' definitions of that are so wildly different as to make the trite-ass "it's different for every person" cop-out true in this case. But let's be sure, eh? Fandom poll!

For each factor, just indicate how important each is in how you might rate fandom. My purpose is just to see if there's any consistency at all, even among a group as insular as a blog's readership.

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* In my life I've been all but the 2nd Estate. But there's time yet.

Seriously, all of these narratives are in my head at once.

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More Surveys!

Left: Two guys we're pretty sure have pictured themselves as Ray Lewis.
Right: what the board thinks of our moderating job at present.

It's survey week at MGoBlog. The first by umhero is probably the most inadvertently useful bit of recruiting news I've ever read. It asks the board to vote on who they think will end up in the class, and reactions are so lopsided I feel like I know the kids' decisions better than they do. I'll let him do the honors of results but the poll is here. By the way hero, pollcode? That's so 2009!

Survey Two is results-oriented. That is wingedsig published the results of his 500-person study on MGoBlog's board moderation, which proves two things: the pos/neg system isn't near perfect, and there are at least 20 females on the Internet!

Orange!

Finally in surveys I give you justingoblue, who responded to Brian responding to a Mailbag by surveying Title IX and demonstrating quite succinctly that it has doesn't regulate coaches' salaries:

I took a look at the law itself, and have concluded that coaches salaries do not have to be equivalent, both through reading the law and through anecdotal evidence as told by UM's salaries.

Justin took the salaries of the revenue sports (coaches, then coaches and assistants) and the numbers changed. He ends with 30 coaches for women's sports and 18 for non-revenue men's sports. The mean salary is pretty close (both over $80K) and explainable by the ladies' coaches being incredibly good at their jobs.

For example softball is No. 1 in the country right now, and Tennis just won the Big Ten Championship again!

Orange!

When We Were Slaves in Egypt…

The Spring Game's technically not a game, but it's enough to bring monuMental back (to the future)!

Look closely and you'll see the 1901 team's secret to scoring a point a minute: Time Traveling Denard Robinson! Also time-traveling Hoke.

In another past blast, JimLahey wrote up his encounter with Lloyd Carr at the WESPY Awards (Windsor Essex Sports Person of the Year). It's so vintage Carr:

The conversation was about 8-10 minutes long and we mostly discussed literature and philosophy. There was a great point in the conversation when we talked about writers who make their work inaccessible to most people by unnecessarily writing in complex schemes just for complexity's sake. I said I preferred the simple, classic, and understated genius of writers like Mark Twain and Charles Dickens, whose complexities come from the depth of their characters. He agreed.

That little part right there is the Diary of the Week, because remember how the part about Carr that we all loved was absolutely unique and genuine and wonderful? Read the short diary and you will too.

The other candidate for DotW was stubob's statistical attempt to create a new metric (which he calls "effectiveness") for offensive and defensive play. Right now it's mostly raw data that says what we already knew about last year:

Defense, on the other hand, was great in the rain against Purdue, better-than-average against ND and Illinois (per drive, remember), and shelled by MSU, the other MSU and Wisconsin. This should not be news.

But he's getting some help from the comments and promises to pick apart SD State games next so keep your eyes open because I've got a feeling Part II's gonna get good! Bonus: one of those enlightening, wordy exchanges that the comments section used to be back in the before time* broke out at Comment 3.

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* My recollection of the before time was a lot of sarcasm from WLA and Brian a lot less worried about pissing people off, but then I came late.

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Orange!

MGoBlue /Ghostwhistle. Not in picture: Hockey East referee being incompetent.

Site note: If you're here for the official MGo-Take on last night's championship game, only Brian can deliver that. These are my opinions, not the blog's. And my opinion is that "Intent to Blow" is the worst rule in sports:

As there is a human factor involved in blowing the whistle to stop play, the referee may intend for the play to be stopped slightly before the whistle actually being blown. For example, the fact that the puck may come loose or cross the goal line before the sound of the whistle has no bearing if the referee determined that the play had stopped.

I have been saying that for years, mostly because the Red Wings are famous for getting screwed by it like all the time. So when Michigan had their first goal waived off last night, I already knew what I'd be writing about this morning, because "Intent to Blow" is one of those topics that I – like pretty much anyone else with who spends an unhealthy amount of time at Kukla's Korner - get screaming mad about whenever it's brought up. The internet hockey world thinks it's such a joke that it's the nom de plume of its best satire guy.

So of course the consensus most mindfuckingly stupid rule ever goes ahead and rips away a National Championship from Michigan.

I can't get into the ludicrous penalty disparity (thanks again Hockey East) that had M playing one fifth of the game with 20% fewer players; I wasn't taking notes, and don't have the torrent yet. Not that it matters: during the course of a hockey game a puck squirted through a sieve and entered the UMD net several seconds before a whistle was blown. As is always the case with game-altering intent to blow calls, the referee was out of position in the corner, lost sight of the puck, and made up his mind that all official hockey activity had ceased. After making some tea and ambling his way behind the net, he finally deigned to blow his whistle to let everyone else know that hockey activities had ceased, and that all things that had transpired in the interim never happened.

In slow-mo thanks to hal2thevic0r:

The point of the rule, as I understand it, is to discourage dangerous scrums in front of the net between when the goalie goes down on the puck and the ref manages to get whistle to lips. But that is rendered moot by the players, who will play until they hear the whistle. Ultimately the refs should blow a play dead when they lose sight of the puck. However in an age when video replay is available and in use, it's all too easy to use standards for goal scoring and stoppage of play that are not at all subjective: pucks cross lines, whistles blow, and we just go to the evidence.

Above I linked the last round of a "worst rule in hockey" tournament by the Minnesota Wild SBNation site. The blog had this to say:

Intent to blow has crushed all opponents thus far in this competition. The reason is clear. Fans are tired of a rule that has so clearly cost teams games. The referees are not supposed to affect the outcome of a game. They are simply supposed to call the penalties and ensure a fair game. With a rule such as this, they have the subjective control to change the outcome of a game. That's just not acceptable.

The rule of "play to the whistle" seems so simple. It is reviewable, it is fair, and it is indisputable. Was the puck across when the whistle blew? Yes or no are the only two answers. Was the puck across the line when the referee intended to blow the whistle? How are we ever supposed to know that?

I'll go further: Video makes the Intent clause nothing more than a cover for referee fallibility. It's the ref's fault, not the players', if he's out of position and loses sight of the puck because of it. Even good refs can have bouts of incompetence, because hockey changes direction faster than jetpack Smurf Denards on swivel rollerskates.* If he blows an early whistle, well, that's an inevitable thing that happens with human refs. The Intent rule was an understandable standard in the absence of instant replay, because how else do you make a call out of a total clusterf—?

MGoBlue /How dare you question my intent! To the box, all of ye!

Video changes this because we now have what is essentially another referee who's usually in the perfect position and can provide incontrovertible evidence of everything he saw. So if the on-ice ref doesn't blow his whistle until later, what the bloody hell does it matter when he lost sight of the puck, just so long as the video didn't? Why codify errors that are easily avoided? Why keep a rule which its only extant function is to disallow good goals?

I swear if Michigan had scored the overtime winner I'd still hate the stupid rule. If UMD had a goal disallowed I'd still hate the stupid rule. But of course the stupid rule had to be the exact difference in a national title for the one team I can't possibly claim a lack of total idiot bias for.

Due to the butterfly effect we have no idea if the game would have transpired differently had that goal been allowed, but it doesn't change the fact that except for a rule that allows referee incompetence to trump video evidence Michigan scored 3 goals before Minnesota-Duluth did. If you're here from UMD looking for some sour grapes, okay, you have a fine hockey team which played some championship-worthy hockey these past few weeks. Congratulations. Also: the Bulldog is a silly name for a hockey team.

Way to go Champ.

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* If you allow that there are competent NCAA hockey refs surely you'll forgive me jetpack Smurf Denards and their associated accoutrements.

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Diaries and Whatnot, but First Lose the Shirt

Eddie Shore?

2006 Tigers fans will nod at this: sometimes you have a team that looked kinda good but not like world beaters, and then all of a sudden they're in a miracle season with new traditions and a palpable excitement, and then they topple Goliath and the only thing between it and a championship is the one thing all year they're actually favored a little bit to beat. Then it goes to hell, and not in the "well we came as far as we could" kind of way of freshmen losing to Duke by two but in the 20 errors by pitchers while the dream is shot and stabbed kind of way.

The way Michigan was playing last night after Intent to Blow you thought they were the better team. Then came all the UMD power plays – a few of them actually deserved – and by overtime you could tell Scooter had lost a step and Rust was run ragged and with all of that shaking something had to finally come loose.

It's been five years since the '06 Tigers got within sight of The Thing then fell out of the tree, but all I remember today is the climb. There was gum and Verlander and Inge fouling off 25 pitches from Barry Zito and the Slam in the Bronx, and all of that. Five years from now, what will we remember? The penalties will sting, but more than that it'll be Caporusso's Valentine, Scooter's shot, Rust's defiance of human capacity, a huge Swedish flag, and a tiny little goalie who made big.

Your Diarist of the Week is Gordon, who's already there:

At this time next year, around the time that new banners go up, and old banners get updated, there will be a Carl Hagelin plaque hanging in the north hallway of Yost. Is that anything to be disappointed about?

That's the conclusion of Gordon's diary, but like the 2010-11 Michigan Men's Ice Hockey season, it's not about the end but the journey.

Old Time Hockey?

Before the championship game became literally just this, Brian – as only that guy can do – aptly summarized the "1-0" victory over NoDak as the "world's longest penalty kill." Shortly before that Blazefire made a much less apropos analogy of Berenson's coaching v. UND to a Lloyd game:

"Make that lead hold up, boys! Drive them crazy!"

Just like a Lloyd coached game, UND had chances, and plenty of them. But what they got very little of was the break away, one on that makes goalies around the world wet themselves. Most of their good chances erupted from a pile of bodies, more of which were Maize and Blue than Green and White.  But it was always in a pile of chaos that’s hard to take advantage of.

“We’re gonna out-execute them. No mistakes. Do it right every time.”

Blazefire is pretty much wrong on the comparison – that's just my e-opinion – except for the part of the quote I bolded. If you ask me, Berenson's more Fielding Yost than Lloyd Carr or Bo. But I could totally see him telling his players on the bench that whole UND game: "keep up the pressure, you're driving them crazy!"

FTR, I like Blazefire. I just think the analogy isn't a fit.

They Teach You How to Underline in College

Board, meet yourself:

This is but one small sample of wingedsig's survey results, posted mere moments before I was going to post this. I haven't even read through it all yet but it's MGoDemographics and long so giddyup!

User ertai last week laid out his case for paying D-I revenue sport players, comparing Ph.D. students and their stipends on the basis of how much $ and prestige they bring to the university by choosing to do their work here. Some folks negged him out of hand because paying players is going to be a non-starter for the current NCAA folks. But:

As we can see, from a high level perspective, there are many similarities. The difference is that PhD students get a stipend, which varies based on the school and the location. Also schools may offer PhD students different amounts of money for their services based on how good they are. For example, an OSU PhD student choosing between OSU, MIT and Stanford will probably get a larger offer from OSU than one who just got into OSU. Stipends range between 15K to 30K a year, based on the department, school, and your attractiveness as a candidate.

Read and lend your e-pinion – it's obvious he put some time and thought into the proposal. The strongest case I can make against it is that for most schools, even in D-I, the revenue sports can barely bring in enough to pay for the rest of the athletic department, so we'd essentially be going back to a system of a few mega-Haves and the Boise States of the world unable to compete. Michigan would obviously be a Have, but the other 90% would raise so much hell it's a non-starter.

The folks who don't like Johnny RBUAS got a rep in the diaries in zoltan the destroyer, who riffed on Johnny's guest post. Of course, zoltan totally missed the point: the intellectual weakness of a Johnny post isn't in being kindly sentimental to his subjects, just in the bias of choosing Michigan subjects. When I can explain in less than 800 words why Johnny fans like me naturally get bent out of shape when a cynic breaks up our sap, I'll do so. Just a thought from a writer's perspective: the reason the thoughts he puts in M players' heads are those of great good isn't saying they're all heroes; he's doing that because in our own heads we're all heroes. Make sense? Probably not. Have a haterz gif.

DDIII, John T. Greilick/The Detroit News, MGoBlue

The Spring Roster has been updated again. It still doesn't list new weights so I'm not going to bother with Weight Gain 2011 for now, but it's excuse enough for me to do a little delving. First, a couple of tidbits:

• Jihad Rasheed!
• Ricardo Miller is listed as a TE (and 6'4, 215). As with all things Ricardo-related, please mentally insert "Ninja." Too early for YMRMFSPA Tim Massaquoi? Yes.
• There are still 12 scholarship players still listed at receiver.
• Mike Williams is no longer on the roster. As expected, the concussion last year ended a disappointing career for a by accounts good guy. I hope he finds success in life after football, and that his dreams aren't too haunted by visions of 11 foot tall robot Juice Williams.
• Safety watch: M-Rob, Furman, Hawthorne, Carvin, Prison Abs, and Kovacs are your scholarship players listed as "S."
• Heininger back on the 2-Deep: It's a good thing we're recruiting defensive ends. RVB and Roh are the only scholarship upperclassmen on the roster; Jibreel Black is the only other schollied-player listed. Wilkins, Talbott the Elder, and Ash are listed as DTs; Jake Ryan and Paskorz are LBs. Since Steve Watson is back at TE, at least one and most likely two of the freshmen Beyer, Rock or Heitzman will need to play this year. If Roh or RVB miss any extended time, file the transfer of Anthony LaLota as a greater-than-zero bad thing.
• Marell Evans is officially back and wearing his old No. 9. Evans was a 2- or 3-star linebacker recruit in Lloyd's "oh god we need LBs and DBs" class of 2007, and started a few games as a redshirt freshman in '08 in a Ray Vinopal-is-your-starting-FS kind of way before falling behind Thompson, Ezeh and Mouton. He transferred the summer before the 2009 season on "good terms" but left pointing out he had three DCs from '07-'09 and didn't fit with GERG's system. Marell rather quietly returned to the program this winter (not because Rich Rod's gone) and is listed as a 5th year senior.

Stray thoughts:

• Nobody minded the decision at the time, but in retrospect the decision to make Shafer the goat after '08 rather than butt out of the defense may have been the crucible of the RR era.
• Evans:In/Vinopal:Out could be a microcosm of the dichotomy between the RR and Hoke/Lloyd regimes: one early playing 2-star is a tiny speed bug; the other is a 6'3 sure tackler who can't move laterally. This would be a good lead for a "Hoke = Return to Pre-Rod" column…if you're Lynn Henning.
• Attrition on the defensive side is still going to be hurting M's defense this year.
• Did someone say "defensive attrition?"
• Here we go again…

The Decimated Defense Revisited

Yes, I'm going there again. We have two more years of data to see how things have progressed, for one. We have a wide disparity in expectations for next year's defense, for two. And three: I now know how to use pivot tables on Excel – that would have been really helpful last time. This week I'm going to go through Michigan's 2007-2011 classses to re-establish our baseline. I'll also link you to my full list of attrition and retention in case you can add any thoughts before next week.

The Expectation Tracker is an estimate of how much the class is contributing compared to the average of five other schools for which I tracked attrition: Ohio State, Michigan State, Penn State, Notre Dame, and Alabama. The baseline is the average number of defensive players left from that class between those five schools.

Class of 2007 (5th Year Seniors)

Attrition: 4/9 recruits remaining (Avg. retention = 4/10)

Position Breakdown (DL-LBs-DBs): 2-3-4 recruited / 1-2-1 remaining (Avg. = 1-1-2) So running count, we're up a linebacker and down a DB.

Star Breakdown: 4-3-3-2 remaining (Avg. = 4-4-4-2)

Gone: Donovan Warren (Early NFL after '09), Michael Williams (bust, injury, unrenewed 5th), Artis Chambers (transfer in '08), Renaldo Sagesse (Graduated after '10), Austin Panter (JUCO, Graduated after '08).

Remaining: Troy Woolfolk (Starting CB), Ryan Van Bergen (Starting DE), Brandon Herron (backup SLB), Marell Evans (backup LB)

Walk-On: Kevin Leach (backup MLB)

Discussion: I think you would expect the 5th year class to leave a few B+ guys with a few years of starting experience. The trueborn talent probably found their ways to the NFL, either through early entry or contributing since their true freshman seasons. The 2007 class, recruited from the tail end of the "Year of Infinite Pain" and through the undefeated-till-OSU 2006 season, leaves two such players on defense: Woolfolk and Van Bergen.

Warren was the surprise "horray" commit of the year. Van Bergen was a Zettel, i.e. a 4-star who would be the highest rated player of a typical State of Michigan crop. Michigan whiffed on a lot of top players, and the fallbacks were uninspiring or worse: UCLA and Oregon had backed off from Michael Williams, so there were some red flags around him long before Juice Williams shattered him. Chambers was a 2-star early enrollee who transferred Ball State and couldn’t crack the two-deep.

Panter was a stop-gap JUCO for a scary-thin depth chart, Evans a low 3-star from Brandon Minor’s school who saw the field a few times before losing his job to Mouton in 2008; he transferred to Hampton (FCS) and was eh before returning this year. Herron was a 3-star boom-or-bust from the Shawn Crable school of athletic DEs too small to play DE. Renaldo Sagesse was a 20-year-old Canadian. Troy Woolfolk was a legacy whom the big local Texas schools didn't offer.

So if you'd asked me to predict in 2007 what that class would leave for 2011, a B+ defensive back and a B+ lineman plus some depth guys would be on the low end but still within expectations. On the other hand, for a class recruited after an 11-2 Rose Bowl season, you would expect a bit more.

Expectation Meter: 3. Baseline 4. +1 for Woolfolk, –1 for Williams, –1 for recruiting whiffs at LB and not getting some backup CBs.

Class of 2008 (Seniors, RS Juniors)

Attrition: 4/8 recruits remaining (Avg. retention = 9/12) (!)

Position Breakdown (DL-LBs-DBs): 1-4-3 recruited / 1-2-1 remaining (Avg. = 3-3-3). Running: –2 DL, +0 LB, –3 DB

Star Breakdown: 4-4-4-3 (Avg. = 4-4-4-4-4-3-3-3-2)

Gone: Boubacar Cissoko (Dismissed in '09), Brandon Smith (Transfer in '09), Marcus Witherspoon (Did not qualify), Taylor Hill (transfer before '08)

Remaining: J.T. Floyd (Starting CB), Mike Martin (Starting DT/NT), J.B. Fitzgerald (Backup SLB, possible starter), Kenny Demens (Starting MLB)

Walk-On: Jordan Kovacs (Starting SS)

Discussion: The meat of a starting group ideally comes from the 4th and 3rd year ranks. To compete for a Big Ten title in '11, the '08 class would preferably contribute at least four starters, one or two of them NFL-bound stars. The hybrid Lloyd/RR class was mostly Carr’s on defense; RR recruited Taylor Hill, who stepped on campus, presumably met the coeds, and took the first bus out of town. The rest were players recruited primarily by the old staff, even if some signed after an heir was announced. Bloggers clamored for more cornerbacks (and got the first wave of slot ninjas).

At points during the ensuing three years this class looked more and more like Mike Martin and disaster. The late emergence of Demens last year means we got at least one Big Ten player out of the four linebackers. Martin is fantastic, even when playing a position that doesn't best take advantage of his talents. Floyd seemed to regress before his injury in 2011, but at his best (see Ohio State 2009) he's a not-fast cornerback who survives on brains, effort and grit. When he's not his best, he misses open field tackles and gives up huge plays. Fitz will have the inside shot at the SAM linebacker position but was so bad at it last year he ended up rotating with Obi Ezeh. Cissoko's story is of the Kelly Baraka variety (kid with no prior problems who develops lots on campus) that nails any school every decade or so. Smith hung around then departed when it was clear the defense was going to be terrible until he was a senior (at which point he would have probably been really useful at the Will spot).

Expectation Meter: 3 - Guh. Baseline 9. –5 for attrition. +1 because Martin is a beast, –1 J.B. Fitz is underwhelming so far, –1 hey, while you're out there trying to convince Pryor that winning the Heisman is better than a free Corvette, could you maybe try and get us another cornerback?

Class of 2009 (Juniors, RS Sophomores)

Attrition: 6/10 recruits remaining + 2 pos. switches, so 8/10 (Avg. retention = 9/10)

Position Breakdown (DL-LBs-DBs): 3-3-4 recruited / 3-4-1 retained (Avg. = 3-3-3) Running: –2 DL, +1 LB, –5 DB (!) and (!) again!

Star Breakdown: 5-4-4-4-3-3-3-3 (Avg. = 5-4-4-4-3-3-3-3-2)

Gone: Justin Turner (transferred before '10), Vlad Emilien (transferred before '10), Anthony LaLota (transferred before '10), Adrian Witty (did not qualify)

Remaining: Will Campbell (Starting DT?), Craig Roh (Starting WDE), Mike Jones (Starting WLB?), Brandin Hawthorne (backup WLB), Isaiah Bell (backup SLB), Thomas Gordon (Backup S)

Moved from Offense: Cam Gordon (Starting WLB?), Quinton Washington (backup DT)

Discussion: The juniors are the guys expected to make the big leap close to their ultimate effectiveness. The class was kind of weak against previous Michigan classes, and really strong for teams that finish 3-9. Given this class was entirely recruited by Rodriguez's staff, the high attrition (40%) due to playing time (!), is really irksome. Two 4-star position switches add depth in the box, but three defensive back losses were not replaced. So the Class of '09 held serve on the d-line and got some linebackers, but ultimately contributed only "Prison Abs" to the secondary. Here you see the genesis of Secondary Disaster 2009-'10.

Turner, if you believe unsubstantiated rumor, turned out to be the cautionary tale of the kid who wanted to be Woodson, but without all that effort. Emilien had an injury that scared away Ohio State and made him look awful in two Spring Games, but board insiders claimed his speed was back. I have no idea if he would have helped; his own assessment was that Cam Gordon would hold down free safety for his entire Michigan career. LaLota was a project recruit who also looked bad in Spring. Witty was the DeVito twin to the Denard's Schwarzenegger, but raise your hand if you'd have taken a 2-star junior cornerback on this depth chart?

Among positives, position switcher (WR) Cam Gordon was epic bad at free safety but has the knack for hitting that could see him turn into a mean Will linebacker, which is where everyone expected him to end up, even during his recruitment. Q has come in for practice hype and wasn't awful at NT after a mid-season position switch from offensive guard. Roh is the kind of high-motor end that has been Iowa's secret weapon for years. Mike Jones was a 3-star S/OLB who generated some practice hype as an outside linebacker before losing the 2010 season to injury.

The 5-star is Big Will Campbell, who looked ineffective at NT, got moved to guard last year, and now is back to the DL as 3-tech. In a spring of precious little breakout player hype, Campbell probably leads the team in positive mentions (and leads the 3-tech battle), but that's also probably because Hoke is most often asked about the defense's lone blue chip in his break-or-bust offseason.

Thomas Gordon was somewhat effective though small at Spur, and is in the mix for free safety or backing up Kovacs. Isaiah Bell was a talented/raw DB in high school but outgrew safety and is rumored to have a bit of the Turner syndrome. Hawthorne is the opposite: his talent level is meh but he's a good roster guy and special teamer. If you think Campbell and Turner were overrated coming out of high school, there's a recruiting/scouting problem with this class; if you think it's due to bad luck or bad coaching there's plenty of that to go around. Anyway, unless maybe Roh pops this year there doesn't seem to be a star in the group. If you're looking for unsubstantiated hope for 2011, it's probably one of the low 4-star guys making that big leap, plus the standard "THIS time the new DC is going to fix all!" that we seem to get every year since Jim Hermann.

Expectation Meter: 3 - Double-Guh. Baseline 9: –1 for attrition. –4 because there are no starting DBs left. –2 Big Will disappointment thus far, +1 Roh=Crab People,*

* Giving a +1 Roh's dad is disingenuous to the mission of this exercise but don't think I didn't think of it.

Class of 2010 (Sophomores, RS Freshmen)

Attrition: 12/16 remaining (Avg. retention = 9/10)

Position Breakdown: 6-3-7 recruited / 4-2-6 retained (Avg. = 3-3-3) Running: –1 DL, +0 LB, –2 DB

Star Breakdwon: 4-4-4-4-3-3-3-3-3-3-3-3 (Avg. = 5-4-4-4-4-3-3-3-3-3-3)

Gone: Demar Dorsey (did not qualify), Davion Rogers (did not qualify), Antonio Kinard (did not qualify), Ray Vinopal (transfer to Pitt)

Remaining: Cullen Christian (nickel CB), Marvin Robinson (Starting FS?), Ken Wilkens (Backup DT), Richard Ash (Backup DT), Carvin Johnson (Starting FS?), Jibreel Black (Backup SDE), Terry Talbott (Backup DT), Josh Furman (Backup S/Starting FS?), Courtney Avery (Starting CB?), Jordan Paskorz (Backup LB), Jake Ryan (LB), Terrence Talbott (Backup CB)

Discussion: By 2010 it was finally obvious to the coaching staff that warm bodies were needed at defensive back, and warm bodies were attained. This is consequently the first class where Michigan didn't match its rivals in recruiting quality; the result going into their sophomore season is two more 3-stars on the roster instead of a 5-star. The desperate staff, which by this point was recruiting with a few clouds overhead, also perhaps relaxed academic expectations, resulting in three DNQs.

The players still around are too young to grade: you'd expect a typical 4-star who eventually ends-up-being-RVB kind of guy to get some rotational playing time, but you wouldn't expect that guy to be a starter without some growing pains along way. Because of the Decimated Defense (TM) that went before them, a lot of this class got playing time when by all rights they should have been redshirting, giving us a peek at their respective abilities. However, I'm wary of judging too harshly for play by true freshmen thrown into a bad situation. Of those who changed opinions, I think M-Rob downgraded a bit from high expectations, Cullen was much worse than a 4-star cornerback should be even as a freshman, Black flashed ability as a pass rusher (caveat: major liability size-wise vs. run) and Avery didn't look like the next Leon Hall but sure looked a lot better than you'd expect of a 3-star fall arrival who was a high school QB. Conversely, Terrence Talbott looked exactly like a 3-star true freshman cornerback should look.

Expectation Meter: 11! Baseline 9: +3 for Dudes! –2 for low-rated recruits. –1 M-Rob did not play like a guy with 5-star offers, +1 Carvin Johnson showed promise, +1 Jibreel Black too, +1 Courtney Avery, –1 Cullen.

Class of 2011 (True Freshmen)

Attrition: 12/12 remaining (Avg. retention = 11/11)

Position Breakdown: 3-4-5 / 3-4-5 (Avg. 5-3-3) Running: –3 DL, +0 LB, –1 DB

Star Breakdown: 4-4-4-3-3-3-3-3-3-3-3-3 (Avg. = 5-4-4-4-4-3-3-3-3-3-3)

Gone: Nobody – it's been two months; what do you think this is, 2008 through 2010?

Remaining: Greg Brown (CB), Raymon Taylor (CB), Blake Countess (CB), Delonte Hollowell (CB), Tamani Carter (S), Brennan Beyer (DE), Chris Rock (DE), Keith Heitzman (DE), Kellen Jones (LB), Antonio Poole (LB), Frank Clark (LB), Desmond Morgan (LB)

Discussion: With the world waiting for the axe to fall on RR, and no coach until mid-January, this class was a sunk cost. There's a few low 4-stars but if any of them end up contributing this year, that guy was either very underrated (YAY!) or something has gone horribly, Cone-is-your-starting-QB wrong (again). Since only Brown is on campus so far, there's zero rating. Michigan made up some ground on personnel with this class, but it's even less highly rated than 2010, on par with a good year for Michigan State and an NCAA infraction at other schools. This is the direct result of "The Process," specifically the part about waiting until Winter Semester of their senior years to tell prospective recruits who their coaches will be. No 5-stars, and short a 4-star as well next to comparable teams, but that's somewhat made up for by four more 3-stars than normal.

Defensive line and defensive back are still priorities to recruit beyond normal this year (if you're a DE in Ohio and you haven't received your Michigan offer yet, please contact us). The next step is lots of quality, since the last two classes really should only be expected to do a good job of producing depth and a few upperclassmen starters.

Expectation Meter: 8 Baseline 11: +1 for Dudes!, –4 for low-rated recruits.

Totals

Need the dudes: Scout via Maize&Blog

Attrition Total: 40/57 = 70.17% of D recruits still here

I mean: Horray, we're over 10 clicks higher than the Alabama-like losses that haunted 2009 and 2010. Then again, what did we lose?

Star Breakdown Total:

• 5 Stars: 1/2
• 4 Stars: 14/23
• 3 Stars: 24/29
• 2 Stars: 2/3

Gawddammit! M retention versus the field:

• 5 Stars: 1/2
• 4 Stars: 14/17
• 3 Stars: 24/20
• 2 Stars: 2/2

The damage doesn't look as bad from out here.

Position Breakdown Total: 14 DL, 12 LB, 14 DB (Avg. = 17-12-13)

Why more DL and DB? The way I handled transitions to offense is to simply pull guys out (so you don't gain or lose from it) and more DLs ended up as offensive players. Converse: more are recruited. At defensive back, there seems to be, in general, a greater attrition rate for DBs across schools. No idea why this is.

Next week I'll get into the direct comparisons and play the blame game. For now, feel free to check my work.

ON NOTICE

Diaries of Darius and Decimation

Melanie R. Maxwell/AnnArbor.com

It's Darius Morris week in the diaries while Darius decides whether he's worthy of this year's NBA draft. While Morris explores, let's talk about how much better he makes Michigan.

Raoul has been active in threads discussion DM and decided to try using a simple WSJ formula to show that Morris is actually the key to Michigan's offense:

His 201 field goals and 235 assists mean Morris was involved in 436 of the team's field goals--or 51.5% of the 847 total.

By comparison:

• [Rumeal] Robinson in 88-89 was involved in 432 of his team's field goals (199 FGs + 233 assists), or 32.6% of the team total
• [Gary] Grant in 87-88 was involved in 503 of his team's field goals (269 FGs + 234 assists), or 42% of the team total

This stat raises the Morris quotient in my hoops heart to 31.4% It's low, but I've got a Hardaway man-crush, and gotta save some for the bench.

Say Soyonara to Da U.P. eh

Meanwhile mfan_in_ohio scooped all of us in Michigan media by breaking the news that U.P. may be sayin' ya to da Cheese State eh?

Upper Peninsula can’t be sure it’s staying in Michigan

BY MARK SNYDER
DETROIT FREE PRESS SPORTS WRITER

The Upper Peninsula said all the right things.

It said it would “definitely” be back next year.  After all, it is geologically attached where it is, and already has the Mackinac Bridge connecting it to the rest of Michigan.

But the UP will investigate other options.

The piece, which I bumped from the boards took a shot at the Freep's Mark Snyder for (at the time) jumping the gun with Morris-to-NBA speculation minus, you know, evidence.

The Schwartz is With Him

In Things Not Morris, denverblue put together an extensive (and mostly correct) puck preview of Colorado College, right before Michigan beat the Tigers to advance to the Frozen Four. Since I can't tell the difference between Denver and North Dakota (they've played each other tight all season), I'm down for rooting for Denver if it means I get another write-up like this Diary of the Week.

PERICLES/ATHENIAN HEROES

Dear Diary,

So I'm back from my honeymoon in Greece, and rollin' a 101 degree fever (much appreciated Delta passenger in Seat 12A). Getting the bed sentence for an American male this week basically means lots of college basketball that you can't really follow because you keep drifting off then waking up to either a.) Charles Barkley talking, b.) a guy who looks like your ex-girlfriend's father screaming at you to buy $1,000 TVs, or c.) a radically different score.

At one point Friday afternoon, after a close half where Michigan's best two players ate bench for early foul trouble, I drifted off again and had a fever dream in which Beilein went to his backups and found only ghosts. These apparitions, though by rights having no call to be influencing the corporeal plane, floated onto the court and proceeded to shut down Tobias Harris (who in my dream is 8 feet tall and can't spell "cat") and nail 3-pointers; Michigan won by 30.

Somewhere on my DVR remains a record of what really happened but I'm a man in a room full of used kleenex and the last time I looked on the internet it said hockey lost to Western Michigan 5-2, so until someone tells me different I'm going with the fever dream.

If the dream were true Michigan faces Duke this afternoon at 2:30. You'll get a full preview (update: scroll down to Tim's preview below), but the gist is that Michigan is baby Duke. The Devils' point differential scares the living hell out of me. Then again, I literally need to get some living hell out of me so let's ball.

Diaries: Hoops Edition

Melanie Maxwell/AnnArbor.com, MGoBlue.com, Kevin Cox/Getty Images

It was late January and a 10-2 non-conference schedule against nobodies became a brutal 1-7 mark against the league's toughest conference. The turning point came against little brother, who in basketball has spent the bulk of two decades as a national power. That team which aneurism-ed in Breslin wasn't the same that dominated a first-round 8-9 game in the NCAA Tournament. The squad in January was but an upset special, something that might pull off a miracle using guts and bloody white guys. When Michigan faced that same MSU team again – in Ann Arbor – it had become the Tim Hardaway show, and a ho-hum victory for the better team. The Wolverines finished fourth in the Big Ten, behind only the consensus No. 1 team in the nation and two popular Final Four picks.

How did we come so far? Leave it to bronxblue to tell it as it only can be told, with basketball movie posters:

This was still a dangerously-shallow crew, but it played like a team and bought into Beilein’s system in a way no other team had.  And nobody grew more as a player than Hardaway, who scored in double figures in every game and was the catalyst for wins over Iowa, Indiana, and Minnesota, playing and being absolutely unconscious at times from beyond the arc.

In a confluence of events that has left dozens of columnists misusing the word "ironic," ESPN aired its Fab Five documentary just as Michigan was sealing its most astounding in-season turnaround in memory. The documentary led to long threads hashing over Michigan basketball's gilded age, but also this fan perspective from Coach Schiano of the '93 Finals run.

The team didn't seem to have their legs that infamous Monday night against UNC. I think Kentucky took a lot out of them. Watching UNC breeze by a lousy Kansas team on Saturday, I was convinced we had the tougher road, and during the last game it showed.

As for the man whose star-birth turned Michigan from plucky guys who might beat the worst MSU team in recent memory to potential bracket busters, Blazefire does a comparison of Tim Hardaway Jr.'s freshman season against his father's four years at UTEP. The younger Hardaway isn't quite the shooter or setup man but otherwise stacks up well against his dad…as a junior.

I also bumped lfj75's Historical Performance of NCAA Seeds to a diary – it basically says 8-seeds don't often win NCAA tourneys. Then again 8-seeds don't usually blow out 9-seeds using spectral bench players.

And though it's now moot, credit jamiemac (of Just Cover Blog) for his Feb 28 bracket matrix, which did a better job explaining which chalk to trust in seeding (and in building a bracket) than about anywhere on the internet.

Diaries: Football Edition

It's official spring tomorrow but it's been football spring for a few weeks. With two other big money sports to hold blue attentions the football information flow has slowed to a trickle. However, lurking user FlyRy4 managed to get us some inside dope from Mattison while attending the Nike Coach of the Year Clinic, and DamnYankee performed a great service by reposting as a diary. FlyRy has received an admin points bump so he can bring things like this to us again. Bullets:

• 4-3 under defense that will look like a 5-2 to some – similar to what they ran in Baltimore.
• Mike Martin supposedly will get single-teams and chances to disrupt.
• Big Will is is winning the group competitions at 3-tech (over Q-Wash, Talbott, Ash et al.)
• Cam Gordon's an SLB, not a safety.
• "Inability of players to watch film correctly." Don't quite know what this means, but I'm all for proper video watching.

There's more in there from Mattison, so click.

The Rivals 250 is out, and Bodogblog broke them down by regions. Unsurprisingly there's a lot more talent in the SEC footprint than anywhere else. I'd like to see somebody do a comparison by year of Rivals 250 versus who gets drafted by the NFL; I have a feeling you'd find suggestive evidence that players in the South are more likely to get a 4-star.

And that maniacal laughter you hear in the background is THE_KNOWLEDGE, who points out the Tressel thing is something even the trolliest troll wouldn't dare dream up.

Diaries: Hockey Edition

As I'm writing this (11:30 a.m. Sunday) I'm watching the tournament announcement show, but if there's few surprises it's thanks to the excellent work of mfan_in_ohio, who has been keeping us updated with the pairwisii. You can go back to the March 13 and March 6 updates to feel out the whole process. Denver lost a nailbiter last night to North Dakota and ended up the 2 seed in that bracket, but mfan says Miami (NTM)'s CCHA championship will give them the last 1-seed, putting Mich in St. Louis with BC, CC and Nebraska-Omaha. And lo and behold, he's right. Michigan will play Nebraska-Omaha then face the winner of Boston College and Colorado College in St. Louis.

For his tireless effort and The_Knowledge-like prognosticative powers, this is your Diarist of the Week.

Diaries: Wrestling Edition

Michigan wrestling is synonymous with verbosity, thanks to AceUofMer, who gave us a preview and then broke down the final results for the Big Ten Tournament.

Enfin, I just wanted to share a little love for the all the Greco-Michigan fans I met. Yes, I can be the kind of tourist douche who wears Michigan gear when in Europe, but apparently there are a lot of Greeks who know the block M. Greek Michigan fans, we salute you, and not just because you built the Parthenon just to rub in a victory over Spartans.