dear diary

Upchurch

What is Hoke pointing at?

Option 1: Dick Vitale with stitches on his nose. Deadspin rumors are often just that, but I have it from the guy who was walking ahead of Dickie V when this occurred that the account of announcer meeting glass before the Ohio State game is mostly true. Variations: it happened more like an hour and half (as opposed to just-) before the game, and it was the glass next to the door (not the glass door itself) that transferred Dickie's forward momentum into Dickie's face in much the same way that air wouldn't have. Tirico behind him stood stunned for a moment before he registered Vitale was possibly really hurt. Staff sat him down in a side room at Crisler and then released him to do the broadcast, which given the circumstances I admit is pretty boss. Usefulness of this knowledge to you is minimal unless you were among those particularly annoyed by the inanity of Vitale's color commentary, but it is important if you are to fully appreciate this epic comment by suspected MGoReader "snoop-a-loop":

University of Michigan Emergency Department
Date: 2013/02/05
Time: 19:01
Patient: Vitale, Dick 73M
Chief Complaint: "I WALKED INTO A PANE OF LAMINATED SAFETY GLASS! THAT THING WAS SOME OF THE HARDEST GLASS EVER! THERE MUST HAVE BEEN A MALFUNCTIONING SENSOR! COMPLETE REJECTION BABY!"

Option 2: I think he just recognized something and is like "hey that totally reminds me of…

."

I'm giving Max an epic basketball Hoke point for this photo essay that matches the iconic Fab Five pics to the 2012-'13 team doing the similar things. Judging by how long it took me to match the four above I figure this took quite a while longer than it looks. 100 more points to whoever can find a Game…Blouses from 20 years ago. Closest I can find so far:

.

Companion piece is GOLBOGM's well-written look at each of the main players (by position) on this year's team up through the Indiana game. He also put together a rundown of the remaining schedules among Big Ten contenders, though it needs an update after last night. Profile says this guy's only had an account for 11 weeks but I've seen him popping up with great comments in various threads, so keep an eye out for the guy with the Hoke RAWR '97 avatar:

LSAClassOf2000 wrapped up Basketball History Week with a comparison of the current team vs. all those since the last national championship squad. Before going on a charting binge he posted a direct statistical comparison of averages which I must front-page:

The mean of 1989+Fisher+Ellerbe+Amaker+Beilein-to-2012 is not a stat (I'm building a new hoops database which I intend to break that up a bit better), but this is how we feel about the basketball team in a nutshell. Free throws and offensive rebounding are sore spots but on par with our typical teams. Where these guys differentiate themselves is they make their shots and win the board battles on defense. Defensive efficiency is down less than offensive efficiency has run off the charts, and the result is 1 more point for every four (total) possessions than we're used to.

I am highly unlikely to devour something unpleasant. These SEC schools with sudden and inexplicable five-star windfalls need to be stopped says AC1997; getting Ole Miss to pee in a cup is harder than it sounds, replies Zone Left. I co-sign the thing about how it's hard for anyone but a journalist with an agenda to uncover evidence—players don't rat, fellow students have no interest in Bartman'ing their own teams, and everybody at the program level has dirt on everybody else. I'll add it's even harder to get a laughably incompetent and profit-motivated NCAA to investigate without tripping over itself, or to sanction to a degree that it's any kind of deterrent.

In this regulatory environment Urban Meyer is technically right in calling out the rest of the conference for its miserly ways. "…I mean we're giving out cars and cash all over the country and you can't match a few grand to a five-star receiver in your backyard?"

Mathlete pointed out yesterday that it's just the top of Mississippi's class that's noticeably different from their historical hauls. I take it as more circumstantial evidence that something was fishy about the top guys, since a "Freeze is just a better recruiter" or "players think Ole Miss is on the up" explanation should have seen a more even distribution of success. There was no across-the-board greater interest in Ole Miss this year among 4-stars, which is the greatest indicator that a program is recruiting at a higher level. Rather they got the same 3-stars they always get, and to that added a ridiculous success rate among the elite of the elite. If this happened naturally I'll eat something unpleasant—let's make it the sleeve of an MGoShirt if no evidence emerges in the next four years because I'm not sure I want to bet the entire digestive tract on how poorly Ole Miss can cover their tracks a lemon because there's already a tag for that. I'm guessing what happened is like in Blue Chips, where Ole Miss decided to leap into a game they figured everybody else was playing, and got burned by Superman III- slash Office Space-level over-success.

Etc. Primer on Lacrosse opponents. Mock Rock videos—chatster points out that the native dance Sione Houma and the football team are doing is the Haka from New Zealand's Maori, but nobody knows where they got if form—perhaps Russell Crowe is hovering around the program again?

[Hit THE JUMP for the board stuff, and why I am suddenly a huge fan of Michigan's rowing team.]

Wallpaper by jonvalk

Multiple well-researched recruiting retrospectives, everything you need to know about being Number 1, and so many memes explained. Buckle in sports fans because this was a week for user comment worthy of being ranked over Kansas. But first, the thing where I give money to i give money to yooooooouuueeee:

IN WHICH VOGRICH AIN'T SO POOR. You have until 11 a.m. tomorrow to register your fantasy team in our Saturday free pool. Winner gets $100, and there's another $200 split among the 2nd through 15th placers. Details are in the Diary. Really it's just you pick eight guys under a salary cap and see who can get the most rebounds, assists, and points. Wings get called guards, which I find appropriate and kind of interesting in a Beilein has changed the game kind of way. This time I tried rolling with a tempo formula and ended up with both parts of the Cody Zeller-Mitch McGary matchup.

Some of the valuations are weird, for example McGary is $7, 476 while…

Did I just put that there because MGoBlog is obsessed with boxscore bagels? Maybe.

IN WHICH WE BELIEVE EYEBALLING IS BETTER THAN MATH. On Tuesday Brian told Big Ten Geeks that if their metrics were coming up "Jordan Morgan is the Big Ten's best defender," the metric is probably wrong. Most people would see a battle of internet sports nerds of this magnitude and just nod on the sideline, but the brave Blue_MQT dove right into that, putting four countable defensive factors (field goal %, turnovers, rebounding and free-throw rate) against defensive efficiency to see which correlate the best. Then he shows pictures to demonstrate the stuff good defense is really made of, and why it doesn't appear in statistics. A million ugly Big Ten forwards with weird names agree.

IN WHICH BRAYLON GIVES OUR RANKING A SCHOLARSHIP. Every time Yeoman does something that takes a lot of work and ends up being super valuable to our interests, the author of this column must decide whether or not to deploy the obvious double-entendre. This week's impressive solo-farming effort yielded the tournament fates of the last 30 top-ranked teams in January. I make pie:

Now keep telling yourself this. Relatedly: LSAClassof2000 charts AP votes for Michigan this year, creates a chart that seems to suggest there's a ranking zero. Blazefire imagines a 2013-'14 without Burke, Hardaway and GRIII; how about we lose only Vogrich, Akune, Bartelstein, McLimans, and Person and repeat as National Champs, did you think about that?? [me choking Blazefire.gif]. No, no, the chart, remember the chart. Anyone else's arm getting tired?

[After the Jump: the final word on the difference between a 4- and 5-star running back. And many memes explained.]

A ho-hum home win versus Purdue doesn't quite register on the official Muppet meter, even if the No. 1 team lost on Wednesday and we're the No. 2. And we can't all be celebratin' an ultimately meaningless ranking that hasn't been posted yet. So I propose a compromise:

Finding a marquee road win on its dwindling schedule was imperative for Purdue's fading tournament hopes, and for much of last night you could tell the Boilermakers were stiffing it. Then Glenn dropped the family stone…

Soundtrack | Ace

Two epic gif dunks in two weeks and we've got ourselves a new Robinson to love. A top ranking may be academic from here with Duke falling to Miami, but just in case you don't trust the coaches to do right, Mmmm Hmmm has tracked the poll movement among B1G title contenders this season. He did the same with football earlier this week, and giving him the Diarist of the Week honors for it so he doesn't have to ask the mods to bump things anymore.

LSAClassof2000 has his own metric for comparing the top teams in the conference based whether you're above or below average on 18 stats he can pull from box scores. When he's done it looks thus (click embiggemates):

The things we're below average in are the usual things; the lack of an elite defender has Michigan last in the conference in blocks with only Penn State, Nebraska, and--oh okay--Indiana in the neighborhood. For what it's worth THE_KNOWLEDGE says we'll play Ohio State in the Big Ten tourney.

A Michigan Man will coach the 49'ers. Brian on Wednesday bumped the diary by stephenrjking pleading for people to forgive Harbaugh his academic comments in '07 because, like, we're blood. I'm whatever; the thing I don't like is when people say they're mad at Harbaugh because he was "disloyal." If there's something that makes Michigan different it's not that we stand by each other, in fact I can't think of any other family among major college programs that's as ready to criticize itself (we're still biased). We're not the school with a "Sacred Brotherhood" that you violate by complying with NCAA investigators and tell the truth.

Jim's crimes were the same as Snyder/Rosenberg's—being mostly inaccurate in his criticism, and being motivated by spite and personal gain—although to a far smaller degree. Harbaugh doesn't care about your grudge anymore than he cares that he currently employs four (Boone, Whitner, Grant and Ginn) Buckeyes who could be exempli gratias for how little our rivals care about educating players to do something besides football or work at a car dealership. He said the thing because he was competing for the same kids attracted by Michigan's academic/athletic combo pitch while being hamstrung by Northwestern-level requirements we don't meet.

If there's an exceptionalism to Michigan—the school and the sports—it's a focus on being exceptional over whether we appear to be so. That's what distinguished Bo from Paterno, it's what distinguished Carr from Tressel, and it's what made Hoke a great choice for Michigan's head coach in 2011.

Rutgers and Maryland Explained? Using a database published by USA Today, woomba found valuations for the pieces the Big Ten recently plucked in the current media environment by manually adding "Rights/Licensing" to "Other". Maryland ($22 million) was still just No. 6 among Big East and ACC teams in this metric, and Rutgers ($14.5 million) was 12th. For reference, Nebraska was at $35.8 million the year before they joined the Big Ten.

Things of interest not related to killing the conference to gamble on an outdated TV model: Michigan leads the nation in licensing but our "Other" is a relatively pedestrian $6 million (Ohio State's was a ludicrous $20.6 million last year but other schools at the top were all around $10 to $11 million). I'm almost sure this difference is in-stadium advertising but don't tell Brandon (I'm sure he already knows and that this grates him endlessly). The football ticket shakedown and replacing the coach raised contributions from $12 million in 2010 to almost $28 million last year. Ohio State's contributions dropped by almost $10 million after Tatgate.

Best of the Board

WELCOME TO THE NEW AGE?

A 2012 highlights/2013 hype video by MGomaha. All of the highlights and none of the "crap" Brady. If all of these are so good it'll be a pleasant offseason. Still nowhere close to a Better Son or Daughter or the Weapon of Choice/Dilithium spring reels.

STARS DON'T MEAN YOU'LL PLAY IN THE SUPERBOWL…

They just wink very suggestively. Discussion on Hinton's Superbowl starters by recruiting stars article linked. One thing I noticed was that most of the guys he listed as "N/A" because they were before the Rivals database were major, major recruits. Frank Gore, Randy Moss, Ray Lewis, Ed Reed, Anguan Boldin, Terrell Suggs and Bryant McKinnie were all among the top 10 high school players in their years (Moss and Boldin of all time). Carlos Rogers and Justin Smith were Superprep All-Americans, which is the equivalent of being a Top-50 player. Jonathan Goodwin you could call a 3- or 4-star; he had all the offers but went to a MAC school so he could play right away.

If you call the other "N/A" guys unranked you end up with a Superbowl roster made up of roughly a quarter each of five-stars, four-stars, three-stars, and lower. Some readers saw that and came away with "See it doesn't matter what you're ranked out of high school because half of the guys in the Superbowl weren't blue chips." This is because these readers don't know how math works.

Rivals this year lists 34 players who are 5 stars, and had 250 players get 4 stars or higher, and gave at least 3 stars to 1,650. That's out of 8,171 high school players profiled. So let's compare percents shall we?

If stars didn't matter these two columns ought to be apportioned the same. Yes it's too small a sample size to scream correlation, but that's a very suggestive wink.

Your Moment of Zen:

Sorry dad.

Via mgovideo - Apparently he and I share an internal playlist.

EDIT: The title of this article was changed after posting because apparently it was causing Creed-related seizures. Please note that the title to the Sly & The Family Stone song where they say "Boom Shakalaka" is "I Want to Take You Higher." There is no reason to have any other song come to your head when you hear those words.

A sixth year senior? Fake! David Jones|Star Tribune

What is existence, really? If a person who was never born dies, but you believed they had been alive, is not the mourning real? Who among us has never felt sad for the death of a fictional person—okay put your hands down Millenials who cried about Dumbledore. You too people who fell for the character of George O’Leary in George O’Leary’s Resume. I mean just a few years ago there was that legend of the basketball player who would appear every year on a different team until his knees…

Okay so I’m being told that Trevor Mbakwe actually exists. Apparently I have not only seen him play basketball as recently as 12 hours ago, but many other independent sources have all confirmed that Mbakwe still has some eligibility left despite the fact that Manti Te’o’s fake girlfriend was in fake middle school when this dude was hawking rebounds for Marquette. How this is possible I'm not sure but one reader in the game thread suggested it might be because they're putting his brain in the stomach of an exosuit:

"Mbakwe looks like Krang from Ninja Turtles. –Dubs

Okay I kinda see it. Also not a myth: Mbakwe is the only member of Minnesota’s starting five who’s not averaging 10 ppg, via the quick preview by robbyt003. LATE BREAKING: the rest of the schedule previewed by mistersuits.

We saw last night just how non-mythological this Michigan squad really is, doing to the Gophers in their building what a million KP100 teams couldn't (the Duke loss was at a neutral site). Before the last 5 minutes turned into Foul Fest '13, Michigan was shooting 58 percent, and not the "they're just going in" kind of 58 percent (like Stauskus couldn't make a 3 for awhile) but the Mr. Hardaway is sick of hearing about how athletic their forwards are kind. Highlights:

"Center the ball! Center the ball! Center the ball!" –Dickie V

Hypothetical Wolverines of the 21st Century: Now that the 2013 class has progressed to the point that M is actively turning away offensive linemen (this is true!) we’re starting to get the comprehensive 2014 lists. Allin4Blue kindly collated the bigger Michigan targets. To recap, Michigan has commitments from LB Michael Ferns and OT Denzel Ward, and is the presumed leader for a handful of other dudes. Long way to go before signing day. The 2014 Recruiting List (originally published in June) is now updated.

Hypothetical Meaning of Football-Related Activities: Ever since he took my suggestion of adding lolcats to his posts, LSAClassof2000 has been getting progressively more interesting. This time he compared the top teams to their performance in top general stats (offense link, defense link) to see which are greater indicators of a team’s likelihood to succeed. Being good defensively seemed to be a slightly better predictor than being good on offense. Otherwise stat values by category:

• Very valuable: Yards per play, Total TDs
• Somewhat valuable: Total yards, yards per game
• Only a little valuable: Number of plays

Takeaway: the object of offense is to score. Don’t let anybody tell you different.

MGOBLUE

Hypothetical Fourth Major Sport: There was a time in 2006 when baseball got really good and people cared. Becoming nationally relevant again is not likely to happen until either a.) NCAA tells the southern teams they can’t keep starting the season in mid-winter, or b.) global warming makes that irrelevant for every state but Alaska. Or perhaps c.) Young coach who turned Vanderbilt into a power is hired, given massive budget and A++ facilities, and gets to go around offering Michigan degrees. Raoul wrote two baseball-centric diaries this week, one to bring you up to speed on Erik Bakich’s program, and a second on the in-state recruiting efforts, which I’ll warn you are like hockey/hoops in that kids commit right after potty training.

I’ll admit what usually gets me to a game a year is when there’s a future MLB’er on the roster so I can later say I saw him in college and sound like major baseball dude. Michigan’s not projected to be very good this summer spring late winter, but there are two speedy outfielders who could see The Show: junior Michael O’Neill who’s the better all around player, and returning captain Patrick Biondi (pictured above), who was a Tigers draft pick out of high school and steals everything in sight.

The Best of the Board

SENIOR BOWL PROGRAMMING GUIDE

All hail chatster for putting together a list of where the seniors we care about will be playing in the various senior bowls. He includes a lot of former opponents but here’s the former Wolverines:

• Last Week: Stonum played in the Casino Del Sol game.
• Tomorrow at 3 pm: All-Star Clasic: Roundtree (#89 in red)
• Tomorrow at 4 pm: East-West Shrine Bowl: Campbell (#73 for West)
• Tomorrow at 5 pm: NFLPA Collegiate Bowl: Mealer (#76 for National team) will play tackle. Also appearing: McGuffie.
• January 26 at 4 pm: Senior Bowl: Denard playing receiver for North.
• February 2 at 2:30 pm: Texas vs. the Nation: Kovacs is playing for Nation.

Siri, remind me at 3:55 pm on January 26th that it’s my last chance to see Denard in a winged helmet.

WHAT KIND OF OFFENSE NOW GUYS?

This question from Hail-Storm will be answered in depth in the coming months (hopefully in super detail in HTTV—maybe Chris Brown will step up to that one?). Basically he’s asking what kind of offense would best suit a team that has a few short but good receivers, questionable running backs of varied talents, a very young interior line, very good offensive tackles, and Devin Gardner at quarterback.

This is a too-short answer but I’d say it’s obviously to live on the edges. Find a guard among the kids who can pull really well and make the base play Toussaint or Gardner running outside, keeping the defense honest by running against their strength when they cheat to Lewan’s side. If it works the corners (who get edge duty) won’t be able to play man on Gallon and Dileo so much. If we can find a tight end who can block, sweeps. If not, there are things you can do with Funchess to keep the LBs from cheating outside. Actually it might not be so different from what Ohio State ran this year. Again, pass with max protect—Gardner can create, is liable to do insane stuff if you make him dodge more than one dude.

THE ROCK OF MY IMAGINATION

So BlueBarron got to shoot a Slippery Rock game earlier this year. When their scores come up at Michigan games I always imagine it as this clearing in the middle of the forest with a rocky little brook cutting through the back of one end zone. Which was actually kind of close. What I didn’t imagine is how similar they look to…you know, that one guy what’s his name…sorry hang on my little brother is jumping up and down with his hand up right now…dude stop I’m trying to think who this Division II team reminds me of.

ROUSING SALUTES TO EACH OTHER

Three threads hit this week for the people in the comments to make comments about people in the comments. In the first we all reminisced about the great posters of yore who are no longer with us. I arrived late but my blanket answer to most of the “where did _________ go he was hilarious!?” questions is “I finally got sick of his shit and caved him.” If it wasn’t that he’s probably writing for another site right now. Like remember how those dudes took some mention of the spread being “communist football” and made that a running theme? They had a blog. What happened to the dudes who wrote that blog? I don’t know. I still have Sharik’s cell from the one time I wrote a diary about safeties and he was like “you are wrong about everything—quick come meet me for a beer while I explain this to you!” which is among the most awesome experiences of my blogging career. I don’t know where he went off to. Others I miss: Meechigan Dan, MCalibur, Space Coyote.

Thread the second was for your favorite posters among the dudes still here. It pretty much devolved into a posbang thread, if one of the more epic of that persuasion.

Thread the third lets you call a press conference and announce something. Already used this week: I have a fake dead girlfriend; I am an athlete and I admit to doping/steroids/HGH; I am a famous person and I love this other person whom I lived with for 20 years and raised some kids with; and two Spartans beat up some dude for no reason.

WHAT IS ACTUALLY A CHARGE?

The thinly disguised post-OSU ref bitching thread yielded an interesting conversation between Tom from AA and Ghost of Yost on the proper calling of blocking fouls and why a defender with a sliding foot who makes contact can still draw the charge. Yes I just linked to something people moderated as “trolling” – sadly this still happens to the guy taking the position that doesn’t side with Michigan, even though I think in this instance Tom from AA is right.

OBLIGATORY TE’O THREADS

Glimmers of the Pattern. Open thread yesterday. Press conference react. He kept talking about her. Sadly none of it explains why he seems to become a non-factor when linemen get the luxury of meeting him downfield (see: Alabama, Michigan in 2010), and yet he kills everything otherwise (see: Michigan in 2012).

Your Moment of Zen:

MGoVideo

Before I forget, go draft your FreeRoll team for tomorrow—if you finish in the top 12 you get legal tender, and you don't have to give up any legal tender for it. If enough people don't sign up we don't get to keep doing these.

Anyhoo,

Okay so maybe I'm still a bit shaken from encountering a real life Tyrannosaur …

gamecocksonline

…who's not even allowed to enter the draft, but the thought of Lewan leaving for the NFL felt like being stuck in the middle of Jurassic Park with nobody but your 8-year-old brother for protection.

"That's not what I'm gonna do." –Taylor Lewan

So yes I saw new starters at 4 of 5 OL positions and turned into a hyperventilating girl—like you didn't! Thank Denard for Dr. Grant. I have no idea why he thinks a stereoscopic scavenger with an occipital lobe 8 times the size of its cognitive center who's related to visually acute crocodiles and birds would have movement-based vision (maybe it's the frog DNA?) but if I'm gonna walk the length of an island of angry therapods I'm very happy to have this man along one more time. That sentiment was passed on personally by justingoblue and megangoblue, at Crisler. Pretty pictures with the cool story bro&sis but guys I'm feeling really warm and fuzzy inside.

How warm and fuzzy? 1.64 degrees centigrade fuzzy. That's the heat generated by the burning of calories in running 4,495 yards according the post-drunk maths of Blazefire. Here's another way to visualize it:

In case you were wondering, yes West Virginia fans are going to boycott everything because Denard used handoffs for the final stretch. LSAClassOf2000 added some perspective on the Denardian career by the percentage of Michigan's total offense he accounted for. Roughly, from the time he was a freshman, half of Michigan's yards were his.

In other things you ought to read, Ron Utah did a comparison of the 2011 and 2012 seasons, concluding the Denard arm was a big deal. Here's some of the things I pulled from that:

Surprisingly Michigan improved on 2011's unprecedented ownership of 4th down, converting 69% of our 13 attempts (up from 59% in '11), and holding opponents to 43% (not far off the 38% of last year).

Etc. I forgot to front-page Mathlete this week; amazingly there were two plays that swung the game more than Tyrannosaurus Clowney making a goat disappear. Combining the sagarin and UPI rankings makes Michigan the top football-basketball combo school in the nation (Florida, Notre Dame and Louisville come after). I'm guessing Ohio State doesn't count for that. The Blockhams was great this week, though the text still needs to be way more succinct—not that I of all people can really talk.

[Lewan photoshopping and really smart raptors, after the jump]

Don't listen to anyone in the Netherlands who says otherwise: "Dennis Bergkamp neemt de bal aan" is Dutch for "Denard Robinson picks up a block!"

Between the WMU run and this week's bitterly unsatisfying conclusion we coined and created new uses for words like "Shoelace", and "Dilithium", and "ERMAGHERD", and "Eating" and "Robinson to Roundtree." Every sharp cut and rocket acceleration by his gangly, graceful legs created another moment pregnant with so much meaning you could utter gibberish about it in another language and the guy next to you would understand exactly what you're trying to say.

DENNIS BERGKAMP!

Think back on the Michigan you knew the moment before the camera first panned to 'Lace's shoes. Think how utterly un-Michigan it all looked: a Floridian freshman who couldn't throw the ball stepping into a role occupied by artillery pieces and disciplined option men since as far back as any reader of this site can remember, dropping the snap, wandering over toward the sideline, then hyperdriving through a field full of men bigger than he is. It used to be other teams' little jet mites doing that to our colossuses.* It was too astounding to be repeatable. How are we to crush souls if every few plays this sprite is jetting off to the end zone, then smiling at everybody? Doesn't he realize scoring touchdowns is just giving the other team more time of possession?

Here at the end we're all not sure what it is we just saw. The thing that turned some practice observers in 2010 into raving lunatics on these boards never stopped being a source of some sort of controversy, from spreadvocates who'd rather Borges run an offense he doesn't know than see him waste such a talent, to insufferable puritans who called him a running back.

To those last to whom circumstances and mankind's ill-planned brachial nervous system ultimately gave them their wish, I give you 100-ish yards on 23 carries, and a ho, and a hum, and a little secret…gonna have to lean closer…a bit closer…I need to whisper…DENNIS BERGKAMP! DENNIS BERGKAMP! DENNIS BERGKAMP! AAAAAAAHHHHH!

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

*If I'd said "it used to be other teams' Vins doing that to our army of Koloss" would anyone have gotten the reference?

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

CHRISTMAS IS STILL RELEVANT. Enough so at least that there remains much to be gained in mistersuits's X-mas Eve basketball roundup, which does things like compare this team to last's, and compare this team to the Fab Five, and publishes the schedule reorganized by expected KenPom difficulty, and lots of analysis and good formatting and stuff. I was out on holiday (and watching SEC football) and missed the chance to bump it—even now it's front page material by a good margin, just a little bit outdated. The diary describes an SEC-like gauntlet of Top 15-ish teams that Michigan and Indiana will both have to navigate.

FILE UNDER NO FRIKKIN WAY: TSS has found an NCAA rushing stat that Michigan leads the country in. Seriously. He calls the statistic "open field rushing yards" and it tracks how many yards you got on top of every rush of 10 positive or more yards. Indeed when Michigan managed to get the ballcarrier into the secondary this year, more often than not he'd be going full DENNIS BERGKAMP! Or losing a shoe. Minnesota was second-to-last.

Actually that stat is just a byproduct of his real effort, which removes the Bergkamping after 5 and 10 yards and gives credit for the first bits back to the O-lines. Relevant results cropped:

Note Michigan's the huge outlier in "AOFY" which is "adjusted open field yards" to the OP, yet still hanging at the bottom of the conference with "AALY" which is basically how many yards per play the offensive line might take credit for. Of course they're also hindered by RBs missing cuts or being too small to carry momentum through a linebacker. Yeoman's work here, with scatterplots and a lot more than the above. Diary of the Week(s). Read it.

[The Jump: lots more diaries, and stuff, and stuff, and by now you should realize I always leave something nice for my clickers-through.]