demar dorsey admissions fiasco

Falk never stops. Falk.

Never stops.

I'd look suspicious, too, kid. Via the SI vault, Desmond Howard dealing with the world's least enthusiastic autograph-seeker:

"Why don't you get out of that bucket of ice," I says, and he says "because you're wearing a Bulls jersey, a Phillies hat, and asking me to sign a Jaguars pennant. Also because I'm in crippling pain."

Score-o. Thanks to the largess of some guy who sold his company to Shell for just under five billion-with-a-b dollars, Penn State's perennial powerhouse club hockey team appears on the verge of moving on up to the big time:

Rumors and speculation have existed for more than a decade, but it finally appears Penn State is on the verge of building a new ice hockey arena near the Bryce Jordan Center and adding Division I men’s and women’s hockey programs.

“We’re close,” a source close to the situation told the Mirror on Thursday. “It won’t be long before we’ll be able to potentially make some kind of announcement. But it’s not a done deal yet.”

Close means within two months. Score. Penn State adding hockey would be the biggest positive development in college hockey since… uh… the shuttering of Division II gave D-I enough teams to expand the tournament to sixteen teams? I guess. If you even see that as a positive.

The existence of the Nittany Lions would bring Big Ten hockey into play—you need six teams to have an official Big Ten league—but extracting Minnesota and Wisconsin from their rich history in the WCHA is problematic. (No offense to the teams in the CCHA but I assume M, MSU, and OSU would leave in a hot second.)

There is the possibility that ripping flagship teams out of the CCHA and WCHA would see several weaker schools in those leagues fold, but it doesn't seem like a strong one. A WCHA anchored by North Dakota, Denver, and Colorado College is still a powerhouse full of good games. A few CCHA schools might be on shakier ground but the emergence of Notre Dame and Miami as powers with shiny new rinks would give the smaller conference a couple of anchors. Also, even if Big Ten teams play each other four times each they'll still have 12-14 nonconference dates to fill and will be able to keep up local rivalries.

Negotiating all that will take time; as it stands Penn State will be a member of the CCHA as soon as it fields a team. I'm betting the powers that be in the league had been informed that Penn State was laying groundwork when they rejected Huntsville's application.

(HT: Slow States. If you miss BSD's content from Kevin HD and RUTS, that's where they've relocated.)

Except with more Coastal Carolina. Slow States—which I don't think I'll be abbreviating, thanks, why don't you just name your blog Not Another Zimmerman Impersonator*—also looks at what a Penn State schedule might look like after the Big Ten goes to nine conference games by pretending ND is part of the Big Ten and looking at Michigan's schedules during the 12-game era. BCS opponents are bolded:

2002 – Washington (return trip), W. Michigan, ND, Utah
2003 – C. Michigan, Houston, ND, @Oregon (H-H)
2004 – Miami OH, ND, SDSU (11 games)
2005 – N. Ill, ND, E. Michigan (11 games)
2006 – Vandy, C. Michigan, ND, Ball State
2007 – [The Horror], Oregon (H-H), ND, E. Michigan
2008 – Utah, Miami OH, ND, Toledo
2009 – W. Michigan, ND, E. Michigan, Delaware State
2010 – UConn (H-H), ND, UMass, Bowling Green

Vandy isn't much but a couple of games against Utah were against vaguely(2002) to extremely(2008) BCS-caliber opposition

The assumption is that the best looking out of conference game gets the bump and Penn State's OOC schedule is going to look pretty sad. Thoughts related to this:

• Penn State's OOC schedule is already pretty sad.
• Michigan won't be able to dump ND and replace it with a tomato can without sparking a riot, so at least in their case they'll be upping the minimum number of BCS games they play over a span like this by four or five. Similarly, MSU and Purdue can't get away with three tomato cans, Ohio State is going to play at least one legit OOC opponent yearly, Illinois will likely continue its series with Missouri, and Minnesota will cast about looking for ways to fill Not The Metrodome. Indiana won't be able to replicate this year's mockery of college football.
• The net result will be more competitive games…
• …and probably fewer competitive games between conferences…
• …which is worth it if I don't have to sit through three MAC/I-AA games a year…
• …but Penn State fans will.

Solution: man up. Or have the legislature threaten terrible things unless you play Pitt every year like you goddamn well should.

*(Which is actually a great blog name for a technically-inclined fellow. Except for the acronym.)

Optimism is a disease. The readership of this here blog has predicted an 8-4 regular season according to the recent survey conducted by MGoUser "tpilews", with 84% predicting a win over UConn, 71% predicting one over Notre Dame, and so forth and so on. Despite being a home game, Wisconsin was declared the most terrifying opponent at 14%; other hypothetical losses come against Ohio State (31%), Iowa (35%), and Penn State (49%—a margin one vote VOTE OR DIE). As these things always are, it's too optimistic but that's life in August.

Divisions. None of this means anything, but:

• Joe Schad says the Big Ten will split into divisions with PSU and OSU on one side and Michigan and Nebraska on the other with a guaranteed M-OSU game, which is absolutely the worst-case scenario for M assuming the rest of that division is the Iowa/Minnesota/Wisconsin triumvirate of hate and Michigan State: Michigan is the only team in the league with guaranteed games against four of the six powers. Woo.
• Teddy Greenstein, who I'll remind you works for a newspaper in Chicago and is therefore about as accurate as the Bleacher Report (the latest crack reporting is random anonymous sourcing that Kentucky's top recruit took 200k), suggests they'll go straight geography.

Dorsey difficulty. Premium article, but the bit that's relevant($) is small:

What about Demar Dorsey and Jordan Campbell? Louisville officials gave no formal update on either player, though InsideTheVille.com confirmed that Dorsey is not on campus yet.

If Louisville is having a hard time getting him through, all conspiracy theories about admissions doing anything other than what they had do can go out the window. RR should never have gone after Dorsey; hopefully Michigan's pursuit of him didn't cost them Tony Grimes or Sean Parker.

Etc.: Via the MB, UConn has lost linebacker/DE Greg Lloyd for the season. Lloyd was UConn's second-leading tackler last year and possibly their best defensive player. If you don't know this already, the Big Ten Championship Game will be played in Indianapolis, as was ordained by geography.

No Kinard. This has been in the wind for a couple weeks now, but it is now official:

Jeff Whittaker, the coach at Youngstown (Ohio) Liberty, said Sunday that linebacker Antonio Kinard is weighing three options for this fall, playing football at prep schools Fork Union or Hargrave military academies, or signing with a junior college in Kansas.

"He’s looking at it like it’ll be his redshirt year," Whittaker said. "It just won’t be at the university and then he’ll be able to get it in order and finish this test and get back on track coming up."

Kinard still wants to come to Michigan and will attempt to do so after a prep year. If he goes to a JUCO, he's probably out, but Michigan's taken military academy kids before, with Chris Perry the most prominent. Demar Dorsey, meanwhile, has frustratingly signed with Louisville and will be on a college campus this fall.

For what it's worth, this does leave Michigan with a couple of open scholarships if they want to get in on any USC players who might like to transfer. Rodriguez didn't make it seem likely, though:

“You got to have scholarships first to give out, and there’s got to be mutual interest and all that,” Rodriguez said. “So we’ve been concentrating on our guys. And guys that have been on campus and taking summer classes and the freshmen that we expect to come on the 26th, that’s had most of our attention.”

With USC's appeal likely to delay their penalties to the 2011 season, seniors will get their bowl game. Juniors will be told that the NCAA will repent, repeal everything, and give USC ice cream, and will buy this for reasons unknown.

The read option. Having gotten sick of the poor quality, I haven't bought NCAA in a few years now.  But after Madden's sales collapsed, EA switched focus from awful new features that add nothing but sound impressive in the gaming press to an effort to actually make a playable, realistic football game. Result: increase in sales.

I'm probably not going to get it this year, either, but this actually looks sort of like a read option:

Sure, the middle linebacker took off for the other side of the field, but the blocking on the line actually looks extant and readable, which is more progress in a few months than the series has made during its entire time on this generation's consoles. They've added a lot of RR's offense to this edition and it might actually work. I follow a couple blogs that look at EA games with a jaundiced eye; if they say it's worth getting I might take the plunge.

Budget stuff. The University has submitted its annual budget to the Regents. While we'll have to wait for a real journalist to FOIA the exact details, the overall picture is unsurprising for anyone not on the "Save the Big House" organizing committee:

Total revenues for FY 2011 are budgeted to be $105.0 million and total operating expenses are budgeted at $100.3 million. The athletic department is a self-supporting unit that does not receive financial support from the University's General Fund.

With the revenues derived from the Michigan Stadium expansion, the U-M Athletic Department will realize an additional $11.0 million, taking revenues over the $100 million mark for the first time. …

"The athletic department projects a $16.1 million operating surplus for the fiscal year ending June 30, 2010, and will start fiscal year 2011 with $35 million of unrestricted operating reserves," said U-M Athletic Department Chief Financial Officer Jason Winters.

Successful businessman with extensive capital and under-utilized resource creates bonus revenue. News… this is not news. Cat videos at 11.

Meanwhile, this enormous pile of money may have actual payoffs for the people providing it:

“We’re looking at some updates and enhancements to Yost ­- bleachers, the concession areas, the circulation space, lighting,” Brandon said. “And we’re looking at some real interesting things as it relates to the scoreboard and technology in all of our venues, including the football stadium.

“We’re in a situation where one of the things we have to attend to at some point in the future would be update the technology because there’s HD technology, bigger screens and higher resolution that our fans would really enjoy.”

Though Munn Ice Arena is a sterile environment easily raided, they do have a sweet replay board. Yost has no capability outside of cartoonish GO FIGHT WIN screens.

Penn State hockey? This seems like your usual off-the-cuff mental doodling from a newspaper columnist who just likes sayin' stuff, but this is more evidence that a Big Ten team might add hockey than has ever existed before:

There's a rumor afoot I cannot yet confirm that Penn State is looking into retrofitting the Bryce Jordan Center for hockey. I left a message for Tim Curley on Wednesday but heard nothing back. I've been told by PSU sources it would easily be an 8-figure undertaking, involving the dismantlement of the arena floor, demolition of some seats and the installation of a cooling system for the ice. That's a lot of coin.

Apparently there's a Penn State alum who just sold some acreage to Shell for a ridiculous amount of money who "has been a youth hockey coach." So this is definitely happening and is not something that Penn State's AD will privately laugh at.

Is this… fluff? Angelique Chengelis dropped an article a few days ago that is your typical slice of profile fluff wherein someone who is involved with sports does something nice for someone else. The only surprise is who got the treatment:

On April 16, a Friday and a day before Michigan's spring football game, the team's final practice before August camp, Michigan coach Rich Rodriguez and his wife, Rita, were at Mott Children's Hospital visiting sick children, as they often do. Michigan offensive linemen Perry Dorrestein and John Ferrara also were there that day.

Rodriguez was running late for practice, as he walked through the hallway of the pediatric intensive care unit.

Dave Page was wheeling his wife to their baby's room to say goodbye. David III was dying, his organs failing, and it was only a matter of hours before he would lose his battle.

Page passed Rodriguez, who was in the middle of a conversation, in the hallway of the intensive care unit.

"All I could think to say was, 'Go, Blue' because I had my mind on other things," Page said. "And (Rodriguez) stopped, had a big ol' smile and said, 'Go, Blue.' "

It goes on from there in a fashion that's only unusual in that it's typical of these sorts of articles. Even the arrogant and unpleasant Charlie Weis got regular praise for his charity dedicated to autistic kids. (His daughter is affected.) When people end up having a lot of money they try to do nice things for other people who are less fortunate. It's not a surprise, or at least shouldn't be without two years of relentlessly negative media coverage that painted Rodriguez as a demon hick with the temerity to attempt to negotiate a buyout down.

Etc.: Hammer and Rails previews a common opponent: Notre Dame. The hockey schedule is out. MGoUser willywill9 has a conversation with a former WVU player in which Rodriguez is described as the "best coach in the country," something that happens about every three months: former WVU player flags down a guy wearing Michigan gear and praises Rodriguez apropos of nothing.

Signed stuff by the bucket. Note for memorabilia-seekers: The From The Heart charity auction is up and going and has a ton of stuff for the man with an empty basement. As per usual, proceed go to charity.

this guy. 

Bombed, but not enough. USC has gotten a severe punishment, with two-year bowl ban and serious scholarship penalties. Woo! Question, though: how does the basketball program get off with nothing more than the self-imposed penalties they've already taken when the USC compliance department explicitly told Tim Floyd to drop OJ Mayo because there was a 100% chance he was on the take. I think they got the football punishments about right—they should have voided all of USCs LOIs and dumped transfer restrictions for the duration of the probation—but their basketball program should have gotten the same treatment.

And then… man. As MGoShoe points out, the current athletic director actually said this:

“As I read the decision by the NCAA, all I could get out of all of this was … I read between the lines and there was nothing but a lot of envy, and they wish they all were Trojans,” Garrett said to cheers Thursday night at the San Francisco Airport Marriott.

Comparing and contrasting USC's response with Michigan's is too obvious to even undertake. The NCAA should retroactively give them the death penalty, and then do it again. How much do you think it would cost to hire a private investigator to go after USC full-time? Surely there are enough people in the country willing to chip in that we could get this done for five bucks each, right?

And don't get me started on women's tennis.

UPDATE: It is officially open season on USC juniors and seniors:

Juniors and seniors to-be on the USC Trojans' football team, hit with a two-year postseason ban among other punishments, will be allowed to transfer to other FBS programs without having to sit out a season, the NCAA clarified to ESPN on Friday.

"The second school would have to submit a waiver asking to waive the year in residence, but NCAA rules allow for this waiver to be granted if a student-athlete's first school has a postseason ban in their sport," NCAA spokeswoman Stacey Osburn said in an e-mail to ESPN's Joe Schad.

A glance at the roster reveals that four of USC's top five corners are eligible to GTFO. I'm not sayin', I'm just sayin'. We are down one corner, after all.

Izzout? After Tom Izzo spent 9.5 hours in Cleveland yesterday—far more time than anyone who is not Serious About Cleveland would spend—the tenor of the Izzo chatter in East Lansing is trending towards grim resignation. Jim Comparoni, the nut who runs Michigan State's Rivals site and in my experience has never once said anything remotely negative about anything related to State, says it is a "very bad sign" that Izzo's scheduled golf appearance has been canceled and that football coaches say it "doesn't look good." There may be a 4PM press conference coming up today. There may not.

At The Only Colors they're simultaneously convincing themselves that Izzo's statement is not bad news and evaluating the coaching tree for possible replacements. Insert your preferred Kubler-Ross interpretation here.

Don the tinfoil hats. If Dave Brandon is willing to bluntly state that he had nothing to do with Dorsey's failure to be admitted, I believe him:

"This is a decision that is owned by the admissions department, our admissions office," Brandon said. "It's always been owned by the admissions office. It is not unusual for a letter of intent to be signed with a prospective student-athlete where there's far more that needs to be done for the student-athlete to be admitted. It involves course work, it involves test scores, and a variety of criteria some of which is fact-based and where and how they went about improving their test scores."

You'd have to be foolhardy to make such a statement in a FOIA-laden environment, and Brandon doesn't seem foolhardy. As discussed yesterday, this had everything to do with grades.

Expansion-o-rama again. The to-date accurate Chip Brown has declared the interest level between Texas and A&M to be "NONE!!!!!!" which doesn't make a ton of sense given the very real benefits available to Texas and A&M if they were to join the CIC—financial benefits that dwarf the amount of money athletics makes, causing the Big Ten partisans in the expansion game to declare him a useful stooge for athletic directors wishing to get a message out, which kind of does make sense.

Meanwhile a report that OU is headed to the SEC has been quickly and widely repudiated. I guess we'll find out.

World Cup linkage. One: GOLAZO! More footie strategy at Zonal Marking, which has tackled the US side "good, but need tactical tweaks" the Slovenians, a typical hardworking, honest, boring 4-4-2, and the Algerians, who were mainly 3-5-2  but are apparently going 4-4-2 for the WC, possibly because of a run of poor recent results. The Algerian goaltender is described as "very, very dodgy," something that takes doing at the African Cup of Nations.

Ace from the Wolverine Blog has some gory details up about Demar Dorsey's transcripts and how they turned into his current GPA. I won't get into the exact numbers if only because I have the strong sense that doing that is a one of the few things you can actually do on a sports blog that could actually get you sued, but suffice it to say the reparations job done by LifeSkills is beyond the realm of the plausible.

I can confirm from a couple independent sources the broad outline of what Ace describes: Dorsey's application remains incomplete. As of the beginning of his senior year his path to qualification was so grim that making it automatically raises red flags about the validity of the new grades. Not that anyone was caught cheating, just that the alternative curriculum must necessarily have been less than rigorous, and the amount of improvement raises eyebrows when it's accomplished in a potentially unsupervised environment outside of a traditional high school. The facts in the post are, to my knowledge, accurate.

The decision not to admit him had nothing to do with tinfoil hat theories and everything to do with the fact that he shouldn't have been offered in the first place. In the parlance of an earlier post…

There are two ways to be qualified. One is to be qualified. The other is to be Michael Oher or Derrick Rose, in which case you are "qualified" via a string of correspondence classes and/or a sketchy test score. Michigan takes qualified guys, but when scare quotes get involved Michigan tends to go the other way. Ask new Bearcat Adrian Witty. Is Dorsey qualified or "qualified"? We don't know until he enrolls somewhere, whether it's Michigan or Florida State or a JUCO. Available evidence suggests the latter, in which case it's better if Michigan doesn't enroll him.

…Dorsey is "qualified." Michigan basically can't take him in good faith because they can't expect he will be able to keep up with the work.

Admissions is not the problem here. They are just doing what they have always been doing, except now they're dealing with some kids that previous Michigan coaches would not have tried to recruit. I did imply that in the UV and maybe by not fully rewriting a couple of sentences in the alliterative Dorsey post, which originally took a much more OUTRAGED position before I edited it, and that was incorrect. The problem here lies in more Michigan-Rodriguez culture clash stuff that would be a minor annoyance if the team had, you know, won any games.

Provost note. Ace spends a section of his post debunking the idea that Rodriguez got a sign-off on offering Dorsey from the "provost" mentioned. I think there's been a miscommunication due to an awkward sentence. The original paragraph:

This situation is the Draper/Labadie/compliance dysfunction all over again, with miscommunication between Rodriguez—who went to bat for Dorsey with a provost before signing day and got a signoff on him—and admissions replacing the lack of communication between the football administration and compliance. It's a different sclerotic artery, but the root cause is the same.

This has been taken to imply that Rodriguez had gotten some sort of sign off from admissions; unfortunately I was trying to express the opposite. When Rodriguez was clearing Dorsey with part of the university—something that did indeed happen, though it might not have been a "provost"—it was about his checkered past and not his checkered transcript. It was the failure of both parties not to explore the kid's academic background sufficiently, or of Rodriguez not to understand that Michigan is not West Virginia in these matters*, that left Dorsey and Michigan in the position they are today, where Michigan looks stupid coming and going and Dorsey's left to find a new home in the middle of June. That is essentially identical to the CARA form fiasco.

Everything in that post remains accurate except for the aforementioned shot at admissions, which basically had no choice when it came to their decision. Michigan should not have offered Dorsey, what happened to him was unfair, and it's another symptom of an athletic department that needs to operationalize some processes stat.

But who do we blame? As per usual, many people can take the hit. Rodriguez is one. Without knowledge of what he's been told is kosher and what he's been told is not—and how strenuously—how much is a guy working from assumptions built up after ten years at Clemson and WVU and how much is pure stubbornness from a guy who should know better isn't clear. If there is someone on the staff who is supposed to be in contact with admissions and know which guys are borderline and which are no way—and I honestly don't know if there is one—then it falls on that person. If there isn't then there should be, and I expect that there will be.

Even if it is all Rodriguez's fault, I don't think this is a major issue if Dorsey isn't a critically needed recruit who created a media circus. He's just another Quinton Woods, albeit one that Michigan should have known better than to take.

*(No moral superiority implied.)

The view from admissions. There is virtually nothing that can convince me that not taking Demar Dorsey is a good idea as long as the university makes a good-faith effort to educate him once he arrives. What you do with the poor black kid after he shows up is what reflects the character of the institution. Admissions obviously feels differently, and the feeling that Michigan is about to embark on a Notre Dame-like wander in the wilderness only gets stronger today.

Our Helmets Have Wings, a recruiting-focused M blog, snagged an interview with a former admissions employee. Unless something has changed, this is purely about academics:

Q: Did the Admissions Office examine potential students who had legal troubles differently than other students?

A: Like all applicants, potential incoming athletes with legal troubles are required to disclose most types of possible run-ins with the law.  This is not only for the purposes of safety on campus, but also to help the university maintain its tradition of selecting students of a particular academic AND moral caliber for admission.  That being said, varsity athletes, ESPECIALLY potential scholarship recipients present special cases that are most definitely looked at differently than normal applicants, but in this realm and in regards to academics.  Again, the behavioral issues tend to fall to the discretion of the athletic department.  If they say the athlete is a good ship, or at least one that can be and will be during his time at UM, the admissions office will defer to that decision regarding said athletic applicant. I do not know, personally, of any decision that was contested by the admissions office when the athletic dept. approved.

If this is about "LifeSkills," the AD should have known about it since Dorsey enrolled there in October. I'm not entirely sure but I don't think that means he stopped going to Boyd Anderson; he probably did the LifeSkills curriculum in addition to his senior year classes at Boyd, using the alternative school credits to replace poor grades from his sophomore and junior years.

Given the nature of the problem here the university can stonewall any FOIA requests by referencing FERPA, a federal student privacy law. We will never know exactly what went down, but if Dorsey ends up at Tennessee or USC or another BCS school we'll have plain evidence that Michigan's is operating with a self-inflicted disadvantage, and negative recruiters will have a field day. There is literally no way the recruitment of a kid who never even enrolled at Michigan could have been more damaging. Now any happy ending to the media firestorm has to happen somewhere else. Thanks, admissions.

Bills update. Poster Raback Omaba reports that Jon Bills's surgery to repair broken vertebrae went well and the "prognosis for a full recovery remains high." He can move his extremities. Bills is obviously done with football, but hopefully he'll make a full recovery.

Hello: Nebraska? Multiple Big 12 ADs suggest Nebraska will be in the Big Ten by Friday. I would care a lot more about this if this Dorsey thing hadn't happened. At least their basketball team will suck.

Ethics follow-up. I posted a transcript of the tense interaction at the end of the ethics panel a couple days ago, and yesterday appeared on Dan Levy's On The DL podcast to elaborate on the opinion I'd shouted in the middle of everything. Again, totally meta, but something that's important.

World Cup content. If you're one of the many people who's been frustrated with the lack of a quality USMNT blog, I think you (and I) may have a new favorite place for the next month. It's Stars and Gripes, a just-launched Nats blog with an inclination towards strategy and a soccer version of Picture Pages:

Rooney makes his run, Johnson puts in a perfect ball, and Rooney puts in his second.

The constant switching from side to side often leaves the middle of the pitch exposed, where Lampard and Barry can move from the back and put themselves in dangerous spots just outside the box. 

Anyone willing to draw a big circle with an arrow on a still of the England-Andorra game is a champion. Read it all.

If you're the sort of soccer fan who doesn't know why everyone wants to drop Jonathan Bornstein out of the team plane (with a parachute; we're not monsters), War Blog Eagle has an excellent primer for you.

An actual number. Almost a month ago, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch deployed the FOIA to finally provide the real hard numbers on how much Big Ten schools are pulling in from TV. Somehow, no one noticed. Here's an attempt to do so. The numbers:

* Includes money from TV, bowl games, NCAA Tournament.

These are less extraordinary than the rapturous articles about Super Genius/Villain Jim Delany have claimed, but they still greatly outstrip everyone save the SEC, which they meaningfully outstrip. Meanwhile, the SEC is locked into an ESPN contract worth 12.5 million per team per year for 15 years and the Big Ten will see BTN revenue grow yearly.

Another note: SNL Kagan analyst Derek Baine says the BTN is getting 88 cents per subscriber in the footprint, which is about a dime short of what they were asking for and more than triple what the Comcast guy told me they valued the BTN at during the year-long standoff between the two. Cable companies did not win.

(Apologies to whoever linked this; unfortunately I've lost it. If you think it's you ask me for a HT.)

Mmmm. Wavery. Michigan's 2011 class is a bit thin so far, with just two forwards coming in in a year when Michigan willl require at least another player at F, D, and G. Lucas Lessio made an appearance at the Oshawa Generals' camp, but is expected to keep his commitment to Michigan. And now the other guy in the class, Ontario forward Alex Guptill, sounds like he's not a lock either:

Already committed to play for the University of Michigan in the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) either this year or in 2011, Guptill said his immediate future, including where he might play come winter, will become more clear at the end of June.

“It is all up to — if a (NHL) team takes me — what their stance is and then Michigan’s,” Guptill said. “It will go from there.”

IE: hope the Kings stay away. Guptill and Lessio were both drafted by the USHL's Waterloo Blackhawks and the Blackhawks believe they'll have them next year.

There is some good news: Guptill was the recipient of the Ontario Hockey Association's "Top Prospect Award," something that's been bestowed on former Wolverines Mike Cammalleri and Andrew Cogliano plus an array of other NHL players like Jeff Carter and Rob Schremp. The OHA covers Ontario's Junior A and B leagues.

Etc.: The Daily puts out another huge article, this on the evolution of Yost from an empty, silent place to the raucous place it is today. I'm pretty sure this "shimmy down" tackling technique is the same that GERG is employing in practice. The idea is to focus on the approach more than anything else because most players can get a guy down if they're in the right spot. This may sound boring, but the words "they want to get pecker to pecker with the guy" appear.

As of yesterday, Michigan coaches were reported to be trying to get Dorsey in. Letter campaigns and what-not were in the process of being launched. You can keep up the campaigns if you want but know that they won't have an effect:

"He signed a letter of intent but basically what happened, I guess he didn't qualify to their standards," Jackson said. "Admissions sent him a letter that they weren't going to admit him to the school and said to disregard the other letter (of intent) and was free again to start looking at other options." …

Now, Dorsey will reopen his recruiting.

"I would like to see him stay closer to home," Jackson said. "But it's wherever he feels comfortable."

This is depressing on multiple levels. GBW's Gene Hankerson says Arkansas, WVU, Tennessee, USC, Louisville, LSU, and Miami will look at Dorsey now.