devin gardner

Sponsor note. Trivia time! Leaderboard is here. Congrats to AdamW and BenT for leading the way with 22 each. Round 3 is here. Complete by 5 PM Friday to make the leaderboard.

If you've participated in rounds one or two you're invited to an Autograph event with Jake Butt and Blake Corum on Sunday, September 10 at 12pm ET. This event is a live documentary experience going into the story of Blake’s childhood, his journey to Ann Arbor, his experience as a Michigan Wolverine, and his expectations for the 2023 season. There will also be a Q&A portion for VIP Pass holders. Details of the three levels:

• Stadium Pass: Join the event for a private hangout with Blake and Jake.
• Field Pass: Stadium Pass + you will be invited to stay on after the show with 20 fans for a special post experience with Blake.
• Locker Room Pass: Field Pass + you will get the opportunity to interact with Blake and Jake and ask a question during the hangout.

It's an opportunity to provide some NIL and ask Blake Corum whatever you need to get off your chest. Don't be weird. If you are weird we will disavow you.

For everyone else, get in the game by playing the trivia. This is how we point the money cannon.

"Stanford? Never heard of it." Any questions about whether Michigan's transfer process is insane or not have been definitively answered. Myles Hinton:

“Right now I’m in General Studies because the credits kind of messed up. I was Human Biology at Stanford. And then, for some reason, they didn’t take a lot of the credits,” Hinton said on Monday. “All my bio credits just dropped. I don't know. It's crazy.”

A reporter replied with the question everyone in the room was thinking: Michigan really didn’t accept credits from Stanford?

“I was like, ‘What in the world?’ I took an intro writing class last semester, and I was like, ‘What’s going on? What’s going on? I took this class freshman year.’ It was crazy,” Hinton explained.

Alejandro Zuniga speculates about why that may be the case, bolding this section of the admissions rules:

Additionally, departmental credit cannot be used to satisfy distribution requirements or major/minor requirements without the permission of an academic or major advisor within the school/college.

This means if you transfer into Michigan all of your non-major classes are garbage and have to be retaken, resulting in a senior transferring in from Stanford re-taking an intro to writing class. So the score here:

• If you have a degree from anywhere, even Michigan State, you can pop on over into a grad program no problem.
• If you're a first-year transfer you can make it work because you haven't taken enough college credits to start capping out. So Michigan can bring in Ernest Hausmann without much difficulty.
• Second and especially third-year players are likely to get Terrance Shannon'd if they can't slog through the rest of their degree over the summer.

This goes beyond sports at this point and is another symptom of a sclerotic bureaucracy at Michigan that seems unassailable at this point. AAPS and Michigan are Spidermans Pointing at this point.

[After THE JUMP: …but fast!]

SPONSOR NOTE: Tom Brady (yes that Tom Brady) and our friends at Autograph reached out recently looking for a way to get the most deserving fans access to the most exclusive Michigan football rewards curated by Valiant Management Group. Brady asked what would make a good Michigan Fan Flex Challenge and we looked at all you all and said "Uh, Trivia!"

How it works: You answer 12 questions as quickly as you can (it's timed) before Thursday, July 13 at 6PM EDT to secure your spot on the leaderboard. Your performance will be ranked based on the number of correct answers you submit and how quickly you complete the questions. You only get one shot, so make it count and check out the Challenge Rules for more information. Or listen to the man himself:

At the end of the submission period, the top performers will unlock front of the line access to purchase exclusive University of Michigan football rewards curated by our friends at Valiant. Once the competition ends, look out for an email from Autograph notifying you if you are eligible with details to purchase.

We are all going to die soon. I bring terrifying news:

San Diego Lincoln 2025 quarterback Akili Smith Jr., was one of the standouts at Future 50 last month at IMG Academy in Florida. The Top247 prospect said he has a loose top three, not an official group, but the one he’s working with right now and it includes Florida, Michigan and Oregon.

The existence of a recruitable Akili Smith Jr. has caused me to drink from the wrong grail. If I find out there's a JJ McCarthy Jr in the 2026 class I'm going to evaporate.

I'm not joining "Threads." Elon Musk is currently running Twitter into the ground but "Facebook but narrower" is not something I will tolerate, folks. I do not want an algorithm populating my social media feed. I want it to be the maniacs I follow in chronological order. If Bluesky attains critical mass I'll migrate, but the sheer number of people I've blocked on Twitter is a critical advantage for that platform. Someone step in and buy it from Musk, please.

[After THE JUMP: Fred Jackson!]

The gap.

Biggest gap for a Michigan athlete between their potential and their reality during their time at Michigan?

— Matthew Cheney (@matthewdcheney) March 17, 2021

This is a fascinating question. I'm going to leave out guys who saw their careers derailed by injury (Antonio Bass, Tarik Black) and also guys who the recruiting industry airballed on (Kevin Grady, Derrick Green) and limit this folks who clearly had something to offer and did not get to display it for whatever reason:

1. Devin Gardner. Gardner looked like a Heisman contender at certain points (ND UTL II, the two point conversion game against OSU) and was battered to pulp by the worst pass protection of all time at all other points. Not too hard to see him in the NFL if he hadn't ascended to nirvana in the middle of an MSU game.
2. Ernest Shazor. Electric hitter, five star recruit, repeatedly ran the wrong way at incredible rates of speed. He must have had some personal issues because he went from a projected second-round pick to completely undraftable in a couple months in which no football was being played.
3. Donovan Peoples-Jones. Five star wide receiver with massive athletic talent who saw his QB exit the pocket repeatedly and avoid downfield shots even when they were blitheringly wide open. Might as well file Nico "60 targets" Collins in here too.
4. Denard Robinson. Had just established himself as the most electric player in college football when Brady Hoke came in and brought in a guy who wanted to put him under center. Nerve injury had a lot to do with his late-career fade, too, but seeing Denard run a waggle will remain a crime against man and panda forever.
5. Evan Smotrycz. Smotrycz was coming off a 53/44 shooting year and was a career 41% three point shooter on ~200 attempts when he decided to transfer to Maryland. A major reason for this was the fact that he got drafted into playing a bunch of center, which he openly loathed. He ended up being redundant with Jake Layman at Maryland and faded into being a bench player as a senior. There's an alternate Smotrycz history where he gets to be a stretch four under Beilein for four years and has an absurdly efficient statline as an upperclassman.

Protests?

Given the timing of #NotNCAAProperty do you think it's likely there will be an on court protest during the tournament?

— Mathew Puskar (@NoExtraT) March 18, 2021

That's impossible to project but I do feel like that day is coming closer every year. Getting garbage meals while quarantined in a hotel so that everyone except you gets paid buckets of cash does seem like a potential tipping point. At some point a team is going to realize that they have a considerable

I've advocated for teams to adopt a mini-boycott where they don't play for 15 minutes—and if the network cuts to commercial the counter starts over. That would be a wake-up call that could escalate if necessary.

[After THE JUMP: ravoli rebels]