elroy-hirsch

[Patrick Barron]

Seth • February 5, 2019 • 2:23pm

With Ty Law joining eight other Pro Football Hall of Famers from Michigan last week, and Tom Brady continuing to push the bar for greatest football player of all time past the outer reaches of the Virgo Cluster, I figured our next Michigan All-____ team should focus on who made the best pro players.

This one got long and took a lot of research so here's Part 1.

Previously:

Today's Rules: I'm creating a 53-man NFL roster with Michigan alumni based on their total contributions in pro football (mostly the NFL). It's not about the greatest Michigan players to go pro; in fact I'm going to include a few transfers best known for playing elsewhere. I'm judging based on things like years in the pros, years as a starter, Pro Bowl/All-Pro selections, a little bit on team success, and their impact on the game, all relative to when they played.

The goal is a bit different than normal because the idea here is to build a team, not reward the best players. A guy had to play a position in the pros to be be eligible for it, within reason: I expect a career left guard to be able to play right guard (but not necessarily center), and a 1950 flanker to not feel totally out of place as a modern slot receiver.

A * means he's in the Hall of Fame already.

Quarterback: Tom Brady (2000-present)

It doesn't seem to get old. I think we can skip the career rundown because you've no doubt been on this Earth the last few weeks. At this point Tom Brady and Bill Belichick are past trying and just making up challenges to keep things interesting.

Tom: Okay guys, don't even block Aaron Donald, Ndamukong Suh, and Dante Fowler for a quarter.

Bill: Betchya I can convince the whole league to go back to punting on 4th and short from the opponents' territory.

Tom: Oh yeah? Watch me make a short, bearded Jewish guy a Super Bowl MVP.

Bill: Ooh, that's a good one. Try this…I'm going to hold Jared Goff to the worst passing day of his career.

Tom: Yeah?

Bill: Using just zone defense!

Tom: That's good, but you know what would really be funny?

Bill: What?

Tom: Okay, here it is: Not only do you have to hold the Rams under 7 points, but you also have to get McVay to forget he has the highest paid running back in the league for a half…

Bill: …and?

Tom: And then you've got to bust out your own 1st round RB from Georgia and salt the game away using nothing but double ISO and counter-trey.

Anyway the nice thing about the All-Michigan NFL Team is it will beat any other college's all-NFL team. I mean, what other school gets to put out a tweet like this every year?

Congratulations to Brian Hoyer on becoming a Super Bowl Champion! #GoGreen #SpartansInTheNFL pic.twitter.com/qZL9p0Zc5n
— Michigan State Football (@MSU_Football) February 4, 2019

Backups: Benny Friedman* (1927-'34) and Jim Harbaugh (1987-'00). What's more incredible about the greatest quarterback of all time is he pushed down the Most Important. Without Benny the NFL would have taken much longer to get out of the college game's shadow. Benny also provides depth at RB, the secondary, and special teams. Former 1st round pick Jim Harbaugh was 49-22-1 as an NFL starter, mostly for the Bears, but had a long second career as a backup who doubled as a mentor and coach for young prospects.

Honorable Mention: Elvis Grbac (1994-'01), Brian Griese (1998-'08), Chad Henne (2008-present), Todd Collins (1995-2010), Larry Cipa (1974-'75), Jake Rudock (2017-present)

[After THE JUMP: a position that isn't as deep, and one that's deeper]

Dear Diary is Speaks Fluent Jive

Seth •

By now you've read the Burke tweet, which needed three full-sized threads before everyone could get their Ha-Ha's out: One to point out its irony, one for when big brother slapped him in the face for it, and of course the wicked hangover. The oddity I saw was "People u seek out is better than those that seek u" and "EVERYONE got something to say... smh I thought this was my life!" are in a dialect totally incongruent with every tweet I found in 20 minutes of scrolling through Hollis tweets. Dude wasn't just giving Trey Burke sage advice, he was delivering it in a language that young people understand. Allow me to translate:

This will all blow over soon enough but should serve as warning to young people everywhere: NEVER under any circumstances give your handle out to old people; they think you speak Jive!

Please tell me you got that. It's somebody's general rule that people won't watch movies more than 15 years older than they are.*† ‡ By this rule you'd have to have been born in 1995 (a high school senior) to be excused from Airplane! I'm looking at you, people who didn't get dragonchild's cockpit full of Michigan defenders.

Funny thing about Airplane!: I respect that flick as a classic to the point where I'll be condescending toward someone who hasn't ~~seen~~ memorized it, but until recently I didn't even know it was an almost perfect spoof of Zero Hour! (1957). It's a testament to how good Airplane! is that it stands up even if you don't get the main joke; to be fair, the diary kind of doesn't. It's also ironic that I would make fun of people for a movie reference going over their heads when what that movie referenced totally went over my head.

Everything You Need to Know About Airmen. So I checked out Zero Hour! and now one of the Airplane! jokes I never really got totally makes sense. You know how Kareem Abdul-Jabbar's character is obviously Kareem Abdul-Jabbar but the narrative keeps trying force this "he's Roger the co-pilot!" thing, to the point that when they pull him away he's got his Lakers shorts on? In Zero Hour! the co-pilot was played by Elroy Hirsch.

ie Elroy "Crazylegs" Hirsh…

…and when Kareem appears we're supposed to get how crazy it was that a kid could see Crazylegs in a pilot's uniform and not be like "OMIGOD YOU'RE ELROY HIRSCH!"

Crazylegs was a Badger who got moved to Michigan when a lot of WWII servicemen were transferred as part of a program to give in-training Navy and Marine officers a college education. Hirsch on the transfer:

"But I was to learn a far more important thing about Michigan. It's not something you can hold or see ... but you sure can feel it. I'm speaking about the great Michigan tradition. Corny you say? Not on your life. It's there ... it engulfs you."

Today the service academies don't get first dibs on any draft-age citizen they want, but they do have virtually unlimited scholarships, bringing in 40+ recruits a year (that makes two oversigners on the 2012 schedule). This and many more interesting facts about Air Force can be found in the very early preview by Rabbit21. The whole thing is fascinating. Diary of the Week!

Lines! The bats, oh the bats. They are home and hot, as softball swept their five-game homestand by 10-2, 11-2, 12-4, 6-0, and 12-2 scores. Outfielder Nicole Sappingfield had five RBI last night, including a walk-off grand slam. Shortstop Amy Knapp owes a girl in my section an apology for her put-away homer on Sunday vs. Penn State, which hurt the girl's wrist when she tried to catch it.

Player	ERA	W/L	GS	CG	Sho	IP	H	R	ER	BB	SO	OppAvg.
Haylie Wagner	1.28	15-4	15	13	4	109.1	72	25	20	20	68	0.185
Sara Driesenga	2.39	6-5	14	5	1	76.0	73	41	26	25	39	0.247
Stephanie Speierman	1.83	1-0	2	1	1	15.1	13	5	4	6	17	0.22
TEAM	1.73	22-9	x	19	6	202.0	158	71	50	53	125	0.211

Etc. CenterIce's writeup on the incoming hockey recruits. AC1997 updated the basketball offseason outlook for departures; now with 100% more ohgodBurkestay! Helle had a board-bumped travel diary for this year's road games. If you're going to Minnesota, try the Jucy Lucy [sic]. Pro-tip: let it cool first.

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* There's a corollary rule that states you will think anything made in the 15-year span around when you were born is pure genius, but this rule is really just an observation by people my age that most of the best movies (Godfather, Star Wars, Back to the Future, etc.) all came out around then.§

† Trekkies are of course excluded.

‡ It's at least 17, since my wife agrees with me that The Lion in Winter with Peter O'Toole and Katharine Hepburn is way better than the remake with Patrick Stewart and Glenn Close. Reminder: Angevin discussion is not OT in comments. Someone's going to take me up on this eventually.

§ Which is to say if some kid thinks Harry Potter and something with Russell Crowe in it constitutes the golden age of film, they should be beaten.‖

‖ Yes I'm doing the Alt85 thing again.

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