facepalm
In the late stages of last week's narrow victory over Minnesota, John Beilein drew up a beautiful post-timeout play that culminated with Jon Horford dunking over three Gophers (capital 'G', of course, or that's a far less impressive feat):
Pretty cool dunk, right? After the jump, check out several more enjoyable GIFs from the last two game--WAIT, HOLD IT RIGHT THERE.
[/types furiously]
That white-haired Minnesota fan has seen kingdoms rise and fall, winters that lasted a generation, and the White Walkers descend upon Westeros Minneapolis, but this she cannot bear to witness. Winter is coming—nay, winter has arrived—and this lady knows it.
Don't ever say a Spartan never did anything for you.
[After THE JUMP, Mitch McGary stays fresh to death, Richard Pitino is a strange fellow, Zak Irvin catches fire, Northwestern plays "defense," and dunks on dunks on dunks.]
Facepalm of the last half-hour. Trey Keenan is a Texas offensive lineman with three stars, a Michigan offer, and a slightly shaky grasp of the recent past($):
Keenan admits he likes the direction that the new staff is taking the program. “I like that they’re going back to being the old Michigan and not the team that got beat by Appalachian State,” he said.
It's a good thing I set up a facepalm hotkey. Ctrl+Alt+FFFFUUU:
Dude is hardcore. Hey, look, it's the Little Brown Jug:
Just hanging out… uh… in some guy's basement on what appears to be a pool table. This would be the point at which we round up a posse and hunt down the varmit who stole our danged jug, but that would be pointless violence since some dude made a Brown Jug replica (and apparently that box) because he is hardcore. Auburn fans should try this: get some hardcore guy to make a replica of Toomer's Corner. Problem solved.
Come on, baby. Red apparently doesn't think anyone's jetting in the offseason:
Michigan coach Red Berenson said Monday he finished his postseason individual meetings with players and doesn't expect anyone to leave early for the pro ranks. The Wolverines, who advanced to the national title game, return two outstanding defensemen in junior Brandon Burlon and freshman Jon Merrill.
No quotes and frankly the Detroit News isn't an outlet that spends a lot of time on hockey, but… woo? It wouldn't be too outlandish: Merrill and Burlon are the only serious departure threats and both are Devils draftees. The Devils have a track record of leaving kids in college and have a number of D prospects a bit further along the development path than their guys at Michigan.
While it's kind of a negative that I can't think of a Michigan forward who would even think of an NHL departure at least we won't get blindsided, except of course we will.
Attention Shawn Kemp. You take any random son of an NBA star, have him commit to Michigan, and bam he's awesome:
I did not recognize Glenn “Trey” Robinson when compared to the skinny kid I watched last summer. Robinson was maybe 175 pounds soaking wet then.
Now he has a body that makes you envision a flying combo forward finishing strong on the offensive end with lock down ability defensively. Robinson did just that Friday night against Upstate. He finished at the rim, often violently, through contact.
That's the third or fourth early rave GRIII has picked up in the month or so AAU ball has been going on. In addition NBE lists Robinson at 6'8"(!), 205. Other first-hand reports like those of UMHoops think that's generous, but he's clearly bigger than he was when he committed.
(HT: UMHoops.)
Stats are bad (this time). I hate to disagree with a guy who goes back and checks out actual game film instead of talking about football players playing football, but KC Joyner has an ESPN Insider article that claims Michigan is going to have an "elite passing game"($) this year because of some shiny Denard stats that I think are silly.
Joyner splits Denard's attempts* into buckets by yardage: 11.9 YPA on throws of 11-19 yards, 16.4 YPA on throws from 20-29 yards, and 15.4 YPA on throws of more than 30 yards. These compare favorably to some guy you may have heard of:
A review of 11 of Ryan Mallett's games against SEC and bowl-level competition over the past two seasons found that the possible future first-round draft pick (and one of college football's top passers) posted an 8.2 total YPA, an 11.6 vertical YPA and a 14.6 stretch vertical YPA.
Robinson's 10 games include his three worst contests from last season with regard to passer rating (Ohio State, Michigan State, Notre Dame) and exclude his two of his three best passer rating contests (Massachusetts and Bowling Green), yet he was still able to top Mallett in all three categories.
There are a number of problems with this analysis. One: it does not account for the frequency of throws. Mallett's Hogs passed 53% percent of the time; Michigan threw on 40% of snaps. Two: Denard's throws are heavily slanted towards short stuff. The "stretch vertical" number cited by Joyner consists of just 31 attempts, which is both a sample size problem and another equilibrium issue. Three:
A large number of Denard's long touchdowns were stupidly easy because of the system that ran so much and so effectively, often with Robinson himself. You can't point to 11 completions featuring safeties going "WHAT DO I DO /explodes" and extrapolate anything approximating Mallett's production. The opportunities above simply will not exist in an under-center WCO, leaving Denard to try to do this:
I love Denard like he is a combination of my own son and Olivia Wilde but I don't think he's making throws like that. Maybe "simply will not exist" is a bit much, but the amount of pressure Denard put on opposing safeties last year—and the interceptions he threw even when given reasonable windows—prevents you from divorcing his production from his system.
I'm not saying he won't be a better QB than he was last year. I'm saying the smart bet is on a significant reduction in passer efficiency if he's operating a WCO.
*[Attempts against Michigan's Big Ten schedule, ND, and UConn. Unclear why the bowl was left out. Probably because KC Joyner doesn't like watching snuff films.]
Get this man a cereal commercial. Don't tell that to Denard, though, who says "I really like this offesne and what we're doing" in a brief TSN interview. Also:
Q: Defensive coordinator Greg Mattison says he talks a lot of trash to you. What’s going on there?
Robinson: We have that love/hate relationship. I love competing against him. Every day at practice, he says something to make you want to compete.
Q: What does he say?
Robinson: He says, ‘You can’t throw. Can’t throw.’ I know he’s teasing. I make a throw, and I’ll say something to him. Or I’ll just look over and smile at him.
Thank God for Denard—whenever you're feeling ambivalent about your connection to the program because of the Braylon Edwardses of the world just think about Denard.
Um… thanks? Believe it or not, this is Jack Nicklaus trying to say something nice about Ohio State:
"I don't know what really happened, but I'll promise you that Tressel wasn't the only one that knew what happened," Nicklaus told The Plain Dealer.
If he's right pieces of the Ohio State athletic department will be slowly descending from the troposphere for decades. (Not that he's anything other than a very famous message board poster in this department.)
Etc.: Ace relates the story of his first game at Michigan Stadium. I'd play but I can't remember which game it was because I was small. The Hero Of Tiananmen Square (AKA John Pollack, king of futile Big House preservation attempts) puts out an awful book on puns featuring many awful puns. As per usual, he misses the point entirely. You should have gone to Vermont, but at least you didn't go to Iowa State. TTB outlines the 4-3 under in parts: line, linebackers, and secondary. Forward Thinking surveys the QB landscape in the aftermath of Zeke Pike's Auburn commitment. If you didn't get enough carpet-bombing of former players who have fallen back in love with Michigan football, Mets Maize is over Avignon right now.
Droid app. The MGoDroid app has been tested and has hit the store. That link probably isn't very useful but just search for "MGoDroid" on the app store and lo, it will be there.
PRESS CONFERENCE. Is this the first college football hype video to ever prominently feature a press conference?
I'm thinking yes.
Everybody get a face tattoo. So… Mike Tyson thinks he is you but wants to be Marques Slocum:
Other than his pigeons, he’s had pet tigers over the years. I ask Tyson if he were an animal, what animal would he be?
He looks up at the tinseled ceiling. He scratches his thick neck. “I’d like to be a lion, but I think I’m a wolverine,” he says.
Wolverines: “They’re like big giant rats. They’re about 50 pounds and fearless. They fight to the death. They don’t move fast. They walk slow because they’re not afraid of nothing. That’s how I think. And they can be a little reckless.” But also, he says, “I’d like to be a lion and have lion status: to make other people do my work and get the credit for it.”
This does not qualify as one of the top thousand crazy things Mike Tyson has said, but it does qualify in the top one of weird things he's said about your favorite school's mascot. Mike Tyson, man.
We were like whatever. Denard talking about staying, talking about what his teammates said, talking about oh come on—PREPARE THE FACEPALM:
"They took me in and said, 'Man, look, we're not trying to have the team break up like it did our freshman year,'" Robinson said. "They said, 'We kind of rebelled and it was like whatever.' My teammates, they're like brothers to me, and they were like, 'Stick around. We need you to stay.'"
I hope we learned our lesson about it was like whatever, because the lesson is then you get like whatevered by Toledo argh argh argh.
E-fact: Jerry Kill is a BHGP plant. E-fact for real:
In 28 years as a football coach, Minnesota's Jerry Kill has developed an extreme dislike for unforced errors…. So the first-year Gophers coach set the accountability theme quickly.
Some players have been forced to wear brown jerseys in spring practice with the words “Minnesota Lophers” on the front and “I let my teammates down” on the back.
If that doesn't work he's going to show them Courage Wolf.
This week in the near future of Michigan Stadium. Penn State blog LBU on the PSU facebook page soliciting suggestions for piped in-music:
How about letting the Blue Band play on a more regular basis? You know, because part of what makes a college football atmosphere better than the NFL is that live marching bands provide the soundtrack with their unique fight songs. Words cannot describe how frustrating it is to listen to other college football broadcasts, hear the band play consistently, and then listen to a PSU broadcast and constantly hear Blur's "Song 2" played after every defensive play and "Zombie Nation" after every touchdown while the Blue Band is virtually non-existent. Not that Guido D'Elia or anyone in the Beaver Stadium brass seems to give two shits, though.
This is the inevitable end state once piped in music is permitted. We have already heard "Let the Bodies hit the Floor" like Michigan Stadium is the site of a very special Smackdown taping; Special K will not stop until your spirit is dead. Constant vigilance is required.
This week in the semi-distant future of anywhere but Michigan Stadium. Not that I'm arguing David Brandon should schedule Miami (Not That Miami) instead of doing this…
"We've had some preliminary discussions with Stephen Ross about whether or not it would be possible to come down here [Miami's Generic Corporate Stadium] and play a game," Brandon told the Naples Daily News. "We don't have anything scheduled, but that's something we'd consider because this is an important recruiting area for us, as well."
…but it's frustrating we've devolved college football scheduling to the point that the only things that make sense for big nonconference games are neutral sites. I don't care who or what Michigan hypothetically plays in Florida, it would be a thousand times better to have a home-and-home. I mean, how much more awesome would this upcoming Alabama game be if it was a two-game campus series? Like 250%, easy. I'm insane but I'm not flying to Miami to watch Michigan play a nonconference game.
Orson tattoo suggestions. One: refugees need your help and if Michigan helps the most Orson will write things about how Michigan is awesome. Two: if everyone puts up 50k, Orson gets a tattoo. This should obviously be a portrait of Adrien Karsten doing a black-power salute, his defiant fist gripping a 1040. With like guns and bloody roses ringing it. Now that you've envisioned this you must make it happen.
Of course Manny Diaz likes advanced stats. Bruce Feldman has an Insider article on Manny Diaz($), the former Mississippi State DC who pwned Michigan and hopped to Texas this offseason. I've mentioned more than a few times that Diaz's D does very well in advanced stats, and Diaz himself knows this:
"It is really cool to see how many people who are a lot more intelligent than I am, and who obviously have a fair amount of spare time, are starting to take the game of football and try to really break it down and get under the hood in terms of their analysis," Diaz said. "You see this with college basketball, too. They're not settling for whatever they've been force-fed, either, through mainstream stats or through mainstream media analysis. They're looking to find the story behind the story, and there's really some quality stuff out there. When I have some time, I enjoy looking for this stuff. It's not always some 'A-ha!' like you're at the oracle moment, but it is interesting. There is a lot to this game, and I am constantly fascinated by it."
He pointed Feldman to a post on Bill Connolly's new SBN blog that ranks MSU's D 12th nationally—considerably better than they did in total yardage (49th). He also mentions that red zone percentage is a dumb stat, complains about sacks counting as rush yards, and references the Bulldogs' tremendous luck when it came to fumble recoveries last year. All these things are regular hobby-horses of the stat focused. He's an internet nerd.
There's a lot more that goes into Diaz's success, but I think he's the first coordinator at a major school to advocate advanced stats. College football isn't exactly basketball and their growing Kenpom obsession, but that's a start.
Seriously? This proposal was apparently shot down or tabled or something but merely proposing it is some kind of audacity when you're facing down a massive lawsuit:
Currently, the NCAA bars companies from using an athlete’s name, image or likeness in advertisements, promotions or other ventures. That would change if the legislation gets passed.
The initial proposal, for instance, would allow game footage of current athletes to appear in TV ads, as long as the ads mention the name of the athlete’s institution. Companies could publicize sales events by saying athletes would be present to sign autographs.
In both cases, the sponsor would benefit from the athlete’s image or presence. The school would benefit with money from the sponsor. The athlete would remain unpaid.
Sam Keller and Ed O'Bannon are currently suing the NCAA for unpaid videogame representations of themselves; this would make the currently wink-wink nudge-nudge system explicit. That can't be legal, right? I mean, you can make guys sign whatever you want but at some point you can't just demand unpaid publicity rights get handed over. Do the guys on the NCAA cover even get paid? Why can they throw Tebow on the front of a box after he's out of eligibility? Amateurism make law explode.
Etc.: Get yer Crisler Arena clock. Another pointless urging for a pointless anti-trust hearing on the BCS. I have no idea who this rabbit is, but apparently it is my muppet analogue.
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