i find certain things very important indeed

MORE LIKE COME PLAY WITHDRAWN FORWARD FOR JURGEN KLINSMANN

O reader, I bring to you a topic of great significance. The blogosphere has been riven by controversy after a horse tried to play football on twitter. Should horses play football on twitter? Should horses not play football on twitter? This is the great modern give-and-take of discourse. This is the First Amendment. This is America.

The Anti-Horse Alliance is led by one Adam Jacobi, an Iowan who loathes all hooved mammals you cannot eat. I must agree that a thousand pounds of lovely-seeming meat just, like, composted or whatever is a waste and is hateful. In addition, he says the idea of horses playing football is anathema. He has many fine reasons for this take.

Horses can't understand football. Horses aren't completely stupid, and their skills at dressage lead me to believe that an end zone celebration involving a horse hot-steppingcould be PHENOMENAL, but football is a very complicated sport with rules and regulations governing virtually everything, and I just can't imagine that a horse would be able to abide by the rules of the line of scrimmage and the snap. False start penalties everywhere, even for just a twitch of the tail. "Set" means "set," horsie.

And so forth and so on.

The Coalition of the Horse Willing counts the esteemed Spencer Hall in their ranks.

Horses can qualify academically in the NCAA. Provided they get a learning disabled qualification, a horse should be able to stay eligible at several SEC schools. Auburn and Ole Miss come to mind first, but let's not single out those schools alone, but yes, mainly Auburn and Ole Miss. Horses may also succeed--neigh! even thrive!--at the C-USA, Sun Belt, and MAC level.

I fear that both these men have missed the mark on the original question so badly that they have embarrassed themselves in the manner of a 50-year-old white Christian male who demands credit for such, also on twitter. They will live down their shame in time.

That shame: by debating whether or not horses should play football they fail to ask the question "what sport should horses play?" Football is an ill fit. Basketball is preposterous, hockey promising but problematic, track and field faintly ridiculous, and horse racing completely out of the question. It's obvious, though. It's right in front of your face, and thus two or three feet below a horse's face.

Horses should play soccer.

THEY HAVE MORE FEET. More feet equals more skill. Leo Messi in fact has a foot that branches just below the ankle into ten toe-sized feet. Horses cannot match this, but with four feet they have double that of the average American, and are therefore twice as good at soccer than said average American, four times better than many World War I veterans, and eight times better than Robbie Findley.

PREHENSILE LIMBS NOT REQUIRED HERE. The McDonalds inside of which horses play soccer beautifully has a sign outside that says "NO SHIRT NO SHOES NO FINGERS NO PROBLEM."

HORSES CAN UNDERSTAND SOCCER. It's mostly a matter of booting a ball around without whistles and the like. Much simpler than football. Also, horses came from Europe! QED.

While I think a horse hockey team would be pretty good since the goalie would occupy the entire net, you'd probably have to shoot it. I digress.

TURNING HORSE ANKLES INTO A MIST OF TENDONS AND DEATH IS SANCTIONED IN SOCCER. In football, exploding someone's ankle is not a penalizable offense except in certain situations. Anyone turning a leg into a spray of horror gristle in soccer is generally shown a red card. The tendency of horse legs to fall off with little provocation is an asset to the team, if not the horse in particular. Go team.

SOCCER DEVELOPMENTAL PROGRESS GENERALLY AVOIDS THE NCAA. Horses do not have to take tests to sign with Liverpool or whatever.

POOPING ON THE FIELD IS PROBABLY STILL NOT GOOD. But they do play on actual grass. The cost savings. Think of them.

AMERICA CAN USE THEIR ATHLETES ON AMERICAN SPORTS. Horses are a great untapped resource in our race to dominate the globe's favorite sport, allowing us to  both have LeBron James and LeHorse Soccer.

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This is the First Amendment, that I can say that horses playing football is a terrible idea… unless it's the other football.

"Don't tread on me"

–Horse America.

See you at the World Cup final. Bring carbonated oats, baby.

We're just a few days away from the start of bowl season, which means I get make my annual appeal against subsidized hell. But first a short message from Billy…

Tired of being an unwitting accomplice to some company's branding campaign every time you mention a bowl? Are you constantly struggling to get readers and listeners to know which the hell game you're talking about? Then let me tell you about the latest in idea-exchanging technology from MGoBlog: THE COMMUNICATION COLLECTION™.

Using our one-of-a-kind, industry-leading, low-fat, blogger-approved line of sponsor-free bowl names and logos, you too will be able to immediately convey accurate information to other humans. Using special shared experiences technology and our copyrighted, non-ambiguous terminology, our scientific logos and bowl names are precisely calibrated to provide you with information-sharing vehicles that are recognizable, representative, and syllabically economical. Just look at our happy customers:

• : "I told my friend I'm thinking of attending the 'Citrus Bowl' this year and he knew exactly what I meant! Thanks, MGOBLOG!"
• : "My readers kept asking why I'm so excited over some fast food joint. Then I switched to MGOBLOG's Peach Bowl logo; now they all immediately register that I'm talking about a crazy-off between Dabo and Les Miles!"
• : "People at my office thought I was going around saying a crappy buffalo wings chain will be a 'real defensive snoozer.' But as soon as I showed them MGOBLOG's 'Copper Bowl' logo our shared experiences helped me convey I was really talking about MSU-TCU in Arizona!"

See for yourself what your friends are buzzing about (click on each logo to get at the full-sized, sponsor-free versions):

They Call It	You Call It	Logo	Started	Payout	Date/Time
Alamo	Alamo		1993	$3,175,000	Dec 29, 6:00 PM
Armed Forces	Armed Forces or Ft. Worth		2003	$750,000	Dec 29, 11:00 AM
BBVA Compass	Birmingham		2006	$1,000,000	Jan 5, 1:00 PM
BCS Championship	Just Kill Me		1998	$21,200,000	Jan 7, 8:00 PM
Beef'O'Brady's	Tampa II or St. Pete's		2008	$1,000,000	Dec 21, 7:00 PM
Belk	Queen City or Is it Basketball Season Yet?		2002	$1,000,000	Dec 27, 6:00 PM
Buffalo Wild Wings	Copper		1989	$3,300,000	Dec 29, 10:00 PM
Capital One	Citrus		1946	$4,250,000	Jan 1, 1:00 PM
Chick-Fil-A	Peach		1968	$3,350,000	Dec 31, 7:00 PM
Cotton	Cotton		1936	$3,625,000	Jan 4, 8:00 PM
Famous Idaho Potato	Potato or Humanitarian		1997	$750,000	Dec 15, 4:00 PM
Fiesta	Fiesta		1971	$18,000,000	Jan 3, 8:00 PM
Fight Hunger	San Francisco Fight Hunger or Bay City		2002	$825,000	Dec 29, 4:00 PM
Gator	Gator		1945	$2,500,000	Jan 1, 12:00 PM
GoDaddy.com	Mobile or Empty		1999	$750,000	Jan 6, 9:00 PM
Hawaii	Hawaii or Aloha		2002	$750,000	Dec 24, 8:00 PM
Heart of Dallas	Heart of Dallas or Cotton II		2010	$1,200,000	Jan 1, 12:00 PM
Holiday	Holiday		1978	$2,350,000	Dec 27, 9:00 PM
Independence	Independence		1976	$1,100,000	Dec 28, 2:00 PM
Las Vegas	Las Vegas		1992	$1,000,000	Dec 22, 3:00 PM
Liberty	Liberty		1959	$1,350,000	Dec 31, 3:00 PM
Little Caesars	Motor City		1997	$750,000	Dec 26, 7:00 PM
Meineke Car Care	Houston or Bluebonnet		2006	$1,700,000	Dec 28, 9:00 PM
Military	D.C. or U.S.O. Show		2008	$1,000,000	Dec 27, 3:00 PM
Music City	Music City		1998	$1,700,000	Dec 31, 12:00 PM
New Mexico	New Mexico		2006	$750,000	Dec 15, 1:00 PM
New Orleans	New Orleans		2001	$500,000	Dec 22, 12:00 PM
Orange	Orange		1934	$18,000,000	Jan 1, 8:00 PM
Outback	Outback or Hall of Fame		1986	$3,400,000	Jan 1, 1:00 PM
Pinstripe	Bronx or Pinstripe		2010	$2,000,000	Dec 29, 3:00 PM
Poinsettia	Poinsettia		2005	$750,000	Dec 20, 8:00 PM
Rose	Rose		1901	$18,000,000	Jan 1, 5:00 PM
Russell Athletic	Tangerine		1990	$2,125,000	Dec 28, 5:00 PM
Sugar	Sugar		1934	$18,000,000	Jan 2, 8:00 PM
Sun	Sun		1934	$1,900,000	Dec 31, 2:00 PM

I'm not against branding. We do plenty of it, and I plan to do more. Sponsoring a nice thing so people can have it for free is one of the most polite ways folks have yet found to introduce themselves to customers. Marketing is subject to the same rules of propriety as all other intra-species communication. Polite: Your banner over the entrance to the guest lecture you're sponsoring. Impolite: making the lecturer interrupt his spiel to talk about the fantastic deals you're currently offering. Polite: Leaving your business card on the restaurant's bulletin board. Impolite: Renaming all the meats in the sandwiches after your products. Also impolite: naming your kid "Need School Supplies? Call 1-800-555-PENS and We'll Deliver!" so that every time the teacher does roll call you're drumming up business.

So yeah, my real beef is with naming rights that become a barrier to communication. The Rose Bowl doesn't need to remind anybody where it takes place or who's supposed to be in it because years of tradition have made it apparent. Outback Steakhouse annoyed me at first, but over a decade of having the name plus the smart decision to leave out the second half of their name (thus actually being easier to say than "Hall of Fame") allowed it to settle. Plus the Outback is a place on Earth; it is conceivable in the imagination that a bowl might be played amidst the gumnuts and wallabies. Bowls for causes annoy me less if they're nouns (Liberty, Independence) than adjectives (Humanitarian), which in turn is better than sentence fragments (Fight Hunger). Synonyms (Military*/Armed Forces) shouldn't be allowed. I'd prefer if newer bowls include the city name for the first five to ten years (e.g. San Francisco Fight Hunger Bowl). Anyway these are all things people might name an event without obviously having to get paid to do so.

That's where I draw the line. Adding "presented by ___" as part of the name makes it easier to ignore but still as disingenuous as if I changed my blogging handle to "Seth Presented by Iowa Corngrowers Association of America." Calling a young event the "Brelk" or "Breef-o-Ladies" means we'll never figure out where the hell it is. Letting that tire company with a name that sounds like a German salute name a second bowl after themselves when they lost the naming rights to the first is borderline criminal. Even more criminal is allowing a terribly named company to take over a well-established brand. The Copper Bowl can't claim the history of the Copper Bowl if it's no longer called the Copper Bowl. And here's where I bring up how the chicken people want to get rid of peaches:

I am guessing this is what the protests were about earlier this year.

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*Since the one in D.C. is newer it should be told to change to something that differentiates it from the Fort Worth bowl. How about "The Great Big U.S.O. Show" since it's the U.S.O. that sponsors it anyway.

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Half the bowls need to die. This year's lineup will feature 70 teams in 35 bowl games. For reference, the 71st-best team according to FEI this year is 3-8 Arkansas. Teams much worse than John L. Smith'd Arkansas are in bowl games. East Carolina and Louisiana-Lafayette will have a bowl game for a $500,000 payout provided by the title sponsor, who is a trucking company from Wilmington, Ohio. Somebody will broadcast it, and TV crews will show that one ECU fan dressed like a pirate and a few Cajun fans while studiously avoiding angles that show the 90% of Superdome currently unoccupied. And ultimately many people—especially those schools who'll be shelling out way more than 500k to settle their entourage in bowl-approved New Orleans hotels—will ask "why are we even having this?" And the only answers are "because to somebody this is still profitable," and "we need the practices and the swag and the recruit invitations so we can remain competitive."

No I don't think it'll change anything. If someone was going to have a conversation about diluting the concept it would have been had 20 years ago. I am resigned to a future in which the Enterprise Products Partners Bowl matches the 9th Big Ten team vs. the No. 5 Sun Belt team (you are not sure if I just made that one up just now). A win here is if people on this site and others adopt the non-subsidized logos and terminology.

Trey Burke does not approve

I made some disapproving noises last year around tourney time about Michigan's nonconference schedule, not because it was easy but because it was decent to good but RPI and Kenpom didn't think so:

Each of these teams went 9-3 in the twelve games listed. Losses are in italics. Tourney teams are in bold with their seed in parens after:

DREXEL			IONA			MICHIGAN
KP	Team		KP	Team		KP	Team
26	Virginia (10)		24	Purdue (10)		9	Memphis (8)
65	Saint Joseph's		65	Saint Joseph's		17	Duke (2)
82	Cleveland St.		74	Marshall		26	Virginia (10)
89	Princeton		78	Denver		30	Iowa St. (8)
104	Fairfield		105	Richmond		48	UCLA
202	Rider		112	Nevada		133	Arkansas
213	Norfolk St. (15)		120	Vermont		156	Oakland
237	Niagara		124	Maryland		174	Western Illinois
257	Winthrop		165	Long Island		268	Bradley
268	Bradley		181	Western Michigan		327	Arkansas Pine Bluff
308	St. Francis PA		221	Hofstra		338	Towson
343	Binghamton		287	William & Mary		340	Alabama A&M

Which of these teams has by far the strongest nonconference schedule? Michigan. Drexel and Iona played one team capable of acquiring an at-large bid each; Michigan played four plus a middling Pac-12 team and not so good SEC team. From the perspective of the good teams that expect to get in the tournament, any differences at the bottom are meaningless.

Is Michigan's nonconference SOS a lot better than both these teams? No.

Is it better than Drexel's atrocious number? Barely. Michigan has the #181 nonconference strength of schedule to Kenpom, #173 to the NCAA($).

From the perspective of a tourney aspirant, that schedule was much more difficult than either Drexel or Iona—last year's big "team X got screwed" controversy—but was judged far worse than Iona and barely better than Drexel. The reason for this was the end of the schedule. Michigan played five teams in the Kenpom top 50 and five in the bottom 100; Iona played one and one. In both Kenpom and RPI the results were bad.

I thought of this Friday when Luke Winn posted an analysis of the folks doing the best job of exploiting the RPI's quirks. Because the RPI overvalues teams with excellent records against iffy competition, teams like Pitt have been able to get nice seeds even when their resumes are lacking:

But in 2010, when Pitt earned a No. 3 seed despite having zero marquee wins outside the Big East, it was in part due to Dixon's manipulation of the 158th-best efficiency NCSOS into the 49th-best RPI NCSOS.

What Dixon likes to do for his home guarantee games, he says, "is play the teams that we think are the best picks to win the non-BCS conferences." These are the best "gap" teams, because they're beatable despite having high RPI returns. In 2010, Dixon beat five of them in Wofford (69 RPI), Wichita State (43), Kent State (47), Ohio (95) and Robert Morris (129). He only had one 250-plus RPI opponent (Youngstown State, at 271), either, and so it didn't matter that he played just one marquee game (against Texas) and lost it; the Panthers were in good standing due to their choices of non-BCS opponents. Despite their efficiency profile suggesting they were the quality of a 7-8 seed, they were a No. 3 on the strength of their RPI.

How does Michigan's schedule stack up?

Slippery Rock

Not D-I so is essentially another exhibition.

Preseason NIT

IUPUI was a 14-18 Summit team that loses a guy who took almost 35% of their shots. Thumbs down. The second round against Cleveland State or Bowling Green will probably be much the same. CSU was pretty good last year(22-9, 12-6 Horizon, NIT bid) but loses their three most important players and is projected sixth in the league by SBN. BG was 16-16 last year, 9-7 in the MAC. They do return their top two usage guys.

Michigan of course had little control over who their initial opponents were going to be in a preseason tournament.

If Michigan reaches the finals at MSG, they are likely to play Pitt in the semi followed by either Kansas State or Virginia. Pitt was terrible last year; they add a couple of big recruits. K-State and Virginia are probably going to be middling members of their Big Six conferences. Those games should be properly evaluated by RPI.

NC State

If NC State lives up to their elite billing this is a necessary showcase game for any team hoping to get a one or two seed.

Arkansas, WVU @ Brooklyn

Arkansas is poised for a major leap forward as they were extremely young last year—316th of 345 in experience—and return everyone except a backup post. It's hard to predict what will happen with WVU after they lost efficient minute vacuums in Darrly Bryant and Kevin Jones, but they'll at least be a bubble team. You might get a slight RPI boost from Arkansas relative to their quality since the SEC is not too good at basketball.

@ Bradley

A terrible idea from a competition standpoint as the Braves were 7-25 last year and 12-20 before that, but this is a favor Beilein is paying Geno Ford for hiring his son. Also it's a road game, which helps mitigate the RPI hit.

Western/Eastern/Central Michigan

These are the wrong MAC teams and the wrong Michigan teams. Western loses their top three usage guys from a team that went 6-10 in the league; Central just fired Ernie Zeigler and lost the star player off a 5-11 MAC team. Eastern managed a winning MAC record at 9-7 but was 14-18 overall.

To maximize the return from playing these guarantee games, Michigan should be squaring up against Oakland and Detroit, who will be pursuing bids in their leagues and figure to have relatively shiny overall records.

At least these games are better than last year's double SWAC/Towson binge. There's only one team on the docket this year like that…

Binghamton

The one really bad idea on the schedule. Binghamton was 2-29 last year, the third-worst team in the country according to Kenpom. They are one of the anchors that kept Drexel out of the tournament last year. Michigan would be much better off playing a D-II team instead of this collection of Tony Kornheisers. (They are literally all clones of Tony Kornheiser grown in a lab.)

Overall

It's an improvement. Michigan's not going to look at their schedule at the end of the year and see three teams in the 300s of the Kenpom rankings, and I doubt any of their major opponents end up 6-10 in their league like Arkansas was last year. Their Preseason NIT opponents are probably out of their hands.

Downers: You'd still like to see them schedule some of the local small schools that project to be good and the Bradley thing is pretty weird. There is absolutely no upside to scheduling a Binghamton.

Michigan's nonconference schedule should be more helpful to them than last year's as long as they make the NIT final. Five power teams is a lot to go with an 18-game league schedule, and they don't have as many anchors as last year.

RIP Charles Drake. I was on the road when news of Charles Drake's untimely death hit the internet. Drake was one of a legion of mid-90s players brought in at running back who eventually found their way to the field at another position. If Ian Gold was the most prominent, Drake was second, moving to free safety after finding running back crowded.

Free safeties who aren't once-in-a-generation good are kind of like longsnappers in that you're usually not happy when their name is splashed across your television. In the safety's case it means they're chasing someone else. The lack of a visceral "oh, THAT play" emotion when his name comes up speaks well to his play. He was a low-event guy in an era when safeties often weren't. Condolences to his family and teammates. 

Holdin' The Rope has a perspective piece worth your time.

In other sunny news. ESPN reports that this consulting firm Penn State has hired is "expected to be tough on" one Joe Paterno:

"Much of the focus will be on the culture of the football program, with findings that go back more than a decade," said a Penn State official briefed on the inquiry, who spoke on condition of anonymity. "It's going to be very tough on Joe (Paterno)."

The long-awaited report, compiled by Freeh Group International Solutions, the consulting firm led by former FBI director Louis J. Freeh, is the culmination of an eight-month investigation that examined whether university policies and culture were contributing factors to a lack of reports and action about abuse that occurred on campus. Investigators interviewed more than 400 people, including Penn State administrators, faculty members, trustees and former coaches, players and staff from Penn State's football team.

At this point it would be more of a surprise to find out that Paterno would come out of things looking okay. In retrospect that mid-aughts run of arrests that Paterno had little control over and seemed disinclined to care about seems symptomatic of the greater attitude that led to the decade-long Sandusky cover-up. History will not treat the "Grand Experiment" well.

Square hats and blasphemy. Jalen Rose, on the left, in his younger years:

Rose should show up in a Michigan-themed version something similar the next time he's on ESPN. I would pay a dollar for that.

Probably the final number. The number of current or former Michigan athletes who will be competing in the London Olympics: 18. And then there's Michael Phelps, who may not have actually attended Michigan but it something of an Ann Arbor institution if you've ever been in one of the diners he shoveled calories into himself at.

Points for sentiment. Not so much execution. From a reader, here is a tattoo:

This is not quite up to Lamarr Woodley standards.

The new guy. The News interviews Erik Bakich, Michigan's new baseball coach. There's not much that's not boilerplate, but I liked this:

When you're building a program based on pitching you need to have strong frontline pitching.

We'll see how it works out. Bakich has a thin track record but did relatively well at a tough place to win, is young, and has recruited well both as a head coach and an assistant. It's a reality check as to where Michigan's program stands.

Keith Jackson. The 1985 South Carolina game featured Jamie Morris hammering the Gamecocks and SC's "wide open, gambling offense" scoring three points:

Chesson hype: incremented. Sam Webb reports that Jehu Cheson ran a 4.4 40 at Michigan offseason workouts. If fast, will be intimidating.

CEASE PANIC. Our annual Cass Tech Commit Considers Taking Visits But Decides Not To After Panicking The Internet event has transpired:

Michigan football commit David Dawson turned some heads Friday when his plans to camp at Florida were revealed.

A day later, the trip is no more.

After speaking to Michigan coaches, the Detroit Cass Tech offensive lineman -- ranked by ESPN as the country's top guard -- no longer will attend the Gators' Friday Night Lights camp, according to GoBlueWolverine.com's Sam Webb.

Twitter warriors can stand down. Those inspirational quotes about loyalty can be re-directed to your significant others. I've found that condescending public tweets are what make a relationship go in this modern age of ours.

Extremely important abbreviation UPDATE! If you see "FINAO" on a football recruit's twitter, it stands for "failure is not an option." Thus sayeth Heiko in an act of investigative journalism unparalleled in the history of the site. You may all resume your day to day lives.

This is a man to have a drink with. Sun Belt Commissioner Karl Benson proposed a four-league, 33-team superconference combining CUSA, the Sun Belt, the WAC, and Mountain West. The slide on which this proposal was tendered was labeled "Makes Too Much Sense." Someone should get Karl Benson drunk and have him opine on the other conference commissioners.

Next year's defection worries. A couple of Michigan's 2013 hockey commits made the "A-list" of big time prospects the CSB puts out around this time every year. C JT Compher (expected) and D Michael Downing (maybe a bit of a surprise) are two of the five college-bound guys on that list. That generally means they're expected to go in the first couple rounds.

Big Ten hockey expansion: seeking 100 million or bust. New PSU coach Guy Gadowsky was interviewed by The Pipeline show and PSU hockey blog Thank You Terry transcribed interesting bits. From the non-PSU perspective, this is the most interesting bit:

Speaking of the Big Ten...
"I know for sure there’s been three other Big Ten schools that have contacted our administration and are very curious as to how [the transition to NCAA hockey] happened and what they needed to do. The reality is that the prerequisite to that is that you get a Mr. Pegula or Pegula family that’s going to give 100-odd million dollars. Those guys aren’t hanging off trees. So that’s the prerequisite and that’s hard to find. But I do think there’s a lot of interest – if they can get it done, I know there are Big Ten schools that would love to be a part of it."

Don't expect the Big Ten to get up to eight teams unless magic fairies with money bags descend on the right schools.

Etc.: Ace will no doubt cover LaQuon Treadwell's not-quite-itchy-enough trigger finger extensively in Tuesday Recruitin', but what you need to know now is he didn't commit and now plans to do so on a "random day($)," probably by rolling a d100 until it comes up 1. Yes, highly touted receivers have d100s. Loads of them.

Alex Anzalone has decided to avoid creeper-associated universities and will go to Notre Dame. Beilein is not calling recruits at midnight. Burke and Hardaway are among the 20 players at the Lebron Skills Academy.

Upchurch / "We don't need to drink blood to know what it tastes like"

My favorite day of the year growing up was right about now, a morning in mid-June when I woke up and it was still sunny as it had been when I went to bed, and I'd sit up and go through the painful transition from a reality where the Care Bars (or post-1991 Desmond Howard) and I solve crimes, to one where Number 2 pencils are a thing. Then mid-boot it would suddenly dawn on me that yesterday was a half-day and today is…

Then there was a morning when I was already working but still living in my college house and realized that school and the first day of summer vacation were a package deal. This is young adulthood: trying to find meaning in everything because that which used to have meaning is gone, and you don't yet know what having kids is actually like. That day my buddy convinced me to see a local post-punk band based on the challenge of how much crap the lead singer could threaten to break before the set ended/he actually broke something important. And they sang something about losing that first day of summer, or I thought it was about losing that day. Anyway fast forward to that train track-ity walk home from the Blind Pig and two recent grads calling the world insufficient when I brought up, "well, we beat Ohio State this year." And that worked, because I had no idea we wouldn't beat them again for eight years.

Since November I've had another pinprick thought to convince me to leave a dream just on the edge of lucid and reenter this plane of existence: Guys, we beat Ohio State this year. This is the payoff for all of those years of traversing the darkness rather than sucking it up and hiring Les Miles or something. We get this little ray of first-day-of-summer-vacation-level happy that we can access any time, and it doesn't even poop itself!

Doing lines. From his opening paragraph I can tell jamiemac has been doing the same thing. The post itself covers the Vegas lines for highlight-able Michigan games this year. I'm not much of a gambler (I like picking but not risk-taking) but I love reading their stuff. People trying to play the margins necessarily have to cut through all the fluff, including their own biases. Movement of the lines set by casinos trying to entice people to bet, and where that movement ends, is a far more accurate power ranking than that produced by columnists with 30 logo pictures and 30 snark remarks.

This one is especially well written and speaks volumes about what the smart money thinks our chances are against rivals and power programs. There's wonkiness too—like a poker player who always plays Jack-Nines because he won big on those a few times, he always takes the underdog in Michigan-Notre Dame. Then again you've got two programs who often enter seasons ranked above rationality—especially ND—and presumably this affects the higher ranked of the two each time, so maybe that's the effect? Anyway Michigan's the dog so yay. If you were handicapping Diarist of the Week, the smart money's on jamiemac.

The smart football. There will be more on this over the summer but Chris Brown has collected some of his best works into a book, something Brian thought of doing before we realized nobody wants to relive either of the eras his best works were written in. You can buy the book, which is like $5 for an Amazon download, or read the columns on his site and Grantland, or get the Cliff's Notes from a friend. This friend is DonAZ, who added his own thoughts as to how the lessons relate to Michigan. They're in the form of questions, some of which are answered well in the comments. Also in the comments is a jackass complaining about improper conjugation of forms of "thee."

Hey Rube, easy on the bears. Hunter S. Thompson once shot his assistant while trying to shoot a bear. If you guessed this my lead-in for a jhackney diary, you know your diarists too well. His dream is similar to mine but with more members of carnivora:

Unfortunately, I missed half the game studying an accordion type device that promised to send you to a planet of unicorns, badass grizzly care bears, and a bottomless plate of fat free/vitamin rich BBQ spare ribs. I did return from the outer reaches of the universe to see an anemic offense get in a position to win the game with a field goal. At first I thought I ended up on an episode of Sliders, reaching a parallel universe.

The Sugar Bowl was real! Ohio State was real! Trouncing Nebraska was real! Bears are real!

Going for the jugular is real. The Mathlete says so, or I should say his database says so. By this I don't mean a bear trying to make your trachea dangly, but a coach trying to "capitalize on momentum" by attempting a +20 yards pass on 1st down after a turnover/punt/momentum shift. I'll go ahead and ruin it because you're going to read it anyway math junkies: coaches absolutely do this, and it doesn't seem any more effective than the rest of the offense. In the book a poker-loving roommate used to leave in the bathroom I remember it saying players who just won a big hand will bluff immediately after (the loser will fold something decent, then go on tilt). Whatever the poker move, as anyone who spent a significant part of their adult life with Carr teams, if it gets them throwing deep, fine. But since coaches seem prepared for it, the best move would be a short and easy pass. Get 5 yards, keep the crowd into it, get the QB comfortable in a rhythm, and wait to catch the defense on tilt.

Half-way through high school. The 2014 offer list is out, courtesy of Sinsemillaplease. Needs more list of competing offers. Also MOAR of these guys:

That's Mr. Blue, Happy Teeth, Data, Nefarious Eduardo, and Sad Josh to those of you with precisely manicured MGolawns. If you weren't a recruiting board follower pre-2009, these are what recruits looked like before kids committed to their schools before 4th grade. Most of the players on that list have drivers licenses, though not all. If you want to just skip to the part where the Class of 2014 are graduating with multiple Big Ten Championships, ask the guy from the future, if you can get him to stop predicting Heismans for Houma.

Etc. TSS was breaking the server late last night, so I imagine he'll have something about comparing Alabama's roster to Michigan's in the near future, if it's not up already. The little he had uploaded as of 1 a.m. had me refreshing in hopes of more.

Best of the Board

IN A WORLD WHERE LES MILES CHEWS FIELD TURF.

This is one of those posts that goes to a link but the MGoDiscussion is better than that on the site with the article (happens all the time with Yahoo). This time Andy Staples pretends the world hinges on one 3rd down scramble by Chris Leak that saves Zook's job in Florida. From this point the timeline skews into a tangent, creating an alternate 2012 in which Bobby Petrino is rich, and powerful, and married to your mother, and where this has happened to me:

When the bracket is announced the following day and Stanford and Florida make the playoff as at-larges and Michigan doesn't, Miles delivers an impassioned speech on ESPN that will be studied by linguists for decades. His message? Who really knows? But he uses the word "chest" 57 times in seven minutes.

But hey we win the 2006 national championship all Alabama style and somehow this reminds Crable to block the guy so no Horror, no Peanut Butter Jelly Time and, uh, Denard Robinson at Florida State with Chip Kelly? Like people who've been through actual horrors, I'll keep the guys I survived hell with.

IN A WORLD WHERE DENARD HAS LOWER ACCELERATION THAN LEWAN

Alternate title: OUR QB IS ODDJOB!

Every year EA Sports gives us plenty to complain about, and every team that isn't us way more to complain about (I still hear it from my brother about Greg Jones being rated under Will Campbell in NCAA 2010, which is for 2009, which are they ever going to fix this?) Mr. Yost put together an extensive formula for re-rating guys, then stuck Ricardo Miller on the WR three-deep, starts Funchess, and Gallon's not even the slot receiver. I'm sad this is the last year 12-year-olds will be asserting a neighborhood rule against using Michigan because Denard plus EA game mechanics is "unfair."

IN A WORLD WHERE TACKLES CAN WEAR 11 AND CENTERS CAN WEAR 48

Informal poll: un-retiring numbers or no? This was a prevailing theme over several threads as further Legends jerseys were leaked. This is one of those places where I don't care what a majority of fans think—I want it given to freshmen, redshirt freshmen, sophomores, or at the latest a redshirt sophomore. I want them to be recruiting tools and to not interfere with already purchased jerseys and databases and most importantly my dreams of long-term Michigan starters riding around in their signature numbers on unicorns and helping me fight crimes. I find this very important indeed.

IN A WORLD WHERE COUNTING SYLLABLES IS CONSIDERED HIGH ART

Offseason Haiku.

IN A WORLD WHERE WILL CAMPBELL AND "SLEEK" ARE IN THE SAME SENTENCE

This is Wendyk5's description of BWC. See this and other snippets from the Women's Football Academy. Things in that video: Borges's arm is in a cast:

Darrell Funk looks like a Law & Order policeman. Several times the girls ran Denard Power from the shotgun spread.

Your moment of zen

A while back I posted on an athletic department initiative to reclaim maize from the vast sea of generic (and increasingly bright) yellow that has slowly enveloped everything from t-shirts to the uniforms themselves.

This is the part where very serious people leap in to note the effects of lighting, your monitor, your mood, and your brain on your perception of color. When I asked for an official RGB conversion of the pantone colors the University recognizes as official to deploy here, helpful users came up with a hilariously diverse gamut of possibilities.

In response to this I threw up my hands and didn't change anything, because it's not like there's a right answer. The one useful thing we can draw from this is that all of these shades are darker than than the current deployments in basketball and football:

Gordon chosen for maximum soul-offensiveness; I was at that game and that seems like an accurate reproduction. Hardaway uniform an approximate median from the first couple pages of Google Image Search.

Insert usual disclaimers about pictures—the famous Desmond Howard picture I brought out for the original post is almost orange because of things not related to the actual uniform color—but I've been there in person, I've scanned the student section and had the lack of pop from an actually-maize shirt pop out at me: this is correct insofar as these things can be correct.

Argh.

We're never going to get anywhere doing this. I'd like to put aside the hard science of color and play a little feelingsball, if we can. Here's an email I received a couple weeks back after a guy tweeted at me about the differences between the Crisler floor (a darker shade I associate more strongly with maize) and the team's uniforms (YELLOW YELLOW YELLOW):

Brian,

I saw your RT of some guy's tweet referencing the "maize" on the Crisler Center's floor and the "highlighter yellow" of the bball uniforms.  I fall more on the highlighter side of the argument, as I remember as a kid watching teams in the late 70's and early 80's crushing opponents with maize pants that were far closer to the highlighter than the Crisler M border that reminds me of the maize used by t-shirt street vendors.
Bored, I dug around and found this article from 1996. Interesting read, but it seems that the author concludes that the maize we see in the uniform is closer to the 1912 approved colors than the border around the M.  The last two pics are interesting in that the one on the right:

looks more like the bball floor than the approved:

Love the blog.

Regards,

And now the background color of block quotes is really bothering me. We must forge on.

Here is the feelingsball: that strip on the bottom is wrong. It's Second-Great-Awakening-preacher wraoooong, at least as far as athletic teams are concerned. In other contexts I'm sure it's fine. If a Michigan team came out in a blue that light, though, there would be a riot. It would be a genteel Earl Grey kind of riot in which people hop on the internet to demand the email address of Dave Brandon, but it would be a riot nonetheless. I question the validity of applying the yellow from the official colors when the blue is clearly not right.

I bring it up because I've gotten a moderate amount of pushback on the idea that Michigan's current yellow is bad and ahistoric and should be hit with a shovel and buried in an Iowa cornfield. Like the guy above there's a group of Michigan fans out there that sees the lighter shade as the right one. I think they're in the minority, but they exist.

I'm with the darker shades mostly because I find them more aesthetically appealing. They're also more distinct and remind me less of the Seattle Sounders's increasingly neon kits.

Even if you're on the other side of the divide, we can all agree that this…

…is not good. Those are the actual helmet decals Michigan used this year compared to an actual Michigan helmet. MVictors acquired them from Helmet Hut, the manufacturer Michigan uses, and reports that Helmet Hut does have colors that match the helmet but Michigan wanted the darker shade.

Dave Brandon's all about uniformity of branding. This aggression will not stand, and on the thing Michigan could change immediately they went with a darker, maiz-ier color. That's the direction we're headed. When Michigan isn't wearing their commemorative flamenco-inspired jerseys against Notre Dame or their special Save the Marsupials outfits for the Big Ten opener, Michigan will take the field against a MAC team looking more like Rick Leach is piloting things. In this, we can take comfort.

SEE ALSO: Maize 'n' Blue Nation.