jim delany

Bo. Via MGoVideo:

Playoff bits. So now the Big Ten is saying "screw playoffs altogether." Jim Delany is advocating for the four best teams in any playoff that does occur, and everyone hates the system of voting we have in place now. Delany:

“Everybody recognizes that the present poll system is not a good proxy,” he said. “It’s flawed, it’s not transparent, it has people who have a stake in the outcome voting, it measures teams before they play a game.”

I hope Bill Hancock has a fainting couch.

At this point it's clear that most fans don't have the same priorities in mind as the people in charge of the leagues they're fans of—see SEC expansion—and arguing with them on the internet is pointless. It's like trying to communicate with sentient mushrooms. Their desires are so alien that attempting to comprehend them leads to you shooting railguns at a distant planet for no reason other than fear.

Whatever happens, we can be assured that everyone was in favor of it at some point. Even the generally sober folks employed by actual newsgathering organizations are getting peeved at this point. Adam Rittenberg:

"A computer doesn't have an eye," Delany said. "So an eye test is missing if there is an injury" or other issues with a contender. Delany also said the impetus for change is that the BCS "has been battered and criticized" and treated "like a piñata" for the past 15 years. So to reiterate: The Big Ten's No. 1 preference would be to keep a current system that everybody hates and which uses a totally bankrupt formula to select its teams. Gotcha.

Sentient mushrooms, man.

IRONY EXPLODE. Dave Brandon, one of the Big Ten's most prominent complainers about a playoff:

"Every change I have ever proposed has been met with resistance," Brandon told the crowd… "I don't care what it is, any change that's been proposed, this has been a culture that wants to resist it, because we all want to go back to the way it was when we were there because that's friendly and that's comfortable."

Notice how he switches back to "I" from "we" when he's talking about all the great stuff he does and not the fact that six different uniforms in a season may have been a tiny bit excessive.

No move. UConn's AD has restated that the Huskies will not move their return game scheduled for next year from their home field. That's fine by me but now the UConn bloggers are looking at the $2 million buyout clause and wondering if the game will ever be played. I'd guess it will since there's not a whole lot of time to find a suitable replacement, but Brandon's had occasional grumbles about the indignity of playing at such a place since he arrived.

UConn's ace in the hole may be their athletic director. They hired Michigan alum Warde Manuel away from Buffalo, so Michigan may be more willing to go through with things.

via Jamie Owens and UMHoops

Incoming pointage. Those Indiana junior/senior All-Star scrimmages have kicked off and the first one featured a lot of the above-pictured activities. Glenn Robinson III was 9 of 10 from the field en route to leading his team in scoring. He also added seven rebounds in 22 minutes. Junior rep Zak Irvin was his team's leading scorer as well, though he didn't shoot as well as GRIII.

Pee and flee. A couple of OSU players are suspended indefinitely—or at least until they pick up their whatever misdemeanor plea bargains—for urinating on the side of a building, then taking off when the cops arrived:

Police in Shawnee Hills, Ohio, a Columbus suburb, spotted the two players and a third man not connected to the football team early Saturday urinating outside a restaurant near Stoneburner’s house, located just off the course at Muirfield Village Golf Club.

Collins said the men dashed away when they saw a spotlight, unknowing it belonged to police. He said Mewhort and Stoneburner stopped about 40 yards away from the restaurant and did not attempt to hide.

This is not interesting—it's no defensive tackle Dukes of Hazzard attempt. I just wanted to call it "pee and flee." BONUS: these guys were peeing on the side of a building mere feet from a thicket dense enough to hide in. Sounds like they need to take OSU's Andy Katzenmoyer Memorial Drunken Decisionmaking 101.

Kind of good. A re-rank of the top 100 basketball prospects from last year finds Trey Burke in rarefied air:

Elite

5. Trey Burke, Michigan (84)
Along with Cody Zeller, Burke was named Big Ten Freshman of the Year and second team All-Conference. He and Zeller are also, comfortably, the top two freshmen returning to school this fall. Burke came out of nowhere (or, at least, the "obscurity" of the non-McDonald's All-American section of the ESPNU Top 100) to be a superstar do-it-all point guard for an NCAA tournament No. 4 seed. He scored often, he scored efficiently, he passed, and he took care of the basketball. The Wolverines' round of 64 loss to Ohio shouldn't alter the fact that Burke had a fabulous season. Michigan returns their three key players from 2012 and adds a pair of recruits capable of making an immediate impact. There's a reason expectations for 2013 are high.

Cody Zeller is the only guy higher than him who will be in college next year.

Like Coke, but fast. Drake Johnson tells a delightfully weird story about Fred Jackson to Kyle Meinke:

"I'm sitting in his office, and there was a fridge right over there, and he's like, 'You hungry?'" Johnson said. "I'm like, 'No man, I'm not hungry.' So he's like, 'OK, I'm going to grab myself a Coke.' So he grabs himself a Coke and he sits down.

"He takes maybe two sips, and he's like, 'Hey Drake, you want something to drink?' And I'm like, 'No, I'm still good.' He's like, 'I think I'm going to get myself an orange juice.' I'm like, 'Dude, you have a Coke in front of you.' He says, 'It's fine.'

"So I'm sitting there, and maybe two minutes later, he's like, 'I think I'm going to get myself a drink,' and I'm like, 'Coach, you already got two drinks in front of you, man! Your thirst can be quenched by what's in front of you.'

"He says, 'I'm just going to grab myself some water. You want some water?' And I'm like, "Nooo, I have Gatorade in my hand, guy. It's fine.'"

My thirst cannot be quenched by what's in front of me, Drake. What is satiation? THE MOMENT BEFORE YOU'RE THIRSTY AGAIN. Now let me tell you about how you are a taller, quicker version of Jim Brown. /dondraper'd

Suggestion box. Cover It Live has decided to charge out the nose for use of its product. Running Signing Day liveblog alone would now cost $300. It would have cost the site almost a thousand dollars last November. All this for a moderated chat system. This is clearly not a good use of funds, so I'll be looking for alternatives. Let me know if you know of any.

Etc.: Will Campbell's hood-crumpling registers in the Fulmer Cup. Pro Combat uniforms for Northwestern. More on Big Ten baseball's tough spot. NHL draft roundup from MHN. Holdin' The Rope on the Denard play. The first one. You know, that one. We need a nickname for it. Shoelace in the dirt or something. Mark Donnal invited to the NBPA camp. Can we stop giving credit to Jim Delany's amazing foresight when the conference he's piloting has won two national titles in fifty years?

Please don't take offense at clearly manufactured Queensbury-style smack-talk emanating from real journalists at ESPN. None of the journalists cares one whit about anything that is not the relevance of the serial comma in today's fast-paced society.

Brady Hoke's Pet Viking mgoshirt? Yes, at the WTKA Mott Takeover.

be like Steve Everitt without killing a moose with your bare hands

Steve Everitt forever.

Also, Everitt described bounties surfacing during his long NFL career.

Super-regional ho. Congratulations to the softball team, which dramatically came from behind in their tournament opener, then shut the door on top seed Louisville to win their first road regional in a long, long time. The dramatic finisher in Michigan's second consecutive walk-off win… a hit by pitch. The win that finished the weekend off was a more comfortable 4-0 affair.

They'll initiate what appears to be a series of Michigan-Alabama bragging rights contests in a super-regional in Tuscaloosa next weekend. Winner hits the WCWS.

Yes. Do you believe in improbable sporting outcomes. Go. Go. USA. Pam Ward, deadener of Big Ten noon games since time began, is no longer doing college football on ESPN. This will result in marginal improvement, and probably fewer nasty comments about injured players.

Since ESPN started shoehorning Beth Mowins into college football games she didn't seem to know much about last year, the emphasis is on marginal. Insanely fun things were happening in the Northwestern-Illinois game last year and she busted out "it's a Persa party in Champaign!" I'm pretty sure this is not plain ol' misogyny and I have good reason to think both of the female announcers put on Big Ten games are not so good.

He's pretty fast. That would be Jehu Chesson, the lanky 6'3" wide receiver from Missouri who signed in February. The main knock on Chesson was his speed, something his recent track exploits are bringing into question. Chesson won the 300M hurdles (37.73), 110M hurdles (14.55), and 100M dash (10.79) at his sectionals. As mentioned, he also wears cool sunglasses doing this.

According to the recruiting rankings, Michigan hasn't done as well at wide receiver as they have at just about every other spot on the field, but I wouldn't be surprised if that was not a problem during the careers of Chesson and Amarah Darboh.

Yes, do it. The plausible deniability that saw Butch Davis emerge from the UNC NCAA scandal without a show-cause penalty despite the fact that one of his assistant coaches was operating as a runner for an agent may go away in the near future:

Under the current NCAA bylaw, a head coach is "presumed" to have knowledge of what is occurring in his program and "can be responsible" for the actions of his assistants.

The proposed change would do away with presumption. It would make the head coach responsible for his assistants' actions regardless of his knowledge of them. The penalties would range from 5 to 100 percent of competition in a season.

The NCAA included in the discussion material some examples of behavior for which a head coach would be held accountable, such as in-person, off-campus contacts with a recruit during a dead period, providing team gear to a recruit, or multiple phone calls or contacts when they are not allowed.

This is part of a larger overhaul mentioned a few months ago in this space that could see penalties become predictable and massive, but right now that's a long, long way from becoming reality. It's in the "special committee" stage—ie, a spitballing group throwing stuff at the wall without considering how feasible passing it is.

Not enough data, so everyone makes big. Ex-NFL players are dying at a rate half that of the general population after they retire and are 59 percent less likely to commit suicide. May want to slow down on the concussion panic. Small sample size disclaimers apply to that study, but they apply just as much to the panic side of the equation:

We don't need the CDC numbers to tell us that the national debate over head trauma and suicide has long since outpaced the scientific evidence. Just a handful of cases so far support the notion that repeated head injuries (concussive or otherwise) can lead to drug abuse, aggression, and self-harm. No one knows the baseline rate of chronic traumatic encephalopathy among athletes, let alone the general population. No one knows whether the pathological signs of CTE—microscopic spots in the brain, found after death—relate to behavioral symptoms like dementia and depression. And no one can explain how repeated knocks to the head might produce CTE, or how CTE might produce suicidal thoughts. Yet in spite of our near-total ignorance, a moral panic has taken hold: Elaborate explanations are concocted when simple ones will do. Faced with the regrettable facts—a troubled man dies a lonely death—we resort to hocus-pocus theorizing about tau proteins and fibrillary tangles. It's a form of denial: By obsessing over hidden trauma, we ignore what's right in front of us. Many ex-NFL players have sad and difficult lives.

The concern over concussions is taking the usual route of a moral panic, where some stuff happens and some tenuous data connects things to stuff so things are condemned because stuff is bad. Then some more people look at other data and say things might not be that connected to stuff after all, and everyone moves on to the next thing. See: alar, fat people, etc. This is the phase where the noise overtakes the signal and Something Is Done that may or may not affect a problem that may or may not exist.

BONUS: ex-NFL players are really good at not getting tuberculosis.

We have a second challenger. Patrick Vint of Black Heart Gold Pants takes a swing at defending the Big Ten's retreat from home playoff sites. The argument boils down to "remember the last time we all taunted Jim Delany?"

Everything Jim Delany has done as commissioner of the Big Ten -- especially since the summer of 2007 -- has been in pursuit of long-term advantage to the conference as a whole, and its individual teams only by way of that. The Big Ten Network was supposed to be a money-losing catastrophe that nobody would watch and even fewer would pay to see. After a year and a half of publicly negotiating/ridiculing/screaming at Comcast and Mediacom, Delany had transformed it into a massive cash cow, making the Big Ten schools richer than those in the SEC, the Big 12, the Pac-10, and every other conference. When the SEC responded by signing a big new TV deal with ESPN, it still didn't make the Southern schools as much money as their Northern rivals.

Delany used his newfound financial leverage, and a not-so-subtle call for expanding the conference, to bring the biggest collegiate sports programs in the country to his door. He damn near disemboweled the Big 12 in the process, causing an insurrection that fired Dan Beebe and landed Nebraska within his conference's ranks, all while we were all losing our minds over Rutgers and Pitt. When the Nebraska regents voted unanimously to cut ties with 100 years of tradition because the financial pull of Big Ten membership was too great to deny, Delany was there, emerging from behind the curtain and shaking hands with Osborne and Perlman like Hollywood Hogan joining the Outsiders. A year later, Delany's SEC rival was picking up Big Ten reject Missouri to fill out his own expansion process, an expansion that made his conference exactly zero more dollars and done solely because the Big Ten had done it first.

It's a good point. Vint also notes that the difference here is four Big Ten home games since the inception of the BCS, which is not a big huge deal.

Where he loses me is with the assertion that the Big 12-SEC Never Happening Bowl is the revelation of the master plan:

Delany gave up on four home games in fourteen years, but what he got was hard to understand -- we already had the Rose Bowl, after all -- until the SEC and Big 12 announced their own end-of-season bowl game Friday. With that, Delany's plan became evident. With the conferences poised to create a four-team tournament (as Delany and his athletic directors repeatedly stated this week, the four-team maximum is a deal-breaker) within the confines of the bowl system, Delany, Slive, Larry Scott, and whoever's running the Big 12 now, as heads of the four premiere football conferences, had just effectively locked themselves into the final four. More importantly, Delany had locked out the ACC and Big East (and Notre Dame, for that matter), the other two BCS bowl games, and the distinct possibility of two teams from the same conference making the tournament. There will be four champions in the playoffs, and with the two semifinal bowls effectively set as the Rose and (presumably) SEC-Big 12 Sugar, Delany has ensured that a Big Ten champ will be one of them. That's fourteen spots in fourteen years, with none of them in an opponent's stadium (unless UCLA makes it to the Rose Bowl) (LOL).

Um. The Big 12-SEC game is specifically around in the event that the champions of those conferences aren't in the playoff. There is no bracketed final four that cuts out the ACC or Big East. So… what we're left with is the Big Ten giving up the idea because the… because it's… because the Rose Bowl. There is no way the BCS cuts out smaller conferences, because they'll get sued. Virginia Tech, Miami, and Florida State? Forget it. Notre Dame, if Notre Dame is ever relevant again? Come on.

Protecting the Rose Bowl at all costs is just another example of why the Big Ten finds itself where it is relative to other conferences: richer, but unable to leverage that wealth into on-field success.

Etc.: Get the Picture notes that the Ed O'Bannon lawsuit survived a motion to dismiss and seemingly got some support from the judge for the larger trial in the process. Expect more Gardner this fall. Other Big Ten ADs think playing at home is a good idea. Rob Bolden may finally be exiting Penn State.

Your bounty. The Shutdown Fullback has been created. Don't click it if you can't take jokes about Lloyd Carr's inability to gameplan from a Florida fan who clearly filed the most recent matchup of the two teams under "LSD-induced hallucination."

My name is Orson Swindle
I have taken LSD
Lloyd Carr is beating Tim Tebow by running a wide-open spread offense

PLEASE HELP ME

I mean… yeah. I get it.

Anyway:

Jason Kirk has started making meth with a former student of his. That is all.

That's not all. Final total for M: $6,316. Second place: Georgia with $1,318. OSU: $250. Rest of Big Ten combined: $600.

YES THAT IS WHAT YOU SHOULD LOOK LIKE

Everyone hates it. Literally the only positive response to the Big Ten's recent smoochy session with the Rose Bowl I can find: Drew Sharp [for the love of God, don't click that]. That's when you know you've made a bad life decision. Drumroll…

Kyle Meinke opens with "all due respect, but have you lost your mind" and doesn't back off much from there:

"I’m a big advocate for playing as many games as possible on campus, but I’m also a realist to know when you get to the point where you got those kinds of national games, with teams coming to various regions of the country, playing outdoors in the Midwest in January probably is not going to be a salable option," he said.

Right. Because Lambeau Field and Soldier Field and Gillette Stadium and MetLife Stadium have such a hard time drawing fans for December and January games.

Of course, Delany revealed minutes later the Big Ten is interested in adding the Pinstripe Bowl to its postseason slate -- a game that's played in late December in New York City. So, apparently the Big Ten doesn't mind playing postseason games in the cold, as long as they're not playoff games.

And what about all the fans, who likely will be asked to travel to a Big Ten championship game, national semifinal and national title game within the span of a month?

Maize and Blue Nation:

If you were to ask me why Jim Delany and the Big Ten brass have, essentially, given up without a fight to be able to host semi-final playoff games on college campuses – I would not have a coherent answer for you.

Corn Nation, which doesn't have the lingering fondness of a Big Ten tradition:

I hate the Rose Bowl. I hated it before we joined the Big Ten, I hated it last year, and I'm going to hate it even more now. I don't want a college playoff system if it includes the existing bowl system. I don't care about Rose Bowl tradition.

I wanted to see a SEC team play in freezing temperatures in the snow some day before I die. Now it looks like I'm just going to have to live forever. Bastards.

Land-Grant Holy Land:

Yesterday, Michigan State's athletic director, Mark Hollis, informed us peasants about the death of on-campus semi-final games. The "value" of the Rose Bowl has to be maintained, you see. I guess I'm not surprised fossils are defending other fossils which make them money. It's a hell of a ruse, and I guess in the end, I have to tip my cap and wait for the Grim Reaper to do what he does.

Eleven Warriors:

To hide behind the fallacy that elite B1G teams set the Rose Bowl as their ultimate goal is a joke. That joke becomes the kind you don't deliver in front of women and children when you basically go out of your way to disadvantage your own teams by not pushing for warm climate schools to possibly play big boy football in football weather.

As icing on the cake, the decision makers put an even greater financial burden on fans who will be racking up a lot more air miles with no chance of a home semifinal or at least a semifinal potentially located within the conference footprint.

With self inflicted decisions like this, it's not hard to understand why the B1G struggles to be elite on the gridiron. But hey, at least we still have the Rose Bowl tradition.

Yay.

Get The Picture, a Georgia partisan:

I give up.  These guys really are that dumb.  If I were the folks at ESPN, once I got them signed on the dotted line for the next postseason TV deal, I’d invite ‘em all over for a friendly game of poker.  There’s no reason to leave them with any money in their wallets.

There was also the Wetzel piece, a Holdin' The Rope bit, and a bunch of other stuff I could keep linking for days. Everyone hates the Big Ten's meek-shall-inherit act.

Further statements to make your head explode. Urban Meyer:

"I would rather have neutral sites," Meyer said. "I'm not sure you can, on a crisp December day here in Columbus, have a Southern team come up to play. The Southern teams I coached [at Florida], I know it would be a problem."

AARGH

Meanwhile, I found the Brandon quote about fairness:

"I think there are two issues," Brandon said Wednesday after meetings with conference AD's wrapped up. "One is the salability of that to the other conferences in terms of whether that is a fair fight to bring somebody up in the snow of January from the South. Whatever system we come up with it has to be agreed to by everybody, so that is the practical reality."

ARGHHHHHHHH (The other issue is that players like free vacations.)

In other bowl news. The Big Ten is thinking about diversifying its bowl locations. Right now there's the Rose and then Florida Florida Florida Florida. Delany:

"When you have three bowls in Florida and you're a school that is constantly in that range for selection, your fan base could end up, in a five-year period, four times in the state of Florida," Delany said. "So does that depress the interest? Again, sometimes less is more. Is there a way to give them a taste of Florida and Phoenix and Texas and other places in California? We want to have the fan base excited about going, about who they're playing and about where they're playing.

Delany said they'd be interested in the Pinstripe Bowl in New York—probably the least-embarrassingly-named minor bowl around—and Graham Couch, the author of the above-linked piece, speculates that the Big Ten would like to move in on California bowls like the Holiday and the Fight Hunger Bowl. You may remember the latter as the host of the saddest game in the history of college football (Illinois-UCLA, featuring two fired coaches and zero winning records), but it's in San Francisco so at least it's somewhere interesting. I said my bit on this already; diversity is good, they should put one in Denver. Average temps there in January are in the 40s. Not exactly Frozen Tundra.

Minor violations ahoy. Another minor avalanche of secondary violations from OSU contains little of note except another screwup from Gene Smith, but I want to point out this guy:

…assistant coach Mike Vrabel [was] using smokeless tobacco on the sidelines during football games last season, which was noted and reported to Ohio State by a Columbus-area health teacher, and was a secondary violation of NCAA rules against using tobacco during games or practice.

Of course the guy ratting on Vrabel is a high school health teacher. Now let me tell you about these sexually transmitted diseases. Remember, kids, everything is going to kill you. Now read a book or die.

BONUS: article features Only Lawyer In America Michael Buckner.

"In general, if you're not reporting numerous secondary violations, then from the NCAA perspective, that could be considered a bad sign," Buckner said.

Someone find another lawyer. Surely we must have a second somewhere in this country.

Etc.: Big Ten to make title game tickets less deliciously scalpery. Michigan to spend a quarter of a billion dollars on non-revenue sports facilities over the next ten years. Even the Big Ten schools regularly hovering around 6-6 want bowl minimums increased. More Beilein transfer policy stuff. Staples endorses a committee. 2013 Scout Bball revamp moves Walton up, adds Donnall, still omits Irvin, confusing local observers greatly. Josh Levin says one-year scholarships are the "most evil thing about college sports" in Slate.

Total abominations

The Big Ten meetings are currently underway in Chicago, and the big story is the Big Ten bowing to their SEC overlords respecting the sanctity of the Rose Bowl by abandoning the desire for on-campus playoff semifinals. Of course, the stated reason for such a stance can't be "we're hopelessly in the pockets of the bowl system, so we'll sacrifice a competitive advantage for the sake of preserving some bastardized ideal of tradition," so this is now about... fairness?

DB: Admitted playing northern sites outside simply isn't fair even though Big Ten could have competitive advantage...

— Freep Wolverines (@freepwolverines) May 16, 2012

Sure, USC or UCLA playing in the Rose Bowl, LSU playing in the Sugar Bowl, Florida or Miami in the Orange Bowl, that's all fine. God forbid Big Ten fans actually get to drive to a postseason game while their SEC counterparts don coats (gasp!) and get on an airplane for what amounts to a road game! No, this can't happen because the kids want a nice trip and their bowl swag:

DB: Many UM FB players in favor of traveling to warm weather sites for bowl experience but could be tough in multiple weeks w B10 title game

— Freep Wolverines (@freepwolverines) May 16, 2012

Fair enough, I guess. I'm assuming, if the question was framed differently, the players would be in support of hosting a semifinal—and evening the playing field—instead of playing a "home" semi in Pasadena before a warm neutral-site final, though I could be wrong. Escaping Michigan in January is always high on my list of things to do in Michigan in January. This, however, is not my ideal destination:

Delany said he will "have conversations" about adding Big Ten bowl tie-in to New York City.

— Kyle Meinke (@kmeinke) May 16, 2012

Just so everyone has this straight: B1G concerned about cold weather for playoff, but would like to play bowl games in NYC in January.

— Kyle Meinke (@kmeinke) May 16, 2012

I present Yankee Stadium, home of the Pinstripe Bowl, one day before the 2010 game:

What's really remarkable is that the Big Ten is so brazen in its hypocricy that these ideas are presented within mere minutes of each other. The sooner the bowl system dies a fiery (icy?) death, at least when it comes to determining a national champion, the better.

Staying for a while. Helmet numbers are around until someone gets tired of them again if correspondence sent to Shane Morris is any indication:

I like them so much better when they're the same color as the rest of the helmet. Let's work on that, kids. Also someone send one of these to Treadwell with a #1 on it.

Michigan Replay, 1999. Intro not present, unfortunately. Post PSU win. This was smack in the middle of the We Own Penn State period.

Old, old school. Great article by John Kryk as he catches up with 91-year-old Al Wistert to talk about how his brain's doing and various other things. Wistert is hale and hearty, full of stories:

Wistert said he often did take a pounding; speed can help an undersized tackle avoid only so much contact.

"It was always a problem," he said of his size. "Each guy that I played against outweighed me by 40 or 50 pounds, and that was never easy.

"Playing nine years in the NFL would be a long time in any era. I didn't have a lot of injuries, though. I usually played 60 minutes and didn't come out of the game. But I managed to survive it. I guess I was pretty tough."

Wistert said he doesn't recall there being any protocols, or even concerns, back in the '40s about the effects of hits to the head. He doesn't recall having suffered a concussion, and said he doesn't know of any teammates who were ever kept out of a game for having had, in the parlance of the day, his "bell rung."

"No, I don't remember any serious precautions that they would make about that. So I guess there wasn't any concern about it."

Wistert played both ways for nine years in the NFL at 214 pounds. Different era then. Obviously.

NEVER TALK JIM DELANY. Unless you're telling that story about how you fingerbanged Mark Shapiro. All responses to all questions should be colorful anecdotes about turning his outrage into yearning. That's quality stuff.

It's just the everything else that's an issue:

"I don't have a lot of regard for that team," Delany said in a phone interview with The Associated Press.

Who is that team?

"I don't have a lot of regard for that team," he said. "I certainly wouldn't have as much regard for that team as I would for someone who played nine conference games in a tough conference and played a couple out-of-conference games on the road against really good opponents. If a poll doesn't honor those teams and they're conference champions, I do.

He didn't say Alabama. Did he have to? Anyone ever heard of a team not winning its division or its conference but going on to win the national championship?

GODDAMMIT JIM DELANY NOW ALABAMA IS GOING TO SHOW UP IN DALLAS AND TRY TO WIN. OUR WHOLE PLAN WAS THIS: DO NOT MAKE ALABAMA FEEL LIKE THEY SHOULD WIN THIS FOOTBALL GAME. OUR WHOLE PLAN IS NOW: AAAAAAAAIIIIEEEEEE. I SHOULD SHAKE YOU, SCREAMING "GET AHOLD OF YOURSELF" AND YES I KNOW THAT'S IRONIC.

Or maybe this doesn't matter and Alabama was already thinking they should win the game. But probably not.

Potentially useful walk-on? Michigan's acquired a preferred walk-on named Chris Maye from Union City, Michigan. He's a defensive back and he seems pretty fast:

Maye had several opportunities; officially visiting U-M and Michigan State for track, as well as making official visits to U-M, MSU and Army for football. He was the No. 1 track recruit at U-M, but Maye set his sights on playing football, actually turning down track scholarships.

With Brink poised to contribute and Kovacs entering his fourth year as a starter, guys like these are worth keeping an eye on in case they turn out a lot better than expected. Or Dantonio offers them. Whichever comes first.

Slash. Slash is old now, and I wonder if he just has a wig with the hat attached that he puts on when he wants to be Slash and takes off when he just wants to be an old guy in leather pants. Maybe he has to take the leather pants off too.

Anyway: Jay Bilas is sick of watching basketball teams beat up on weak sauce that probably shouldn't even be in D-I and has a radical solution($):

The bottom half of Division I is simply not competitive enough on a consistent basis to justify the bloated size of Division I. If Division I is reduced to a more reasonable size, there would be better games, a better distribution of talent across a smaller pool, and a better and more marketable product.

If Division I shrinks to 120 or 150 teams, the cry that Butler and VCU would be left out is the first one hears. Slow down. Look at the 120 FBS teams on the football side, and then look at the top 150 in the BPI. Teams like Butler (which just bolted the Horizon League for the Atlantic 10) and VCU would be among the 120 to 150 teams that are qualified and committed to a better Division I. It would include plenty of committed and competitive teams, and nobody would miss the early-season games against sacrificial lambs.

Most of the competitive programs would make it above that bar, and Bilas further suggests that top D-II teams—where the bottom 200 teams would end up—could get bids to the NCAA tournament to keep the Cinderella factor high. End result would be much better nonconference scheduling. It's a win for fans.

Unfortunately, we live in a world where John Calipari cancels the IU-Kentucky series because he can't get Tom Crean to move it off of home courts. Fans are about #10,000 on the list of stakeholders. As long as the NCAA is a loose confederation people are going to make eyes at status they can't achieve. There's nothing to be done except make sure you avoid the real dregs so your RPI doesn't suffer.

Answering rhetorical questions. It's my hobby. Here are three masquerading as one:

Zack Novak: The world's smallest, toughest and most self-deprecating power forward?

Smallest: at a major college level, yes. Not for all of D-I thanks to the problem above. Toughest: um… probably not. Most self-deprecating: hell yes. Should have asked "most likely to have a rage fit" as well:

“A great all-around athlete,” Beilein later added, gesturing along the table of 10 honorees at Barton Hills Country Club. “If he had chose wrestling, he’d be sitting next to (wrestling assistant) Sean (Bormet). If he had chosen hockey, a great defenseman, he would have been. (Hockey coach) Red (Berenson), don’t you think so? Knock some people around. (Football coach) Brady (Hoke), a cornerback? One of those other things -- a safety?

“(Golf coach) Chris (Whitten), that’s the one thing I know, he would not be sitting next to you -- unless Happy Gilmore can make a comeback, because every club would be broken by the end of the first round.”

I find it odd that Beilein knows who Happy Gilmore is. This is probably unfair.

It's like Japan, except flat and slippery and less irradiated. That would be Michigan hockey practices this fall. The addition of Andrew Copp, an end-of-the-bench NTDP player who is likely to be Danny Fardig 2.0, gives Michigan 15(!) forwards, 9(!) defensemen, and 4(!) goalies this fall. Some of these guys are deep roster players who aren't getting scholarship money and don't expect to play, but the defense corps is especially jammed now that it appears everyone's back next year.

Michigan brings in two NTDPers who will be drafted, one very high, and these guys who played frequently last year:

• Merrill
• Moffie
• Bennett
• Chiasson
• Serville
• Clare

Two of those guys are probably going to get scratched every weekend unless Connor Carrick is also in the scratch mixture.

Scoring is the main issue. The cavalry there arrives in 2013. A senior-year blowup from AJ Treais would be most welcome.

Etc.: BYB's Kurt Mensching gets a Detroit News columnist gig. May they replace Rosenberg as effectively. Kyle Bosch will enroll early. The Hoover Street Rag posts its version of Special K for a day. These posts are tempting me to put together a list of the worst possible stadium anthems. Sigur Ros: untoppable? 

Michigan Hockey Net is not a big fan of the new jerseys. The St. Louis Blues gave Red a shotgun once. In a good way. Jacobi on the Snow Bowl.

Gorilla smash. This blog's readership annihilated the annual EDSBS charity fundraiser last year, bringing hope to refugees and a Bo-themed skin to EDSBS. Michigan coasted past #2 Auburn by a full two grand, and lo, we were amply rewarded.

You can take the opportunity to defend your crown by hitting up the 2012 version; this year the winning team also gets an episode of Shutdown Fullback devoted to it ("in a good way!" Orson says) and a "custom essay focused on doing nothing but denigrating the things the winning school finds deplorable."

Just going to leave this screenshot here now.

Yes, that's real. Or at least it is for me. /shakes fist at google personalization

Unfortunately, only round dollar amounts are available this year so you can't punch in your favorite score from a rivalry game unless you want to go big baller… or commemorate the Yakety Sax game with your 38.00.

Note: make sure to leave the school name in the DESIGNATION line, lest your donation not be credited to the glorious university you owe your lives, fortune, and honor to. If you need further hate to motivate you, that guy whose operative theory about why Brady Hoke will fail is "recruits too many NFL-sized offensive linemen who remind me of a guy who didn't work out for OSU" is suggesting that OSU fans should donate to "embarrass Michigan." Also he has not read the instructions closely enough, the bastard.

The last tie. 1992 OSU:

Kiss your sister, unless you've already married her. OOOH SICK BURN. MGoVideo also has all of the 1992 Purdue game.

Reinstated. Josh Furman is back and ready to go. Given the way this worked out, couldn't he have been practicing? He and the team would have benefited and… like… it doesn't sound like anything happened except some yelling into a dorm room (and, of course, the heinous crime against Furman's locks).

Somehow this sums up everything perfectly. SBN headline:

College Football Playoffs: Which 2 Bowls Should Be Added To The BCS?

College football? College football.

The plan. Two and out for Trey Burke is the plan:

Dime: Do you plan on leaving school for the NBA if you have another good year next season?
TB: If I have a great season, and we go far, I probably will lean towards coming out. I can’t really speak on that right now, it’s too early. But I definitely will look into it and my coaches will help me look into it because they understand the type of situation I’m in.

It would be nice to get Michigan's hyped freshman point guard a little time to get his feet wet but I'll take it. Derrick Walton's happy about his choice right now.

The limit. It turns out I've got one when it comes to recruiting, and it's one the premium sites, Tremendous and UMHoops are now exploring on a daily basis. If I see a "2014" or even "2015" in front of a kid's name, I am unmoved unless they seem extremely good and likely to end up at M.

A comprehensive list of 2014 football recruits I am interested in hearing about at this juncture: Malik McDowell. Since some of them are ending up at M it is also interesting to figure out how good the next crop of Cass Tech kids is. IL CB Parrker Westphal just got offers from half the Big Ten and is coached by Todd Howard (yes that Todd Howard), so he's getting there. I may be interested in 2014 Mississippi SG Devin Booker, but am not sure yet.

This will change after football players' junior seasons; in basketball it will change when Beilein can fire out offers in June. Right now it's just all so futuristic, man. Like finding an NCAA tournament loss to a major underdog hits only a pile of scar tissue where your heart used to be, I assume this is an effect of being a hockey fan. When Tristin Llewellyn committed he was supposed to be amazing. This did not happen. Need more data before emotions get all emotional.

Under that limit. I am interested to hear how Michigan's 2013 basketball commits are doing during their AAU season. Zak Irvin's play continues to improve:

Zak Irvin (2013, Wing, Eric Gordon All-Stars – Commit)

Zak Irvin is without a doubt one of the better players in his class. His jumpshot is water and when he gets it going from beyond the arc it’s almost impossible to stop him. His long arms make him a terror at the top of the zone on defense. In man-to-man sets, he was easily the best on-ball defender on his team. Irvin’s team is loaded, with two players headed to Indiana, one to Notre Dame and another to Purdue, but when the Eric Gordon All-Stars needed buckets it seemed like Irvin was the primary option. Irvin’s handle is solid and he looked okay running point guard sporadically, though he had a few turnovers. Two areas of his game to watch are his passing ability and rebounding. He made a concerted effort to rebound all weekend and wound up with 12 in the final game of the day on Saturday. He was also able to find his teammates for easy buckets in the post after using his quickness to get by his defender.

Love the idea that Irvin can be a 6'5" shutdown perimeter defender in the mold of a Bernard Robinson Jr. Michigan hasn't had an elite defender since. Also in that post, Mark Donnal gets in a bunch of foul trouble. UMHoops also has an article on Donnal featuring his relationship with Dan Dakich, who happens to be his AAU coach.

You realize this makes you Mubarak, right? Jim Delany:

Delany defended the Rose Bowl and compared the coming changes in college football to the Arab Spring, the revolts that erupted across the Middle East and North Africa last year.

“Not all change is manageable,” Delany said. “You want to control change. You want evolution, not revolution, because you don’t know what the unintended consequences will be.”

As always, Jim Delany should not say things.

Incoming defenders. The United States of Hockey also scouted the USA U18's defense corps, with all three of Michigan's commits turning in good performances. Trouba:

Jacob Trouba — It is plainly clear why Trouba is getting a lot of Top-10 buzz. He can do a little bit of everything. His pro-ready size and strength are going to be attractive to a lot of teams. He also plays with an edge and had several bone-crushing hits in the tournament. What people often forget is that Trouba is a tremendous skater. He has speed, sure, but there’s more to it than that. He’s able to find seems and turn it up ice quickly. Then there’s his cannon from the point. Trouba’s one goal at the tournament came off a stunning one-timer that required video review because it came right off the back bar in the net so quickly. He posted three points total. Knocks on his offensive upside are overblown, I feel. There are clearly many tools at this defenseman’s disposal. He should go early on Day 1. Committed to the University of Michigan.

Carrick:

Connor Carrick — Playing a strong game at both ends of the ice allowed Carrick to have a lot of success. The offensive-minded defenseman posted four points including a pair of goals. Carrick has good speed and some creativity with the puck. He also has pretty good strength along the walls, which makes up for his lack of height. Carrick also has a good feel for when to jump into plays and often makes good decisions when pinching. If Carrick ever got into trouble, he was able to recover with his feet. There should be a few teams that will be looking to pick up Carrick in the later rounds of the Draft. Committed to the University of Michigan.

Continues to sound like a bigger version of Langlais. Carrick's going to be important next year as Michigan tries to get that third pairing solidified, but if Michigan does hold on to all of their incoming defensemen they'll be in good shape.

Rutledge only got one start, a shutout—all games not against Canada were shutouts—in which he "bailed out" his team more than once. Click through for that report.

Etc.: The Solid Verbal features Dan, Ty, and Andy Staples talkin' playoffs. More Staples on playoffs. MVictors has audio of Willie Heston. If Dave Brandon was at FSU. Jerald Robinson's violence against a parking lot gate gets Michigan one point the Fulmer Cup. A second is added for "admiration."