maize is not highlighter yellow

play it cool

The professional approach to replays.

Hey Brian,

After watching Michigan slowly walk to the line after the Gardner not-a-catch-not-a-3rd down conversion on Saturday, I screamed at the tv for Michigan to snap the ball and run a play before the official reviewed the play.  My question is why don't coaches have a set of 3-4 plays that they  have their team run whenever they think a big play might be overturned? In this case, even a quick QB sneak that burns a play and starting over at 2nd and 10 is better than punting the ball back to Air Force.  I feel similarly after teams have long passes that change field position or off a turnover.

I was wondering if numbers and percentages support this theory,and if there are coaches (potentially including Hoke) who may have this package of plays already installed.

Go Blue,
Brooks

I have heard your frustrations many times and seen teams hurry to the line after a questionable decision almost as frequently. And it never works. When a team hurries to the line in an attempt to defuse the replay threat, the replay guy stops watching the Golf Channel, gets incensed, and always calls down for a review. Always. Without fail.

It's like running away from a crime scene. It's a rookie move. Would that French dude from The Professional hurry to the line? No. He would play it cool, man. He's got all the time in the world.

In re: having a set of quick plays after a turnover or big change in field position, clearly some teams put an emphasis on that sort of thing. We just saw Air Force go up-tempo whenever they'd pick up 10 or 15 yards. That approach isn't free, though. Michigan is emphasizing other stuff.

New banner.

I noticed this live but immediately forgot about it:

Not sure if you noticed or not, but we finally got the new M Banner out for Air Force.  It's been a 3 year project.  We've made 3 different banners for various reasons, and it finally was approved and used for Air Force. 

It looked great.  With the "maize" much closer to the actual maize and much more matching the uniforms.

Here are a couple pictures: The 'orangeish' picture I took from the MGoBlue website.  The 'maize' picture, I took from the front page of MGoBlog. (Eric's slide show.)

Just wanted to close the loop on this god awful long project.  (there was still a problem with the poles, so hopefully that will get handled by UMass)

-Neal

(This will come up because it always comes up: photos make things different colors. Look at the contrast between the banner and the pants in both photos to confirm a very real difference.)

Man. I'm in the cap that thinks maize is not bright-bright yellow, and I'd heard the AD also thought this and was going to move more towards the orangeish yellow color that I thought was the real maize. It's the difference between burnt orange (understated) and Tennessee's goin'-huntin' orange (HEY GUYS I'M ORANGE). I guess that scuppers that. Maize is blinding now. C'est la vie.

Shane starts?

Brian,

I wrote you earlier this summer about whether Shane Morris would be down for a redshirt next year, to which you said, “yeah”.  Well, two games into this season and seeing how the Denard/Borges fusion cuisine is coming, and seeing how Devin Gardner is progressing as a WR, is causing me to rethink that for 2013.  There are a couple things I think Hoke and Borges are concluding right now: 1) DG will not get that fifth year from the NCAA in 2014; 2) they’ve seen enough of DG at QB to think that he won’t work out as a starter in their system in 2013; 3) they are willing to roll the dice with a freshman Morris starting at QB next year, throwing to a mini-Megatron in Devin Gardner (who will still be the #2 QB).   Like I said, three things.

I know the 2012 season has hardly started, but I get the feeling DG’s move to WR is permanent even if he doesn’t know it yet.  I see Borges thinking he’s done with this transition as soon as Denard ends this season and Shane gives him the best bet to do that, potential magical 2017 season be damned.  What do you think?

Pete-rock

I think there's a possibility things work out like you suggest, but not a strong one. Michigan is planning on moving Gardner back to quarterback after the year is over, something that will presumably last through the spring. If Gardner gets beat out, then and only then will he move back. And even then you've got Russell Bellomy with not one but two years of experience under his belt in front of Morris. It's a tall order for any true freshman to beat out experienced scholarship guys in front of him, and Morris seems like a pretty raw kid when it comes to reading coverages since most of his time in high school is spent running for his life.

Let's not do the freshman QB thing. I don't like that thing. If Gardner is Braylon 2.0 the rest of this year, okay maybe. Long way to go on that project.

I do agree that next year you'll see the offense flip into what it's going to be going forward even if Gardner wins the job. The OL will be shifting into more of a manball mode, they'll have plenty of tight ends, and they'll have a collection of strapping downfield targets at WR. The spread is dead at Michigan after this year.

Neutral sites are lame, according to the best announce guys ever.

I know you're a fan of McDonough and Spielman and thought I'd reinforce that.  They're calling the USC "@" Syracuse game from MetLife Stadium in New Jersey and have spent a good portion of the 4th quarter talking about how much better this game would be for Syracuse if they were playing it in the Carrier Dome in terms of recruiting and rewarding their fans who have suffered through some lean times and now are starting to get a half decent team again (they're hanging in pretty well, if they could cover a punt they could maybe have a chance).  But instead of having a top five team at home, they have to drive five hours for some ridiculous overpriced tickets.

So kudos to McDonough and Spielman.

Also: the Big Ten sucks, ye gods.

Yes. My thinking flipped on the Alabama game when the ticket prices were announced. At a minimum they were 60% higher than Michigan tickets, and I'd bet the average price was double. A lot of those cost 250 bucks. They had no problem selling those tickets at those prices, so why not move that to a home and home where you get 20k more people in the stadium and aren't cutting Jerry Jones in on the profits?

I don't get the neutral site thing at all. You built your stadium for a reason. Use it. If it's a UConn thing where the stadium they built is actually smaller than the big-game venue, I guess I get that, but even so I'd rather Michigan plays at Rentschler than Yet Another Identical NFL Stadium. That doesn't wow my experience. The opportunity to visit Tuscaloosa for a game does.

In re: Big Ten. Seriously.

A thousand words on branding.

Attached - taken in section 25 before yesterday's Air Force game.

I'm a staunch believer in Brandon but had to admit that this looked ridiculous.  Correct me if I'm wrong, but L to R: 2010-11 away, [some woman], 2012 Sugar Bowl, 2011 UTL, 2012 Cowboys Classic.

"Chief marketing officers and Hunter [Lochmann]’s job description would include building the brand, which is very much about the presentation and the image of the 'Block-M.'  How do we enhance it, how do we expand it, how do we make sure that the image of that brand is consistent with what we want that image to be, how do we present that brand in the most positive light possible?  And this has everything to do with how the brand appears when it's being used — from the uniforms we wear, the branding of our facilities, the branding of our materials, a lot of classic brand management kinds of responsibilities."  - D. Brandon, 4/5/11 (link)

Keep up the good work and Go Blue,

Chris
North Olmsted, OH

At least they're making a tiny amount of extra revenue from those—under a million from the UTL jerseys and who knows how much of that was cannibalized from regular sales—that they're spending on people in the athletic department who plan ways to get incremental revenue so they can hire more people to acquire incremental revenue. Also, the man Michigan hired to build the brand has the twitter handle "Lochdog715." Lochdog should use some of that incremental revenue to polish up his personal brand.

Lochdog. Holy pickles.

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.