maryland

I'm pretty sure this is Delvon Roe. Yeah, this guy has been doing this for years.

This person has 375 youtube videos in which he wears an Optimus Prime mask and Gorilla costume while extolling Michigan State things. Delvon Roe was an acting major or something and now spends 90% of his time trashing Denard Robnson on twitter. QED.

Our brief regional nightmare nears an end. After chatter chatter chatter for months about what the new and devolved Big Ten will look like, Adam Rittenberg reports that this whole "geography" thing is going to get a spin and the last decision to make is which Indiana team to put in each division. The future of your football, at least until Florida (Gulf Coast) gets added:

"East" division
Maryland
Michigan
Michigan State
Ohio State
Penn State
Rutgers
Purdue or Indiana

Michigan State was apparently not able to weasel its way into the West division and force Michigan into a protected crossover, so there's that. The Indiana teams will get a protected crossover, and that'll be the only one.

A nine-game conference schedule is on the docket for 2016, which will allow Michigan to play teams in the other division slightly less than half the time. The goal is "for every pair of teams to play at least once every four years." Conference expansion, y'all.

For balance purposes the East should get Indiana, which has not had a recent run of success like that of Purdue under Joe Tiller. Rittenberg concurs, or rather I'm agreeing with him since he wrote his thing first. Whatever.

Goodbye, Iowa, Wisconsin, Nebraska, and Brown Jug game. Hello… you. At least I don't have to figure out if I should root for Ohio State anymore.

What is doubt? Baby don't hurt me, no more. I no longer have any reference for what is reasonable doubt of Michigan and what is flat-out hatin'. Still, my vibe from the various NCAA talking-head shows was that all things were extrapolated from Michigan's lack of tourney pedigree and flameout last year. Michigan was a popular upset pick in the first round, and even if that was avoided most discussions centered on how awesome VCU was and how they would cut through the tourney like a hot knife through butter.

I said this back before, but if I was VCU, Michigan is the last team I would want to see as a second-round matchup. You thrive on turnovers. Here is a John Beilein team piloted by Trey Burke. Sad Panda. Meanwhile, this Wolters kid at SDSU is pretty good… and his team has two guys taller than 6'6" and a defensive rating in the 200s. Also John Beilein has a pretty decent tourney record himself despite last year.

In any case, there are a couple people reacting to the televised Michigan-trashing. Luke Winn is one despite being the guy calling BS on Michigan as a national title contender because of their defense a few months ago:

Upset I Don't Like: No. 13 South Dakota State over No. 4 Michigan. Nate Wolters is a cult hero -- I wrote an ode to his brilliance in November -- and Wolters vs. Trey Burke should be quite the show. But Burke was shut down last year by a defensive-minded mid-major star (Ohio's D.J. Cooper), and Wolters is far from a lockdown guy. Nor is his team. The Jackrabbits have the fourth-worst defense in the entire bracket, which doesn't bode well for their ability to hold the Wolverines' high-powered offense in check. A fun game to watch, no doubt, but it won't be an upset.

While he adds Michigan to his "why I'm hesitant about five teams you might like" section he also adds the #1 and #2s from this bracket in there and predicts Michigan to the Elite Eight against Florida. I would take that.

BONUS: Winn's random upset pick is Valpo over Michigan State. Oh, Luke Winn, you cad. I'm not that… yes I am. Yes, yes I am.

THE VERY UNBONUSEST: Damn near everyone is calling an Ohio State-Wisconsin regional final. Having no compulsion at all about rooting for Ohio State to win a 38-33 game is the worst.

Good catch. Kyle Meinke takes up the Analyze Spring Video For Bits baton, fitting in the usual complaint…

Michigan has gotten very good at providing tight shots that reveal very little information. And it's just one padless practice in March anyway. So, really, not much can be gleaned.

…before noting that Antonio Poole is there and dressed. Hoke didn't mention him after mentioning all the linebackers so it's good to see him there and on the team.

[watches thing]

I think Meinke gave that short shrift. There's quite a bit of player-coach interaction in there. That was interesting to me. Hoke exhorts, Hoke orders a rep, Hoke says minimal progress has been made and seems slightly mollified. I enjoy anything that shows you the way these guys interact with the players, enjoy the detail Hoke and Mattison and Funk get down to in these things.

Let's play to tie. Beilein broke out the cliché like whoah:

As long as it doesn't play "not to lose," everything should be fine, the Wolverines say.

"We missed layups, we played not to lose (against Ohio) and (now), we're going to try to do everything we can to go in there and play to win," Michigan coach John Beilein said Sunday night.

This entire article made me sad for the people who have to say things to the media, and the media that has to write them down. Their mutual existence leads to statements like this:

"We just focus on this game, this is a different team," Morgan said. "This Michigan team is a different team.

"And I'm not saying that in a bad way, I'm just saying (the Ohio loss) doesn't necessarily haunt us."

The most innocuous comment possible is followed up by a disclaimer. This is our lot, we readers and talkers and writers.

We're what? The Big Ten is paying Maryland 20 to 30 million extra in travel subsidy? We needed the Terrapins to turn our league into bloated chaos that we're giving them extra money to not be sad with? Gahhhhhhh. HERE IS YOUR MONEY YOU WILL FIND THAT YOUR SADNESS IS INHERENT TO YOUR EXISTENCE AND YOU MUST WORK ON YOUR INNER PEACE TO FIND HAPPINESS. RESIGN YOUR BODY TO ITS DESTRUCTION AND FREE YOUR MIND, MARYLAND.

Bone thugs. Wojo's latest is headlined like so:

Michigan basketball at crossroads between hope and disappointment

Yeah, pretty much.

Etc.: Daily with an ill-timed profile of Mike Chiasson, who has been a healthy scratch for a month. Better timing: Benji Burke profiled.

Recruiting de-regulation inevitably leads to recruiting re-regulation. For locals, the Arena may not exist much longer—their application for a liquor license renewal is not going well because of nearly 9k in unpaid taxes. Jerald Robinson, who departed last year, was caught with a pound of pot around home. Women get an eight-seed.

In Maryland-related news, everything good will eventually be replaced by David Brandon.

IMPORTANT. McGary sings Beiber, endorses Teen Wolf:

IMPORTANT AS WELL. You kind of felt this was on the table when the Big Ten Network put up a survey that asked you whether you knew which division your team was in and you instinctively knew that even if you could figure it out by remembering that Michigan is not in the one mentioned by their fight song, you should put down "no." And then you thought about it and knew everyone else would do the same thing too. So yeah this happened at some conference that is apparently going on today:

Delany says names of Legends and Leaders TBD.

I mean who could question a decision to expand coming from the people who gave us Legends and Leaders? Speaking of:

So I went to a Maryland basketball game last night. They played a MEAC team Kenpom ranked 345th, and played like it. I have seen more people at a basketball game.

I am pretty sure I have seen more people at a softball game.

The arena itself is cool, and amongst the few people around me were some old guys who had clearly been getting seats adjacent to each other since the dawn of time. At one point the cheerleaders held up big cardboard cutout credit cards and asked people to wave theirs around for some sort of prize that was probably FREEEE PIZZAAAA, and I marveled at… that.

I came away with an excellent picture of why Maryland's in such dire financial straights and with an unformed joke about how Northwestern should start calling themselves WASHINGTON'S BIG TEN TEAM™ because the position is most certainly open.

Meanwhile, Maryland forms a commission to consider re-adding some of the seven sports they recently dropped.

Mercenaries for… wait what? Yesterday's Bielema-related bombshell was the revelation that Arkansas offered him a whopping 600k extra to move to a school that has never won an SEC title and is probably never going to. Bielema was forced to say the usual things, added in some nonsense about how his first year he lost to Michigan 27-13 because of a bad call, and said this:

"When I began to have more and more success at Wisconsin, I stayed but a lot of my coaches left," he said. "I just wasn't able to compensate them in the way other coaches were. I know I'm hiring the right guys, because everybody keeps taking them from me."

Bielema lost six assistants last year, and he noted that three of them went from salaries around $225,000 per year to over $400,000 annually. He said that hours after the Badgers won the Big Ten title game last Saturday, three of his assistants told him they'd been contacted by other schools and were offered significant raises. He said he wouldn't have been able to match those offers.

"Wisconsin isn't wired to do that at this point," he said. "With what I wanted to accomplish, I needed to have that ability to do that. I've found that here at Arkansas."

If that's true—and I'm skeptical that people fleeing Wisconsin are not actually fleeing Bielema himself—that's another way in which the money is just not a factor. Wisconsin has that, and they are just choosing not to spend it because…? Because they need to build world-class facilities for non-revenue sports? Is that the answer?

That can't actually be the answer. But Wisconsin was the 8 team in revenue as of 2008 and I find it hard to believe they've dipped much what with the BTN. That year they brought in 30 million more than Arkansas. And yet…

Don't give me recruiting budget stuff either. Wisconsin spent 466k less than Arkansas in 2011, which is a big gap but it is also chump change. I don't know what the problem is, but adding more money to the huge and ever-growing money spigot isn't going to fix it. If it would, it already would have.

The problem is cultural: as Bielema said, we don't want to be like the SEC at all. Probably the best thing Brandon has done is pay the assistants the relative chump change that makes them happy.

The least the Big Ten can do for us as they set every tradition they can find on fire is actually spend the money on the stuff fans care about like "keeping that guy who has gone to three straight Rose Bowls."

BIG TENNNNN. Darrell Hazell is introduced as Purdue's next head coach and the world gets a terrifying glimpse into the reality of being a beat reporter in West Lafayette:

if I could summon the energy to do anything it would be obtain the sweet release of death

Darrell Hazell, by the way, is a wild-ass swing at another MAC coach of exceedingly short tenure (two years) who has shown little other than the ability to inherit a team that floats to the top of the MAC talent hierarchy for reasons unknown. And he'll just fly the coop if he works out anyway. Expanding the league does not fix this. Purdue is still Purdue.

But maybe they can be Purdue in another division! Here we go again:

"There are some advantages to 16 (teams) compared to 14," Michigan State athletic director Mark Hollis told ESPN on Wednesday. "Fourteen is clumsy. We're not out looking for two teams, but basically we will continue to survey the landscape."

At this point I endorse all Big Ten expansions in an effort to get to the Bargaining Phase post. With 16 we we can chuck the Indiana teams into the other football division and pretend none of this ever happened.

But it's about academics you guys! No, no it is not. It is not about academics in any way whatsoever.

Professors at the meeting alleged that the Athletic Department did not consult the ABIA on the addition of the Maryland and Rutgers to the Big Ten Conference.

“I happen to think that the implications of expanding the conference ... are significant academic matters, and I was personally very disappointed when I heard it on the radio,” Political Science Prof. Edie Goldenberg, an ABIA member, said.

If it was about academics, the academics would know about it.

Explaining to do, attempted. Michigan nixed a charity run at the Big House in two steps.

Champions for Charity is a for-profit limited liability company, though Highfield says all of the money a team raises prior to the race goes directly to a charity of the participant’s choice.

"It's just a little mom-and-pop organization," Highfield told AnnArbor.com.

Champions for Charity rented the stadium each previous year for roughly $7,000. Highfield was astonished when the school more than doubled the old rate, charging just under $16,000 for the next annual run.

The next step was just cancelling the thing entirely, because:

Really the decision in the end came down to our external focus," said Ablauf. The department announced last monththat it would begin partnering with the Special Olympics of Michigan for community service efforts. The first event of that partnership is the "Polar Plunge" at Michigan Stadium on Feb. 23, 2013.

That partnership, Ablauf said, has become the department's priority. Ablauf said the run had become "a very challenging event ... to fit into our stadium."

"We have our own private rental program, we're doing stuff with the Special Olympics and we have a lot of things we do now in the stadium," Ablauf offered.

I was waiting to sputter about this until the athletic department had its say, and… that's it? You can't spare the stadium for one day in April and one of the reasons you state for this is because you rent the thing out for profit (and annoy everyone at every football game by constantly repeating that fact)? I'm feeling a sputter comin' on you guys!

Actually, I don't have anything to say on this that I haven't already said a lot. I mean, this is a great thing to have people do from the ol' branding standpoint:

someone had a super idea once and people liked it

The thing had a lot of traction and if there was some problem with the organizational nature of the thing that was not organized as a non-profit it doesn't seem to be that hard to work through the issues. But I'm neither surprised or even disappointed that this happened. It's just how things work these days.

Antidote! Hey Charlie Strong seems like a good good dude.

Strong: I was 9-10, and (Jurich) hands me an extension...How do you walk away from someone who trusts and believes in you. …

Strong said his ego had him thinking abt what he coud do in the SEC. "It's not abt that. It's about people and how you affect their lives."

Yes Virginia, there are Bo-like people still around. One of them is Michigan's coach, and that's nice. 

Anti-antidote. Mario Cristobal is fired by FIU after one bad year when he turned down opportunities to move up in the world after he took the fledgling program from an 0-12 national joke to a couple bowl games.

STAUSKAS. As always, Canada bails us out of feeling bad. John Gasaway ranks his top 25 freshmen in college basketball and Stauskas comes in third($):

3. Nik Stauskas, G, Michigan Wolverines
Stauskas is merely Michigan's third option on offense, and you may think being rated the No. 3 freshman in the nation is self-evidently disproportionate for a role player. In the abstract I agree wholeheartedly, but exactly how much tribute do we give to a player who has helped his team's offense to the very limit allowed by the sport itself? Stauskas has an offensive rating (152.8) that's in another zip code entirely from what even the amazing likes of Bennett (127.5) and Adams (122.8) have posted. He is a normal carbon-based player in only one facet of the game: Stauskas inside the arc with the clock running is a mere mortal. But if he's at the line (89 percent) or, heaven help the opponent, outside the arc (64 percent), he's Stauskasesque.

His numbers will correct downward from this point forward, but the larger point is that for a second consecutive season John Beliein has a freshman who arrived in Ann Arbor as a lightly regarded recruit and then promptly began stomping on opponents like Mothra.

Stauskas was a little less lightly-regarded than Burke but yeah I mean seriously the hobbit at NC State was a burger guy. Oh right and that GRIII guy comes in ninth, which probably gives Michigan the best recruiting class in the country as of December what with adding in McGary and LeVert and Albrecht.

Etc.: Annual bowl swag update. Here is a tiny fraction of the money in gift cards because we can't give you cash. Tom Izzo goes full Holtz after MSU beats up on a SWAC team. Bielema fallout. More fallout. UMHoops podcast. David Merritt stops by to suggest his Merit fundraiser. Hockey coaches can now call CCHA reffing a joke in public. Gordon Gee is either lying now or lied to Urban Meyer.

B&B; on this business

Click big-itates. Three! Three references to Europa Universalis in the history of one blog, ah ah ah!

Depending on what hour you are reading this, Brian is somewhere on the Kübler-Ross chain between coming up with 20-team divisions sans Purdue, and emulating an otter. Since this thing is happening despite the sentiment expressed in our totally scientific internet poll, I thought maybe being, like, informative…?

Tell 'em what they've won, Jim:

Maryland

+'s: Lacrosse power, soccer power, unique mascot, fits academic profile, unlikely to upset anyone's national title hopes.

-'s: Not a power in anything but sports nobody cares about. Almost Indiana in football. Were on their way to mid-majordom.

The School: Founded in 1856. Those who know their Morrill Act history could guess one sentence before you did that it's a land-grant school (Michigan State, Penn State). Original name: Maryland Agricultural College, later Maryland State College. They're AAU members, and about the same size as Michigan or Purdue. Academically they're solidly in the Purdue/Ohio State midpoint of the conference, although they only got super serious about being a research institution since the '60s so their endowment—$791 million—is easily last among the current conference, and only a tenth of Michigan's. They're also a system school—sharing a degree with UMD-Baltimore and an affiliation with a bunch of other in-state schools—so I don't know if the CIC plans on sharing dollars with just the flagship campus, College Park and Baltimore, or the whole system.

Important alumni: Jim Henson and Larry David. Sugar daddy: Kevin Plank of Under Amour.

Colors: Red and white or yellow and black are good enough color schemes for most corn-fed Midwesterners, but marshaling of arms in English heraldry has no concept of clashing, thus the Terps are liable to favor any of those from George Calvert in any combination. They've been known to take the field looking like an unholy abomination of leftover Iowa running back parts and Rex Burkhead, or in maroon and chrome, or lattice bodices and cloaks of animal skins.

Mascot: A terrapin, or "terp" for short. It means turtle.

Athletics: Here's a guy answering my query on their SBNation blog:

Uhh,m

Basketball school (right now like 80-20, but when we rebound in fball it’s more like 60-40). We hate Duke as much as you hate anything in your life. If something big happens we riot. A great deal of our fanbase already hates PSU, so yea, we can hate them for ya.

Really good at Msoccer (good womens), great at lax and field hockey. Womens basketball too
We don’t dress funny, you just dress like some 80 year old man with a hideous fashion sense and call it tradition.

Our college Bball atmosphere is way better than fball, but we do have Stefon Diggs who is likely god himself

Emphasis on the hating Duke. In re lacrosse: the ACC's deal was similar to the Big East's, where they belonged to other conferences but the few schools who had programs played each other [EDIT: they had a conference, but didn't send a champion]. They're immediately the best lacrosse school in the conference. Women's lacrosse is probably the best in the country.

[JUMP: Meet Maryland athletics, and Rutgers]

i can be as incompetent as you want baby

The second-worst game ever. Wolverine Historian has digitized the 1995 Purdue game, which was played in miserable conditions and ended 5-0 to the Wolverines:

so I herd you like mudkips

It's not 2008 Northwestern because the team didn't finish 3-9 and won that game, but it's probably the second-worst game of the last twenty years to attend. I didn't; I was playing Quiz Bowl in high school.

A man after Lloyd's own heart. Don't bother asking incoming freshman OL Jack Miller any uncomfortable questions. His presser-fu is unassailable:

"On the Buckeyes, they're a great program and they will be resilient. But we need to take this opportunity as a team to move forward and keep getting better."

Rich Rodriguez: call this man for pointers.

Heavens to Betsy. Maryland hit with violations essentially identical to those of Michigan:

Maryland self-reported the violations and recommended penalties — which the NCAA has accepted — that will include the loss of 2 ½ hours of the normal 20 hours a week maximum for practices and games. The penalties will be enforced during the 2011 season. Maryland officials confirmed details Friday in response to inquiries. …

"Specifically, 30 minutes of meeting sessions and 30 minutes of practice on Mondays and one hour of weightlifting on Wednesdays were not accurately reported," Maryland said in a May 5 letter to Chris Strobel, NCAA director of enforcement for secondary violations. "During the review it was apparent that the coaches and staff at the time believed those activities were voluntary in nature; however, when reviewed in detail, the institution determined the activities to be mandatory."

Yeah, you read that right: secondary violations. I'm not sure why these are secondary. It seems Michigan got hit with a major violation because its problems were persistent, not isolated, and that that was enough to trigger all the stuff Michigan dealt with the last two offseasons. Here Maryland did almost exactly the same thing and gets almost exactly the same punishment but doesn't get the black mark.

It's mostly important for semantics, but goddamn if the NCAA had hit Michigan with the exact penalties they did but only secondary violations that would have been epic win for the internet in Internet vs. Free Press. Maybe the sensational nature of the original article caused the NCAA investigation and prevented Michigan from self-reporting the results of the audit they'd already done.

Oregon stuff. So… yeah, that thing about the NCAA having to make an inference a fourth-grader could make and this being an important thing for them to do: nevermind all that. Unusually for a dude who received a big check for acting as a "street agent," Lyles has taken the opportunity presented by an NCAA investigation to launch a media blitz.

You know about the Yahoo article. That in and of itself isn't unusual. What's unusual is what happened the next day: instead of recanting after people threatened to burn him at the stake (or offered him dollars) Lyles said more stuff. He called up a local columnist who had called him "scum" and a "slimeball" and offered an extensive interview with quotes like this:

Lyles said he’s willing to fully cooperate with NCAA investigators. Said Lyles: “What did coach Kelly say to the NCAA? What did he say to the administration? That’s going to be a key piece of information for them. I keep things. I don’t throw things away. It bodes well in this circumstance.”

He also did an interview with the Register-Guard and was on The Morning Jones this morning. He is very talkative for a street-agent-type-guy.

His defense isn't totally unbelievable insofar as it doesn't seem like Lyles is a terrible guy. He's inserted himself as a middleman in a market created because of NCAA restrictions and got some football players to go to some colleges, for which he got paid. If not for NCAA regulations he'd just be a guy doing a job.

But those NCAA regulations do exist and Oregon paid 25k to a representative of their athletic interests who got to act outside said regulations, so they've got to suffer. How much will be fascinating. This isn't an extra benefits case so the USC benchmark doesn't apply.

Throwdown. YELLING IS WARRANTED

Tim Hardaway is fifth on the USA U19s in scoring; they're 5-1 in pool play after avenging a blowout loss to these same Lithuanians in a tourney tuneup. They just lost to Croatia today. Two more games until the quarterfinals.

This is what it sounds like when no one has any idea of anything. If this whole hockey superconference-insofar-as-you-can-call-an-eight-team-conference-that thing comes to fruition and some CCHA teams fold and everyone blames the Big Ten that's going to be annoying. Nebraska fans feel me on this after being blamed for the Big 12's dissolution when there was going to be a Pac-16.

But it might happen. North Dakota is the latest school sporting the initials ND to make noises about it:

UND is having formal discussions about pulling out of the Western Collegiate Hockey Association and joining several other schools in creating a new power hockey league, multiple sources have told the Herald. … It is believed that eight teams are involved in the talks to some degree.

UNO, Miami, Notre Dame, and Western Michigan(!) are specifically mentioned in the article. Add UND, CC, DU, and Fortunate Minnesota Team Pretty Much Indistinguishable From The Ones Left Behind and that's an eight-team conference that has a lot of traditional or nouveau powers, no geographical sense at all, no home base, and some chance of keeping pace with the Big Ten.

You've also got flailing WCHA and CCHA remnants trying to figure out how to survive. The WCHA schools might be able to grab Air Force* for an eighth team; the shattered rump of the CCHA would probably grab a handful of Atlantic Hockey schools who want to offer maximum scholarships. The financial viability of the WCHA schools isn't much in question—most have just put a lot of money into infrastructure and hockey is king in Minnesota. The CCHA would be in some trouble, though.

If I was Michigan I'd be rattling my saber at anyone eyeing this new superconference, promising to play any local nonconference games against the teams who don't get raptured up into the Engelstad Conference.

Ugh—I just realized we have two more years of this before the Big Ten even exists.

*["Might" because the conventional wisdom in the hockey community is that priority #1 for AF is being in the same conference as Army and Atlantic Hockey's scholarship restrictions and general lack of behemoths makes them more competitive.]

Barnett shelved. TX TE Chris Barnett was one of Brady Hoke's biggest recruits in the brief window he had to acquire dudes before Signing Day, and he plays a position of desperate need now that Michigan's going all pro-style and stuff. Unfortunately, this does not sound like a guy who is going to be ready to play this fall:

I tore my ACL in early October, and I didn't have surgery for it until December, because like I said, me and my mom, we struggle. We don't have a whole bunch of money. So the injury thing wasn't to the point where I could go get surgery. But I've been working out really hard...I came up on the spring game, and I was 295 [lbs]. Right now, I'm 272. Coach wants me to be 280 -- no [not any] more than 280. But at the same time, I'm getting stronger. I'm crisp [while] running. My knee that I had surgery on still isn't 100%, so I go about 80/85%. But talking to Coach, I still have 2 months [before the season starts] to rehab with them

That sucks in four different ways. Hopefully he makes it back but December surgery plus generally being a freshman seems like a recipe for a redshirt.

Etc.: Bill Connolly reminisces about the 2000 Northwestern game (yes, the 54-51 one). Shorter Andy Staples: watch The Wire, college football coaches. OH DE commit Tom Strobel tells twitter he'll play strongside defensive end and hopes to get up to "at least 270"—if that's by the time he hits campus, whoah. Also, paging Matt Godin to aisle defensive tackle.

This Northwestern-ish blog is updated about every three months but has the most fantastic blog name ever: Bring Your Champions, They're Our Meat. Nik Stauskas is finally loose on the AAU circuit and is impressing with more than his three-ball.

How do you list a home with a waterfall and not include a picture of said waterfall? Boo, Edward Surovell retailers. Boo.