miami (that miami)

Legolas is cooler than Treebeard. Brian's taking a short vacation and left me to write UV today. That's too bad because he's missing the party after Spath heard from Norfleet's mentor/7-on-7 coach ($) that the MGoFavorite little bugger's defensive foray was a temporary thing:

"He's supposedly going back to offense," Blackwell said. "They will use him in the slot and in the return game, and some as a running back. Coach [Greg] Mattison is saying he can still use him on defense and is making an argument to keep him there, but Dennis' passion is for the offense. That's where he wants to play, and from talking to Dennis it appears that's where he's going to play.

Putting him with the other elves made some sense when the cornerback two-deep was the starters, and what carries he could siphon last year from Toussaint, Rawls and Hayes would now have to be defended from Drake Johnson and three highly rated incoming freshman. The rooting for Norfleet to take over Smith's role comes from simple fan interest: it's way more fun to hold your breath and watch this guy scamper around like a maniac than to plunge a tree into the enemy lines and watch him fall forward for the same result.

Contempt for compliance, not photos of Donna Shalala. The Miami (of course THAT Miami) case was to be the Austerlitz of the new and improved NCAA enforcement empire; instead it's going to be a summer of Waterloo metaphors and Shalala vs. Emmert lead images. SBNation's Robert Wheel's afore-linked take calls for Emmert's resignation, while admitting that won't do anything to fix the underlying problem:

If the NCAA were enforcing rules that didn't require a lot of investigation, then this lack of power would not be a problem. But as long as college sports remain a big time moneymaker with rich guys who want to circumvent the rulebook to see their teams win, said rich guys will find ways to try to outfox the rules. Unless we want to give the NCAA subpoena power (we really don't) then this will always be a losing battle. The NCAA will never have the ability or the resources to catch up to people breaking its rules.

In a real legal system the Canes could discredit the prosecution's only witness and get the case thrown out. This isn't a real legal system: schools don't get in trouble for breaking NCAA rules, they get in trouble by publicly reminding everybody that the NCAA can't really enforce them. USC tried this and got slapped down despite the evidence in hand being too weak for any court. Meanwhile investigators with bees up their butts couldn't prove what every 4-year-old knows in re: Ohio State gives players cars, or really much of anything in the original Tatgate story until the NFL forced Pryor to talk. For stonewalling so politely the extent of the Buckeyes' punishment was to end a 12-0 season with Meyer on their sidelines and Tressel on their shoulders. The dumbest thing Shalala could do is comply.* The second-dumbest thing she could do is say na-na-na-boo-boo to an organization that only slightly cares if it turned up doo doo.

The obvious answer is pay the players (FoxSports in re: Clowney and the risk of injury) and end the shadow ring where guys like Shapiro are the only people who can perform the otherwise perfectly legal function of paying adult U.S. citizens for the services they provide.

* There are a select few schools like Michigan who don't have a choice because our whole thing is being the good guys, and because we're among those who would benefit the most if tradition, competitiveness and the quality of education were the only factors in recruiting and retaining college football talent. Kind of like how Great Britain would prefer to settle everything with a sea battle.

Basketball on verge of spread revolution. Weinreb dug up a budding Mike Leach from a D-II school in West Virginia to highlight a story about how pacing in basketball has slowed way down while the smart guys beating up the lower ranks are going the other way. That coach's motto is "Don't do it unless you can rationalize why you're doing it." He's too old to end up in Ann Arbor, but apparently the Yost alleles for engineering-minded coaches are still going strong in Appalachia. Beilein small ball isn't speed ball, but this…

When Crutchfield recruits, he looks for kids who react quickly — "You can make up for a lot of quickness and speed if you react mentally," he says — and play with high intensity: If they get beat on defense and they don't D up even harder the next time down the floor, he starts to wonder if they might not fit into his system.

… is similar to Beilein. HT and board discussion itauditbill. While we're on Grantland's court Shane Ryan has updated his chart of the Big Ten's "Big Six" versus each other on the road:

That's part of a discussion on how road game success can be a strong predictor of postseason performance. I've used it for predicting NBA and NHL playoff results, and March Madness would be right there with them if it wasn't such a crapshoot in general. HT again from the board: SoFlaWolverine.

Assistant Coaches like money too. There's a rumor that Oklahoma may be going after Jerry Montgomery (Meinke via Footballscoop). Cam Cameron you may have heard just joined Les Miles's staff, further evidence to my theory that LSU is the In a Mirror, Darkly evil twin of Michigan from another dimension.

Dark universe Les Miles is in his 5th season as head coach at Michigan, where he's been slowly rebuilding the school's reputation shredded by win-at-all-costs Evil Lloyd Carr

Cameron will be making $3.4 million over 3 years, and this has made internet people start buzzing about top assistants commanding the kind of salary you give the school president. /mind blown. /thinks about the difference between GERG and Greg. /mind unblown.

It's right because the internet said so. The NCAA cover vote on Facebook has moved to a semifinals where the S-E-C!!! vote has been split (to Eddie Lacy's doom and random A&M guy's benefit) and Denard now leads. Every time this appears on the board cynical-me goes to erase it because it's playing to somebody's marketing ploy, and enchanted-me says "But Denard on the cover would be a wonderful thing!" I wish Denard would be on the cover because he is the living symbol of what is singularly spectacular about NCAA football; I also wish they could have come to that conclusion without somebody "developing an engaging social media campaign" that might only settle on Robinson because a cat playing guitar hero wasn't allowed in the race. #AIRBHG2014

Etc. People of the East Coast, check your DVR schedule or wind up recording a Virginia-BC game. UMHoops takes on Michigan's defense, scores a bazillion points (ha!). Zoltan's foundation update. FAU's marketing department derps stadium sponsor, double-derps wikipedia entry. MGoAndroid App is updated, report bugs here. NFL logos if they were designed by British people.

Get away from tourists. Visit a Miami game. Miami vs Bethune-Cookman, second quarter:

At least one intrinsically corrupt football program has had the decency to wither up and die. BTW, that was reported as 39k.

Massive injuries. No fair bringing up Blake Countess if Michigan happens to lose against MSU or ND, as both of those opponents came down with injuries just as important over the last couple days.

MSU right tackle Fou Fonoti is out six to ten weeks with a broken foot. M plays MSU in four weeks. In his place MSU inserted Skyler Burkland, who missed most of last year with an injury of his own. Burkland proceeded to get owned by ND LB Prince Shembo on several third and longs on which ND rushed three and still got plenty of pressure. MSU also replaced their LG, which didn't help matters but doesn't look like it's something that will persist until the Michigan game. The Spartan OL is now on depth alert equivalent to Michigan's: they've got a guy or two on the interior; a tackle injury will be time to sound the klaxons.

Notre Dame's already flimsy secondary took another major hit when Jamoris Slaughter tore his achilles against the Spartans. Projected starting CB Lo Wood is also out for the year. It looks like redshirt freshman Matthias Farley is Slaughter's replacement; he is a converted WR who was a consensus three-star with middling offers (Illinois, UCLA, Wisconsin) as a recruit. He's been getting talked up some, and played big chunks of the Purdue and MSU games.

In injury news that may not affect Michigan, Minnesota QB MarQueis Gray has a high ankle sprain and is projected to be out 2-4 weeks.

Gathering data. Seth had a good idea that we're going to give a shot: we're going to collect a bunch of data about the market for Michigan tickets and try to make it useful. This is an idea that the MZone also had at about the same time we did, undoubtedly prompted by the calculation a lot of people made this year: would I be better off scalping instead of getting season tickets this year? For UMass, it's a blowout in favor of yes, but that's the easiest ticket of the bunch.

Their hypothesis is you'll actually get off cheaper at Stubhub, which if true would be a stunning upset since Stubhub not only takes 15% from the seller but tacks on twenty bucks in fees for the buyer. We don't really have a hypothesis, we're just trying to figure out what's a good deal on gameday. 

AIRBHG is running out of targets. Dude.

The Hawkeyes lost two more running backs Saturday, as both Damon Bullock and Greg Garmon were forced to leave an eventual win over Northern Iowa early due to injuries. However, it appears Iowa has learned how to overcome the wrath of AIRBHG in the process: With so many other choices available, the Hawkeyes turned to fullback Mark Weisman, who ran over the UNI defense and AIRBHG en route to 113 yards and 3 touchdowns.

Bullock and Garmon are supposed to be good to go this weekend. AIRBHG licks his chops. Weisman dances.

Yost. Another shot of Yost:

Since an assistant coach took this one hopefully the athletic department won't ask him to take it down, as they did with the last batch of Yost photos.

Etc.: Hope you didn't care about the Block Ms on the pylons, because they gone. ND used wristbands to prevent sign stealing after an S&C coach moved from ND to MSU this offseason. Given massive game prep problems w/ MSU in recent past, that might be a good idea. Q: why isn't that more commonly used anyway? I'd rather have rotating wristbands than having to communicate in hostile environments.

regression + old-timey Greg Mattison = ?

Let it breathe. So how about that diary this morning? Man. I'm heartened by the idea that the admittedly rough model contained in it thinks Michigan's defense will bubble up to 71st even though it asserts changing coordinators/coaches is a worth an eight-spot hit to your final rankings.

In this case you can—are compelled to—argue that if anything it will swing the other way once Michigan decides to run one sane defense instead of a mélange of incoherent ones. Regression to the mean is our most favorite friend:

Not only are we bad and expected to regress upwards, we were much worse than expected. Expectations will deflate but even so they will come in well above our finish last year.

The main argument against this is the impact of Michigan's recruiting rankings on the model (quite positive) versus their impact on the field (not so much). The list of the departed is depressing and extensive: Boubacar Cissoko, Brandon Smith, Taylor Hill, Justin Turner, Vlad Emilien, Cullen Christian, and Demar Dorsey are a big chunk of Michigan's four and five star defensive recruits; none are around. Will Campbell and JB Fitzgerald, two of the thin remainder, are badly underperforming expectations. Attrition from the underclass has also hurt.

The numbers point towards a two-year project. Like the 2009 offense, the 2011 defense should be worlds better than its predecessor. Unfortunately that will only get them to average, which isn't that average for a BCS team that will play cupcakes who can't compete with it.

The other interesting thing from the model was a quantification of how important the quarterback is: getting a returning starter there is more than four times more valuable than an average non-QB offensive starter. Guess who's got a returning starter at QB for the first time since 2007? Michigan. You can even argue that 2006 was the last time Michigan really got to use a returning starter to his full capabilities—Chad Henne missed big chunks of 2007 and was never fully healthy until the bowl game.

Oh snap. Pac-12 commissioner Larry Scott is itching for a duel. His statement on Larry Dee:

"If the allegations prove true," he said, "the words irony and hypocrisy don't seem to go far enough."

These corrupt NCAA functionaries would do their cause a favor if they at least required some caricature before they looked like Thomas Nast cartoons. I, mean, seriously:

That Junker guy That Junker guy also looked like a walking editorial cartoon. This is not helping their public image.

Oh snap part II. I was going to make this comparison myself but Grant Wahl beat me to it:

FIFA and NCAA are almost exactly the same in their complete inability to police themselves.

When you can compare an organization to FIFA with little, if any, hyperbole and don't have an obvious breaking point in 2014 there is trouble.

Yahoo continues strafing runs. It's a good combo they've got going at Yahoo: Charles Robinson flies over in the B-52 dropping the big bombs while Wetzel swoops in to pick off any survivors with a machine gun. This time Wetzel's plinking away at the whole damn system:

Guys wanted to party on a yacht. Guys wanted to drink free in a VIP section of a nightclub. Guys wanted some cash, or a mansion to hang out in, or some extra money for a big hit, or maybe even the wildest of parties.

It’s not abnormal behavior from 20-year-olds.

Except in the mind of the NCAA, which is so far backward, it’s wasting time arguing over whether offering players a minor monthly stipend will cut too far into the adults’ gravy train.

Would it be so bad if this stuff was okay? Not the prostitutes, but just hanging out maxing all cool with guys who want to be your pet ATM? I guess that's not in the Spirit of Amateurism but even the Olympics have given up that ghost. Adam Jacobi asked much the same question at CBS, and the only objections I have to it are purely selfish: I don't know if Michigan boosters can dole out the rewards with the same kind of élan other schools can.

I've advocated something less holistic in the past in regards to basketball: let kids enter the draft whenever they want, let them play summer ball with teams, let them sign with agents, let the NBA teams sign them—and then let the kids go back to school and play if the NBA doesn't think they're ready. Where's the harm in that?

The NCAA continues to pretend like it's 1955, and that there wasn't rampant cheating in 1955, and that everyone has the morals of 1880. They could go a long way towards making the system fair without unbalancing it just by acknowledging that pro leagues are not evil. The last people to have that notion rode bicycles with one enormous wheel and one tiny one and thought Irish people were basically livestock. They also looked like Paul Dee—ohhhhh. I get it now.

But it's not so they must burn. A bit more on Pryor getting paid by Sarniak:

Pryor said he and his mother received cash and assistance with car payments from Ted Sarniak, a businessman in Pryor’s hometown of Jeannette, Pa., sometime before leaving school in June, lawyer David Cornwell told ESPN.

Cornwell, who is representing Pryor in his bid to be declared eligible for the NFL supplemental draft, said Pryor informed the NCAA and provided documents in May. As Pryor was being recruited in 2008, the NCAA told Ohio State that Sarniak could not provide anything of value to Pryor once he enrolled.

It's Big Brother-y, but NCAA teams can view the bank accounts of their players, which is probably why AJ Hawk and friends had three thousand dollars in cash on them when they got robbed that one time. Smart people keep their booster money in hard currency. Terrelle Pryor put it in a bank, one that OSU had access to, after his controversial recruitment found that he had received extra benefits in high school from Sarniak. Sarniak was in frequent contact with not only Tressel but the head of compliance at Ohio State. Pryor had lots of suspiciously nice cars. At no point did anyone in the compliance department add two and two together.

Brace yourself for this bit of spin:

Phone records also show that Ohio State compliance director Doug Archie stayed in regular contact with Sarniak.

“It’s expected that a compliance officer is calling constituents involved with the athletics department,” Lynch said. “It speaks to the compliance department’s thoroughness in monitoring such matters.”

Chutzpah!

Available for viewing at the cube. Three Michigan commits made the NTDP U17s: Evan Allen, JT Compher, and Tyler Motte. This was already known, so it's a bit disappointing a couple of the other guys didn't slide their way onto the team. Three is still a good number. No other school has more than two.

Also, the U17 team is an indication of how much college hockey recruiting has accelerated. Only four of the twenty skaters are uncommitted. These guys are 2013 commits with two years of junior in front of them—that's like 80 of the top 100 guys in Shane Morris's football class already being committed.

By that time Michigan will be in the Big Ten, so you can ignore the Miami guys on the list. The only player from the U17 Michigan will see down the road is Michigan State commit Mike McCarron.

Waiting it out. Michigan would very much like to add U18 defenseman Jacob Trouba, one of those weird guys who waits it out. Trouba is a potential first rounder in next year's draft and has yet to make a decision because he plans on sticking to it:

"That's sort of why I haven't (committed), because I don't want to make a commitment and then back down from it," said the 17-year-old on Wednesday. … "My family and I have always been like that -- my parents have always told me that if I make a commitment, that I have to stick with it, at least until the end of the year and then I can do whatever," said the 6-foot-2, 193-pound blueliner. "So, I'm going to wait until I know for sure what I want to do and then I'm going to choose."

Michigan is "in the equation" along with Notre Dame and the OHL's Kitchener.

Etc.: A third oh snap: Braves and Birds defines Clay Travis by calling him "embarrassingly self-congratulatory." Also he demolishes the silly argument about lawsuits he's making in re: Texas A&M to the SEC. (Remember when people cared about that?). Rock M Nation/Football Study Hall/Football Outsiders guru Bill Connolly is profiled by Vox Magazine.

UPDATE: Fear The Hat adds SI and USA Today and deliciously points out that the Miami story isn't even on the front page of their college football section. Despite the name, FTH does not appear to be Les Miles fan blog.

It's about 2 AM after Charles Robinson reduced the already fairly smouldering ruins of Miami football to a radioactive field of glass. Let's check national sports websites to see what they think is important!

Sporting News:

CBS Sports:

Fox Sports:

Yahoo Sports won't be a surprise but here it is:

NBC Sports:

SB Nation:

What does ESPN think is important at this moment? Do you think it's something other than an earth-shaking, NCAA-threatening, death-penalty-warranting annihilation of a major college football program? Surely. Surely they have passed it over in favor of someone who plays baseball in the Northeast, because they suck that hard, you say?

WRONG, SUCKERS!

That guy totally plays regular season baseball… in Atlanta.

Goddammit, ESPN. Sometimes you do suck just as hard as everyone says you do. #freebruce #dontcallitashapiroback

The heat melts their brains. Miami fans are trolls:

You've got me there, Jim Martz.

(Via Jerry Hinnen.)

Further adventures in Remember When Smoking Was Cool And Pregnancy Drankin' jes' fine. Les Miles has done all manner of disqualifying things since the Kirk Herbstreit Miles Hiring Fiasco, before which I was highly in favor of Miles as Michigan's coach and after which I was very upset at Bill Martin. He derped the Ole Miss game and lied about it afterwards. He cut some kid who'd been on campus for a month. Whatever the hell that was at the end of the Tennessee game happened.

Miles is now in the radioactive bin of hypothetical Michigan coaching candidates next to Ron English, Mike DeBord, and Stan Parrish. I'd rather have Brady Hoke around. And yet somehow this is the worst thing he's done since that fateful day on a sailboat:

I'd rather see Simon Cowell as head coach around here.

Quarterback ding monitor. So you may have noticed that three Penn State quarterbacks wandered around the field asking for direction/pudding from the coaches in their win over Minnesota. This is because starter Robert Bolden left the game with "a cut hand" or "a cut hand and an eye poke" or "concussion-like symptoms" or, you know, a concussion. JoePa thought Bolden was questionable at best for next week; JayPa thought he was fine. JayPa's probably right since someone asked Joe about Kevin Newsome and he said "who?" I wouldn't put much stock in this "McGloin might start" headline from the Post-Gazette since it's generic walk-on fluff and the only mention of the injury is this:

Bolden was expected to undergo a series of medical tests Sunday, but Penn State spokesman Jeff Nelson said Bolden's status would not be updated until today at the earliest. If Bolden is unable to play Saturday night at home against Michigan on ESPN, McGloin could get his first career start.

I'm guessing Bolden starts.

Meanwhile at Purdue things just keep getting worse. Third-stringer Rob Henry acquired a "crushed index finger" against Ohio State and Boiled Sports believes that means true freshman Sean Robinson will end up starting when Purdue takes on Illinois next week.

Penn State confidence monitor. They didn't lose against Minnesota but they did get outgained by 70 yards and cough up 400 yards of offense to a team headed for 1-11, so reviews are negative:

-- Penn State made Gopher running back DeLeon Eskridge look like Barry Sanders out there. The Lions missed so many tackles I thought they must have brought the wrong shoes. … -- Lion defense just has no playmakers.  … -- In fact, until the fourth quarter, Penn State had precious little success running the ball against a defense ranked 102nd in the nation against the run. Unimaginable, really. … -- Minnesota's 75-yard TD drive to start the second half was so easy I thought I was watching the New Orleans Saints shred the Penn State defense. Very, very scary, folks.

This was a win, but no one was impressed. The line swung from M +2.5 to M –3 based on it, though it's gotten bet back down some since.

It's not that timeout, it's that you still had it. Back to the hat: many people are pointing at Kirk Ferentz going "Les Miles!" in the same manner you would scream "witch!" during a good hysterical mass hallucination after Iowa biffed its clock management good in their 31-30 loss to Wisconsin. Cue defense from Ferentz:

"We wanted to burn the timeout and just go from there," Ferentz said. "I guess we could have gone the other way. Might have saved us two seconds, something like that. I don't think that was exactly the turning point in the game."

Cue Hat reference:

Les Miles might agree.

Iowa fans probably won't.

Ferentz is right—taking the timeout there is not a major factor. But he's not off the hook because he made the most frustrating error coaches make these days now that they don't punt from the opponent's 34 (HINT, NORTHWESTERN): he didn't immediately start calling timeouts when Wisconsin made it first and goal. If Iowa has 40 seconds instead of 12 when the spike/timeout decision is made it's not nearly as big a deal. Always, always get rid of your timeouts on defense if given the opportunity—you will never save more time by holding them.

No, still a punk. In the weeks before the season Ohio State teammate Tyler Moeller said Terrelle Pryor was "kind of a punk" by way of explaining that he was no longer the kind of guy who puts "VICK 3:16" on his eyeblack or talks about how everybody steals from people, murders from people, whatever. Pryor should ban the word "everybody" from his vocabulary:

“Not to take anything away from Wisconsin at all – I really don’t want it to come off like this – but they weren’t better than us,” he said. “Everybody knows that if we play nine out of 10 times, we’d beat Wisconsin.”

Pryor stats: 14/28, 156 yards, 0 TD, 1 INT, 56 yards rushing on 18 carries. Final score: Wisconsin by 13. I'm sure Michigan would have been better off the last few years with Pryor behind center but right now I'm happy Michigan missed on an unlikeable guy who's not living up to his athletic potential.

The unabated stupidity. Richard Billingsley's computer rankings are even more off the chain than usual this week:

His ballot does not disappoint this week, ranking TCU at No. 1 (three spots higher than any other computer poll) and Missouri at No. 10 -- the Tigers' lowest spot in any computer poll by seven and two places below the less Mizzou-friendly humans. …

In fact, the rule that causes the high and low scores for each team to be thrown out might as well be called the Billingsley Rule -- counting ties, Billingsley ranks 17 of the 25 teams higher or lower than any other computer in the BCS, including being the only one to rank Virginia Tech at all.

At least the discard rule does effectively neuter Billingsley's poll. His poll is maybe 20% as impactful as the other four.

Etc.: You think we have problems? Boston College fired a good coach, hired a career assistant in his sixties named Spaz, is 0-4 in the ACC, and has scheduled Vanilla Ice to participate in something called "Ice Jam." Boston College has problems. EBay watch hits up 1976.

Cone deficiency. The news that Conelius Jones will not be with the program this fall is not exactly news today, but permit me a day to recover from my World Cup hangover. This is the reason:

According to Brown, Jones went through a rough stretch with personal issues over the winter. Although he graduated with the rest of his class and maintained a 2.5 grade-point average, the 6-foot-2, 190-pound Jones struggled with the SAT, which kept him from qualifying.

That must have been a rough stretch with grades almost at rock bottom, since Jones claimed he had a 3.7 GPA and offers from Wake Forest, Duke, and Stanford when he committed to Michigan. A decline that steep probably means the initial GPA report was a bit inflated.

Unlike Dorsey and his immediate enrollment at Louisville, Jones will head to Fork Union in an effort to get qualified, at which point he'd come in as a mid-year enrollee. This means he's honestly just a hair away from qualifying—the NCAA severely restricted how much grade magic prep schools could work a couple of years ago—and has a decent chance of getting in in January. Michigan has taken kids from prep schools, although not particularly successfully: Marques Slocum spent a semester at Milford and Arizona CB Quinton McCoy spent a prep year before ending up on campus. Neither lasted two years.

As far as the 2010 team goes, Jones's absence creates a distressing lack of Cone in the hairy depths of the quarterback depth chart, and that's about all.

I don't think Dorsey's situation is at all related to Jones and Kinard. Dorsey was qualified; the other two guys are headed to prep school. That doesn't have anything to do with hypothetical anti-Rodriguez forces executing their dastardly master plan. And even if the academic side of things is cracking down, they have a very good reason to do so: Michigan's latest transfer-saddled APR score is ugly, and Michigan is going to have to put up a major improvement lest they fall below the 925 line of doom.

Meanwhile, the other blame meme floating around is that Rodriguez is bringing in a lot more kids at academic risk. That may or may not be true but unless Jones's transcripts and offers were just totally fictional this doesn't seem like an example. It's one thing to take a guy who has a lot of work to do, and another to take a guy well above the minimums only to watch him collapse.

What happened with Cissoko? In other happy news about never-were kids, Boubacar Cissoko pled guilty to four separate counts of robbery and faces sentencing that won't be 45 years but hypothetically could. The News takes an in-depth look at what happened to a high school kid no one thought would have problems until he got out of this protected environment:

He was intentionally protected, growing up on Rosa Parks Boulevard in Detroit, a neighborhood that was rough-and-tough 40 years before Cissoko got there.

"He came from a sheltered background," Willis said. "By 10:30 he was in, home. He was driven to school, driven home. We are a close-knit family, we were tight on him."

Even the history of the riots which began along what was then known as 12th Street was kept from Cissoko, by the family.

"He's a good kid," Willis said. "When he left, he was praying five times a day."

Isn't there a show about Amish kids who head out into the world for a year or two and go totally nuts? In this case it seems that protecting Cissoko from negative influences left him unprepared to deal with them. He was unvaccinated. Bonus points to the News for deploying one of those beautifully dry newspaper sentences that radiate detached authority:

Less than worldly, he was suddenly thrust into a scene in Ann Arbor in which young adults believe they have achieved a level of sophistication that they may well never attain in life.

Oh, snap.

Another oddity: court documents show Cissoko's age is actually two years older than Michigan (and Cass Tech) listed him, which might explain why he didn't live up to the recruiting hype.

Burn the regionals down. It takes some doing to make me livid about something that won't happen until 2012 and involves a committee making a decision, but holy aarrgh I want to punch a wall:

First, the announcing of four more regionals means we won't be seeing the slightly less moronic proposed tournament format, which at least included one playoff round that made some sense.

The second problem is the hosts themselves.  The hosts will be Minnesota, Michigan Tech, Holy Cross, and Fairfield/Yale. If it feels like a repeat, it's because it pretty much is. The two eastern ones aren't that big of a deal. They're sure to be boring, empty arenas for critically important games, but there aren't really any better options. Plus, with now-defunct Fairfield helping host in Bridgeport, you get the joy of the 17 people in attendance saying, "What the hell is that deer doing in here?"

Tech is hosting in Green Bay, which is WCHA territory. This will be the fourth consecutive year that Minnesota hosts something. They were awarded regionals in 2009 and 2010, get the Frozen Four in 2011, and now have another regional in 2012. WCH points out that over that time span the entire CCHA gets to host three events.

It is ludicrous that the next two years will see zero regionals in CCHA territory. I hope the St. Louis regional is attended by five people. Are any CCHA teams even bidding for these things? Why hasn't Michigan put in a bid using the new rink in Toledo? I'm not sure where the breakdown is, but something's got to change.

Solar domination. The American Solar Challenge is Michigan's. If you don't think this is a big deal, look at the size of the trophy:

It's a big deal. From the looks of it, it's about three times as big a deal as the World Cup. This is Michigan's third straight national title. Seriously: Directors Cup this event, yo.

An actual loss on the tubes. EDSBS found 40 minutes of youtubery not posted by WolverineHistorian. It's the 1988 Michigan-Miami game that Michigan ended up losing 31-30. Though it is depressing, the pants are very tight and Al Trautwig's doing his very best Data impression:

Draft disappointment. We knew that Michigan's 2010 hockey class had collectively slipped in the eyes of NHL evaluators, but the extent to which they did still surprises:

• Jon Merrill fell into the early second round, going #38 to New Jersey.
• Alex Guptill went in the third round to Dallas.
• Luke Moffatt and Lee Moffie were both seventh-rounders.
• Clare, Fallon, and Deblois did not go.

That's disappointing from a talent standpoint. At least Merrill and Guptill went to generally patient, NCAA-friendly organizations. Michigan might get an extra year out of Merrill and stands a good chance of hanging on to Guptill.

Etc.: Nebraska fans are preparing for Big Ten hate. Michigan is not featured. Woo 8-16!