michigan underachieves surprise

Obvious. As part of his annual defense of the recruiting-industrial complex, Doctor Saturday has surveyed many things. Now he has struck upon the most over- and under-achieving teams as seen through the lens of recruiting classes. The overachieving list has a variety of causes:

1. Oregon. Spread genius.
2. Oregon State. JUCO/grayshirt addiction.
3. Virginia Tech. FSU, Miami, UNC, and Clemson all recruit like demons and suck on the field. The methodology here prioritizes wins over teams with good classes no matter their results on the field. The ACC champion is set up to do well here.
4. Iowa. Own Penn State, greatly benefit from Michigan's implosion.
5. Stanford. Harbaugh. Sigh.

The underachieving list… well, you don't even have to look, really. Guess which big time rivalry finishes 1-2? You get zero opportunities. You got it anyway:

Hurray! In Michigan's case the underachieving is due to massive attrition, a change in program philosophy, the program delightfully eating itself alive, and the dumbest hiring decision in the history of the world. Notre Dame had a decided schematic advantage.

The rest of the lame are UCLA, Texas A&M, Miami, and FSU. Unsurprisingly four of these teams have changed coaches in the last two years. UCLA is going to have a hard time not firing Neuheisel next year, leaving A&M the only school that may be able to dig out under the current leadership.

Special K is a disease. He infects the world. I could help but think about Special K when I read about UConn's spelling cheer. It's the generic spelling cheer wherein you spell out the thing you like and repeat it three times. Example: "B-A-C-O-N bacon bacon bacon!" In this case it's U-C-O-N-N. It would be better if it was bacon, but it's UConn.

UConn's version is actually a cool tradition, however, because of this guy:

His name is Kenny, and the reason UConn has a cheer almost as good as B-A-C-O-N is because this lone nut created it via force of personality. People love this:

The reason Big Red's cheer has caught on and become a marker of UConn's success for the past 20 years is because, unlike so many things at UConn games, it is organic. There is no sponsor. It is not forced. It is not pre-packaged. No, instead it is a reflection of pure joy at the success of the young men who step out on the court wearing the jerseys that say "UConn." It is beautiful, and cheering along with Big Red is one of my favorite parts of being a UConn fan.

Unfortunately this year the cheer has been pirated by the PA guy and is deployed at times completely irrelevant to the game situation. It's basically WHO WANTS SOME FREE UCONN CHEER. In two years it will be WHO WANTS SOME FREE UCONN CHEER BROUGHT TO YOU BY CORPORATION. It is in this way that genuine things are co-opted and destroyed by marketers.

Also: bacon, bacon, bacon.

Filling in another hockey blank or two. Hockey gets a 2012(?) commit from Max Shuart, a nephew of former Wolverine captain Alex Roberts. Shuart's playing for major midget—unusual for a Michigan recruit at this stage in his career—and has filled in with the U17 team this year. He's got no points in three games with the U17s.

Michigan also just picked up an Alex Kile from Compuware for 2013. Kyle leads his team with 18-19-37 in 32 games, and is ninth in the league in scoring. He was a 14th round pick of London in the OHL draft—it's always hard to tell how much of that seeming lack of respect is talent and how much is signability.

MHN points out that Kile and Shuart were born only ten days apart, so Shuart may be ticketed for 2013 instead of 2012. That would make more sense since a guy who's doing well, but not amazingly, in midget doesn't seem like a guy who's going to make an impact in two years. I couldn't find anything on the internets indicating either guy was getting early hype, FWIW.

Random two year old sings fight song. Aww.

Is there a way to avoid this pun? Rumors of Soony Saad's departure for Europe are no longer rumors. Michigan's going to have to replace basically all of their scoring next year, which totally sucks because with Saad they were probably Big Ten favorites and in position to establish the sort of success that sustains itself over years. Now I'm not sure who the hell is going to be probably better than Robbie Findley.

Yes, dolla bill. The number for Michigan's guarantee game against Air Force: 1.1 million, which tops Ohio State's million-dollar payout to Navy by a few thousand dollars but not their $2 million guarantee to Colorado. It's a little scary that we just went back to a mid-90s Michigan DC and we're going up against the triple option, no?

Bug status. Items fixed:

• The iPhone app.
• IE bug where content would show up way down the screen. (Inline CSS wasn't getting used on pages other than the homepage, for some reason.)
• Up/down voting has returned. It's a bit different, as an update in the software brought a new widget that tracks up and down votes separately and more obviously. There's also a setting to "dim" comments that fail to meet a certain threshold; I picked –5. No idea what that will do yet. [It appears the answer is "nothing," but maybe it puts classes on these items that I'm not doing anything with yet.]
• Have restored image upload facilities for trusted users using WLW. There is new login information that can be found in the post that explains how to use WLW with MGoBlog.

List of known issues in approximate order of importance:

• IE 7 users (and I think just IE 7 users) are having issues seeing the box wherein comments are composed. Note: I don't even try to support IE 6, so if your company hasn't updated its browser in ten years I cannot help you.
• The message board is ugly and uses space inefficiently again (but at least there are permalinks).
• Voting is not applying points to user accounts.
• mgolicious is not automatically updating.
• Sidebar pagers are goofy.
• The message board homepage is also in an undesirable state.

If there's something else wrong email me about it, please.

Etc.: There was a very silly AnnArbor.com article that chalked up Forcier's departure to the "impossible expectations" placed on his shoulders, such as going to class and not taking incompletes. It cried out to be fisked; The Wolverine Blog has fisked it. Tom Harmon is the #5 Big Ten Icon, so 1-4 better have dominated jungles, too. Braves & Birds explores why commentary is so dumb. Wrestling takes out OSU and Indiana; I stumbled across the OSU dual on BTN and decided "what the hell" since Michigan was ahead. It was surprisingly entertaining.