mitch-albom

As the Harbaugh turns. There were two main appeals to Jim Harbaugh as Michigan coach. One: he wins a lot. Two: he makes things interesting. After the last couple years, when the only interesting thing was finding out just how incompetent an offense can be, that latter is a breath of fresh air. 

Harbaugh's swooping down upon injured people by the roadside, he's getting tweeted at by Judge Judy, and then he's… uh…

…OAKLAND IS STILL IN PLAY

HEAD FOR THE HILLS

WE DIDN'T LISTEN, NFL REPORTERS

WE DIDN'T LISTEN

…

False alarm. Harbaugh was just out there making fine distinctions between classes of lions:

"The A's to me, the way they compete, the team, the different way they think, they are jungle lions," said Harbaugh, who also coached at Stanford before joining the 49ers. "Zoo lions get tired of zebra after a while and want filet mignon. Not jungle lions."

No one ask him about the Detroit variety.

Oh, and if you're worried that he's slacking off because you're a crazy person:

"He's quite the competitor and a winner. We've been trying to work this out for a long time, but the day after he left the 49ers he was out recruiting for Michigan. There hasn't been that much time."

We get the crazies around here some.

Like the head coach. File under "too good to check." This story from around 2000 involves Harbaugh wanting to throw the ball around with some girls at Dominicks. An observer feels this is flirting until…

He said to the first girl, “keep your hands up, thumbs down,” and he showed her the proper motion with his own hands. When she didn’t get quite right, he grabbed her wrists and showed her how to position her hands. He then paced off 15 yards, held the ball in front of him, squatted like he was under center, patted the ball hard, took three hard steps back, planted his back leg and fired the ball at the first girl. As he let the ball go, you could hear it click as his fingernails hit the ball and, I shit you not, as the ball whizzed through the air you could hear it ssssssssssss… THUNK! It hit the girl in the shoulder and knocked her down. Jim wadn’t playin’.

“Come on, let’s go!” Jim barked. While Girl #1 picked herself up, Girl#2 gamely grabbed the ball and lobbed it back. Again, Jim got in his QB squat, smacked the ball, did a hard three-step drop-back and fired the ball at Girl#3, she ducked but the ball hit off the top of her head and went into the street. Girl#2 ran after it while Girl#3 sat on the ground rubbing her head. When Girl#2’s throw back to Jim was short, Jim got a bit annoyed, and set the girls up in a relay so that two girls were about 25 yards away, and the third girl was halfway in between so that that girls could throw to her, and she would run the ball to Jim. For the next 5-10 minutes, he was firing balls at these two poor girls, knocking them down or hitting them in the face about half the time. He was 100% oblivious.

…until it becomes clear that the only context in which Harbaugh has ever heard the word "flirt" is immediately preceding "…ing with disaster," and associates it with throwing over the middle late.

Bo post OSU, 1986. Dr. Sap is a treasure:

I'm going to find that high school teacher and tell her what a grave mistake she made almost twenty years ago. Long story short, wrote a funny ha-ha paper that would no doubt make me cringe today, teacher gave it a nice grade and wrote on it something along the lines of "you could be the next Mitch Albom!"

Flash forward to the present day:

Yo @MitchAlbom the Lions have never won a super bowl what the heck are you talking about pic.twitter.com/xqQKSOPSr6

— Michael Proppe (@mikeproppe) March 9, 2015

Woof.

Is that good

Aubrey Dawkins shot 48% from three in #B1G play. Let's just say he's a fan of high-percentage shots: https://t.co/bsIEkuvqdR

— Alejandro Zúñiga (@ByAZuniga) March 8, 2015

I feel another "what the hell were people thinking not recruiting Aubrey Dawkins" podcast segment is in our future. Also I accidentally typed his last name "Dakwins," which is either Andrew Dakich's rapper alter-ego… or his dad's.

Fisch's contract. Interesting piece by a 247 board member on Jedd Fisch's contract, which is relatively paltry compared to the rest of the staff's… and only for one year. Why:

Since Fisch was fired with a year remaining on his Jaguars contract, Michigan found themselves in an odd position with him. It’s somewhat uncommon to see a coach simultaneously drop in both level of sport and title, but Fisch went from the NFL to college and from OC to a position coach. Thus, even if Michigan were to make Fisch the highest-paid position coach in college football, it’s unlikely he’d even approach his NFL salary. From a financial standpoint, it pretty much doesn’t matter to Fisch what his Michigan salary is – in 2015, he’ll be getting the Jacksonville money either way. From Michigan’s side, Michigan now has motivation to pay Fisch as little as possible, since they still get the full benefit of Fisch’s services, while the Jaguars have to pick up the tab. Fisch doesn’t care, so the only real obstacle to Michigan paying Fisch $1 for the year would be the Jaguars.

Michigan gave him something plausible—200k, just over what JayBaugh is making. Otherwise he'd be making in the 300-400 range the rest of the staff is, especially with the "passing game coordinator" title.

This is a nice change from the previous regime. Brandon paid way over the market for Hoke and then did the same with Borges, giving him a ludicrous bump after his first year. (One that ended with Michigan gaining fewer than 200 yards, remember.) He paid people to make them look like they were good ideas. Now Michigan is saving money where it can, like on Fisch's contract, so it can pay the right amount of money to people who are likely worth it.

Something something master… slingers? I'll work on it. 6'10" German F Moritz Wagner was at Crisler over the weekend, hanging with the governor:

#Michigan recruit Moritz Wagner hamming it up with the ushers. Even Gov. Snyder got into the love fest. #GoBlue pic.twitter.com/0jIvJnCLbR

— Yvo M (@_YV0) March 7, 2015

It's hard to tell how big of a prospect Wagner is. An NBA scout who Evan Daniels pinged makes him sound a bit developmental:

“He’s a versatile kid who knows how to play ball,” a NBA scout that has evaluated him multiple times told Scout. “He’s not an athlete, but with his length and coordination he manages to deceive his opponents and get to the rack quite easily. Once he becomes a more consistent shooter he will be a nightmare on the wing.”

“He reads the game well, gets his teammates involved and is unselfish player,”

Sounds a bit like Chatman, actually.

Hackett on Project Unicorn. This is a very smart section of his radio interview:

"It was more about "What did the institution need?"," Hackett said. "It can't afford to experiment a lot more. If you look at the last seven years going back to Rich Rod's arrival, there was a seven year period where these were experiments that we weren't sure were going to turn out. There was a gradual decay of "something" because of that. You can call that "winning", you can call that "fan support", you can call it "enthusiasm for Michigan's history". This is the winningest program ever in this sport and it carried the day for a long time. It wasn't behaving that way now though. That Sunday night (after the Ohio State game) I called the President and told him that I don't think we can experiment anymore."

The rest is history.

Etc.: Tom Crean and Indiana fans aren't really having a good time together. I almost feel bad for the guy. The Aubrey Dawkins show.

Nova boards. Dave Brandon's been talking about new scoreboards for a few months now, which is great because obviously:

That's Auburn's board. It's wicked. We haven't had a timetable on them yet, but last night Brandon addressed the assembled stadium ushers and said… 2011. Which is next year. Presumably Michigan's version wouldn't put up ads every once in while when you were looking up for a replay, too.

Brandon also mentioned another 5k seats. where is unclear. I keep pushing crazy orbital bleachers on top of the luxury boxes.

The money is made. Michigan's opening opponent this year is one of very few BCS teams to end up in the red a couple years ago:

…UConn was one of five BCS football programs that failed to make a profit during the 2008-09 academic year. UConn lost roughly $280,000 in football, according to the numbers. Only three BCS programs lost more — Syracuse, which lost $835,000, Wake Forest ($3.07 million) and Duke ($6.72 million). Rutgers, which spent $19.07 million on its football program, was the only other school to fail to make a profit, although the Big East school broke even.

So the only way to lose money is to be a basketball school with a flailing football program in a league that isn't on the end of the money hose yet (presumably Wake and Duke will get much closer to even with the ACC's new TV contract). And that doesn't take all of UConn's football revenue into account because some things are school-wide contracts that surely have their value increased by the presence of men in helmets. And UConn was profitable the three years before that. Keep that in mind the next time someone complains about all the money being thrown at football: with very few exceptions, schools in the top half of  D-I have all they spend and more thrown back.

As for the rest, well… maybe the best way to force Eastern Michigan to drop its football program is to mandate balanced budgets lest scholarships be reduced by the amount you're in the red.

Recovered. The Loeffler ring saga has ended with a satisfactory conclusion from the perspective of one Scot Loeffler, but less so Arizona pawn shop owner Aaron Herdez, the guy trying to turn a profit on the thing on eBay. MVictors confirmed that police seized the ring with Herdez and got a few details on what went down:

On Loeffler:  “He didn’t call it in stolen, he said he lost it and then he changed his mind.”  “We don’t know what really happened.”

What is the status of the ring?  “It’s not for sale and it’s already been seized [by the police].  If I want it back I’ll have to take it court.”

On how they came to own the ring:  “Everything we get comes from customers that walk into the store.”

So there you go. Justice in action.

JUSTICE IN ACTION. The persnickety Indiana Excise Police continue their campaign to improve Michigan's head-to-head recruiting against Notre Dame by throwing a huge net over a house party that got out of hand and coming away with arrests for more than 20 ND athletes, including eight guys on the football team (and incoming freshman hockey player Scott Summerhays for the 10% who care about these things). Orson handles the case by channeling the ghost of Salvador Dali. Everyone's lives will go back to normal minus a couple hundred dollars starting today—not even the Matt James incident is going to result in meaningful suspensions for the Indiana equivalent of the MIP.

And now for the only reason I brought it up:

I consider it a civil rights issue
by BIG MAC (2010-07-18 12:21:18)

---

In reply to: ND alumni should set up a Legal Defense Fund  posted by ACross

The fact is that the state of Indiana once boasted the biggest concentration of KKK members of anywhere in the country. Equally important is that the Indiana Klan focused as much or more of its hatred against Catholics. I believe that you are seeing the great grandsons of the Klansmen in action once again. Do they pull these cowardly Gestapo acts at Purdue and UI? If not, there should be a discrimination lawsuit filed with the Federal Government for this nonsense. A lawyer could certainly figure out the fine points of this better than I have stated them, but I think there is a case. Really.

ND Nation, of course. This is also the first hit for "I consider it a civil rights issue" on the Googles. America.

Do you wear pants, sir? In a column for Indiana's sports journalism school, Dave Kindred takes issue with Mitch Albom receiving the Red Smith award for lifetime achievement in treacle journalism. Marvel at this bit of bloggery from Albom's typically windy acceptance speech:

I never spent much time in media hospitality suites because I saw the trap of comparing notes, trying to impress colleagues with who could write more viciously. I saw how quickly conversations degenerated into complaint sessions and where I lived, cynicism was the wrong approach. The reader of Detroit, the guys on the assembly lines, the grandfathers in Alpena, wished every day they could trade places with me. If I turned cynic, how would that serve them? So I often kept a distance. I spent more time at events than in the office, more time in my community than in press boxes or media parties, and this may have cost me over the years.

I essentially do the same thing, figuring The Grandfathers of Alpena would rather have the from a fan than another guy wearing the hat that says PRESS. If Albom spends most of his day in solid-gold pajamas (as we all surely suspect he does), our conversation about the Free Press Jihad, already hypocritical on his part, goes straight to performance art.

Etc.: Lloyd Carr talks with the News-Herald of Southgate, "the voice of Downriver." In two parts. Not much in the way of shocking reveals but a considerable score for that paper. The 925 APR line used to be a 60% graduation rate, but with all the exemptions it's down to about 50. This UNC thing is looking serious, and now Florida is getting some heat. The Bylaw Blog on the former.