randomness

[Marc-Gregor Campredon]

2/16/2020 – Michigan 89, Indiana 65 – 16-9, 7-7 Big Ten

Sports fans are prone to wild swings in mood, often with little justification. Everything that just happened will keep on happening, and this goes double when things are bad. Back when I ran the Blogpoll voters tended to overrate their own teams a hair when things were going well, but it was a dead certainty that they'd under-rank them significantly after a loss. Every voter, every time.

Lose painfully for a month and your perspective gets jaundiced. When Michigan played at Nebraska a few weeks ago they were down Zavier Simpson and Isaiah Livers. Then Franz Wagner got in foul trouble. Michigan spent a big chunk of the first half with Adrian Nunez and CJ Baird on the court. Our photoshopper-in-residence Abraham wondered on twitter why he was watching a random MAC game, and I laughed sardonically.

At some point in January I said I wanted to sim to the end of the season and get the Howard croots on campus. This season felt like a snakebit write-off: Livers couldn't stay on the court, the trident was haunted, Michigan would get a million good looks they miss while opponents poured in every variety of garbage known to man.

At the same time I tried to argue that Michigan's January was a massive statistical outlier that could not last, because Michigan was not the second-worst team in the country at all things from behind the three-point line. And lo:

Opponent M 3P% Opp 3P%
Rutgers 47 25
OSU 32 39
MSU 39 26
Northwestern 35 23
Indiana 53 25

Those five games are the five they've played in February.

The situation is now flipped. Michigan's probably ahead of its skis a little. But you've seen the shots. You've seen Michigan tee up open corner threes over and over again as the opponent issues a contested jack from NBA range. Reality is somewhere between 59 and 1. It's a lot closer to 1.

[After THE JUMP: The Mona Lisa of floor slaps]

Let's watch a punt. This is a Big Ten blog, after all. This is incoming freshman Brad Robbins:

And that's a 5.0 hangtime punt. I'm a little surprised Robbins was headed to Nevada before Michigan had a scholarship open on Signing Day. Seems like a potential Zoltan Mesko.

Rise of the nooners. Michigan/Air Force will be at noon on BTN, the fourth 2017 home game at which toe will meet leather at God's time. The only remaining home dates without times are Michigan State, which seems fated to be a night game despite everyone save TV thinking that's a bad idea, and Minnesota. Minnesota is November 4th. In the past that's meant both participants would have to sign off on a night game, and despite changes to the TV contracts that clause appears intact. Manuel:

“The only difference is, the Big Ten and television can assign us to a primetime game [before November] and it’s not our option. In November, we have the option if we choose to do so. I don’t anticipate that choice being made.”

I would anticipate Minnesota being noon or 3:30 as well.

As a person who likes to watch a lot of college football this is an excellent development. YMMV.

Ready to roll. Steve Lorenz has a piece on Michigan's incoming linebackers that features this piece of good news on Drew Singleton:

He is 100% healthy and ready to go for fall camp according to two sources I spoke with on Monday and Tuesday. Because of his lock status as a recruit and his knee injury, he may be the most under-talked about prospect the Wolverines signed in the 2017 cycle.

He also asserts that all three incoming LBs could be on the two-deep this fall, which is good news for them and maybe less than good news for the extant linebacker corps past the starters.

Good luck with that. College football twitter set a new record for most "that's a bold strategy, Cotton" references yesterday after Ole Miss responded to their latest NOA by saying 1) we're super guilty and 2) Hugh Freeze is not responsible.

Why is Ole Miss going to these incredible lengths to protect Hugh Freeze?

What the Rebels are going to the NCAA Committee on Infractions with later this year is the kind of defense a school might mount for Nick Saban or Urban Meyer or John Calipari. It is a full-fledged document of support for Ole Miss’ football coach, unequivocal in its admission that major violations occurred but unwavering in its denial of Freeze’s responsibility for any of them.

Ole Miss’ institutional decision to pursue this strategy is puzzling. While Freeze has had some shining moments in Oxford, he’s 19-21 in the SEC and is nobody’s definition of irreplaceable. Yet the school is taking the path of most resistance in defending him, and by doing so, potentially risking the total destruction of its football program for the foreseeable future.

Hugh Freeze draws a lot of water in this town, NCAA.

Poor ol' Barney looks set up to be the fall guy:

“It’s not right,” Loyd added. “It is a betrayal of him. Do I think Barney’s been made a scapegoat? Yes. Based on what I’ve seen and know, they set him up. ‘You are the most unsophisticated, the most expendable, and, tag, you’re it.’ But I have to say, I’m his advocate in this.

“Barney’s thinking is, ‘We were all in this together – what happened to me?’ They were a team, and a team doesn’t abandon their own on the field of play. It’s also not the Ole Miss way.”

Barney Farrar was the guy Laremy Tunsil was told to see in the text messages released on Tunsil's instagram on draft day last year. Told to see by Ole Miss's Assistant AD of Football Operations. Totally without Freeze's knowledge. Uh huh.

It remains a mystery why Ole Miss wouldn't throw Freeze overboard and try to mitigate the damage. His best skill is credulously accepting commitments from guys his boosters bought. Surely whoever's at Arkansas State can replicate that.

Grabbin' grad transfers. Brendan Quinn on Michigan's entry into the grad transfer market:

For a program like Ohio, this is an atomic loss. There is no replacement. There is no recruit that Ohio can discover in the forests of Neverland who will walk in and average 15.9 points and 6.5 assists per game. The roster is not built for attrition, let alone its best player picking up and leaving as a graduate transfer.

Phillips declined an interview for this story.

Beilen, meanwhile, told me he spoke to Phillips twice during the transfer process. At one point, he recalled telling Phillips: 'I just hate how this is happening." Beilein feels for Phillips because Beilein sees himself in Phillips. This is the little guy getting screwed.

It is also, though, the reality of college basketball in 2017.

Simmons was strongly considering attending Ohio State. Other Big Ten schools were circling. Beilein was faced with a dilemma.

"He was going to go to one of our competitors, probably, if he didn't come to us," Beilein said.

It's bad for the lower reaches of D-I but good for the players, and teams who have to fill unexpected holes annually. At this point the grad transfer rule is all but sacrosanct. These days trying to restrict a transfer in any way comes with it a media outcry and a hasty retraction; trying to do away with grad transfers would cause a huge blowup. It is what it is.

Hockey is too random. There's such a thing as too much unpredictability, and hockey has it.

Goalies and defensive systems got a lot better; goals plummeted; games turned into a bunch of coinflips. Hockey is now the most random major sport:

continuum

Shots and possession don't turn into goals enough. The only solution is to embiggen the nets; otherwise goalie dominance will continue and the NHL playoffs will remain almost totally random.

Etc.: Scouting Akrum Wadley. Jim Harbaugh has a fan. Midlevel Big Ten teams are about to be irritated by Cincinnati. Via Mike Rubin, more on Flin Flon. M players had a month off to be humans. Now that's over.

10/31/2015 – Michigan 29, Minnesota 26 – 6-2, 3-1 Big Ten

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[Patrick Barron]

ONE. We've got a radio show now so I've been listening to sports talk radio even when Sam and Ira aren't on. I do it to compare and maybe get better and maybe draw confidence from the fact that a lot of sports talk radio is outrageously bad. The parts that aren't are often outrageously robotic. WTKA has a bunch of NFL stuff now that they switched to CBS, and it's on when I go to and from our podcast on Sunday; sometimes I catch it on a Thursday.

Tom Brady was on. Jim Gray actually asked him a lot of pointed questions about the upcoming game against the Colts and whether he had a desire to rain unholy fire upon those bastards. Brady responded with the passion of an accountant. I would chalk this up to Brady's flat affect, but I've seen player after player descend into this anodyne non-existence. This is a a league that spent most of the offseason discussing the Ideal Gas Law, after all—even if they didn't know they were doing so. It's just a thing. Colleges teach it but it doesn't take all the way. The NFL perfects it, along with the slant.

TWO. Minnesota has not been good for literally 50 years. Their blips to the positive aren't even Illinois blips. Every decade Illinois will show up in a BCS-level game; the Minnesota coach with the best winning percentage since 1944 is one Glen Mason, who the Gophers fired so they could hire Tim Brewster.

THREE. In 2005 I was pretty mad after a weird game where the Michigan Stadium scoreboards fritzed out and Jim Herrmann called a blitz on which Prescott Burgess, a 230-pound linebacker, was tasked with two-gapping a 270-pound monster TE. When I get mad I tend to be mad about everything, but when Lawrence Maroney rushed out to midfield and planted the biggest damn Minnesota flag in existence I was just like "yeah, go ahead, you earned that."

Sixty-plus Gopher players stormed across that field to reclaim the Jug without considering decorum, sanity, or sportsmanship. Michigan had just lost a game mostly because they called a blitz so telegraphed that a petrified backup QB could check them into a 50-yard run and I had enough non-hate in my heart to genuinely enjoy the fervor with which the Gophers reclaimed Fielding Yost's 30-cent chunk of crockery.

FOUR. Last year the Little Brown Jug went on a tour of the state of Minnesota.

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This was a good idea.

FIVE. Jerry Kill retired last week because he could no longer control the seizures his cancer had bestowed upon him. Jerry Kill talks like a NASCAR driver. He comes by his coachspeak honestly, and when Tracy Claeys was again thrust into a role he probably never thought he'd be in—Kill tends to buy and hold assistants until the end of time—he sounded 100% like Jerry Kill.

It was awkward. It was stilted. It was genuine as hell. He told his kids not to play with emotion because emotion evaporates but to play with passion because passion sticks and I was just like YOU MAY BE SAYING THIS LIKE TOM BRADY SAYS THINGS BUT I KNOW THAT FEEL.

SIX. Junior Hemingway, just shouting and weeping after the Sugar Bowl.

SEVEN. Jerry Kill.

EIGHT. Michigan won a football game that often doubled as an exercise in hilarious improbability. Michigan gave up a 52-yard touchdown after Jeremy Clark executed the platonic ideal of coverage against a corner route. With 19 seconds left in a football game, Minnesota spent 17 seconds on a series of elaborate motions on first and goal from the half-yard line.

Football is weird and terrible and sometimes it gets you to within a half-yard of a cathartic, wonderful victory and then says "nah." Sometimes when you're 2-and-a-billion after always being good your walk-on QB dials up a bunch of incredible throws and you go grab the Little Brown Jug with a newfound respect for its importance. Football, above all, is cruel.

NINE. If you are a Minnesota fan on a bitter Monday indeed, here is the equivalent of Lawrence Maroney planting a flag. It is Jon Falk, the recently retired and legendary Michigan equipment manager, welcoming his favorite 30-cent crockery back home.

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It hurts, but that means something. That is a thing that is real. It is a reflection of Jerry Kill killing himself to be in this game and dying because he has to leave it.

TEN. I've always hated THIS IS MICHIGAN a bit because it reminds me of going to Penn State in 2006 and having their chintzy-ass scoreboards proclaim WE'RE PENN STATE… AND THEY'RE NOT. It's not necessarily as bad, but sometimes it tends to AND THEY'RE NOT. I'm not a huge fan of Michigan's excellently-executed James Earl Jones intro video this year because it claims a bunch of things that should be gestured at instead.

Michigan's great. I love Michigan. I love it all, though. I've been to Georgia and Auburn and Penn State and Ohio State and Minnesota and the feeling of college football is something else. Minnesota hasn't done anything Colin Cowherd would note for 50 years. You could maybe compare them to the Lions, who no one should ever be a fan of.

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Except no. Tell me that doesn't matter. Tell me This Is Minnesota doesn't mean anything. We took the Jug and we mostly earned it and that matters to me. It matters to Jabrill Peppers and Jon Falk and Jim Harbaugh and Greg Dooley. It matters because it's college fucking football, and Minnesota means something.

To Michigan, it means the Jug. They got it back on Saturday by the skin of their teeth, and for a program that's had a bit of a rough go of late they'll take it any way they can get it.

HIGHLIGHTS

Column inspired by Dr. Sap digging up a post-game Bo speech after the 1987 Jug game:

A half hour version that must be most of the game from WD:

Parking God has a more reasonable length reel:

AWARDS

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[Barron]

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Known Friends And Trusted Agents Of The Week

you're the man now, dog

#1 Jabrill Peppers had a 40 yard KO return, a 40 yard punt return, two PBUs, a near pick-six, a rushing touchdown, a reverse set up by everyone fretting about Peppers, a pass interference call drawn—Peppers played nearly 100 snaps and was instrumental in all three phases of the game.

#2 Maurice Hurst didn't actually pop up in the box score much but he was frequently in Leidner's grill; on the final stand he blew up the pass protection on the first play and was one of a few different Wolverines whipping their dudes up front. Actually in the box score: he had a critical TFL that forced Minnesota to kick a short field goal.

#3 Drake Johnson didn't get many carries but was by far the most effective runner Michigan had; other guys had lanes but didn't take advantage of them. Hoping to see more of him going forward.

Honorable mention: Chesson and Darboh both had nice days. Glasgow again contributed to mostly good run defense.

KFaTAotW Standings.

9: Jourdan Lewis (#1 UNLV, #1 Northwestern, #1 MSU), Jabrill Peppers(#2 BYU, #2 Northwestern, #2 MSU, #1 Minnesota)
5: Chris Wormley(#2 Utah, #1 Oregon State)
4: Maurice Hurst (#2 Maryland, #2 Minnesota)
3: Jake Butt (#1 Utah), De'Veon Smith(#2 Oregon State, #3 BYU), Ryan Glasgow (#1 BYU), Desmond Morgan (#1 Maryland),
2: Ty Isaac(#2 UNLV), Willie Henry(#3 Utah, #3 MSU).
1: AJ Williams (#3 Oregon State), Channing Stribling(#3 UNLV), Blake O'Neill(#3 Maryland), Jake Rudock(#3 Northwestern), Drake Johnson(#3 Minnesota)

Who's Got It Better Than Us Of The Week

This week's best thing ever.

Form a f-ing wall.

Honorable mention: Speight throws the go-ahead touchdown and then converts for two; Peppers has the ball in his hands.

WGIBTUs Past.

Utah: Crazy #buttdown.
Oregon State: #tacopunts.
UNLV: Ty Isaac's 76 yard touchdown.
BYU: De'Veon Smith's illicit teleporter run.
Maryland: Jehu Chesson jet sweeps past you.
Northwestern: Chesson opening KO TD.
MSU: the bit where they won until they didn't.
Minnesota: form a f-ing wall.

imageMARCUS HALL EPIC DOUBLE BIRD OF THE WEEK.

This week's worst thing ever.

Channing Stribling gets beat over the top for what seems like the game-winning touchdown, until it was not.

Honorable mention: Mitch Leidner hurling the ball downfield on throws that are very bad ideas only for those to be complete anyway. Rudock underthrows another deep ball by 20 yards.

PREVIOUS EDBs

Utah: circle route pick six.
Oregon State: Rudock fumbles after blitz bust.
UNLV: Rudock matches 2014 INT total in game 3.
BYU: BYU manages to get to triple digit yards in the last minutes of the game.
Maryland: Slog extended by deflected interception at Houma.
Northwestern: KLINSMANN OUT
MSU: Obvious.
Minnesota: The bit where the lost it until they didn't.

[After THE JUMP: fluky fluky fluky.]