Iowa

This would be the equivalent of 30 football players, so there must be a family values issue. Dispatch Drew Sharp on a special assignment!

"Lickliter said Friday that starting guards Jake Kelly and Jeff Peterson and reserve forward David Palmer plan to transfer. The announcement comes two days after junior Jermain Davis announced that he will to transfer to Minnesota State, a Division II school.

The departures of Kelly and Peterson, who would have been juniors, and Davis and Palmer, both of whom have one year of eligibility left, leave Iowa with just seven players and recruits Eric May and Brennan Cougill."

Actually Kelly has some personal things to deal with, so he is just getting closer to home. Interesting that the local media there had no reason to make it more that what it was. Do we get them twice next year?

ESPN is reporting that the Cleveland Browns are prepared to make a "Huge" offer to Scott Pioli of the New England Patriots. According to ESPN Pioli wants to bring in Kirk Ferentz as head coach. Now I like Ferentz just as much as the rest of the mgoblog community but I'm not sure he has what it takes to succeed in the NFL. Am I crazy?

Penn State 23  Iowa 24

What are the implications of this for the Big 10 and the BCS possibilities? Also, the Bama/LSU game is getting pretty crazy in the last 45 seconds, all tied up!

....Juice Williams ?!?!

26 of 41 attempts with five TDs and a pick on the first game of the season.

The Mizzou game was seriously impressive. Chad Henne never threw for as many yards as Williams did Saturday night, 451. He's grown up...the Mizzou secondary kind of sucks, but still, he gave a performance worth of Troy Smith.

Who else in the Big 10 is even close? Maybe the Indiana QB, and whoever is under center for Northwestern these days... 

From my observations and what
has been written on this blog and in the MSM, I believe that we have changed our
recruiting focus from one that was more heavily focused on retaining all of the
talent within the State of Michigan and capturing what we can get in the
surrounding states (Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Illinois) as well as a few athletes
from certain talent hotbeds (Florida, Texas and California) to a greater
emphasis being placed on recruiting from the talent hot beds.  What are the ramifications of this philosophical
shift?  And how have coaching changes
resulted in shifts in intra-region power? 

1. It is likely that MSU is going to recruit
   better within Michigan
   than they have in the past.  My reasoning
   is that as RR draws greater numbers of recruits from outside of Michigan and the Midwest
   than the prior regime, more quality players will be available to the Spartans.  In addition, Brian had a post some time back
   describing how the change in the type of players we recruit will lead to
   certain players that would have been a lock for Michigan, now being a better fit at State.  I am not implying that we will not get the
   guys we are interested in recruiting.  That
   will be dependent upon our continued success on the field and fostering relationships
   between the program and the high schools within the state.
2. MSU will likely become more competitive in
   the Big Ten and nationally.  The
   increased talent level will have the potential to move them up into the second
   tier of the Big Ten currently being fought over by Wisconsin,
   Penn State, Illinois
   and Iowa.
3. Assuming that RR is able to land better talent
   from outside of Michigan than is available
   inside of Michigan,
   our overall talent level will rise, making us more competitive nationally.  Hopefully, the relative talent level between
   us and MSU will remain constant.  This
   should raise the absolute level of talent in the Big Ten at the expense of the
   SEC and ACC (assuming our recruiting focus has moved towards Florida and the south east).

The risk is that we chase
windmills and fail to land equal or better talent in the southeast and cede talent
within the State of Michigan
talent to MSU.  The Spartans then gain an
ability to win the recruits we want and there is a possible shift in power.  As I stated before, the mitigant to this is our
continued success on the field and fostering relationships between the program and
the high schools within the state.

Observations and Parallels:

Is RR’s focus on talent
outside of the home state due to his time at WVU where there was far less
instate talent than in Michigan? I’m not implying that Michigan is OH, PA, FL, TX or CA, but it is
clearly better than WV.  One thing that
seems clear, is that the tenures of Bobby Williams and John L. Smith (and the
Spartans refer to us as slappies??) decimated the in-state recruiting at
MSU.  While there were not great numbers
of Plaxico’s and Duckett’s at MSU there were some clear examples of players we
wanted but State got.  BW and JLS seemed
to have killed this very nicely.

There have been some
interesting changes in balance of power within different regions during the
last 10-15 years that may provide interesting insight.  

1. The fall of Washington
   and the rise of Oregon.  How much of the rise of Oregon as a national
   power have to do with the influx of Phil Knight / Nike money versus the
   missteps and poor coaching hires at UW?  Has there been a re-routing of talent from Seattle to Eugene?  Did the re-emergence of USC shut down UW’s
   access to southern California
   recruits?
2. The fall of Notre Dame, Illinois
   and Michigan State
   and the rise of Iowa and Wisconsin (and Northwestern and Purdue to a
   lesser extent?).  Did the inconsistency
   of ND and Illinois cede some degree of control
   over greater Chicago
   recruiting to other Big Ten School?  A
   close analysis of the recruiting records (in particular recruit hometowns) for
   each school over the last 15 years would yield some interesting insight.  Did the Spartans losing Nick Saban to LSU and
   the ensuing coaching chaos provide an opening to NU and Purdue?
3. The fall of Nebraska
   and the rise of Oklahoma.
4. The fall of Alabama
   and Tennessee (to a lesser extent) and the rise
   of LSU and Auburn.

This post is to generate
discussion, as many of the ideas I have included have not been researched,
rather are observations of mine that seem to fit together with some degree of
logic.

One of the "entries" today on ESPN's new Big Ten blog is a phone interview with Kirk Ferentz, in which he speaks about the University's handling of a sexual assault victim - if you haven't heard about this story by now, you haven't been paying attention.

Some key quotes from the interview:

Ferentz on how he feels about addressing the situation publicly: "I would hope people would realize there may two different sides to this last release, if you will. I don't have access to information, to every degree of the letter that came out. But certainly the part I have knowledge of, I'm very confident that the Regents will find that the steps taken by the members involved were first and foremost, of the best concern for the young woman and her family. Everything was followed very properly, procedurally."

What. I mean really, what? Procedure was followed to the letter, never mind the fact that the procedure was fucked up as all hell.

But maybe Ferentz will redeem himself when asked about how he would change those procedures?

Was there anything you would have done differently?

"Not to my knowledge. The bottom line is it certainly appears there was an incident. That will be decided in the proper place, which is not on our campus."

Except that it wasn't decided in the proper place, BECAUSE the people on your campus told the girl to keep it "in house." Gah.

"I'm totally confident that everything was done the way it was supposed to have been done. There's a strict protocol that has to be followed. It was followed, to my knowledge. It's sad that an alleged incident took place, but nobody can do anything about that at this point. What happened after, from my knowledge, everything was handled extremely well."

It's sad that the victim's trust was betrayed by the very people who are supposed to protect her. Man, it's so sad that the University basically engaged in a cover up operation for the benefit of two football players, trampling all over this girl's rights.

"From what I know, at least everyone on campus exhausted every possible option available to them and everything was handled very well. The Regents already came to that conclusion after an investigation, and I'm very confident they're going to come to the same conclusion down the road. The only other aspect of that, I would not be surprised if they readjust the procedure one more time. That may be a result of this investigation. But that's up to them. All the parties involved could do was follow the procedure that's been laid out.

What could that adjustment be?

KF: I have no idea what that might be."

Oh dear lord. All the University could do was follow a fucked up procedure like robots? He has no idea how this situation could be remedied in the future?

I was ready to give Ferentz the benefit of the doubt on this one. I was ready for him to come out and say "I'm not happy about what happened, and I hope it will be remedied in the future because this was WRONG." But no, instead we get repeated statements that the University did all that it could and that since the Regents approved the procedure before (importantly, BEFORE the victim's mother alerted them to the gross miscarriage of responsibility that happened here) then the procedure will obviously be found A-OK now.

Does this interview piss anyone else off, or just me? Full interview here.

EDIT: Apparently a second letter from the mother has been published here. This one's from May 16, 2008. I wonder how much worse this situation can get before it gets better. If it ever does.