Unverified Baby, Stay For My Voracity
Baby, please don't go. The looming terror hovering over Michigan's basketball season is the potential departure of Manny Harris, and looming terror two is the potential departure of Deshawn Sims. So let's see what Chad Ford has to say in his year-end "naughty and nice" list. Sims checks in on the nice list, (un?)fortunately:
DeShawn Sims, F, Michigan
Sims is a tough player to project. Many scouts question whether he's a 3 or a 4, and much dreaded "tweener" talk is out there. But his production of late has been undeniable. He scored 28 and 12 points in two contests against Duke and an impressive 20 points and 20 rebounds Monday night versus Florida Gulf Coast. If Sims can answer questions about whom he'll guard in the NBA (offensively, he can play both positions well), he could become a late first-round pick.
(The answer to "who can he guard," of course, is NO ONE. Not even Adam Morrison. I talked to Joe Dumars and Jerry West and God about this, I swear.)
"Could become a late first-round pick" sounds like a guy who's likely to return for his senior year in an attempt to guarantee himself that first round cheddar. Ford currently ranks him #46 on his top 100, safely in the return-to-school zone.
Meanwhile, Manny actually checks in below Sims at #48, which seems wildly improbable and totally awesome if it actually represents the opinion of NBA general managers. It might. After all, they continue to trade for Allen Iverson and could well be totally bats. Personally, I don't believe it and am bracing for a departure.
Tempo-free. Excellent chart from Spartans Weblog as we enter the Big Ten basketball season:
Teams to the right are good at offense, teams towards the top are good at defense, and vice versa. These are opposition-adjusted numbers, FWIW, so you can't plead schedule strength: Michigan has by far the best offense in the Big Ten. And, uh, the worst defense.
This comes as little surprise. Michigan's killer weakness in the post results in a lot of faulty man-to-man defending, an over-reliance on the not quite ready for prime time 1-3-1, and poor defensive rebounding. But it affects Michigan's perimeter-oriented offense not at all. Yeah, verily, Michigan is the platonic ideal of the Perimeter Oriented Team, so post guys can get bent. On offense anyway.
BTW: I watched yesterday's Purdue-Illinois game and I'm concerned about UI's skilled, 7'1" center, especially given Michigan's issues with the 1-3-1 of late. The only guys on the team who remotely match up with that guy are redshirting or stupidly at Baylor; I think the Illini are a bad matchup for us. Hopefully Alex Legion takes a zillion stupid shots with 30 seconds on the shot clock. This has a 50-50 chance of happening.
(Note that there's an entire Big Ten Wonk homage blog, a now-annual reprise of the Big Ten Wonk tempo-free aerial (above), and you can see terms like POT pop up on any half-decent blog covering Big Ten Basketball. Wonk is dead, long live Wonk.)
Physician, heal thyself. I read a lot about the decline of newspaper because it's a business interest—and, yes, I relish the day when I get off the freeway and see Drew Sharp holding a sign that says "will annoy for food"—and one of the most common complaints from the old guard is about how darn unreliable those blogs are in comparison to newspapers. This is sort of true, but it's sort of true in the way "average quality" goes down whenever barriers to media contribution are lowered. Any whippersnapper with an e-blog can post whatever they want, sure, but if it's crap the reader will move on, never to return. When there is a panoply of sources the average quality of items written goes down; the average quality of items read goes up.
Anyway, if you're trying to make the case newspapers are more reliable you probably shouldn't do this:
Departed defensive coordinator sworn to not rip Michigan
That's the title of a Mark Snyder post on the Free Press' website that details the verrrry suspicious clause in Scott Shafer's contract that says he can't disparage the university in public and keep his moneys. People contacted for blog post: 0. Disclaimer-type verbiage that would indicate uncertainty about how significant this is, as you would find on many of the "this is speculation!" sort of posts here and elsewhere in the blogosphere: 0. Blog posts that completely blow this out of the water: 1.
Here's MVictors:
Instead of speculating on this I shot a quick note to local attorney Nick Roumel whose firm (Nick Roumel and Associates) handles sports and entertainment contracts. I asked for his take on these terms and in particular, whether this language prohibiting Shafer to “demean or disparage” the football program is unusual.
Roumel responds that the terms sleuthed out by the FIOA experts at the Free Press are "typical for most employment separation agreements"; MVictors then notes that's just one lawyer's opinion—see what I'm saying about proper framing of information?—but that "it's one more attorney than was asked to comment on the Snyder post."
Owned picture goes here.
Meanwhile, the New York Times just published an article in which an Oklahoma commit—five-star DT Jamarcus McFarland—claimed he visited a wild Texas-sponsored coke orgy with naked women "romancing each other" and painted Mack Brown—perhaps the country's most successful recruiter not named Pete Carroll—as a self-centered jerkass more concerned about his flatscreen TVs than this kid and didn't bother to ask Brown for comment. The author of this hit job used to work for Oklahoma's Scout site! McFarland himself admitted the passages in his school paper about the Studio 54 scene were "spiced up" when Scout/Rivals reporters asked him about it, which this Thayer Evans didn't think to do before he published his gullible article in the New York Times(!).
One: though blogs traffic in information far less certain than do mainstream newspapers, they do a much a better job giving you a certainty level for that information and do a much, much better job of swiftly punishing idiots.
Two: your content is as good as the people writing it, and when it comes to sports my money is on nuclear engineers and bored lawyers over journalists who other journalists scorn for playing in the kiddie pool.
Never punt. So there's this insane high school coach in Arkansas who never punts. "Never" as in twice last year, once because they were trying not to run up the score. This insane guy just won the Arkansas state championship. Insane like a fox!
As you might expect, Kevin Kelley—the coach in question—was inspired by one paper in particular:
Kelley had tinkered with eschewing the punting game since winning his first state championship in 2003. He became further emboldened after reading several studies, including "Do Firms Maximize? Evidence from Pro Football," by University of California-Berkeley economics professor David Romer.
The Romer paper put together a statistical model of a football field and concluded that NFL head coaches were way too conservative when it came to going on fourth down, but not even "Do Firms Maximize?" does away with the punt entirely. The only place I've seen that suggested was at Football Outsiders, which published a guest article about eschewing the punt a couple years ago. The idea was so weird that FO took pains to clarify their editorial stance on the matter:
There are many writers at Football Outsiders, and sometimes its hard to convince people that an article on our site represents "the author says X" rather than "Football Outsiders says X." This is extra true for guest columns. This article should not be taken to mean "Football Outsiders says never punt."
That out of the way, the article launches into a discussion of "actual turnover ratio" that counts punts and successful onside kicks and etc etc. It's very dense, and I don't agree some of the lot of assumptions made, but at the very least it's interesting.
My off-the-cuff stance: this strategy works well enough in high school, but that's a land where kickers are often dire and so are defenses. High-level college stuff is much closer to the NFL than high school, and the Romer paper, which suggested you punt on fourth and long yardage, as much better argued. I don't think this applicable past high school.
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