Man, I really really hope there aren't any Michigan fans out there who go post on Sparty boards sounding like this guy. If there is, let this apply to them too. Doctor Worm, you are a bad thing for the Internet. This is a medium trying to prove it can have substantive material, and then guys like you come along and provide ample evidence that any space of free thought will fall victim to Troll Entropy. Allow me to deconstruct your little "rant" here and see if there's actually anything of value in it. If not, I will recommend you get banned from this site -- not for your partisanship, understand, but because baseless and mean are of no value to anyone but the person writing it.

Brian, your desperate rants get more and more pathetic as the weeks roll by. I guess when your football, basketball, and hockey teams are inferior to Little Brother, all you have left is the ability to blubber on a public forum.

Interesting introduction. How is he "desperate?" What about the above was a "rant?" What about it was "blubber"-ing? What makes MSU's awful hockey team on par with Michigan's. You called MSU "Little Brother," so props for a little self-awareness, but the rest is just dragging out shots for no other reason than to be an asshole. I'm under the impression already that you care more about cheapshots than actual discussion.

In regards to the first incident of Winston getting into a fight, do you really think Sturges was innocent? Do you know any hockey players? The way you make it sound, Sturges was grooming puppies to be adopted by orphans when Winston bust in the door and beat him down. They got in a fight, and Winston won. Yet the penalties for getting in this fight were months of jail time, solely because he was on the football team.

(emphasis mine) Ah, now we have the makings of a point -- suggesting that the initial Winston thing was a fight between two combatants, in which one was hurt and therefore the other guy got in trouble. Congratulations. However, you have a lot in here that is flawed. Your rhetorical question about knowing any hockey players, which is a suggestion that hockey players are cheap-ass fighting douches, is invalid, or at least doesn't apply to the hockey players I know (and I know a lot of hockey players). We do know that there have been some hockey players on MSU's team like that of late, but still I don't most Spartan hockey players are Conboy and Tropp. In fact, both were suspended by the team when they gooneded it up, suggesting pretty strongly that such behavior is neither typical, nor tolerated, by hockey players at Michigan State. You seem to be distorting the facts of the case, particularly by your characterization of Winston's first incident as a "fight." A fight implies a mono a mono tussle which dudes get in from time to time. Is that what this reads like to you? Here's how Sturges described it: Last October, I was assaulted by Glenn Winston. This was not a fight, or a disagreement. I was in bed in my room and came downstairs after hearing the commotion caused by three cars pulling up filled with screaming and violent people. I was standing in my front yard trying to figure out what was going on when Glenn Winston punched me in the head from the side. I never saw him. I did not have any chance to protect myself at all. Neither did his other victims. Not a fight. That's an attack.

Why do you have the nerve to spout off about this case when you know almost nothing about it? You're just spinning hearsay and rumors as fact to make your joke of a coach look like less of a blundering idiot.

It seems Brian knows more about it than you do, since he's going off eyewitness evidence. You can't dismiss this as "hearsay and rumors" when it's in a public statement written by a guy who has a vested interest in Spartan sports. You then go into "...your joke of a coach look like less of a blundering idiot." Do you go on to at least prove the validity of that statement? No. Did you write this for any other reason than to antagonize? I'm guessing no. Is that the very definition of a troll? Why yes it is.

In addition, Charles Burrell, Glenn Winston, Andre Anderson, Caulton Ray, and Jenrette have all been removed from the team in the past few months. Yet you conveniently gloss over this fact to reach your stunning conclusion that the world is unfairly arrayed against Michigan.

Your reasoning is backward, and your conclusion more so. Brian here is discussing only the work of one Detroit columnist, not "the world." Burrell, Anderson and Ray were not brought up at all by Rosenberg in his post-potluck column, thus they weren't brought up in the discussion of that column. If he did bring them up, wouldn't that just be MORE evidence of Brian's actual conclusion, which is that Rosenberg is too nice to MSU's disciplinary problems and too harsh on Michigan's?

After the Rather Hall fight, those players that were known to have been involved were kicked off the team. Where is your "20% of the football team" fact coming from? Do you have a link from Michigan State University indicting the team? Or are you just another Wob Parker, whose moles tell him that Kirk Cousins was also involved in the fight?

No, I think he's referring to police statements from eyewitnesses in the State News that said 15 to 20 (16 to 21 percent of MSU's 95 scholarship football players, i.e. the football team) were involved.

I'm assuming you're referring to the statement from the prosecuting attorney that gives an exorbitant number of football players that could have been involved in order to begin settling the case.

Nope. Pretty sure it was the eyewitnesses quoted in the police report via the State News

You're a smart guy, Brian, or at least you think you are. Do you believe that a lawyer worth his salt would admit that those responsible had already been dealt with? Where does the publicity come from, then?

First, love how you couldn't resist, after stating as a condition of your proceeding argument that Brian is a "smart guy" you still had to yank that away into a diss. Very classy, brah. As for this all just being a legal show: This is actually an argument, which is better than you've done up until now, but it's a pretty lame one. So what are you really saying? Do you think that the only people involved were the two guys who were already on thin ice for previous incidents, one of whom was supposedly on crutches? Because if that were so, this would have to be one hell of a conspiracy! I mean, you'd need to get the eyewitnesses to all fabricate a story about 15 to 20 football players, and tell that fabrication to the police, meaning all of those eyewitnesses would be subjecting themselves to perjury! You think one of the assaulted students' lawyer did that? Play this one out: why would the plaintiff's lawyer jump the number from 2 to possibly 20, if it was indeed only two guys (one on crutches)? What more is to be gained by the plaintiff if it's twenty guys rather than two? If I'm the plaintiff's lawyer, I'm sticking strictly to the facts, because it's my burden to prove guilt, not the defendant's burden to prove innocence. Dude, the number doesn't matter from the plaintiff's standpoint! What matters is that Jenrette and Winston were there, and had already been involved in something similar (a grudge attack), meaning there's potential liability for MSU and the football program there. Play this case one more time: if you're that lawyer, do you want to have a PR war with the state's largest university over a trumped up number of attackers, or do you scare them with the possibility that they're responsible for two specific guys? Winston and Jenrette ARE the fucking case!

Your use of the phrase "innocent bystanders" is particularly hilarious. Yes, I'm sure none of the guys at the fraternity did anything to provoke the football players,

Do you seriously believe that any "beef" justifies 15 to 20 guys coming in and attacking people? This isn't Sparta.

nor did sweet AJ Sturges (regardless of your own double standard in condemning Michigan State hockey players as thugs when your Michigan player was down on the ice crying;

FUCK YOU. Seriously, Fuck You. This is to what you're referring when you say "condemning Michigan State hockey players as thugs when your Michigan player was down on the ice crying"? I don't care what team you support. If the guys who did that were in maize and the guy on the ice was in green, I'd feel exactly the same way: that's total thuggery. Your coach agrees with me, because both players were suspended for the rest of the year.

no, for this instance only, they've morphed into sweet angels because it serves the point you're trying to make). Of course, violence isn't justified, but come on. You don't know jack about what happened, so your use of phrases like that are ridiculous.

Actually, you're doing all of the mischaracterization. You brought up Tropp and Conboy, not Brian, who was talking about Sturges. And in the midst of all of this, you say "of course, violence isn't justified," which, 1.) I agree with, and 2.) completely undermines the whole point you've been trying to make with this post, which, correct me if I'm wrong, was that what happened was a "fight," rather than an "attack." Again, Brian seems to know more than you what happened, since he's going off of cited reports in the State News article which you don't seem to have read yet.

Also, why do you constantly insist on comparing being a cocaine dealer to getting in a fight? You point to Feagin and say "Well, Rodriguez kicked him off the team, so all is roses", then you look at Winston and Jenrette and say "Dantonio only kicked them off the team! Double standard!". You might want to examine your own double standard there, pal.

And thus you again miss the entire point of the article, which is to compare Rosenberg's coverage of Feagin: "this guy was kicked off the team -- RR is running a goon factory," with Rosenberg's coverage of Winston after the 1st incident of violence: "this guy went to jail, has paid his dues, shouldn't miss any time" and the second incident of violence: "this guy was kicked off the team -- maybe an overreaction?" RR kicked a guy off the team immediately. Dantonio let a guy back on the team after his jail sentence, AND THEN the guy committed a similar crime again (we think) and got kicked off the team. And still, Rosenberg was harder on RR's kicking Feagin off the team at the first hint of an infraction, than he was on Dantonio after kicking Winston off the team for a second infraction following minimal punishment by Dantonio for the first one. That's a double standard.

You've done this multiple times, though. You keep trying to spin it like Feagin didn't do much wrong, and Rodriguez came down hard on him, while Winston was a villain with a moustache that he twirls while cackling maniacally and murdering babies and Dantonio encouraged him.

Who's trying to spin it again? Because Brian said directly what Feagin did wrong. And he said directly what Winston did wrong. Wanna see spin? Here's spin:

Feagin dealt cocaine. Winston lost his temper and got in a fight. One was premeditated and a major crime, one was an instance of a college kid losing his temper. When it became clear Winston was no good after all, after Dantonio gave him a second chance, Dantonio immediately removed him from the team, along with his pals.

"lost his temper and got in a fight..." Actually, the first time, Winston was responding to a perceived slight, gathered a posse, and went to go attack the guy he thought had pissed him off, but ended up splitting the head open of a completely different guy. The second time, we don't have details yet, but again, hours after the initial altercation, Winston appears to have gotten people together to go attack a different site, this time going after the fraternity of the guy he had a beef with. Both are premeditated. That's not a kid losing his temper. That's someone out to cause physical harm, and indiscriminately at that. They're both "major crimes," asshole! If I came over to your apartment building right now with 15 buddies and a baseball bat because you wrote this column, and I started swinging it at your neighbors' heads, is that worse than trying to organize a cross-state cocaine deal that didn't work, and selling pot? I'll let you decide; society says they're pretty much the same, but personally I think the former is a lot more detrimental.

Of course, at Michigan, no one gets second chances. Am I right, DUI Grady? Or unidentified rapist? Amazing how you didn't mention that particular incident in your indictment of the double standard. Now, if you'll excuse me, I've got bowl tickets to book. Enjoy being second best in the state in every revenue sport, Big Brother.

Shall we now go into every incident of our two football teams' indecent activities, because there's a lot more on both sides. And it ignores the point again: Rosenberg treated Dantonio with kid gloves twice concerning the same player, while coming down extremely hard on Rich Rodriguez for a player to whom RR didn't give a second chance. Have fun at your bowl game. I know you don't get to go to them very often. As for second chances, I think you've had plenty of them already, and for this trollish post and many before it, I recommend you get banned from this site.