Dear Diary is Four Degrees from Kevin Bacon

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Multiple well-researched recruiting retrospectives, everything you need to know about being Number 1, and so many memes explained. Buckle in sports fans because this was a week for user comment worthy of being ranked over Kansas. But first, the thing where I give money to i give money to yooooooouuueeee:

IN WHICH VOGRICH AIN'T SO POOR. You have until 11 a.m. tomorrow to register your fantasy team in our Saturday free pool. Winner gets $100, and there's another $200 split among the 2nd through 15th placers. Details are in the Diary. Really it's just you pick eight guys under a salary cap and see who can get the most rebounds, assists, and points. Wings get called guards, which I find appropriate and kind of interesting in a Beilein has changed the game kind of way. This time I tried rolling with a tempo formula and ended up with both parts of the Cody Zeller-Mitch McGary matchup.

Some of the valuations are weird, for example McGary is $7, 476 while…

Did I just put that there because MGoBlog is obsessed with boxscore bagels? Maybe.

IN WHICH WE BELIEVE EYEBALLING IS BETTER THAN MATH. On Tuesday Brian told Big Ten Geeks that if their metrics were coming up "Jordan Morgan is the Big Ten's best defender," the metric is probably wrong. Most people would see a battle of internet sports nerds of this magnitude and just nod on the sideline, but the brave Blue_MQT dove right into that, putting four countable defensive factors (field goal %, turnovers, rebounding and free-throw rate) against defensive efficiency to see which correlate the best. Then he shows pictures to demonstrate the stuff good defense is really made of, and why it doesn't appear in statistics. A million ugly Big Ten forwards with weird names agree.

IN WHICH BRAYLON GIVES OUR RANKING A SCHOLARSHIP. Every time Yeoman does something that takes a lot of work and ends up being super valuable to our interests, the author of this column must decide whether or not to deploy the obvious double-entendre. This week's impressive solo-farming effort yielded the tournament fates of the last 30 top-ranked teams in January. I make pie:

Now keep telling yourself this. Relatedly: LSAClassof2000 charts AP votes for Michigan this year, creates a chart that seems to suggest there's a ranking zero. Blazefire imagines a 2013-'14 without Burke, Hardaway and GRIII; how about we lose only Vogrich, Akune, Bartelstein, McLimans, and Person and repeat as National Champs, did you think about that?? [me choking Blazefire.gif]. No, no, the chart, remember the chart. Anyone else's arm getting tired?

[After the Jump: the final word on the difference between a 4- and 5-star running back. And many memes explained.]

IN WHICH SCHOLARSHIPS GIVE OUR FOOTBALL TEAM A RANKING

The 4-stars of 2004: Max Martin, Pierre Rembert, Darnell Hood, and Jerome Jackson.
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There were three excellent diaries by this week on assessing football recruiting, and all are required reading if you are to be discussing expectations for the latest Hoke classes. Ron Utah went over the Rivals 100 players that Michigan and Ohio State recruited since 2002 to see how many worked out; unsurprisingly the sweatervesticule got more out of his guys than Carr/Rodriguez/Hoke.

EGD looked at whether it's best to bank a scholarship rather than spend it on a late offer, the result being a kind of surprising "maybe." In practice, the late offers tend to go to fliers, not your standard 3-stars, but I guess the payoff rate is the same for either. My answer is it depends. When Michigan lost out late on some expected guys for the 2005 class Carr suddenly offered two Renaissance kids—Carson Butler was full of talent but didn't have an offer because he was a headcase, and Andre Criswell was just a kid who got really big suddenly. I was fine with that at the time, but in retrospect it looks ill advised bordering on reckless. On the other hand Brian and I were separately penning "why not Norfleet?!?" articles on Signing Day 2012 before he got the offer. If there's a lesson it's "do it if you know what you're getting."

I mentioned the study by gordie bell on what you get when you recruit a highly ranked running back when I stole his thunder with this week's Hokepoints. I mention it again so I can rap a little further on the topic.

Here also I point out that Michigan has a pair of 4-star running backs in this class, Deveon Smith and Wyatt Shallman, who could both leap the current depth chart by fall. Shallman is a pretty straightforward Brandon Jacobs-type man-beast, while enough coaches from Ohio have been screaming "man are you guys underrating Smith!" right now to point out we might be underrating Smith.

The reason for the dissonance here, other than they're just four-stars, is Michigan's recent four-stars haven't panned out so much. Since 2002 guys in that range include Darnell Hood, Jerome Jackson, Pierre Rembert, Max Martin, Carlos Brown, Brandon Minor, Sam McGuffie, Michael Shaw, Mike Cox, Austin White, Fitz Toussaint, and Justice Hayes. The diary is mostly the lists from Rivals but if I put that data to a spreadsheet we see there's a big difference in hit rate between the fours and the fives:

NFL Draft:

1,000+ yard seasons in a BCS conference:

A hundred years in the future, recruiting data will still only go back to 2002 and anything before that will be called "the dark years." I keep a database of the last 10 years of The Dark Years culled from Lemming ratings, newspaper articles, player profiles in old programs and the like. Adding the '90s recruits seems to round out Michigan's efforts to pass the eyeball test so…

Five Stars: Kelly Baraka, Ryan Beard, Anthony Thomas, Justin Fargas, Charles Woodson* and Tyrone Wheatley

Four Stars: Ed Davis, Ray Jackson, Tshimanga Biakabutuka, Ricky Powers, Andre Weathers*, B.J. Askew, Walter Cross, J.R. Ford, Ian Gold*, Chris Howard, Woody Hankins*, Charles Drake*, Chris Perry, David Underwood, Pat McCall, and Clarence Williams.

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* Back in the day fewer top high schoolers would transfer to football powerhouses, so a larger proportion of D-I athletes would come in as running backs or option QBs, since that's where you put your best athletes.

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Rounding out this week in running back recruiting, Ace apparently didn't want his original Hello: Derrick Green post from July to go to waste.

ETC. Diarist of the week honors to EGD for the above and riffing on Bama's little huffing problem—read for hilarity and so you'll get all the jokes about "Spray" this week. Thorin put together Devin highlights. Baseball Recruiting Part 2: the Out of Staters.

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KNOW YOUR MEMES: WE ON

Onetime Globetrotter Bacari Alexander says stuff, and sometimes it catches on (ha!) Sometimes you are watching Big Ten highlights without sound during the MSU-Illinois game and Bacari has himself a hard-hat and is chest-bumping people. Or he has a long-handled sledgehammer and you are like "what are you doing with a hammer, Bacari?" Motivating. The answer is always Motivating. He's also a big reason this team is so damn fun to watch. You know what, watch that video:

"We all know the best Canadian shooter in the country is [Gonzaga's] Kevin Pangos. He's made seven threes in a game, have you done that? I've seen five."

KNOW YOUR MEMES: BLOUSES

You are watching and/or reading about Michigan basketball, and Nik Stauskas does something other than shoot™, and suddenly people are saying "Game…Blouses" on your favorite blogs and you are like "what did I miss?"

You missed a classic sketch from Chappelle's Show is all.

KNOW YOUR MEMES: SIX DEGREES OF KEVIN BACON

The closest Michigan connection—one degree—is Michigan man Mart Metcalf (Niedermeyer) in Animal House. But thee OP wanted to see if the blog could be connected to The Great Connector. This can be accomplished in just three degrees, thanks to a quarter of my head appearing for three frames in a movie with Bill Paxton. If extras don't count, my best friend at the time got a line—"Sorry I have to pass you Bethie, I want to win this one"—and appears in the credits, so it's four.

The real hero of this thread is Butterfield, who managed to connect us to Kevin Bacon via peoples' blog handles. I share, you r amaze:

Lets try this with MGoBlog posters.....

Odds are that someone who sits in (1) Section 1 suffers from (2) Diabeetus.

(2) Diabeetus care prescriptions can be filled at the CVS located at 209 S. (3) State Street

(3) State Street is home to Stairway to Heaven , where you are likely to find old vinyl LPs of artists featured on (4) The Quiet Storm.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quiet_storm

(4) The Quiet Storm style is often used to describe (5) Marvin Gaye's "Lets Get it On" LP

(5) Marvin Gaye's "How Sweet It Is" plays during the street party scene of the 1988 romantic comedy "She's Having a Baby", starring none other than (6) Kevin Bacon.

That was NOT easy.

KNOW YOUR MEMES: BEST TEAM SINCE THE FRO SQUAD

Bentley

Not counting the Fab Five, the last time Michigan's basketball team was #1 in the country was three years before I was born, however mGrowOld remembers them well enough to tell the tale. That makes Bill Frieder…

KNOW YOUR MEMES: MAIZE UNIFORMZ

(The photo's the link).

KNOW YOUR <MEMES/>: HTML TRICKS FOR PRETTY POSTING

Let's all thank moderator justingoblue for building a new sticky to help you do things like blockquote, embed videos and pictures, or make a table in your posts.

ETC. Basketball moment of appreciation thread. Another. Mr. Yost's scouting report of the same. Odoms checks in to apologize for the delay on kickstarter stuff. One sympathizes. If you agree to write his C&D letter make sure you exempt us, kay? I saw "Johns Hopkins to B1G?" as a thread title and giggled then went to go moderate it only to discover this is srsly (for Lacrosse only, perhaps). Chris Brown's book's on sale. What's the hardest football position to play? Somebody find out which player asked his hatred of Ohio State to be published with exactly 50 exclamation marks. Should we try this? Yes.

I HATE OHIO STATE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

That's actually pretty reserved, though I imagine in a newspaper column it would be all broken up and look terrible. This is why we win.

Your Moment of Zen:

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