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Brian

The re-rank. More on Evan Smotrycz and the hype train a-buildin':

"I was pretty impressed with him; he's pretty tough," Daniels said. "I heard the rumblings about him. He was known as a guy that can really shoot the ball, and I hadn't seen him before so he was a priority guy for us." …

"I expected him to be able to shoot the ball well from deep," Daniels said. "I was surprised with how he attacked the rim and surprised with his toughness. Against Jayvaughn Pinkston, one of the tougher guys in the class, Evan more than held his own. He mixed it up inside, and I was thoroughly impressed with him."

It's getting to be that time when the scouting sites put their rankings where their mouths are, and the first vote is in. Scout has slid Smotrycz up to #17 amongst power forwards. He still a three star, but he's right on the verge of a fourth. The #16 guy, Melvin Tabb, is #73 on Scout's preliminary list of 75 kids, so Smotrycz is probably around #80. That's a big step forward from unranked and virtually unknown.

(Side note: one of the Rivals mods posted that Prep Spotlight shot Smotrycz all the way to #46 in their latest rankings, but there's no way to link—Prep Spotlight's website is defunct and it exists only as a magazine.)

The flameout. The Free Press considers Michigan's 2005 recruiting class, which turned into Mario Manningham, Terrance Taylor, and not much else. This is territory this blog has gone over in detail. The 2004 and 2005 classes, in summary:

Michigan got killed by back-to-back classes that saw a ton of attrition at key spots. Basically the only thing Michigan has to show from the 2004 and 2005 classes is the defensive line, which was Big Ten championship caliber.

The rest of the team? Is not.

By the time Rodriguez arrived at Michigan the excellent recruiting classes of the late Carr era had already been decimated, and few of the departures afterward were unusual. The attrition was worst on the offensive line, which was terrible early until finding some sort of footing as the season approached its merciful end. Speaking of…

The WTF. The Wall Street Journal puts together a piece on offensive line experience and its correlation with football success—strong—and just as you're bracing for Michigan to find itself on the face-punched list you get this shocking table:

TEAMS TO WATCH O-LINE STARTS TEAMS TO WORRY ABOUT O-LINE STARTS
Notre Dame 100 Oregon 20
Virginia Tech 100 West Virginia 25
Texas 91 Oklahoma 29
Florida St. 86 Penn State 39
Michigan 75 Alabama 50

Holy hotpants. I guess that's what happens when you return every single player on the line. A small caveat for the hope implied here: a number of those starts won't see the field as Ferrara and McAvoy get booted to the bench in favor of Huyge or Omameh.

Other bits of interest:

  • If Penn State's offense undergoes an inexplicable collapse after returning Royster and Clark, the line might be why. Or the vast talent deficit at WR.
  • If Notre Dame can't run the ball this year they never will.
  • Remember how everyone was predicting one last bash for West Virginia followed by a swift, Bill Stewart-spurred immolation? Yeah.

The confession. File this under "things you already knew":

“Last year all I did was supervise. I was more of an observer,” Paterno said of his 11-2 team that lost to Southern California in the Rose Bowl. “I have a heck of a staff. Those two years I didn’t do much. Last year we had a pretty good football team, and I didn’t do much.”

So all those shots of Paterno sitting in the press box never talking into his for-show headset meant what we thought they meant: Tom Bradley is Penn State's head coach, and a pretty good one from appearances. (HT: EDSBS.)

The mocking. This goofy video put together by a bunch of kids is more entertaining than it has any right to be:

They also listed it as a reply to 'Jimmy Clausen for Heisman,' which never fails to rope me in for the whole 2:16.

The enemy. Sunday Morning Quarterback surveys the great gray menace:

This is definitely a "rebuilding" year with a lot of uncertainty on paper, destined for the fringe of the top-10 in all the preseason magazines -- and still, Ohio State is likely to be favored in every game except USC, with Penn State serving as the toss-up for the auto bid to the Rose Bowl (where OSU, for all its success, hasn't been in more than a decade). I'm willing to project a conference loss, although I don't know where it will come from if not the Nittany Lions, and another 10-2 effort will be hard for the BCS to ignore.

The whole thing is, as always, a good thing to spend your time reading.

Etc.: MVictors examines the 1934 Willis Ward controversy in detail.

Comments

ameed

May 1st, 2009 at 5:29 PM ^

Probably one of the more reassuring things one can read in early May is Matt Hinton saying re: OSU: "yes, I'll consider UM a threat at year's end"

ShockFX

May 1st, 2009 at 8:55 PM ^

Whiners bitch and moan because that's what they do. If the team wins, they'll find something else to bitch about, and if they lose, they'll just bitch about how they were right. These people, after fucking Kate Beckinsale, would probably complain that her reverse cowgirl wasn't a 5* performance like the handjobs their ex gave them.

biakabutuka ex…

May 4th, 2009 at 10:13 AM ^

Teams that are more stable at any position are probably so because they have better players, and are therefore...better. Unfortunately, I think Michigan is unique with its thin line, while they had wild instability at almost every other position the last year or two. This had little to do with quality and had more to do with quantity.

On the other hand, Brian has elucidated many times that o-linemen are the hardest to gauge transitioning from high school to college. I wonder if this has anything to do with coaching staffs' fickleness? Maybe coaches should be more patient with that 4 star OT that didn't seem to pan out right away.