Unverified Voracity 11/1

Wonk: Back. I mean it sincerely when I say that if you are interested in college basketball (at all) and you do not read Big Ten Wonk, you are doing yourself a terrible disservice. Rejoice, for he has emerged from this thing called "the offseason" with a veritable torrent of must read material. Vaya con dios, readers!

I guess Ian won't be watching. This is your FCC-mandated 10-day Pam Ward Alert: Indiana-Michigan is a nooner on the Deuce. I don't think the mad genius behind Sexy Results was lathered in anticipation of this one anyway, but now he won't even flip by it.

No fun. Well, someone at ESPN is reading bits of the blogosphere. Mere hours after the most glorious headline ever was posted, it was neutered. Quite literally. Good on The House That Rock Built for pulling a screenshot.

Nike must be stopped. Page 2's Uni Watch is all over this Florida/VT sleeve abomination thing. Lukas talks to the poor Nike PR flack who's been tasked with defending the indefensible. She says "the fan response seems to be very positive"; Lukas annihilates that fanciful notion:

Knox might want to take a peek at Uni Watch's in-box, which overflowed with nearly 200 e-mails about the Virginia Tech game alone, virtually all of them negative. A quick statistical breakdown reveals that seven different respondents made reference to vomiting, six made reference to eyestrain (two of whom included the phrase "My eyes, my eyes!"), five said the VT players looked as though they had their left arms in casts and/or slings, four said VT should be barred from the BCS, four more said they kept thinking the Hokies were going to tilt and fall over, three said the orange shoulder reminded them of "Star Wars" stormtroopers, and three more said Halloween must have arrived a few days early.

Money graf that pisses me off something fierce about Michigan's stupid accession to a piping-included redesign:

The problem with all this -- aside from, y'know, its looking really, really stupid -- is that it creates an aesthetic connection between the mismatched-sleeve schools, so they all look as though they're playing for Team Nike instead of for themselves (just like all the teams that wear the wraparound rear bib, another Nike "innovation"). This not only waters down and cheapens the individual schools' visual identities but also perpetuates Nike's patently bogus notion that its own brand is more important than the teams' brands. Memo to Phil Knight: The swoosh draws its legitimacy from the teams that wear it, not the other way around.

Emphasis mine. Lukas is somewhere beyond right on this; Michigan has deigned to consort with fashion victims like Miami and Arizona, even if it is a more reserved version of the piping abomination. My suggestion is to boycott bib-sporting jerseys until they go away. Why is there a website up complaining about something as tangetially relevant as luxury boxes when the athletic department is dipping its toes in the water of Uniform Abomination? Priorities, people!

Penn State Paranoia Pool Day 1: Strong start. Today's check shows "Amazing U of M story on a ref" and starts in with your bias accusation re: alum Dick Honig, who has never refereed a Michigan game.

Get your poll entries in now, we're accepting them until Friday.