Unverified Voracity Comes Up Milhouse Comment Count

Brian

Everywhere you go. A reader sends along this BBC news piece on goings-on in Libya featuring this guy at prayer:

image

CCHA champs and rid of Qaddafi in the same week*—everything's coming up Milhouse!

BONUS: random Mississippi State sweatshirt in different protest. The 2011 Gator Bowl is coming for you, Qadddafi.

*[Michigan hockey guy lives in the liberated east; Qaddafi's still hanging on in the west.]

Vada latest. Vada Murray is home after radiation treatments:

We have never, ever, in our lives felt so scared.  We also have never felt so loved.  Thank you for the cards, emails, text messages, phone calls & messages on this website; thank you for your continued expressions of love & support.  Thank you to the Ann Arbor Police Department for their unwavering love.  They give true meaning to the phrase, "Whatever you need, whenever you need it." Thank you for understanding if we don't personally return your message.  We both want you to know, we love you back.

Moves. Touch The Banner relates that Rivals relates a couple of position switches: Steve Watson has moved back to tight end and Will Campbell to the defensive line. You're probably thinking "meh" and "duh," but there's an interesting wrinkle:

But unlike Rodriguez and his clunky defensive staff, Campbell will actually be playing the 3-tech defensive tackle position.  I can't imagine the conversations in the former defensive staff's meeting rooms.  "Well, we've got this 6'5" behemoth with loads of talent, but his one problem is that he can't stay low and get leverage.  We just can't figure out what to do with him."

There wasn't a three-tech DT in the 3-3-5 and Campbell wasn't going to play DE, so since he's not so good at NT it's off to offense. I'm not entirely sure this is as much of a slam dunk as TTB does—Campbell has fallen prey to single blocks plenty—but it's at least worth a shot. I'd rather he became an awesome NT but I think it's far more likely he becomes an acceptable three-tech, and either one of those allows Ryan Van Bergen to be the SDE I think Michigan needs him to be if their defensive line is going to be good against the run.

FWIW, Campbell was pretty effective in the goal line set when he could just plow into the backfield. He'll have to do a bit more than get under a guy and drive him back as he falls down if he's going to be an effective player in the other 98 yards of field, though.

Well, yes. It's natural for people to explode when your floppy-haired gritmonster makes two enormous plays that turn a probable loss into a certain win. As the morning's post indicated in the "elsewhere" section, if you don't have a post extolling Zack Novak today you probably don't have a Michigan blog. The Wolverine Blog says "what about the awesome guys?"

Tim Hardaway, Jr. locked up his third straight Big Ten Freshman of the Week honor — no small feat in a conference featuring Jared Sullinger — with a first-half outburst of “en fuego” proportions: four three-pointers in the first five minutes gave Michigan an early cushion that would allow them to weather a big Minnesota run and still enter halftime with a 35-33 lead. Hardaway finished the game leading all scorers with 22 points on 7-11 shooting (5-8 from three) …

It was Michigan’s other difference-maker, Darius Morris, who came through with 11 second-half points — continually finding his way into the paint among Minnesota’s massive front line and finding a way to create baskets — en route to a 17-point, 8-15 shooting, 7-assist performance while committing just one lone turnover.

That's ridiculously efficient and very efficient with ridiculous assist-to-turnover; Morris is also ~60% responsible for Jordan Morgan leading all D-I players in FG% in the last five games. I hesitate when TWB calls Novak a "role player"—Vogrich is a role player—but he's not one of the two lights-out stars that keep Michigan around so Novak can declare winnin' time.

Hardaway's stats are now gross. In his last five games he's made 60% of his threes. Okay, that's a hot streak. It's more than that: since January 9th he's pulled his eFG% up from 42% to 52%. In that stretch of 14 games he's made 48% of his threes. Even if you chuck out the last five games in the other nine he's hit 42%. Over essentially half of Michigan's season—the tough half—Hardaway is hitting half his threes.

!!!

30 for 30 on black socks. Jalen Rose tweets this:

fab-five-30for30

That is an ESPN documentary on the Fab Five smack dab in he middle of March. Prepare to be massively conflicted.

God, the Penn State game. That's when it all came crashing down. After a somewhat encouraging performance against Iowa—at least it was encouraging on the ground—Michigan hits the bye week, dumps the mostly 4-3/3-4 sets they'd been using, and comes out in a 3-3-5 that Penn State gashes all day. Before that game PSU couldn't run if you spotted them two guys and three yards, and in the aftermath I blew up. UFR tags included "fffffffuuuuuuuuuuuu," "fire coach x," "greg robinson," "i want a staple gun," "i've got a feeling i'm going to punch the black eyed peas," and "idiocracy."

This bit was particularly painful:

Line Dn Ds O Form D Form Type Play Player Yards
M1 1 G Goal line 3-3-5 stack Run Dive ? 1
Whatever. This isn't even M's to-date successful goal line package. RPS -1.

That's right: Michigan ran a stack on first and goal from the one. I bring it up because a reader hit up a coaching clinic featuring PSU's Mike McQueary and reports back:

He used Michigan as an example of the importance of finding a few things as a coach that you can connect with your players on re: scheme, rather than trying to run every kind of scheme with minimal understanding (Less is better).

The hardest thing to watch was a near-goal line stand where PSU ran a Fullback draw into a 3-man front and barely needed any blocking to get the TD. He referred to that as "some knuckleheaded goal-line defense".

I still can't believe RR screwed up his defense enough to get fired. I mean, of all the epic fails in the history of epic fails. All they had to be was mediocre in year three. This is painful:

"This clip makes me feel a little sad for Coach Rodriguez. His offense is nearly impossible to gameplan for, but the defense couldn't get it done"

Fffffuuuuuuu.

Etc.: The Wolverine Blog rebuts the Rodriguez-attrition meme. I think the truth lies somewhere in between it and the MNB piece. The problem was that Michigan needed to have a run of below-average attrition after late Carr-era departures and didn't get it. Robocop speaks to the city of Detroit: statue yes. Denard Robinson was a clue on Jeopardy.

Comments

Bando Calrissian

March 1st, 2011 at 7:04 PM ^

Do you know why Ellerbe was hired?

When they cleaned house post-Fisher, Ellerbe was the only person on the staff without a deep-seated connection to the Fisher regime.  Being that he'd been on the job for, oh, five minutes.  He hadn't even coached a game as a Michigan assistant yet.  Fisher was let go in October when the allegations were really hitting the fan, within days of practices starting, so there wasn't time to do a coaching search.  Thus, Ellerbe.

So, yes, it does have direct connections to the Ed Martin scandal.

Bando Calrissian

March 1st, 2011 at 8:40 PM ^

What's your point?  Ellerbe was put in charge of the program because he was the only man standing that came from the outside...  

And that '98 team was vacated for Traylor and Bullock.  They were "ready to win" with ineligible players.  Who were still on the take.

BRCE

March 1st, 2011 at 5:18 PM ^

Bando Calrissian is just a 75-year-old cotton pickin' blue at heart.

He harkens back to days when a young gent wore a v-neck blue sweater around campus with big block M on front and sung school spirt songs glee-club style with his pals on the diag after sharing a milkshake with his sweetie in the Nichols Arcade.

 

 

 

cp4three2

March 1st, 2011 at 2:05 PM ^

Yes, Webber got money, but that didn't kill our program.  Our sanctimony did.  We were so worried about getting in trouble that we overvalued being a clean program and undervalued good coaching.  The Fab 5 didn't hire Ellerbee and Amaker.  

 

We can embrace how these guys were cultural icons without being ascetic.  Are they blameless?  Of course not.  They did, however, bring Michigan into a lot of households that otherwise wouldn't have considered our school.  Our applications rose by nearly 10 percent because of these guys.  The Fab 5 should be used in recruiting good, talented guys. (If you come here and you succeed you'll become icons too.  You also might be a Jeopardy question.)

 

The Fab 5 is similar to us as Woody is to OSU.  They did a lot of great things, and it ended badly.  

BRCE

March 1st, 2011 at 5:24 PM ^

Thank you.

Yes, it hurt that the chickens took so long to come home to roost, but our please-don't-hurt-us-we'll-be-good-little-boys-forever reaction was way beyond what most programs would do in a similar situation.

There is a middle-ground in between the screw you arrogance of Mike Garrett and Bill Martin's extreme contrition. I remember watching the Martin/Coleman press conference and thinking of that old SNL skit with the Japanese game show where the contestants cut off a finger in shame when they got a question wrong.

 

 

 

 

jmblue

March 1st, 2011 at 5:31 PM ^

Tom Goss is the biggest culprit, not Martin.  Martin pulled the plug on Ellerbe and hired Amaker, who at least seemed decent at the time.  Goss could not have made things worse.

First, the NCAA report came out in the summer of 1997, and did not even find us guilty of much of anything.  All seemed well.  Then, two months later -right before camp was going to start, Goss suddenly decided that this was a fireable offense and let Fisher go.  I don't necessarily blame him for firing Fisher, but why did he wait two months to do it?  All that did was ensure that no outsider would take the job.

Then, Goss passed over the two established assistants (Dutcher and Trost) in favor of the #3 guy, a brand-new assistant hire who had just been forced out at Loyola (Md.).  Absolutely no one expected Ellerbe to be Fisher's heir apparent when he was hired.  It is beyond baffling why Goss chose to pass over the other two (who were never implicated in the Ed Martin affair) and hire Ellerbe, a proven failure.

Then, even with warning signs on the horizon - recruits were giving Ellerbe the cold shoulder - Goss gave him the job on a permament basis, after turning in a merely okay season with a team loaded with experience.  To very few peoples' suprise, the program crashed and burned as soon as all those seniors left.

And then, if that weren't enough, Goss decided for whatever reason to tell his contacts in the FBI to go after Ed Martin, which produced evidence against us that hadn't previously come up.  The NCAA - which had closed the case - reopened it, eventually causing us to miss the postseason in 2003, punishing a bunch of entirely innocent kids.

And of course, Goss managed to run a multimillion-dollar deficit here.  What a disaster.

 

Bando Calrissian

March 1st, 2011 at 7:13 PM ^

Trost and Dutcher were passed over because of their presence in the program when violations were occurring.  Even if they weren't directly implicated, the entire staff was complicit to the fact that Ed Martin was allowed to openly associate with and give improper benefits to members of the Michigan basketball team.  

So, as much of a total failure Tom Goss was, he cleaned house.  The problem with that was that Ellerbe (who also had a leg up on Trost and Dutcher being that he had already been a D-1 head coach) didn't do much better policing what was going on. 

It's easy to look in hindsight and say it was a bad hire, but at the time (and if you look at what the press was saying at the time), Ellerbe was not viewed as a terrible choice with both the timing and his lack of connection to what had happened.

Bando Calrissian

March 1st, 2011 at 7:39 PM ^

Are we forgetting it was more than just Webber, and that (until Bush and Newton) the Michigan basketball scandal was the largest financial scandal in NCAA history?  

What were Martin and Coleman supposed to do, get up there and say "Sorry we got caught?" We took our lumps for our Athletic Department and coaching staff turning a blind eye to a booster paying Michigan student-athletes hundreds of thousands of dollars.  And cleaned house of the coaches and staffers who were complicit in allowing it to happen.

It's easy to be blinded by the baggy shorts and black socks and all of that crap, but it's secondary to the fact that this particular group of student-athletes, in both their self-aggrandizing identity and their fifteen years of covering and excusing one of their own (still waiting for that apology, or even trace of remorse, Chris), created the identity of the program that got us sanctions.  I'm sorry if I don't particularly look kindly on Michigan basketball's identity continually brought back to the Fab Five.  

It has nothing to do with making jokes about "Cottin' Pickin' Blues" and all that, and everything to do with expecting Michigan to act with integrity and class, to do things the right way, and even if every school in the country does it, that doesn't mean Michigan should, either.  That's not what we're about.  "Leaders and Best" shouldn't translate to the amount we got nabbed for in a major scandal.  It's unbelievable to me that Michigan fans would condone cheating because the teams doing it were fun to watch.

So, BRCE, do continue to fetishize the swagger.  I'm going to concentrate on what it brought to two decades of Michigan basketball players who have tried to mop up the mess.  And the current squad of players and coaches who are doing a great job of putting us on a new footing to move beyond that stretch in our program's history.

Blue in Seattle

March 1st, 2011 at 2:08 PM ^

"That is an ESPN documentary on the Fab Five smack dab in he middle of March. Prepare to be massively conflicted."

I have to believe this comment is either just extreme use of artistic license, or the major demographic of this blog are just too poor to have a DVR.

I can't remember the last time that I watched an advertisement that wasn't forced on my by Hulu or YouTube.

 

 

steve sharik

March 1st, 2011 at 3:35 PM ^

Martin is an All-American candidate and has been playing nose for three years now.  I wouldn't move him.  BWC will be learning anyway, so it's less stress to teach 1 guy a new spot rather than both.

kingcrow

March 1st, 2011 at 3:53 PM ^

What I lament is the absence of excitement in the Hoke offense vs. that of Rodriguez'.  RR's offense was exciting and had me itching for the next offensive play, the next game, the next year.  That excitement is hard to match.  If only he had spent a little more time on defense and won more games.  I'm not (and this may just be the time of the year) excited this year as I was last year in looking forward to Michigan football.  The fan excitement that RR's offenses generate is hard to match.  Here's hoping  I'll be shocked at what Hoke does.

aaamichfan

March 1st, 2011 at 5:33 PM ^

I was driving through a shanty town in Jamaica a couple days ago, and there was a guy walking down the street wearing a Michigan 1998 Rose Bowl Champs sweatshirt. Didn't have enough time for a picture, but it certainly made my day.