Unverified Voracity Is In France Comment Count

Brian

I'M IN FRANCE. Harbaugh in the city of lights.

This has no doubt angered many SEC coaches and Frenchmen. The number of people who have pretended not to speak English as Harbaugh increases his volume level to jet-takeoff levels must be truly prodigious. I would watch a reality show of this. "Football Coach Vacations." This is a million dollar idea.

Random. Denard Robinson retweeted this.

That Wiz Khalifa is a card.

Skate with Jack Johnson. August 1st at the Cube, for charity. MGoBlog not responsible if Jack Johnson turns you into a pylon or a bird or is just so pretty on skates that you forget how to drive. Jeff Moss will be there, too! You can find out if he is a real person or just a floating sack of anger!

TJ Weist, 1992. Via Dr. Sap:

Northwestern, 1981. Via Wolverine Historian:

Also 2002 Minnesota.

…Al? Syracuse used one cadence last year.

Since he was officially named the Syracuse Orange offensive coordinator for 2015, Tim Lester's been a bit of a sharer. We're fine with that since it's nice to actually get updates from the football staff, especially with the honesty and candor he seems to deliver it all.

Sometimes it's a point of debate.

Sometimes it's just a description of the Orange offense, compared to last year.

And others, it's a something that will send you into fits of rage, directly aimed at George McDonald, first and foremost:

SU football used one offensive cadence throughout 2014.

If Syracuse tried other cadences, the linemen "wouldn't have been able to stay onside," because reasons. This makes me feel slightly better about Tyus Battle.

…Rich? Let's check in on Kansas.

The Jayhawks would finish 1-11 in 2012, and with the roster ailing, Weis desired a quick-fix strategy for what he once famously called a “pile of crap.” In early 2013, Weis signed 16 junior-college recruits in a 25-man class. If a majority of the players hit, Weis figured, perhaps Kansas could claw to respectability in a year or two.

The move was a massive failure. By last fall, just eight of those players remained in the program. The volume of junior-college players — many of whom were borderline qualifiers and academic risks — weighed down the program. Six of those junior-college recruits — including highly touted players Marquel Combs, Kevin Short and Chris Martin — never played a down. After senior safety Isaiah Johnson transferred to South Carolina in the spring, and defensive lineman Andrew Bolton left the team this month, not one of those 16 junior-college players remains on the roster.

So here we are, two years later, and just five players remain from Kansas’ 2013 recruiting class.

This fall, Kansas has 60 scholarship players. It's a self-imposed punishment twice as bad as anything that happened to USC or Penn State. Charlie Weis is the king of "people in charge of things are just in charge of them for no reason."

More on cable bubbles. The WSJ has an article on ESPN doing something they haven't even had to think about in a long time: belt-tightening. Cord cutting is on in earnest and it's no surprise that the most expensive channel is amongst the most affected:

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Only the Weather Channel—which is now completely superfluous thanks to the internet—is suffering more. The WSJ attributes Keith Olbermann's departure to simple finances. It is not hard to trace a line from ESPN's current trend and the long-term contracts they have signed with sports leagues and find a point at which it is impossible for them to make money.

ESPN has lost enough subscribers that they have the contractual right to yank their channels from Dish's $20 Sling service. Meanwhile, they are limited in their ability to move to a Netflix/HBO model since if they introduce a stand-alone service cable providers can sell ESPN a la carte—a disaster for a channel that gets six bucks from my grandmother.

Fred Jackson was right! Sort of! Via Austin Roberts, another running back makes good after he departs Michigan:

Another “real bright spot” was running back Thomas Rawls, a 5-foot-l9, 215-pound undrafted rookie free agent out of Central Michigan.

“I love his style of running,” Carroll said. “He’s really a head-knocker. He really goes after guys and when you guys get to see him put the pads on you’ll see how physical of a runner he is. He had play after play in college of just smacking people and running and breaking tackles and all that. He showed very good feet, he caught the ball well, he’s going to be a very-willing blocker.”

All of those came against Purdue or at CMU. Remember when Michigan's running game was so good it got their running backs drafted too early? Those were different times right there. By the end Jackson was stealing money. And various beverages. Holding him over on coaching staff after coaching staff was a major sign of the complacency that overtook the program over the past decade.

Gary Danielson was not right and has never been right. Gary Danielson is pretty good at looking at one specific play and telling you what happened on it. Once you get any more abstract, he turns into a parody of sports commentary. The latest example is Danielson fretting that the SEC is going to lose its way because it might try to score some points.

“The big advantage the SEC had against other conferences was they were the most physical, NFL-like conference there was,” he said. “If they try to morph too much into becoming a fantasy league, they are going to cede their position as the toughest and best conference in college football.”

"Fantasy league." Gary Danielson saying that after Urban Meyer, who was rather successful in the SEC, blew Alabama to bits with his third string QB is a top ten "Is Gary Danielson Having A Stroke?" moment.

Etc.: Hire a Beilein, you get to play a Beilein. Brandon Graham back in town for a bit. You are on the Butkus watch list. Smart Football made another book, which you should buy. BLOOM COUNTY BACK? The Graham Couch bot is either becoming self-aware or has improved its trolling algorithm. Jim Hackett is the best.

Comments

bacon

July 14th, 2015 at 1:40 PM ^

To be fair, both ESPN and the weather channel have strong online presences. I'm not sure how much that dampens their loss of subscribers, but if weather.com is putting the weather channel out of business, then they're still making money. ESPN.com is probably making a lot of money for ESPN. It's the TV providers getting squeezed, and no one feels bad for them.

bronxblue

July 14th, 2015 at 2:35 PM ^

My guess is that a number of those apps get at least some data from weather.com, which in turn gets its data from the US meteorlogical DB and then run their own forecasts on top. Again, there's a reason these massive entities exist, and it's because they have deep connections to lots of venues for revenue.

Wolverine In Exile

July 14th, 2015 at 2:52 PM ^

When they got into their spat with Direct TV, DirecTV went out and put "Weather Nation" on their network instead. Very no-frills weather forecasting and conditions channel and no superfluous / politically themed programming like Weather Channel was venturing into. When Weather Channel finally made their peace with DirecTV, Weather Nation had gained enough market share that people simply didn't worry about watching Weather Channel anymore. I know in our house, our smartphones are source #1 for weather, but then after that is local Dayton digital broadcast weather HD station, then Weather Nation. Weather Channel doesn't even register for me anymore.

The analogy for ESPN for me would be that if someone like FoxSports 1 focused on just presenting the sports (both live content of major leagues and news-based recap shows), they'd take away market share from the STEPHEN A. SMITH led ESPN. But FS1 has gone down the "we're going to be ENTERTAINING" road, and as such have already probably passed the point of no return.

J.Swift

July 14th, 2015 at 2:17 PM ^

Great views, yes; great architecture, no--a hodge-podge of Romano-Byzantine features.  Symbolically, it is also a hodge-podge:  

Sacré-Cœur is a double monument, political and cultural, both a national penance for the defeat of France in the 1871 Franco-Prussian War and the socialist Paris Commune of 1871[1] crowning its most rebellious neighborhood, and an embodiment of conservative moral order, publicly dedicated to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, which was an increasingly popular vision of a loving and sympathetic Christ.[2]

Climb to the top of Notre Dame Cathedral for an equally stunning view of Paris.  

I'm happy to see Jim enjoying Paris, but sorry to seem him denigrate a great cathedral in favor of kitsch.

 

snarling wolverine

July 15th, 2015 at 9:14 AM ^

Putting aside the fact that you completely missed that it was satire...

Notre-Dame de Paris is perfectly nice and all, but it pretty much follows the same Gothic blueprint as a couple dozen other cathedrals in France, some of which surpass it in size/ornamentation.  If you've been to Chartres or Amiens beforehand (to name just two), N-D de Paris doesn't really stand out.  The view from the tower is nice, but you've got to be willing to wait in line a long time to see it.

Sacré Coeur OTOH is entirely unique and the views from anywhere in the vicinity are stunning.  Yeah, it was built to atone for the legacy of the Communards and all that, but if you dig deeper into the reasons why lots of religious structures were built where they were, its story isn't that uncommon.

Incidentally, the church in the Paris area that is truly underrated is Saint Denis, which is the oldest Gothic cathedral, and the burial site of nearly all French kings.  But it's outside the city, in a pretty iffy neighborhood, so most visitors skip it.

 

cutter

July 14th, 2015 at 4:12 PM ^

See http://awfulannouncing.com/2015/big-ten-set-to-begin-media-rights-talks… for an article on the Big Ten's future media rights talks.

It'll be interesting to see how many serious suitors the Big Ten will have for its football and men's basketball televison rights.  The article mentions ABC/ESPN, Fox Sports and CBS.  I hadn't really thought of NBC or its Sports Network, but seeing that their only major college sports property is Notre Dame football, the Peacock Network could actually be a real player--or face getting shut out of the #2 sport in the country.

Could the Big Ten do what the Southeastern Conference did and have a secondary network showing a major game each week?  The SEC has its one weekly game on CBS (along with others on ABC/ESPN and now the SEC Network).  Would it make sense for the Big Ten to do the same in an environment where more cord cutting is taking place and cable station bundling may be a thing of the past?  

CBS Sports had an article on Jim Delany and devoted a section of it ("Big Ten is confident about new tv deal") to the new television deal--see http://www.cbssports.com/collegefootball/writer/jon-solomon/25236837/mo….   Conference revenue distributions are projected to be $44.5M per team (those that are fully vested) after the new contract is put in place.  Here's an excerpt from that article.:

“I think we're confident,” Delany said. “We think we're stronger than we've been, and we think having established a network gives us a great beachhead to launch from. We fully recognize there will be expedited changes in the next five to 10 years -- the over-the-top delivery system and the effects we've seen of various technologies. … We sought advice from the outside. We've gotten a sense on flexibility of what our people will do. We've done our due diligence.”   

 

 

HillStBlue

July 14th, 2015 at 9:59 PM ^

That's obviously Lil Wayne not Wiz Khalifa. Dude has sold more records than Elvis. And Jack Kennedy opened for him. Embarrassing, or a somewhat offensive joke?