Unverified Voracity Has A Desk Full Of Cans Comment Count

Brian

Bo. Via MGoVideo:

Playoff bits. So now the Big Ten is saying "screw playoffs altogether." Jim Delany is advocating for the four best teams in any playoff that does occur, and everyone hates the system of voting we have in place now. Delany:

“Everybody recognizes that the present poll system is not a good proxy,” he said. “It’s flawed, it’s not transparent, it has people who have a stake in the outcome voting, it measures teams before they play a game.”

I hope Bill Hancock has a fainting couch.

At this point it's clear that most fans don't have the same priorities in mind as the people in charge of the leagues they're fans of—see SEC expansion—and arguing with them on the internet is pointless. It's like trying to communicate with sentient mushrooms. Their desires are so alien that attempting to comprehend them leads to you shooting railguns at a distant planet for no reason other than fear.

Whatever happens, we can be assured that everyone was in favor of it at some point. Even the generally sober folks employed by actual newsgathering organizations are getting peeved at this point. Adam Rittenberg:

"A computer doesn't have an eye," Delany said. "So an eye test is missing if there is an injury" or other issues with a contender. Delany also said the impetus for change is that the BCS "has been battered and criticized" and treated "like a piñata" for the past 15 years. So to reiterate: The Big Ten's No. 1 preference would be to keep a current system that everybody hates and which uses a totally bankrupt formula to select its teams. Gotcha.

Sentient mushrooms, man.

IRONY EXPLODE. Dave Brandon, one of the Big Ten's most prominent complainers about a playoff:

"Every change I have ever proposed has been met with resistance," Brandon told the crowd… "I don't care what it is, any change that's been proposed, this has been a culture that wants to resist it, because we all want to go back to the way it was when we were there because that's friendly and that's comfortable."

Notice how he switches back to "I" from "we" when he's talking about all the great stuff he does and not the fact that six different uniforms in a season may have been a tiny bit excessive.

No move. UConn's AD has restated that the Huskies will not move their return game scheduled for next year from their home field. That's fine by me but now the UConn bloggers are looking at the $2 million buyout clause and wondering if the game will ever be played. I'd guess it will since there's not a whole lot of time to find a suitable replacement, but Brandon's had occasional grumbles about the indignity of playing at such a place since he arrived.

UConn's ace in the hole may be their athletic director. They hired Michigan alum Warde Manuel away from Buffalo, so Michigan may be more willing to go through with things.

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via Jamie Owens and UMHoops

Incoming pointage. Those Indiana junior/senior All-Star scrimmages have kicked off and the first one featured a lot of the above-pictured activities. Glenn Robinson III was 9 of 10 from the field en route to leading his team in scoring. He also added seven rebounds in 22 minutes. Junior rep Zak Irvin was his team's leading scorer as well, though he didn't shoot as well as GRIII.

Pee and flee. A couple of OSU players are suspended indefinitely—or at least until they pick up their whatever misdemeanor plea bargains—for urinating on the side of a building, then taking off when the cops arrived:

Police in Shawnee Hills, Ohio, a Columbus suburb, spotted the two players and a third man not connected to the football team early Saturday urinating outside a restaurant near Stoneburner’s house, located just off the course at Muirfield Village Golf Club.

Collins said the men dashed away when they saw a spotlight, unknowing it belonged to police. He said Mewhort and Stoneburner stopped about 40 yards away from the restaurant and did not attempt to hide.

This is not interesting—it's no defensive tackle Dukes of Hazzard attempt. I just wanted to call it "pee and flee." BONUS: these guys were peeing on the side of a building mere feet from a thicket dense enough to hide in. Sounds like they need to take OSU's Andy Katzenmoyer Memorial Drunken Decisionmaking 101.

Kind of good. A re-rank of the top 100 basketball prospects from last year finds Trey Burke in rarefied air:

Elite

5. Trey Burke, Michigan (84)
Along with Cody Zeller, Burke was named Big Ten Freshman of the Year and second team All-Conference. He and Zeller are also, comfortably, the top two freshmen returning to school this fall. Burke came out of nowhere (or, at least, the "obscurity" of the non-McDonald's All-American section of the ESPNU Top 100) to be a superstar do-it-all point guard for an NCAA tournament No. 4 seed. He scored often, he scored efficiently, he passed, and he took care of the basketball. The Wolverines' round of 64 loss to Ohio shouldn't alter the fact that Burke had a fabulous season. Michigan returns their three key players from 2012 and adds a pair of recruits capable of making an immediate impact. There's a reason expectations for 2013 are high.

Cody Zeller is the only guy higher than him who will be in college next year.

Like Coke, but fast. Drake Johnson tells a delightfully weird story about Fred Jackson to Kyle Meinke:

"I'm sitting in his office, and there was a fridge right over there, and he's like, 'You hungry?'" Johnson said. "I'm like, 'No man, I'm not hungry.' So he's like, 'OK, I'm going to grab myself a Coke.' So he grabs himself a Coke and he sits down.

"He takes maybe two sips, and he's like, 'Hey Drake, you want something to drink?' And I'm like, 'No, I'm still good.' He's like, 'I think I'm going to get myself an orange juice.' I'm like, 'Dude, you have a Coke in front of you.' He says, 'It's fine.'

"So I'm sitting there, and maybe two minutes later, he's like, 'I think I'm going to get myself a drink,' and I'm like, 'Coach, you already got two drinks in front of you, man! Your thirst can be quenched by what's in front of you.'

"He says, 'I'm just going to grab myself some water. You want some water?' And I'm like, "Nooo, I have Gatorade in my hand, guy. It's fine.'"

bilde[1]My thirst cannot be quenched by what's in front of me, Drake. What is satiation? THE MOMENT BEFORE YOU'RE THIRSTY AGAIN. Now let me tell you about how you are a taller, quicker version of Jim Brown. /dondraper'd

Suggestion box. Cover It Live has decided to charge out the nose for use of its product. Running Signing Day liveblog alone would now cost $300. It would have cost the site almost a thousand dollars last November. All this for a moderated chat system. This is clearly not a good use of funds, so I'll be looking for alternatives. Let me know if you know of any.

Etc.: Will Campbell's hood-crumpling registers in the Fulmer Cup. Pro Combat uniforms for Northwestern. More on Big Ten baseball's tough spot. NHL draft roundup from MHN. Holdin' The Rope on the Denard play. The first one. You know, that one. We need a nickname for it. Shoelace in the dirt or something. Mark Donnal invited to the NBPA camp. Can we stop giving credit to Jim Delany's amazing foresight when the conference he's piloting has won two national titles in fifty years?

Please don't take offense at clearly manufactured Queensbury-style smack-talk emanating from real journalists at ESPN. None of the journalists cares one whit about anything that is not the relevance of the serial comma in today's fast-paced society.

Comments

iawolve

June 6th, 2012 at 12:05 AM ^

I think about it and it is so damn strange. Is he teaching him some lesson using some eastern logic learned studying running back from the monks in western China? Is FJ diabetic? Does he have no short term memory? Does he just like to use the free drinks he gets? What in the hell? This just randomly keeps popping into my mind and I will read it again assuming I am missing something.

Silly Goose

June 5th, 2012 at 5:15 PM ^

Just because the teams haven't played as well doesn't mean Delaney isn't pretty amazing at his job. I would say that it implies the opposite, as we make a good deal more than the SEC, even with an inferior product.

MGoBender

June 5th, 2012 at 5:46 PM ^

Perhaps use Twitter and a specified hashtag? i.e. #MGoBlogLiveChat

Anyone can post with the tag and we see all the results.

Would it be too much traffic for Twitter?  Is there a nice webapp that you could plug right into the site?

go16blue

June 5th, 2012 at 6:32 PM ^

Lol, as if a sports blog readership could be too much traffic for twitter. It would be very impractical and hard to keep track of though, twitter isn't built for livechat. Not to mention there would be no moderation, which is important for our livechats.

Zone Left

June 5th, 2012 at 8:04 PM ^

Unmoderated chat would be terrible. I don't know how Twitter runs really, but for each thousand comments published in a LiveBlog, there are probably 2500 that aren't published. Most are duplicates (ie "WOOOO TOUCHDOWN" or "DENARD!!!!"), but when things don't go well, such as not scoring a touchdown on the first series or being within 40 of Eastern Michigan, things get progressively angrier and even more comments don't make the cut because we aren't going to publish comments about the horrible things that Player X does because he isn't as good as Terrelle Pryor. 

Seriously, LiveBlogs aren't perfect by any means, but an unmoderated chat or a simple comment thread would just be painful to watch and probably crash the site immediately.

Wisconsin Wolverine

June 5th, 2012 at 5:51 PM ^

I loved the video on Bo ... especially when Bo said that "any football coach worth is salt has to be a great actor."  It made me think of Hoke, & I realized that he's doing a great job of playing the role of an old-school Michigan coach.  That's not to say he's pretending to be something he isn't, but that he's making the effort to be exactly the person we need him to be.  I think the image he's building around his name will continue to recruit & motivate players to be great.

Wolverine 73

June 5th, 2012 at 5:56 PM ^

Depending on who is giving out the titles, MSU in 1966 (shared MacArthur Bowl with ND as national champions); Ohio in 1968; Michigan in 1997; Ohio in 2002 or whatever year the refs called PI on Miami in the end zone in OT.

French West Indian

June 5th, 2012 at 6:15 PM ^

...only Notre Dame cares about mythical national titles.

A better question is, "how many Rose Bowls has the Big Ten won in the past fifty years?" because that is far more impressive.

Zone Left

June 5th, 2012 at 8:08 PM ^

Actually, that number isn't very impressive for the Big 10. A quick count from 1962 to 2012 yields 17 wins for the Big 10 versus about 30 for the PAC 12. 

Let's discuss why we want to propogate a system that gives USC 4-5 bowl games about 20 miles from its campus every decade.

Ed Shuttlesworth

June 5th, 2012 at 6:25 PM ^

The national championship has remained mythical in the BCS era, notwithstanding the efforts of the SEC to insist otherwise. (*)  I'm losing confidence that the proposed playoff will materially change that.  Slapping the label "semifinal" on two games between the poll/formula ranked 1-4 teams doesn't make it so.

As we get closer and closer to the finish line, the post-bowl plus-one with traditional bowl ties recommends itself as the best realistically obtainable system and it seems to be entirely in play.  The extra data point the bowls give you is a massive improvement over a system premised on picking the teams before the bowls are played -- regardless of the system by which they're picked.

(*) Though some years like 2005 have commended a single team as the clear-cut best team in the country, Bo's classic sneer that '"There is no national champion; it's a mythical national champion" has lost little of its power as the BCS era has progressed.

Mich1993

June 5th, 2012 at 7:17 PM ^

I took Delany's comments as a response to the SEC demand for the top four teams in the tournament.  I'll see your "top four teams or else" and raise you a "we'll take our ball and go home".  It's a negotiating ploy to get back to 3 conference champions and an at large.

I think the Big Ten/Pac Ten are a much more convincing sell that they would walk and continue playing the Rose Bowl outside everyone else's system since they did it before.  Time will tell if this will lead to an end solution of 3 conference champs and an at large.

triangle_M

June 5th, 2012 at 9:29 PM ^



I think Delany is a good commissioner, despite how easy it is to criticize him.  The story breaks that the B1G is widening the gap between its revenues and the SEC, his flexibility in statements makes Slive look inflexible and boorish with his "best 4" ultimatum, and he issues this sortie:

“Everybody recognizes that the present poll system is not a good proxy,” he said. “It’s flawed, it’s not transparent, it has people who have a stake in the outcome voting, it measures teams before they play a game.”

 

All in one week.  Come on.  You at least have to say he's doing a good job in spite of the SEC slanted media.  

triangle_M

June 5th, 2012 at 10:47 PM ^

you could explain the difference between the tiers and provide a link to where I could learn more about the individual revenues of various schools rather than just saying its wrong.  I'm just taking the report at face value.  Not that there is much difference between random message board quality posts and cbssports.com posts, but I'd still like to see where you base your opinion from.

DoubleB

June 5th, 2012 at 11:32 PM ^

This simply repeats the above:

http://mrsec.com/2012/06/big-tensec-money-comparisons-arent-exactly-accurate/

This lays out Florida's deal (from 4 years ago):

http://www.sportsbusinessdaily.com/Journal/Issues/2008/07/20080714/This-Weeks-News/Florida-Rights-Deal-May-Rule-Out-SEC-Channel.aspx

It's still not apples to apples as Florida's deal includes stuff not included in the B1G payout (radio for one).

But it's clear that simply comparing the conference payouts doesn't tell the whole story.

BlueRude

June 5th, 2012 at 7:48 PM ^

Were going to be the #1 team until someone else takes it from us. Remeber the old days when we were always ranked in the top 5 and their game was their bowl against us. Let's take that attitude and the hell with the SEC and others. Great video, thank you.

CRex

June 5th, 2012 at 11:13 PM ^

If we want a live chat, perhaps IRC.  

Pick a server and a channel.  Have the mods register names and give them ops

www.mibbit.com for a web based IRC client.  As easier as CIL's interface to use.  Users could be voiced or devoiced based on the content.

The other option might to consider Maize N Brew?  SBN's commenting system works well for the EDSBS open threads and the like.  

GBOD79

June 6th, 2012 at 5:09 AM ^

Why dont you just charge 1 dollar for every person who wants to be a part of a liveblog, once or twice a month? It seems that we get 1000 plus people on the liveblog fairly regularly, so we could pay for a months worth by each giving a dollar. 

jmblue

June 6th, 2012 at 12:12 PM ^

Can we stop giving credit to Jim Delany's amazing foresight when the conference he's piloting has won two national titles in fifty years?

I'm not the biggest Delany fan in the world, but this criticism seems unfair. He can't control whether the teams in his conference go undefeated or not. What he can do is negotiate the best business deals possible, and in that area he seems to be succeeding. I am surprised and impressed that Big Ten schools get more money in TV rights fees than SEC schools do, despite the SEC's incredible run of success on the field lately (and its location in a college football-mad region).