Phonebooks (not that phonebook) are here. Bill Connelly has released his preseason rankings for 2023. Michigan's up there, as you might imagine:

Penn State? I guess Penn State. Drew uber Alles, per SP+. Notable that there is a pretty big gulf between #4 and #5 there, and and even bigger gulf between Penn State and the rest of the Big Ten. The next-best B10 team is Wisconsin at #25, followed by Iowa at 27 and Minnesota at 30. MSU is at 47.

One reason Michigan ranks so high is that they're 5th in returning production and that may undersell it a bit because Connelly's offensive formula has returning RB yards as just 6% of the total. I think that's generally reasonable since RBs are fairly plug and play these days but probably underrates the impact getting Donovan Edwards and Blake Corum back has for M. Let's read a nice thing:

Michigan (third in SP+ in 2022, fifth in returning production in 2023)
When FSU has a chance to be the story, FSU is the story. That's the way these things tend to work. But it's pretty jarring to see a team that made the CFP one year also rank in the top five in returning production the next.

The Wolverines are projected to return quarterback J.J. McCarthy, running back and Heisman hopeful Blake Corum and nine of their 12 defenders with 400-plus snaps. Plus, Jim Harbaugh made deft use of the portal, adding reinforcements to both the linebacking corps and an already-awesome offensive line. Both Ohio State and Penn State enter 2023 with hopes of preventing a third straight Big Ten title for Michigan, but they'll have to clear a really high bar.

Yeah. Clear our bar, please. FWIW, Connelly has Michigan at 50/50 to finish 11-1 or better, which means they're about 80-90% to enter the OSU game as a virtual playoff quarterfinal, give or take the backdoor route.

[After THE JUMP: Aussie gonna Aussie.]

Australia: still Australia 100 years ago. This man comes from a land down under and then pretends to be six feet under so that no one will know he played for Notre Dame:

don't ask why but I just discovered the story of Pat O'Dea, an Australian guy who became a punting superhero in the 1890s, became head coach at Notre Dame, then faked his own death to escape his punting fame and got married to a woman who had no idea pic.twitter.com/8cRnkXZgUw

— Rodger Sherman (@rodger) February 2, 2023

Also the Kirkville Osteopaths.

Would you like nutrition fun facts? Or would you like to know that Cornelius Johnson is suspicious of lemons? I have the tweets for you.

Nutrition Fun Fact:

Lemons are man made.
They are a hybridization of citron & oranges.

“I always knew there was something a little bit off about lemons” - @CorneliusNation pic.twitter.com/aldNpWgiew

— Abigail O'Connor (@A_OConnorRD) May 20, 2022

I go to the Busch's on South Main that is near where a lot of the athletes live and so is frequently populated with people in head-to-toe M gear and sandals. I eagerly anticipate the day I walk in and Cornelius Johnson is owlishly glaring at the lemons.

A reason. We've noted that Michigan strenuously avoids offering up jump balls to their receivers, and this may be the reason why:

Contested catch % (NFL Draft prospects) pic.twitter.com/hfDeB8Quzd

— James Foster (@NoFlagsFilm) January 27, 2023

Some of that is just variance when your sample size is 18, but if you moaned "help him out" at some point last year the numbers back that up.

Lawyers love the NCAA. People are getting paid. Not players, but people. The latest lawsuit seeks to change that:

Wednesday's hearing in front of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit in Philadelphia is the next step in the Johnson v. NCAA case, in which several former college athletes argue they should have been paid an hourly wage like other student workers on their campuses. The NCAA contends that its business is unique and that the normal rules that determine whether someone fits the definition of an employee don't make sense for college athletes. The appellate judges will eventually decide whether the standard tests for employee status should be applied to college athletes and their schools.

"This particular case is flying under the radar compared to some of the others we hear about much more frequently, but it's important," said Sarah Wake, who advises universities on athletic compliance issues in her role as an attorney at McGuireWoods.

The NCAA has won these cases in the past but the Supreme Court decision in Alston has people thinking that the doors have opened up for a challenge like this to succeed at some point.

What is the point of anything, scouting edition. Fascinating Athletic article on scouting in soccer and whether it, you know, works in any way whatsoever:

Based on the studies of hiring managers, Bergkamp believed that giving scouts a structured scorecard like the one described above would make their player assessments more reliable than scouts who used a holistic, intuitive method. Working with a team of researchers from the University of Groningen in his homeland, Bergkamp recruited about a hundred scouts and coaches affiliated with the Dutch Football Association and professional clubs to participate in a study that, he hoped, would point to a better way to scout.

The professional raters were asked to imagine they were trying to find a young full-back for a mid-table club in the Eredivisie (Dutch football’s top division). They would watch half an hour of Wyscout clips of one random player from a pool of 25, rate his performances and make a prediction about how he would develop.

Some of the raters were simply asked to grade the player’s overall performance in the clips they watched on a seven-point scale. Others were given a list of eight tasks relevant to the full-back position, such as whether the player was “available to stop the counter, apply pressure, and retain compactness” during defensive transitions. Raters in this structured group graded the player on each task, then gave their overall score just like the unstructured group.

When his team analyzed the scores, Bergkamp was taken aback by what they showed. “‘Surprising’ is the word, I would say,” he said, when asked to describe the results.

Raters who gave only an overall score could barely agree with one another on how well a player had performed, as the researchers might have expected. But the grades from the group that used a carefully designed scorecard disagreed even more. Even if you ignored the second group’s overall ratings and averaged their eight specific task scores together instead, there was little consensus among the scouts on what they had seen.

Anyone who has ventured onto a soccer message board in the aftermath of the game to find it filled with asburd takes that defy all reason can relate. Football, basketball, usually hockey: these games generally resolve into some sort of consensus. There are disagreements, naturally, but you can say something like "Jett Howard is good offensively but poor defensively" and you will not find a legion of people who swear to the blood god that the exact opposite is true. Try espousing any opinion about the USMNT in the aftermath of the World Cup and you will be beset with those legions.

This is what happens when there is a sport where the commonly accepted statistics are so rudimentary that many players on the field simply have none. It's like if everyone except one guy was an OL.

Steve Holtz's story. Paula Weston on the incredibly scary Steve Holtz situation:

“He said that all of a sudden it stopped, and then he opened the door, and I was sitting, having a seizure.”

The housemates called 9-1-1. The police arrived and asked if there was any chance of drug use. (There wasn’t.) Could someone have been in the house with Holtz, they wanted to know. (Other than his girlfriend Emma, very unlikely.) Could this be a suicide attempt? (No.)

An ambulance took Holtz to the University of Michigan hospital, where he was admitted to the ICU. “They think that I had another seizure in the ambulance as well,” said Holtz. “I had two seizures that they know of. They think I could have been having seizures all day that day because of my condition when they found me.”

Soon after being admitted to ICU, Holtz was intubated and put in a medically induced coma. “I’m not sure of the duration,” said Holtz. “A couple of days.”

For him to return to the ice and immediately get booted out of a game with 22 penalty minutes is an inspiration to shit-talkers everywhere. Also it emphasizes the crazy amount of adversity this hockey team has endured to get where it is today.

On Naurato. He's profiled by Ryan Zuke at MLive; got a little Harbaugh in him:

During a practice last month, a small group of players had remained on the ice afterward to play rebound, a popular game many teams play after practices which pits a goalie against the players. A player will line up at the hash marks while 5-7 others will surround the goalie. The objective is for the shooter to score or at least shoot to create a rebound that one of the other players can put in the net before the goalie either covers the puck or deflects it away.

Naurato joined the group and scored on his first two shots, prompting cheers and stick taps from players. While most head coaches will leave the ice right after practice to begin preparations for upcoming games, Naurato views the extra time as another opportunity to bond with players.

“I don’t know if there’s a head coach at the junior, college or pro level that stays on the ice and plays games with the guys,” he said. “I love doing it. I want to stay and mess around and act like I’m a player or a kid, but more importantly, it’s time spent with them.”

Still no movement on the interim tag, but supposedly after the regular season he'll be re-evaluated.

Etc.: Michigan is building big dorms again. Hockey NIL collective. UM-Flint is losing enrollment rapidly. Details on why the Big Ten is sitting so pretty in Pairwise. PNR defense breaks down. ND can't cover a buyout to get a new OC.