Unverified Voracity Says It's Better At Home
Cullen pursuit. After Sam Webb broke news that Michigan was pursuing Kansas City DL coach Joe Cullen to be their defensive coordinator, an NFL reporter, uh, reported that Michigan wasn't the only team in pursuit:
Chiefs defensive line coach Joe Cullen is considered a candidate for several defensive coordinator jobs, sources say. His name is in the mix with the Seahawks and Commanders, as well as at the University of Michigan.
— Jonathan Jones (@jjones9) February 4, 2024
The Commanders have since filled their spot, leaving the Seahawks. It makes sense that Mike Macdonald would probably both 1) recommend Cullen and 2) consider him for his own DC slot, since both guys have that Ravens background. Webb notes that Macdonald is going to be his own DC, though:
“Yeah, right now the plan is I’ll be calling the plays,’’ Macdonald said Thursday during his introductory news conference. “Now, depending on who the defensive coordinator is and when that becomes — ultimately, I’m the head coach of the football team, so I want to coach the football team. Right now, the best way that we can win in my opinion is for me to call the plays, and then when it becomes obvious that someone else is ready to go and we see it the same way, then we’ll make that change.’’
Cullen may want to be the guy, or the Seahawks may turn their attention to someone else.
[After THE JUMP: death to the NCAA, returning production, home regionals now]
Policework reference. Bill Connelly releases his returning production ratings for 2024. One Michigan unit finishes in an expected spot; the other not so much: Michigan is 132nd in returning offensive production and 109th on defense. The former, ok: the ~only returning starter is Colston Loveland.
Something feels deeply off on defense, though. Michigan returns five experienced DL, three out of five members of the secondary, and played Ernest Haussmann quite a bit last year. What could explain this?
Breaking things out by position is a bit trickier on defense, where units aren't as strictly defined and the percentage of returning production is derived both from position units and types of stats (tackles, tackles for loss, sacks, passes defensed). Here's the approximate layout:
Percent of returning tackles: 69.5%
Percent of returning passes defensed (intercepted or broken up): 12%
Percent of returning tackles for loss: 10.5%
Percent of returning sacks: 8%
By position, linebackers make up about 44% of the defensive formula, while defensive backs are at 42% and the defensive line is surprisingly at only 14%.
Connelly's using some sort of regression analysis here to come up with these weights, but man that does not feel intuitive at all. These days most teams are playing two linebackers; for them to be half of the defensive formula feels like it cannot be right. Put another way: each linebacker spot is worth 22% of your returning production score; each DL is worth 3.5%.
You might be a football coach if you… spend 28 minutes talking about two Kenneth Grant plays.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T1FdYsk49G0
Stay tuned for the discussion of Michigan's defense as a whole, and how everyone has their head up looking for the ball. These guys are clearly high school coaches and they marvel at how Michigan plays so disciplined.
What happens when you punt. Brian Fremeau has gathered 11000 punts to see what happens when you punt from various spots on the field. Things are pretty linear, with nets of slightly over 40 yards, until you get close to midfield:
Also note that the black line is the median result, not the average. If it was the average punts outside your own 40 would look worse. Chalk this up as another reason coaches have more or less accepted David Romer's paper from 20 years ago.
Ban the NCAA. Lee Aaliya got Jamal Crawford'd by the NCAA over this:
Aaliya played for eight or nine months for Club de Gimnasia y Esgrima La Plata, a junior team in La Plata, a city in Buenos Aires Province. According to Saratsis, Aaliya was paid a monthly stipend for living expenses in Argentine pesos equivalent to $90.
The NCAA wanted extensive documentation related to the payments, like gas and electric bills, and Saratsis did his best to provide it. Some of the requests for receipts were, in his eyes, unreasonable. “How is an 18-year-old kid going to find grocery receipts from a year and a half ago?” he wondered.
Saratsis said he responded quickly, only for weeks to pass before he’d hear back from NCAA officials with another request. “They string this kid along for five months,” he said. (The NCAA did not respond to MLive’s request for comment for this story.)
When the NCAA finally came back with a decision, in mid-January, it baffled Saratsis. Aaliya had been paid less than $900, yet the NCAA wanted him to pay back $1,155 and sit out 20 percent of games his first season.
This one is solidly in the Not Juwan's Fault category, not that it does much to change the overall shape of things. I cannot believe it is 2024 and Bryce Underwood is getting seven figures at LSU and the NCAA is still nickel-and-diming international students over grocery bills. The quicker this organization dies the better.
Schlossman's shot of Harvard-Minnesota State in Albany
Yes, please. Brad Schlossman on the debacle that is the NCAA hockey tournament:
GRAND FORKS — The 2022 NCAA men's hockey tournament should have been the last straw for neutral-site regionals.
It started with a game between Minnesota State and Harvard in Albany, N.Y. The crowd was sparse enough to count by hand — in a venue that seats more than 10,000. Pandemic-restricted crowds were larger.
Up the road, Minnesota played Western Michigan to go to the NCAA Frozen Four in Worcester, Mass. That game drew the smallest crowd to watch the Gophers all season.
In most sports, the big games have packed stadiums and the best atmospheres. In college hockey, they often have the worst.
Schlossman proposes doing away with regionals entirely, instead playing one-off games at the home rink of the higher seed on consecutive weekends. This dodges one of the major complaints about home regionals—most college hockey arenas aren't well situated to handle four teams. He also points out that with the expansion of the football playoff, literally every other NCAA sport has some of their postseason at home sites.
The major holdup? Selfishness.
According to conversations with a dozen college hockey leaders, there are athletic directors and coaches who believe it's unlikely their teams will ever be in the top eight of the Pairwise Rankings and have the ability to host.
So, they'd rather play in an empty arena in the middle of a college hockey desert than in a packed house on campus. They believe that gives their teams the best chance to advance.
This is a silly concern. Last year two ECAC teams, Quinnipiac and Harvard, would have hosted first round matchups. The year before, WMU, Minnesota-Duluth, and Quinnipiac would have hosted. Two years prior (IE, skipping the COVID year) Cornell and Umass would have hosted. The year before that, Clarkson, UMass, Minnesota State, Northeastern, and Quinnipiac would have hosted. The only conference that is never going to host is Atlantic Hockey, which is lucky to be in D-1 at all. Meanwhile any team good enough to make the tourney out of a major conference is going to be in contention to be top eight. Schlossman asserts that 28(!) different schools would have hosted first-round games over the last decade. Michigan would have had five, and I am now keenly feeling the absence of four ludicrous Yost environments in my bones.
The coaches and ADs who continue to insist on broken neutral site regionals should be drop-kicked into another sport where it's supposed to be quiet.
Will this ever change? I guess there's some hope on the horizon: Schlossman notes that four of the six conferences have conference tournaments entirely on home ice… including the CCHA and Atlantic hockey, who are the major hold-ups.
Etc.: One guy had a better 1/8 than you. Denard on Denard. The World Cup final will be played at Ann Arbor Elder Law Stadium.
February 5th, 2024 at 12:19 PM ^
I'm guessing we're low on the "returning passes defensed and intercepted" metric because teams aren't throwing at Will Johnson.
February 5th, 2024 at 12:26 PM ^
I agree but I think Connelly could factor that in somehow. If you have a returning DB with a high snap count and a hilariously low target count, that's measurable and meaningful.
February 5th, 2024 at 6:29 PM ^
Sure. I'm generally a fan of the fancy-stats, but defense seems like it could be a hard thing to capture. The "boring safety" problem – maybe offenses avoid him? maybe the D-line and LBs are so awesome that nothing gets to him? maybe the offenses suck? Who knows?
Maybe they do this already, but a "other teams seem to avoid him" should be a statistic maybe?
February 5th, 2024 at 12:26 PM ^
Would the fact that garbage time for Michigan began in the 3rd quarter for the majority of the year have any bearing on returning production rates?
February 5th, 2024 at 12:44 PM ^
You'd think most guys playing in garbage time are returning though.
February 5th, 2024 at 12:54 PM ^
If I'm not mistaken Bill C automatically excludes garbage time from his numbers
February 5th, 2024 at 1:18 PM ^
Yea, but he changed his definition of that a few years ago to match the high-powered passing offenses. I want to say it used to be 21 in the 4th quarter and now it's 28 and 3rd quarter went from 28 to 35, but I might be wrong on that. That basically means that there's a lot more garbage time included in the 3rd quarter because we were happy to sit on 20-something point leads in the second half while rotating guys in.
February 5th, 2024 at 12:27 PM ^
The small schools and eastern schools that want to keep the regional system have at least one public ally: Adam Wodon of collegehockeynews.com, whose defense of the status quo (with proposed minor changes that are profoundly unserious) crossed the line into dishonesty to defend his position.
Re: DCs - It's getting modestly frustrating to hear names cited, wonder "is this guy even a decent candidate for a coordinator job?" and find out that he is because he's getting hired to that role in the NFL.
February 5th, 2024 at 12:44 PM ^
"Re: DCs - It's getting modestly frustrating to hear names cited, wonder "is this guy even a decent candidate for a coordinator job?" and find out that he is because he's getting hired to that role in the NFL."
Look on the bright side Stephen. It means we have a very good eye for Defense Coordinators and whoever we end up with, even if not our first, second or third choice, will probably still be very good!
February 5th, 2024 at 12:46 PM ^
I'm hopeful. Not in panic mode or anything; I actually suspect that this process is going this way specifically because Moore is doing exactly what we want, which is finding a guy who can run the same system that is proven to be excellent with excellent players that already know how to operate in it. If he just wanted any name guy with a different system he'd have done that already.
February 5th, 2024 at 1:14 PM ^
It always feel to be like the major supporters of the status quo have to be the huge cluster of New England schools who are typically getting 2 regionals within driving distance per year. Why would they willingly give up their massive advantage? Their disingenuous arguments for the current system are clearly aimed at maintaining their advantage and the western schools need to keep leaning on them to change it. The arguments Wodon tried to make in favor of the current system were so bad as to be almost insulting
February 5th, 2024 at 2:07 PM ^
Yeah it's got to be mostly the eastern schools. I'd assume any home-site system would still have a certain percentage of seats allocated to the visiting team, and I know my huskies would snap up those seats in an instant if they were within driving distance of any midwestern city. We're known for traveling well and being loud wherever we are. There are huge numbers of us downstate Michigan, so any of WMU, MSU, or UM hosting would be better for us than somewhere in the east. Minneapolis, Fargo, Duluth, Madison, etc are all closer driving distance to Tech than any downstate city, so we'd get a lot of locals and students traveling for that. NMU and MnSU should get comparable support, although I'm not sure about the rest of the CCHA.
February 5th, 2024 at 2:46 PM ^
For sure. Go back and look at the 2015 tournament when #7 Tech would've hosted #10 Minnesota (most likely) in Houghton. That would've been electric. Instead, Tech's reward was playing SCSU 2.5 miles from their campus in Fargo.
February 5th, 2024 at 12:44 PM ^
I've rarely, if ever, contributed to the anti-Warde talk. But Michigan men's basketball being on the wrong side the current NCAA regime in just about every way seems to ultimately fall on him. Juwan Howard shouldn't have to be an expert there.
February 5th, 2024 at 2:55 PM ^
Somebody in the Athletic Department needs to be taking care of this. Yes, the NCAA is insanely tedious, but nobody in A2 looks good here.
February 5th, 2024 at 12:49 PM ^
Could someone help me understand the college hockey playoff issue from the standpoint of making the change.
Is this not under the NCAA purview? If so, shouldn't it require a majority vote from the committee responsible for this to make the change? I don't see how the minority keeps overruling the majority if this is the case.
February 5th, 2024 at 1:00 PM ^
The sad fact is that you don't have a majority of the committee supporting the change. You would need 4 of the following 6 supporting the change and the votes just aren't there. One vote per conference.
The NCAA Division I Men's Ice Hockey Committee:
Jeffrey Schulman, Vermont AD (Chair)
Bob Daniels, Ferris State Coach
Rick Gotkin, Mercyhurst Coach
Josh Richelew, Michigan Director of Hockey Operations
Scott Sandelin, Minnesota-Duluth Coach
Tim Troville, Harvard Associate AD
February 5th, 2024 at 1:19 PM ^
You would hope you could get the teams who would've hosted home playoff games in the past (Vermont, Michigan, Duluth, Harvard) would be on board. Even Ferris probably would've hosted in some years.
February 5th, 2024 at 1:01 PM ^
"The NCAA" is a bit misunderstood here, since it's the hockey schools making the decisions. Brian alludes to this, but there is majority-vote stuff that goes on and there is a significant volume of "smaller schools" that like the status quo. Also ok with the status quo: Eastern schools. As I've observed several times when I've discussed this issue, the regionals would actually be a plausible system if you only considered the "eastern" region of the sport, where a large number of schools reside within a couple hours of driving of each other, and the five major eastern regional locations are all within 2-3 hours (or less) of each other.
When BC was the power in college hockey, they basically never had to play in a regional further than 2 hours from home. The one time they did, 2011, they wound up losing to Colorado College in the first round of a regional Michigan won on its way to the championship game. In contrast, there's almost always at least one top western seed that has to play many hours from home, either in an empty arena or an arena with a large volume of opposing fans.
So Hockey East, the "big" conference out east, is also not really upset with the status quo, since they tend to benefit even when they are lower seeds. Three of the four regional locations these days are within a bus ride distance, while zero regional locations are a bus ride distance for any team in Michigan.
Thus, the votes have not been there to change the system. Western schools and the major programs (the Big Ten schools are obvious, but also programs like North Dakota and Denver and so on; Denver's coach has been vocal about the need to change this) are naturally in favor, but the small school/eastern school cabal, representing much smaller fanbases, has obstructed change.
A key may be to flip the CCHA schools, which are smaller and tend to be less competitive. However, Minnesota State, currently in the CCHA, is one of the teams that has lost out the most with the current regional arrangement, regularly getting top seeds and having to travel to distance places many hours from their fanbase. Maybe a few of those schools can change the tide.
February 5th, 2024 at 1:20 PM ^
The most frustrating argument to me is schools saying a home playoff game is fundamentally 'unfair' when these schools always have 2 regionals in driving distance and there is seldom ever a regional in the Michigan-Indiana-Ohio footprint. Don't talk to me about unfair
February 5th, 2024 at 1:43 PM ^
How important is the non-conference schedule? I would expect there is some reliance on the smaller conference teams playing the bigger conference teams during the regular season to earn pariwise points. Why don't the bigger conferences band together and agree not to play the smaller conferences until they vote for on-site playoff games? Sure, that's the ultimately definition of collusion, but this is the NCAA and college sports were talking about, isn't that standard?
February 5th, 2024 at 1:52 PM ^
Yeah, now having lived out East for over a decade it's been obvious to me that a bunch of little schools around here have no incentive to break the system. For example, in 2021 two of the four regional sites were Albany, NY and Bridgeport, CT, a mere 130-ish miles apart from each other; the other two (Fargo, ND and Loveland, CO) are 800+ miles apart from each other. #1 seed Minnesota had a 860 mile drive to Loveland, while #1 seed Wisconsin had to 1k drive to Bridgeport. #1 BC had a 160 mile drive to Albany, and NoDak (to their benefit) only had an 81 mile drive to Fargo. But that's 2 incredibly long treks for half your #1 seeds, and in Wisconsin's case the #2 in their region (UMass) is barely 100 miles away from Bridgeport while #2 seed UM had around 900 miles to Fargo. BU was a #3 seed and got the same Albany regional as BC.
2022 wasn't any better - UM's in Allentown (550+ miles) and Minnesota State is in Albany while Harvard (#4 seed) is about 150 miles away. #1 WMU is in Worcester, which means the #3 and #4 seeds at playing in their home state (hell, you can drive from Boston or Amherst to Worcester in about an hour) top 2 seeds are 600+ miles away.
And that seemingly happens every year. College hockey isn't some huge revenue sport but they'd all generate more money with bigger gates, and I'm sure you could figure out some revenue sharing where even the lower-seeded schools got a decent chunk of change from the gate. But there's no reason, especially in single-elimination sport like hockey, where you just add more Plinko pegs to the board via off-site arenas.
February 5th, 2024 at 1:55 PM ^
if you talk to eastern school fans, the neutral site games are downright sacrosanct
February 5th, 2024 at 12:53 PM ^
Strangely I find myself offended that FIFA refuses to use the stadium sponsor name while simultaneously getting a huge kick out of MGoBlog inserting its own sponsors on stadium names.
February 5th, 2024 at 1:03 PM ^
That Denard article is good but needs an update!
February 5th, 2024 at 2:07 PM ^
Yeah, that is a great read, but I was halfway through when I realized it sounded really familiar. Worth reading twice, but I was excited for a minute to hear his thoughts on being back with the Wolverines.
February 5th, 2024 at 1:04 PM ^
The Denard piece, written in 2021, is a good read. I assume Denard remains part of the Michigan recruiting staff?
February 6th, 2024 at 6:15 AM ^
I kept seeing him on the sidelines during games all year, so he's definitely been with the program up until last month at a minimum. No idea on his status since, but hopefully he stays. Michigan is better with Denard around.
February 5th, 2024 at 1:07 PM ^
KC defensive coordinator is who we are going after? Is this a good thing? I mean, wouldn't that be like going after early 80's SD Charger defensive coordinator or mid 80's Miami Dolphins coordinator? Someone please talk some sense into me and tell me this is a good thing?
February 5th, 2024 at 1:43 PM ^
No, he's the Chiefs DL coach.
I'm not sure what the rest of your comment means, but Cullen was recently on the Ravens staff with Minter and McDonald.
February 5th, 2024 at 1:46 PM ^
he isn't their defensive coordinator, he is their d-line coach. Also he won a Super Bowl with them literally last year so that's pretty good
Southeastern Michigan football fans might know this guy best as the Lions assistant who was fired after going through a Wendy's drivethrough naked and drunk in 2008
February 5th, 2024 at 1:58 PM ^
Chiefs have been one of the best defenses in the NFL for 3 or 4 years now. That's why they're in the Super Bowl despite the offense taking a major step back.
February 5th, 2024 at 2:08 PM ^
The Chiefs defense was quite good this year.
February 5th, 2024 at 1:11 PM ^
I assumed that Schlossman was in response to the rough Wodon article on CHN a few weeks ago Wodon's was actually after but never references Schlossman. Maybe it was just an odd coincidence?
If you look at both articles as the cases for either format, the neutral site regional justification is truly pathetic. You're basically saying a bunch of teams probably lucky to ever make the tournament and upset they can't negate advantages of the higher seeds in the tournament. This is the big conclusion of Wodon's write up:
Let's stop the Committee from giving 4 seeds de facto home games at nearby Regionals just to help attendance, when there are other options.
So we're gonna take a horrible, really poorly attended format...and make it horrible, really, really poorly attended format. Brilliant. And no one likes to touch on the fact that this beautiful system is resulting in almost zero midwest regionals. The old CCHA teams are always flying somewhere. There's no good argument for the current system
To Schlossman's argument, the home site regional where the 1 seed loses is a good point. I still would like to see best of 3 or minimum 2 game aggregate for the 1st 2 rounds to eliminate some noise and then go single elimination at the frozen four.
February 5th, 2024 at 1:40 PM ^
I agree with the best-of-three idea but I think I'm in favor of fighting the biggest battle first.
So, the current format is this:
* Week 1 = 4 four-team regionals at pre-determined sites
* Week 2 = bye
* Week 3 = Frozen four at a neutral site
And the proposed new format is this:
* Week 1 = 8 first round games at better seeds
* Week 2 = 4 quarterfinal games at better seeds
* Week 3 = Frozen four at a neutral site
The great thing is that the new format will actually be cheaper than the current format. The current format has 12 or so flights for the regionals, and it requires 48 hotel room nights (2 nights for the teams eliminated in the first round and 4 nights for teams who win their first round game, since they added the "off day" to the regionals).
The new format will have 9 or so flights the first 2 weeks, averaging out over the last several years, and only 24 hotel room nights (2 nights for each visiting team and 0 for each home team).
If you change to best-of-three, that price advantage disappears and that would just give the small-minded small schools another excuse to not go with the better format.
I think another good question is why we allow division 2 schools like Ferris State, Mercyhurst and Minnesota-Duluth to have any say at all in how a division 1 sport is conducted. I mean, I am not opposed to allowing them to play at the division 1 level, but the administration of the sport should be left to the schools that actually have division 1 athletic departments.
February 5th, 2024 at 2:50 PM ^
Well, I think the answer is that college hockey does not exist if we don't give the D2, D3, and very small D1 schools a spot at the table. IIRC they're over half the sport, but we shouldn't let a bunch of schools who are lucky to make a tournament every few years dictate how the tournament goes. Pretty much every other D1 sport does home site regionals.
February 5th, 2024 at 2:01 PM ^
Wodon's article came after Schlossman. Schlossman's article reflects the groundswell of support for home site games. Whether it's a direct response to the article (which quotes David Carle, among others) or the general zeitgeist, it was dumb. I still feel a little bit grimy about frontal assaults on stuff like that, but I don't consider any of my pointed attacks on Wodon's article to be wrong, even if I'd edit stuff with more time.
February 5th, 2024 at 1:32 PM ^
What gets me about the defensive production stats is that the OL metric counts snaps but seemingly he doesn't do it for the defense. That feels pretty easy to do, and would capture guys who don't collect a ton of tackles but are still vitally important to a defense.
February 5th, 2024 at 1:32 PM ^
The crazinest of the NCAA is even worse when you consider that in 1990, my parents were giving 10 year old me $5/week in allowance to do my chores, which I saved to spend on TMNT toys. With inflation, this would be the equivalent of $48 / month last year. He was given less than twice this amount to get groceries, and living accommodations, and utilities. This is a rounding error in most college division ! coaches yearly salaries. Why was this even a thing to investigate.
Edit: I looked at it another way. He was given $900 over 8 months, which amounts to roughly $3.75 / day over that time. The NCAA is telling a kid that he needs all his receipts to show how he spent that $3.75 / day stipend. About the equivalent of an Egg Mcmuffin at Mcdonalds. Note: Just the sandwich, not the breakfast meal. Yes, surely this kid is paid like a professional. I would have revoked his amatuer status as well.
February 5th, 2024 at 6:03 PM ^
There are some rosters with 5,6,7 foreign players. Ive got a feeling the team he was going to played a big role in this. You think they give a few hundred (thousand?) foreign players this same kind of treatment. I highly doubt it, but we keep telling ourselves its just NCAA randomness?
February 5th, 2024 at 1:46 PM ^
The NCAA's treatment of Aaliya's situation is even more messed up when you consider Argentinian inflation. Given that the rate of inflation for the Argentine peso was 185% in 2023, and is estimated to be 250% this year, if the NCAA is asking for this repayment in dollars, they're demanding he repay vastly more money than he received, in order to participate in a sport where players are now regularly being paid significant amounts of money by entities so close to the team that there is no meaningful distinction between athletic department and NIL collective.
February 5th, 2024 at 2:12 PM ^
The Locked In: Football Intel video about Grant and Michigan's defense is a lot of fun, by which I mean they're remarkably high on how well coached the unit is.
"You know why they're the least penalized team in the country? Because they're the dag-gum smartest and most well-coached team in the country."
February 5th, 2024 at 5:26 PM ^
For even more fun, they spend the first part of this video saying that Georgia would not have beaten Michigan. "Michigan whips Georgia". "Michigan is way better than a lot of people are giving them credit for." "We're going to talk about them (Georgia) losing a physical game to Alabama. They absolutely would have lost a physical battle against Michigan."
February 5th, 2024 at 2:29 PM ^
Were Elston or Clinkscale offered the DC job by Moore? If not, why not?
If they were but turned it down, why?
Does Moore expect both Elston and Clinkscale to stick around if he hires someone from outside the program as DC?
Or is he going after outside candidates because he believes they're leaving anyhow?
February 5th, 2024 at 4:09 PM ^
Don, I just wanted to tell you I thought your questions re: Clink, Elston & Cullen were valid & interesting.
Unfortunately it looks like people are more in the mood to vent about hockey playoffs than ponder further what this DC coaching search is telling us.
One thing I thought was most telling about the DC candidates is Cullen apparently asked Sam not to even mention his name because he was afraid it might hamper his candidacy for NFL DC openings.
Between Michigan being interested in various Ravens affiliated coaches who all grabbed NFL jobs instead, and Cullen not even wanting to be linked as a Michigan candidate for fear of jeopardizing his pro opportunities, there's a lot about the new world of NIL & portaling that's gonna chase a lot of talent away from the college game.
If Cullen ends up at Michigan they should already be vetting replacements as soon as he takes the job!
February 5th, 2024 at 4:25 PM ^
"Between Michigan being interested in various Ravens affiliated coaches who all grabbed NFL jobs instead, and Cullen not even wanting to be linked as a Michigan candidate for fear of jeopardizing his pro opportunities"
This isn't meant to be a criticism of Moore, but I wonder if part of this apparent reluctance to move from the NFL to Michigan is that from a head coaching perspective Sherrone is a pretty blank slate.
Most Michigan fans—including me—applaud what he did in the final three games of the regular season and are comfortable using that as a major reason for his ascension to head coach, but I think we're deluding ourselves if we believe the outside world necessarily draws the same conclusion from those three games that we do. There's a huge difference between coaching three games on an emergency basis on one hand, and having an established record of being in entire control of a large football program for a full season or more on the other.
The contrast with Harbaugh is pretty stark—when he was hired here in 2015, his NFL and collegiate credentials as a head coach were beyond question, and that gave him a credibility and a star power to attract and hire quality coaches that Moore simply hasn't had a chance to develop yet. That's a big reason why I was so disappointed (not surprised, though) that Harbaugh hired away two of the key figures in the program—Minter and Herbert—to join him in L.A.
Moore is going to need all the help he can get in his first couple of seasons; a head coach is only as good as his assistants.
February 5th, 2024 at 2:36 PM ^
What is the college hockey equivalent of the B1G and SEC forming an advisory group? Because those conferences should do that.
February 5th, 2024 at 2:53 PM ^
Well, in hockey there are more or less 3 power conferences: Big Ten, NCHC, and Hockey East. The problem is one of them (Hockey East) probably wants to keep the current system where they get home regionals every year and they have 2 other northeast leagues (Atlantic Hockey, ECAC) who are right there with them. That's half of D1 right there who want to keep the current imbalanced system. It's a lot for the Big Ten and NCHC to fight, especially when most of the CCHA schools and independents may be ok with the status quo too
February 5th, 2024 at 3:43 PM ^
Connelly formula- I would rate position groups closer to 50% for DL, 35% for DBs and 15% for LBs.
February 5th, 2024 at 3:49 PM ^
Changing regional sites for hockey makes too much sense. That's why the ncaa won't do it.
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