Unverified Voracity Scoffs At Vikings
Brief Big Ten Tournament note. No column on it; I wasn't feeling massively invested because I had to miss the second half of the Minnesota game to go to Yost and watched it after I knew the outcome, then Ohio State came out and was all like "today we will play like a team with two lottery picks on it." Once that happened and Burke got annihilated by Craft it was clear this was going to be an ugly old-style loss, which fine. Michigan is not on the level of national contender… yet.
If anything the tourney just reinforced my feeling that this team did fantastically to pick up a Big Ten title split and now that there's a banner in hand the rest of this is house money. After beating OHIO*, that is. Losing to a 13 seed would leave a sour taste. Everything else is gravy-coated candy.
I'll leave the garment rending about how we're not competing for a one-seed for the next couple years.
Side note: now do we believe that Craft is a totally awesome defender? Yes? Okay.
*[SBN MAC blog Hustle Belt refers to the Bobcats as "OHIO" for reasons that are unknown but very probably related to their stunning upset of Georgetown as a 14 seed two years ago.
![232323232%7Ffp43366%3Enu%3D3434%3E252%3E8%3B6%3E25252529%3A7235ot1lsi[1]](https://mgoblog.com/sites/mgoblog.com/files/images/UV_C171/2323232327Ffp433663Enu3D34343E2523E83B63E252525293A7235ot1lsi1.jpg "232323232%7Ffp43366%3Enu%3D3434%3E252%3E8%3B6%3E25252529%3A7235ot1lsi[1]")
Since giving them the all-caps treatment is a term of respect that doubles as diss of plain ol' Ohio, this blog will refer to the Bobcats as OHIO from now on.]
Dave Brandon approves. Michigan-ND 1978 was like Michigan-MSU 2012 in two ways: one team looked totally ridiculous and lost 28-14.
The two games were different because one team didn't look ridiculous and Ufer was going ape in '78.
This game also provides ammunition for both sides of the maize/yellow debate. It's clear that UM's maize is much lighter than the yellow ND is wearing; it's also unattractively blinding.
Also ridiculous. I wish I'd found this before I posted on hockey's tourney streak today, as it really hammers home how remarkable it is:
Let me put that in perspective- of ALL of the teams that have won a National Championship in Hockey the last 21 seasons, here's the tournament appearances:
Michigan- 21
Boston U- 15
Minnesota- 15
North Dakota- 14
Michigan State- 14
Maine- 13
Wisconsin- 13
Boston College- 13
Denver- 10
Lake State- 6
Northern Michigan- 5
UM-Duluth- 4Inside that, the longest streak is 9, shared by Maine, Michigan State, and North Dakota, but North Dakota will extend that to 10 this year. At least should.
Unless there's a power lurking outside this list—and I don't think there is—every other team has missed the NCAAs at least six times during the streak.
Help next year. Hockey's got blue chips on the blue line and at forward in their next recruiting class. Boo Nieves is the forward, and he sounds a little like Carl Hagelin:
Matt Herr thought he had seen it all after taking over as coach at the Kent School in Connecticut following a productive collegiate and professional playing career.
That's before he was introduced to 6-foot-3, 184-pound center Cristoval "Boo" Nieves last season.
"I don't know how he skates so freaking fast for his size," Herr told NHL.com. "He's one of the best skaters I've seen this year. I think he can jump into the American Hockey League and play right now and you wouldn't even blink." …
"He just explodes off the mark and has agility, balance and quickness to break loose from traffic," Eggleston said. "He also has the physical strength to plow through checks along the wall and bring the puck with him. He sees the ice very well, is a very smart and creative playmaker and captains the team ... he's a very good team player."
Herr then compares him to Joe Thornton, which… like… probably not. Here's hoping, though. If Michigan doesn't suffer any departures at forward I'm guessing that AJ Treais slides up to the top line next year between Brown and Guptill; Nieves should center the second line with PDG and… Moffatt? That sounds pretty good to me.
If they can keep defections on defense down to one they'd be skating something like Trouba-Merrill/Bennett, Moffie-Chiasson, Clare/Serville-Carrick. Depth is a bit scary there but kids develop; Serville especially seems like an offseason in a weight program will do him good.
Help the Mathlete. He needs some crowd-sourcing to fill in holes in his recruiting database. Your reward is good feelings and some interesting posts.
That's the ticket. Kyle Meinke tries to make us all feel better about going up against that Alabama defense:
"There ain't no one who can learn that defense in under a year," outgoing free safety Mark Barron said last month at the NFL Scouting Combine in Indianapolis. "We played in a very difficult defense, first of all. We did a lot of different schemes.
"I really don’t believe anyone can learn that defense in under a year."
Score! Please score.
Trey Burke is childhood friends with everyone on an Ohio D-I roster. OHIO backup PG and lightning bolt Stevie Taylor has played with and against Trey Burke for big chunks of his career. UMHoops has the story and the requisite adorable picture:
![536055206_thumb7_thumb[1]](https://mgoblog.com/sites/mgoblog.com/files/images/UV_C171/536055206_thumb7_thumb1.jpg "536055206_thumb7_thumb[1]")
Um… check with the basketball team. Michigan's hockey team has adopted a mantra that should be familiar to anyone who followed Michigan basketball's NCAA drought-breaking team of a few years back:
The No. 4 Michigan hockey team emerged from its locker room before Saturday’s game against Notre Dame wearing shirts with the team motto, “Burn the Boats,” prominently displayed.
Hey! I remember that! Isn't that…
“(Sophomore forward Luke) Moffatt brought it up this year,” said sophomore forward Derek DeBlois last month. “It has to do with the Vikings. When they would go to fight, they would burn their boats. No retreat, you just kind of lay all your chips on the table and fight until you win.”
…NOT ABOUT VIKINGS AT ALL. It's actually a famous event in the Spanish conquest of everything when they were discovering the new world, which is why the basketball team's version of the slogan was in Spanish. [Ed-S: actually...] Come on. Vikings. I've never heard about anything so ridicul—
![Book%20o2[1]](https://mgoblog.com/sites/mgoblog.com/files/images/UV_C171/Book20o21.jpg "Book%20o2[1]")
SHOULDN'T HAVE TALKED ISH ABOUT VIKIIIIINGS AIEEEE—
…
…
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Etc: James Rogers interviewed. Michigan Tech goalie coach and former Michigan goalie Steve Shields profiled. MEL PEARSON UPDATE: Tech reaches the Final Five for the first time in five years. Tech is two games away from .500 on the year. Carty on Draymond Green and Zack Novak. Ohio's PG in a bikini.
I think Caesar beat both the Vikings and the Spanish during his expedition to Britain. At least that has always been my frame of reference for the phrase "burn the boats"
None of this is accurate.
This entire thing must be a joke I don't understand. Nothing to see here.
Napolean. Napolean burned his boats when he invaded the Falkland Islands.
/s
The Spanish didn't actually do it either. I own and love the shirt, but it's a little embarressing that (a) it didn't happen and (b) the Conquistadors were awful people.
Don't you mean OHIO's PG in a bikini?
I was expecting to see Craft when I clicked that.
I was expecting the women's basketball team's PG. I was disappoint.
I'd take Trey Burke over Aaron "Touchy-Feely" Craft ten times out of ten.
Trey Burke had to play 45 minutes the night before where he had to bring the ball up the court, retrieve the ball at the top of the key, pass to himself, and then score. Oh, and he had to do that all in "holy **** desperation, this team is taking on water fast" mode for pretty much all 45 of those minutes.
Craft played a game in which his job description was "make sure to Sullinger, Thomas, and Buford involved." While playing in a blowout.
Burke is better than Craft. There is no fair judgment to be made when one kid got run into the ground the night before and the other kid coasted.
Agreed, although I don't think anyone on the board is going to fight you on that. I think Brian was just merely stating that Craft is a very solid defender. Something which, frankly, I did not even know was debatable until Brian referred to it like so in this article. He probably gets away with more than he should, but that's true of most good defenders.
That said, I'm really pulling for the Mountaineers to make a Sweet 16 run.
I would have bet you all my dollars that Craft was going to brutalize post-Minnesota Trey in an extremely deceptive matchup. Craft is good at smelling blood, and Trey was leaking from the get go of that game.
You may be right that this is all Brian was saying, but he, himself, notes he didn't catch the second half of the Minny BTT game, which means he didn't see Trey look like he was going to collapse every time he got to the FT line late during the comeback and OT.
Something which, frankly, I did not even know was debatable until Brian referred to it like so in this article.
It's referencing last week's post that defended Craft as the Big Ten Defensive Player of the Year. Apparently there were some people that think he's good defensively, but not the best in conference.
Let me preface this by saying that Craft is definitely a very good defender. I have no issue with this concept whatsoever. However, having watched the game the other day, I have no idea what that has to do with Burke's poor game.
Burke was 1-11 shooting, but 7 of those were 3's. I can't remember any of them that were in any way, shape, or form affected by Craft's defense. In fact, many of them were flat out wide open looks that he missed. It's also not like Craft's defense keeping out on the perimeter forced all these shots - again, they were wide open good looks for Burke normally, who usually hits about 40% on the ones he took Saturday. I also remember him blowing by Craft for a few floaters and a lay-up that was blocked by Sullinger at the rim. Again, no idea where Craft factored into this. He also had 8 TOs, but again, I don't remember Craft picking his pocket left and right, I just remember a lot of throwing the ball to nobody type decisions. I fail to see what impact Craft had on Burke's bad game, a type of game he's had a few times this year against far worse competition. It was the team defense, not Craft, that caused problems.
Thank you. I can't believe anybody is even thinking about how Craft did such a great job—we had an 18-year old boy out there who had literally nothing left in the tank from going 45 minutes less than 24 hours before. His legs were going to be rubber after a game like that at his age, and that's going to affect every shot he takes, regardless whether it's under the basket or from behind the arc.
State is better than Michigan at basketball this year, and they had more to play for. In fact, tOSU is probably winning it all this year, and that simply was not a winnable game. Michigan came in winning 9 of their last 11 basketball games, five of them on the road, and Ohio State was hellbent on getting Deathmatch 3 with Michigan State. That does not mean anything for the NCAA tourney. Butler was not a "national contender" the last two years.
That game was was it was. Michigan (Bielien included) mailed it in. They could have balls out and lost by seven, or they could have played it how they did, and saved themselves from fatigue and injury. This team is going to the sweet sixteen and they are going to punch Carolina in the mouthPERIOD ......
Everybody makes fun of the B1G, but the WCHA's Final Five has had six teams for two years now.
At least we can use the excuse that we ran out of fingers. Are people in Minnesota all one-handed?
The WCHA's claim for sticking with the Final Five is that it is still the final five games of the WCHA season. They still can't figure out why their league fell apart.
The concept of "burning the boats" actually comes from Tariq bin Ziyad, the Berber general who led the Muslim conquest of Spain in the eighth century: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tariq_bin_Ziyad. That predates the Spanish conquests in the Americas by at least 700 years.
Actually, according to that wikipedia article, it was a 17th-century Muslim historian who first told the "burn the boats" story of ibn Ziyad's conquest. That would be a century later than Cortes's expedition, so he may have copied the Cortes legend (if it was in existence at the time).
It's likely that all of these "burn the boats" stories are just post-hoc embellishments of the truth. The idea that historians are supposed to tell the truth, and only the truth, is a relatively recent one. For centuries, "historians" freely invented details to make their subjects larger than life.
A quick Google search reveals an article stating that it was two Muslim historians in the 13th century, not the 17th century, who first told the story of Tariq bin Ziyad burning his boats (6th century Hijra corresponds to 13th century CE):
http://archives.dawn.com/weekly/dmag/archive/040530/dmag12.htm
However, the author also notes that neither of them cite a source for the story, that none of the earliest Muslim sources mention it, and that the historical circumstances surrounding the Muslim conquest of Spain make it extremely unlikely that Tariq would have done such a thing. So your overall point is well-taken.
Football pants were made of polyester then with the fronts made of a more durable coarse fabric cut. There probably was some limits on available coloring for the more durable pant material. Not sure.
Camera and light screws things up, but.....
Maize: 1988 Michigan vs. 1978 Michigan:
1978 Rose Bowl. OG's Jon Giesler's pants really show the contrast in color.
1979: Anthony Carter's britches - no two-tone Maize britches anymore
Here's photo of Rob Lytle's pants (photo 1975)- clearly showing different coloring with the light:
You can't compare photos like that and draw firm conclusions. There are a lot of confounding factors - the amount of sunlight, exposure time, quality of film, etc.
I was a freshman at Michigan in 1978, and yes, the football pants were two-toned. The front of the pant was brighter and the rear was a pale maize color. It was pretty distinct and you could see the two different types of material along the seams on the side of the pant.
I own one of the "queme los barcos" shirts and wear it for games against MSU. Also, I took a bunch of classes in Scandinavian Studies at Michigan. The viking comment is interesting. I suppose they're refering to when people emigrated from Norway (to Iceland) under Harald Fairhair (872-930 AD -- he basically waged war against small communities to unify Norway into one country), which is how Iceland was initially populated.
Ever see photos of Iceland? There's practically no wood. In the early days of Iceland, settlers would kill each other over driftwood (if you've read any Icelandic Sagas you know this resulted in an endless series of revenge killings -- they documented the killings in stories on sheepskin which is why they have the most complete genetic record of any country today). Anyway, Norweigens built boats, sailed them across the Norwegian Sea to escape the conquests of Harald Fairhair, and landed in a place with no wood. It's easy to see how the need to "burn the boats" would be widespread.
For what it's worth, the Icelandic version would be something like "brenna báta."
Iceland wasn't always treeless. It became that way through human activity. According to this article, 25-40% of the island was forested when the initial settlers arrived 1,140 years ago. The stories of people killing each other over driftwood might be apocryphal.
Why would a second-round game against Temple (or a worse team) be "house money"? That's a game we should win. Now the Sweet 16, that'd be house money.
Because this season has been so much better compared to what could have reasonably been expected for it at the beginning. The team earned a Big Ten Championship banner that we can always look to in admiration of Zack and Stu.
No matter what money we've metaphorically had to put down in expectations, we've won. If we lose in the first round (Brian says second), that's a bummer, but it's still an awesome season compared to expectations/hopes.
I think it's Steve Shields <------ s at the end
Harald Fairhair, as I misunderstand it, invaded western Michigan, populating the area with annoying Dutch people (and a few brave Danes), THEN burned his boats.
Which he pronounced "boots."
/s
March 13th, 2012 at 10:30 AM ^
Annoying? I'd cop to cheap, stubborn, judgmental and overly religious, but for all that I think we're quite lovable.
God bless Bob Ufer and his coton-picking-maize-and-blue heart.
(Also, thanks to the person who invented high def.)
...vee-king. Kind of like Mee-chigan.
Dammit all of you, I did it FIRST!* And it totally didn't work. Ammianus:
Finally, the army approached Ctesiphon following a canal that linked the Tigris and Euphrates. It soon became apparent after a few preliminary skirmishes that a protracted siege would be necessary to take this important city.
Many of his generals, however, thought that pursuing this course of action would be foolish. Julian reluctantly agreed, but became enraged by this failure and ordered his fleet to be burned as he decided to march through the province of Assyria. Julian had planned for his army to live off the land, but the Persians employed a scorched-earth policy. When it became apparent that his army would perish (because his supplies were beginning to dwindle) from starvation and the heat if he continued his campaign, and also in the face of superior numbers of the enemy, Julian ordered a retreat on 16 June. As the Roman army retreated, they were constantly harassed by guerilla strikes. It was during one of these raids that Julian got caught up in the fighting and took a spear to his abdomen. Mortally wounded he was carried to his tent, where, after conferring with some of his officers, he died. The date was 26 June 363.
That's me, Misopogon, the apostate emperor. Check the date. Soooo before that Spanish guy. Well it didn't work so well because after I died then so did most of my army, losing an entire generation's best pagan generals. But it was still before that "conquistador" (we just call them "victors") Cortes, before anyone even SPOKE SPANISH! The t-shirts should rightly say...
"Adolebit Naves!"
...except I preferred Greek so
"κάψουν τα πλοία!"
* I was actually totally copying Alexander the Great.
March 12th, 2012 at 10:29 PM ^
March 12th, 2012 at 11:59 PM ^
March 13th, 2012 at 12:21 PM ^
If you only live twice.
Sweet ABC college football intro on the UM-ND clip. Bring this back, ABC.
Ah, 1978… my freshman year. It is great to see that game while I am sober enough to remember anything more than the pass to Ralph Clayton. Terrific team, terrific season, marred only by a brutal loss to Sparty when Kirk Gibson went nuts on us, and the obligatory Rose Bowl loss to USC. Must've been the Sports Illustrated curse – Leach was on the cover of the college football issue that year.
Also gotta love the cheerleaders in the white sweaters. Sure it was a ripoff of USC, but if ever anything was worth ripping off, it was the sweaters from the USC cheerleaders of that era. Just wish I could've participated in that effort!
March 13th, 2012 at 12:19 AM ^
joke that Ufer was making. He was apparently making reference to the 1977 movie "Oh God" in which Burns played himself as the character of God who was invisible to everybody else but one person. Ufer trying to suggest that perhaps God doesn't always take ND's side on autumn Saturdays and that even He would have wanted to shake Schembechler's hand that day.
thanks for making me relive that nightmare of a game against ohio brian. that game was brutal - ohio just could not miss and hit three after three after three. i'm a bit nervous for michigan going into this game.
March 13th, 2012 at 10:23 AM ^
Trey Burke looks exactly the same now as he did in that photo. Stone cold mug and all.
March 13th, 2012 at 11:26 AM ^
You guys, you're all wrong, I was watching the History Channel and they said that none of those guys gave the order to burn the boats, it was actually aliens that burned the boats.
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