Unverified Voracity Stops At Resistance Comment Count

Brian

Scheduling note. I sat down to start UFRing last night and found that I'd actually re-converted the UMass game and hadn't downloaded ND at all. My subconscious is protecting me as best it can, but I now have the thing. UFR will be a day late, which it traditionally is during a bye week anyway.

Denard's night went better than at least one person's. Mmmm Northern Indiana style:

The man on the ground had severe facial and upper body wounds. According to police, both men said they were hit by a car, but police have not confirmed that. Investigators say it's possible that is a story to cover-up a fight.

While police were talking to the men, a woman approached officers and said she'd been hit in the face with a case of Natural Light Beer. The woman had very visible wounds, most profound, her entire bottom row of teeth were missing.

This was at 9 PM, so I assume all of this arose from an argument about whether Borges or Denard was the worst.

The pants! They are motion pants. That's not a Sufjan Stevens song title yet, but I bet it's on his next album. No, it's a reference to some digging done by UMHoops that unearths a piece of basketball's uniforms for next year:

52-89213-F[1]52-89213-1-F[1]

THEY'RE TUBES FOR YOUR LEGS!

The way this works is you put one leg in one tube and the other leg in the other tube and then pull up until you feel resistance. Once you feel resistance, STOP. You will now be wearing your legtubes. You will kind of look like a 12-year-old from 1993. If you did not stop when you felt resistance you will also be in severe pain, but that's your problem. That's what you get for not following instructions.

Nobody at commenting at UMHoops likes these, but they do like Glenn Robinson III.

Uniforms are supposed to be, you know, what's that word… the same. Adidas is still not executing this task, apparently:

8015478800_18ba3c7d75_c[1]

Piping: it's just all over the place man. Also, Washington's missing his block M. If you sent this to me, thanks, but I forget who did.

Bye week activity. WTKA is replaying Ufer's call of the 1979 Michigan State game at noon on Saturday. 1050 on your dial, or on the internets. Here's Keith Jackson doing the same:

Band noise solution? They amplified the band a couple years back to mixed reviews. If you couldn't hear them before it's great. If you could, it sounds horrible as the slightly delayed noise coming out of the speakers conflicts with the band itself. I'm in an area where it sounds horrible.

I thought about this on Saturday at some point in the third quarter when I noticed I could hear the ND band loud and clear despite being about as far away from them as possible, but couldn't hear the Michigan band that was just below our section. I was going to mention this in the game column as depressing commentary on how quiet the MMB, but MVictors pointed out the speaker setup they had on the sideline:

speakers_thumb[1]

Audio people: does this make a difference, having the speakers in the same place the band is? Or am I grasping at straws?

Idiots in charge of stuff. Replacement refs screw up Monday Night Football and the NFL burns its credibility all for a pathetically tiny slice of their enormous revenue pool. In the NHL, Edmonton's ownership laughably threatens to move the Oilers to Seattle; the NHL is bunkered down for another strike less than a decade after an entire season failed to happen.

At some point, it has to be about something other than the pursuit of as much money as you can get right damn now, doesn't it? Maybe, maybe not. They'll have to start to see some erosion before they act, just like college football teams are starting to now that the terrible scheduling practices of the last 20 years are finally resulting in empty seats.

In other news, someone is paying bowtied twit Gordon Gee an exorbitant amount of money and allowing the guy to spend 7.7 million in expenses(!), including $64,000 on bowties(!!!). How's that going?

At the University of Michigan, President Mary Sue Coleman’s travel and entertainment expenses from 2007 through 2010 totaled $410,235. Upkeep and utilities at the university-owned house runs an additional $100,000 a year and if Coleman takes someone to lunch or dinner, she pays the tab out of her own pocket, according to University of Michigan spokesman Rick Fitzgerald.

Coleman’s compensation package is $860,782 a year and includes housing and a car. Her employment contract does not call for first class airline tickets or private jets, as Gee’s does. In Michigan’s last endowment campaign she helped raise $3.2 billion — the most ever by a public university at that time.

There are signs that OSU isn’t keeping pace nationally on the size of its endowment. OSU slipped from 27th in the four years preceding Gee’s return to Columbus to 31st in 2010-11, according to the National Association of College and University Business Officers and the Commonfund Institute. The Big 10 universities Northwestern, Minnesota, and Michigan all ranked above Ohio State for the size of their endowment.

Jim Tressel, fire this man.

Come on Tim. Baumgardner on Tim Hardaway entering his junior year:

"I've watched and probably had more interaction with Tim this summer (than ever before)," Beilein said recently. "With him just coming in, sitting in my office, hanging out and feeling very comfortable as a Michigan man.

"Him being more comfortable with everything has allowed him to have a lot of confidence in the intangible area (off the court). And there's a strong correlation between that and how he'll perform on the court."

I hope that's true. Hardaway's three point shooting should bounce back just because 27% is incredibly low, but if Michigan is going to live up to some extremely hefty preseason expectations he'll have to either be more effective creating his own shots or go from terrible to elite from behind the line.

wat. Mac Bennett on the twitter:

The @BeatsPointZero "Deblois is a Bag of Milk" EP will be out later today. Excited about it

I don't know. I've notified Jon Bois about this, though.

A fast one. The Michigan-ND series opened up in South Bend, and if it's ending semi-permanently in 2014, it'll end in South Bend. Not a smooth move to not build an even number of home/away games into the contract, Michigan. This is probably Bill Martin's fault, FWIW.

Chalk. Via Jamie, Michigan's… performance type thing against Notre Dame has finally provided a leader in Big Ten betting whatnot:

MSU now "clear" betting chalk to win Big 10: MSU +220, Braska +250, Wisco +300, UM +400, PU +700. Odds lot less muddled than a week ago

Purdue's down from 20-1 recently. I TOLD YOU JAMIE /ignores Wisconsin

Also, Michigan lines are frightening. Michigan's favored by less than a field goal at Purdue and about a touchdown at Nebraska and Ohio State. This is all an overreaction to something that won't happen again, right guys? Right?

I'm a little surprised things are shaking out like this after last weekend. I mean, MSU-EMU couldn't have moved the needle in favor of the Spartans, could it?

Here's your statistical nutshell. Michigan State snapped the ball 72 times on Saturday with the intention of advancing the ball.

On 46 of those plays, the ball ended up, or was targeted to end up, in the hands of Le'Veon Bell or Dion Sims. The average gain on those plays was 7.8 yards.

On the remaining the 26 plays, the ball was intended to end up in someone else's hands. The average gain on those plays was 2.8 yards.

Yipes.

Etc.: Hockey starts off ranked third. Seems high. Bois fake mailbag about those refs with mini-Packers TWIS. This is not Ace holding his head, but both Ace and I had to check. Kirk Ferentz is unfireable. Which person is Borges and which is me in this XKCD?

Comments

mgowill

September 25th, 2012 at 1:40 PM ^

This was at 9 PM, so I assume all of this arose from an argument about whether Borges or Denard was the worst.

It was a case of Natural Light that removed her teeth. Draw your own conclusions as to which camp the offending person was in.

ijohnb

September 25th, 2012 at 1:46 PM ^

a touchdown at Ohio State?

[Edit.  We are around a touchdown dogs to Nebraska and Ohio State.  Not clear from OP]

MaizeAndBlueWahoo

September 25th, 2012 at 1:47 PM ^

The way this works is you put one leg in one tube and the other leg in the other tube and then pull up until you feel resistance.

Huh.  And here all this time I've been putting both legs into their respective tubes at the same time.  Do the rest of you not do this?

jayballs

September 25th, 2012 at 1:48 PM ^

It looks like what they did for the ND band was build a ground stacked line array (like what you might see hanging from the ceiling at a concert, only on the ground), which allows for a lot of control over the projection of the audio - essentially, they can hit the crowd on the other side of the field without making it 120 dB on the field where the players are.  I'm a little surprised that it's actually at GROUND level, but I suppose they have to worry about sight lines, too. This is a good solution to the whole delay issue, since the amplified sound is coming from the same location as the band itself, but a football stadium is a big place, and these would have to be REALLY loud to actually make a significant impact on the other side of the stadium. This is usually addressed with delay speakers on the other side of the field that are time-delayed to match the sound coming from the band.  It's a complicated issue, doing sound reinforcement for such a large area.

Smash Lampjaw

September 25th, 2012 at 2:00 PM ^

I could feel its vibrations thumping in my chest through the whole game. I have no idea how they did that. And other than seeing our band in another corner, I did not notice them. I kept hearing the whistles leading up to our snaps, and I thought at least some of them were from the 3 or 4 assistant directors, who all had whistles. I didn't know about the other whistles until later, but it was weird, and I have never heard of that before.

dragonchild

September 25th, 2012 at 6:12 PM ^

This isn't just pumping sound through an arena or a stage concert; the band is right in the middle of the area so they can hear it too.  In conventional setups performers will key off their own sound track, but here you can't separate what the band needs to hear from what the audience wants to hear.  If they're disciplined they'll follow the conductor (a spread-out band covers enough area that the delay from the other side can cause people to fall behind; visual cues are practically instant), but I can easily see speakers contributing to the problem.

One other issue is latency.  You wouldn't expect it considering how must faster electricity moves than sound, but as jayballs says, this is an issue by itself.  You have to time the sound so it doesn't arrive too early OR too late, and god forbid you start cancelling the very sound you're trying to amp.

Long story short, amping a marching band is an unusual challenge for sound engineers.  I've never done it, but I'd presume the most common failure is just uneven sound.  It's very easy to make this sound good in one area.  In a giant, open arena with the source in the middle?  I wouldn't even trust pros to get it right everywhere.  For starters, the acoustics of the stadium itself aren't ideal, and you can't just put the speakers anywhere.  So even if the timing's perfect, the sound won't propagate the way you want it to.

Section 1

September 25th, 2012 at 11:20 PM ^

Was that funky, low-riser platform on the field, the one that nearly decapitated Devin Gardner; was that thing a late addition to the Notre Dame stadium infrastructure, so as to support the extra loudspeaker array?  That's the way it looked to me on tv.

What perfect Notre Dame bullshit.  From the school that gave us student assistants falling to their deaths on unsafe camera platforms in high winds... Now, the extra subwoofer array placed on a metal platform so close to the field that it created a danger to players and caused injury to one of them.

bronxblue

September 25th, 2012 at 2:02 PM ^

The betting lines represent more the ability to draw even action than anything resembling a sense of who would win.  I don't think UM is the best team in the conference, but with OSU and PSU barred from competing for the title and Wisconsin's overall douchiness starting to catch up with them, I guess it makes sense that UM is the prohibitive favorite.  As for MSU, people keep waiting for them to recapture the past couple of years' magic, but there's a reason they have historically been a mediocre program, and we're seeing it now.  It's a team that can recruit reasonably well and coach kids up, but it will forever be a meh program and anything close to a competitive conference will expose that.  This year, Andrew Maxwell and Gholston are just highlighting those deficiencies better than the opposition.

As for Gee and OSU, I was amazed their endowment was even 27th.  And I'd fire the guy simply for this picture:

The 1999 freshman version of me thinks this is tacky, and that guy thought EVERYTHING in the Union's poster section was awesome.  What Gordon, the picture of the two girls making out and Bob Marley smoking a doobie still at the framer?

profitgoblue

September 25th, 2012 at 2:06 PM ^

The section comparing Michigan and Mary Sue vs. OSU and Gordon is very interesting.  I didn't know that about the endowment fundraising.  It says more about the academic value of the respective universities, in my opinion.  I'm sure it makes a huge difference which leader is organizing/coordinating/overseeing the fundraising, but I think it all comes down to the value contributors put on the universities.  Because, as I understand it, OSU has a larger but maybe less active (??) alumni base?

sundaybluedysunday

September 25th, 2012 at 2:52 PM ^

The weird thing to me is that Denard seems to struggle almost exclusively against elite defenses under Borges (Iowa aside) and we have exactly zero evidence that either of those teams have elite defenses this year. I would be willing to bet Michigan against either of those lines.

FreddieMercuryHayes

September 25th, 2012 at 2:17 PM ^

Man, I would bet against MSU being the favorite at this point.  They certainly could win the conference, but man, that offense is just anemic, and the D is not performing as well as I thought they would.  Don't know if it will be enough to make up for the O.  Michigan certainly has a very high varience offense due to Denard and the Denard/Borges fusion, but we are certainly capable of putting up points on anyone in this conference.  Can't say the same about MSU at this point.

micheal honcho

September 25th, 2012 at 2:24 PM ^

The large folded horn subwoofers that can be seen in the picture are just that. Thumpers only. Probably only seeing signals below 100-120hz. Mostly bass drums, tuba with some other drums and perhaps trombone. Those need to be relatively close to the source(the band) in order to avoid phase cancellation and delay that is unpleasing across the field.

 

The large radial horns could be placed at more remote locations without having as much of a problem if they were by themselves but running the subs at the same time requires that the horns be located in close proximity.

 

In the suites @ the big house the band thru the speakers thing was horrible and had major delay issues. I cant speak to how it sounds in the peasant seats because I haven't sat there in years.(in my best judge smails voice).

david from wyoming

September 25th, 2012 at 2:42 PM ^

Which person is Borges and which is me in this XKCD?

You are the guy that has never played chess before. Borges is the guy that plays chess for a living and has just beat you in chess.

This even fits the mouseover text wrt asking mgoblog bubble screen questions during pressers over and over and over.

UM Indy

September 25th, 2012 at 2:52 PM ^

Brian, there might be a sliver of hope to foil the perpetual odd, even year thingy.  As it stands, we will be traveling to Utah in 2015 but already have OSU (Beavers, not Bucks) and UNLV at home so the other OOC game MUST be at home to get 7 home games.  It also must and will be a tomato soup can to knock off the shelf.  Nebraska and Ohio State are at home that year, in addition to Wisconsin. 

In 2016, we have Colorado at home and Nebraska, Ohio State and Wisconsin on the road with 3 OOC games to fill in.  Could maybe start a home and home series with a big time OOC opponent this year and have the home game for us first?  Even more important, because without that, the discrepancy between quality home games increases with Wisconsin joining the same cycle as Nebraska and Ohio State. 

inthebluelot

September 25th, 2012 at 6:02 PM ^

Was much better than at Michigan Stadium, which begs the question... Why? We just spent $2MM on new scoreboards and an audio upgrade so that we can sound worse than "The Little House"? Really... Who in the hell decided that putting the speakers in one of the scoreboards was a better idea than having them attached to the new structures along the home team side? Where the hell are we getting these consultants from? IMO, this is a worse blunder than the HALO, there, I said it. Now... Fix it!

Blue in Yarmouth

September 26th, 2012 at 8:41 AM ^

I have to say I honestly just don't get it. Admittedley I don't know all of the particulars in relation to the lockout and who wants what, but if it has anything to do with the players wanting more money (which I am fairly certain it does) it makes me sick.

These guys are playing a game they love for millions of dollars a year. A game is 60 minutes long and an average player probably logs about 18 minutes of icetime per game. So for 82 games a year that is less than 25 hours of work for their millions of dollars.

The players need to realize that 1) they are very well compensated for what they do and 2) it is the owners who have taken all the risk in this sport. Most of the owners make very little money from their hockey venture and are billionaires because of other business dealings. How many hockey teams actually make billions of dollars a year?

For the most part the owners are in this because they love hockey and not for making a lot of money. Even if there was billions of dollars in it, why sholuld the players get more than they already are? Again, the owners are the ones assuming all the risk, not the players. It's hard to have any sympathy for the players in this, especially when much the worlds economy is still in the toilet and plenty of people work 40 hours a week 52 weeks a year and bring home less than these guys do for playing one game (that amounts to 18 minuntes of hard labour).

SAvoodoo

September 26th, 2012 at 9:15 AM ^

Not sure if serious... 1) this lockout is all the owners, not players. 2) the player work way more than just games, last I checked they practiced and trained a bit as well 3) to say the owners take all the risk is ridiculous, monetarily yes, but last I checked it was the players on the ice taking the hits and fighting the fights.



It pisses me off they are locked out same as you, but I think our reasoning is completely different

Blue in Yarmouth

September 26th, 2012 at 12:29 PM ^

I played hockey all my life and had a pretty decent shot at playing in the league if I wanted to be a fighter (which didn't really appeal to me) so I know what goes into playing hockey with training etc. A players risk is beyond minimal in this. As rookies I believe the league minimum is somewhere near 800,000 dollars per year and most rookie contracts are from 3-5 years. Those contracts are insured so if the player gets injured and never plays a shift they still receive the money for that contract. They don't take on any risk except that of getting injured, which every athlete whether professional or not takes on. If that risk is too big, don't play, but I think the compensation is pretty damn good considering.

You also say this is on the owners because they have locked the players out, but it is because of the state of finances in the league and the players refusal to take any ownership in that that has led to this, it most certainly isn't all on the owners. I admitted I didn't know exactly what the lockout was about in detail, but even I know that much. This lockout can be pretty much directly laid at the players feet. So yes, I am serious.

notetoself

September 26th, 2012 at 2:00 PM ^

well, there are a few factors, but in the end, i'd say it would work better to have the speakers in the same location as the band.

1) sound travels outwards from its source. if you have speakers elsewhere, broadcasting the same sound in different (god forbid: directly opposing) directions, you're basically guaranteeing that the sound will reach some places at different times, creating the hideous echo effect that everyone associates with miking the band.

2) signal latency. the more length and processing you put in line, the more delay you incur. if we're running sound through the stadium sound system, i'm guessing there are a few paths the signal has to travel through. if you're just have 2 mics, a mixing board, and powered speakers, you're talking milliseconds of latency.

so, i'm of the opinion that having a separate sound system in the same location of the band would be the best setup.