It's like Speed except I have to keep talking about Nico Collins. I mean:

15% of all throws to Nico Collins this year, including those negated by penalties, have drawn a DPI penalty

— Jarad Evans (@Jarad_Evans) November 4, 2019

So on 47 targets Collins has 22 catches and 7 DPIs for a total of 544 yards, 11.6 yards per target. And that's with two extremely tenuous OPIs wiping out 38 and 45 yard catches. If those hadn't gotten called you're looking at 13.3 YPT. Collins not getting a zillion targets remains the most frustrating WHY U NO of the Harbaugh era.

[After THE JUMP: Harbaugh's playoff, people are just in charge, Taggart]

Jim Harbaugh's playoff plan was done in Excel. This dude Harbaugh may have missed his calling as blogger. He's put together a wildly disruptive, completely impossible, pretty awesome playoff plan, and then took a picture of it with his phone to send to a reporter:

"I came up with my own structure," he said this past spring. "I can take a picture of it and send it to you."

He is one beard away from being the center of the blogger distribution.

Anyway, that plan:

• 11(?!) teams, including the five P5 conference champions and the highest-ranked G5 team. Five at-large bids.
• Conference champions are "determined within a 12-game regular season by conference record and tiebreakers, similar to how the NFL chooses its division winners."
• Conference championship games are gone.
• Byes for the top three teams—the article says the top two but that can't be correct.
• Home games!

This still caps the number of games anyone might play at 15 unless one of the teams in the first round makes the final. The implication of the conference champion section appears more vast than it originally appears:

"To play each other, to have tiebreakers, within those 12 games, you should be able to determine who your conference champion is," he said. "If you don't have the conference championship games, then you can expand your playoff to at least eight."

I think Harbaugh's advocating for getting rid of nonconference schedules entirely? Or at least severely restricting them? I'd be fine with that, honestly, if Michigan's just going to cancel series after series. But since the reason they keep paying teams like UCLA seven figures to not play them is so they can have seven home games annually, I don't think giving that up is on the table. Does it make sense that Michigan's athletic department budget falls apart if they don't have whatever the net is from a body bag game? No. Here we are anyway.

Juwan Howard's infinite NBA adventure. Via Brendan Quinn:

The fact is, Juwan Howard was never a franchise player. He was not the star to construct a roster around. He was highly skilled, highly motivated, but marginally athletic (by NBA standards) and rarely dominant. As Lynam puts it: “Riley had the right sense for who he was. Juwan wasn’t a guy who was going to score 30, 35 points per game. He was really a foundational piece on which to build, to build a really successful franchise for the long-term.”

What Howard was, more than anything, was a professional.

Pro·fes·sion·al.

“You know, we all think that we change as we get older — but I’m not sure he has,” Chapman says. “He’s the same guy now when I met him at 20. I mean, I know experiences shaped him and stuff, but he was just a dude who was perfectly wired to be a basketball lifer. A lot of guys are in the league to make money. He was there to handle his business. He was a pro.”

If Howard doesn't succeed here it won't be because he didn't put in the work.

The headlines that zombie @Deadspin is cranking out appear to have been written by a nana. pic.twitter.com/nJK6T8uQF6

— fozberry (@fozberry1) November 4, 2019

Deadspin is dead. Always a shame to see some private equity knuckleheads buy a publication and run it directly into the ground, especially since Deadspin was a model that worked. The site made a profit being itself, a Red Panda-level achievement in 2019. It is the height of stupidity to push a woman on a unicycle flipping bowls onto her head to do anything except remain precariously balanced while providing content.

It sucks because that model produced a lot of good things, and the Maven-ing of sportswriting will produce none.

A Mavened publication has certain qualities. First, the owners take whatever editorial line the publication was pushing and do the opposite. Sometimes, this is as simple as taking good journalism and making it bad.

During its death march, the Village Voice pruned its famous arts coverage by cutting critics like Robert Christgau. At Texas Monthly, a magazine with a history of ass-kicking journalism, a former editor was caught discussing publicity plans with the company run by a cover subject. During Forbes veteran Lewis D’Vorkin’s brief, bonkers run as L.A. Times editor, he proposed a homepage full of “GIFs, GIFs, all manner of media.” …

Whether non-sportswriting attracts readers, as former acting editor Barry Petchesky argued, is almost beside the point. Mavened publications want traffic but not thoughts. The “incredibly broad mandate” G/O Media’s owners claimed to have granted Deadspin’s staff is illusory. For them, the worst thing a website could generate is a mild headache—mild and major headaches being pretty much the point of journalism.

From content to #content. It's a zombie.

It doesn't have to be like this! Some tech bros put this in the most douchy possible terms but shit if you're ex-Deadspin staff the time to band together and start an Undeadspin is now. Then you get to own it—looks around—and no one can complain if your SEO strategy is "what is a hat" and your main draw is a post with a 5000-word table in the middle of it. It would be tragic to waste a good outpouring of anger at toolbags who buy things just to ruin them.

Exit Taggart. FSU fired Willie Taggart halfway through year two, which is a hell of a way to go out after you bailed on Oregon after one year to take your dream job. Taggart walked into an offensive line situation that was probably worse than the one Harbaugh walked into: Deondre Francois got blasted out of Jimbo Fisher's last season and FSU trundled to 7-5; they were 5-7 the next year. Turning on an FSU game either year made you want to call 911 whenever the QB dropped back to pass. That's hard to fix in a year and change.

Now FSU has to pay Taggart a whopping 18 million and go pay someone else. Which is naturally rumored to be Bob Stoops. A local television station says FSU is "nearing deal," even. I have a dollar that says this falls apart.

Michigan fans are wondering if Taggart might end up in Ann Arbor. I'd give that a low probability. Taggart probably still has enough juice to get a G5 head job after building USF from 2-10 to 10-2 in four years. He hasn't had enough time at either Oregon or FSU for too much of the shine to come off that rebuild.

Meanwhile, I feel dumb typing this but it kind of feels like Michigan's coaching staff might be stable this offseason?

• Campanile, McDaniels, Nua, and Gattis are all in year one. They probably won't get bounced and probably won't get wooed elsewhere until they've proven a little bit more.
• Brown, Warinner, Partridge, Jay Harbaugh, Moore, and Zordich are probably staying put unless they get a promotion elsewhere.

Even if they Michigan does lose someone only Harbaugh and Moore—the least likely to leave—open up a slot Taggart could fill. If Warinner leaves Michigan has to get another OL coach. Michigan has been un-inclined to do the Hoke shuffle when it comes to defensive openings—every defensive coach has a primarily defensive background, both as a player and a coach.

I wouldn't bet on Taggart in Ann Arbor for a lot of reasons.

Halftime, 1942. Things used to get a lot weirder against MSU:

You guessed it! The halftime show the next year in 1942 was even more bizarre than the year before! pic.twitter.com/T8XoVS20Vf

— Dr. Sap (@DrSap4UM) November 5, 2019

It's Rutgers week at Banner Society dot com. Yes. It is. Don't tell me it's not. Look, here's a post about Rutgers:

In the name of equality, let’s put a little bit of Rutgers in every conference.

Rutgers won’t be forced to play 60+ games every year. All that practice might make Rutgers really good at football.

We’ll instead divvy Rutgers’ 12 games up among the Power 5. Each league gets to mix two Rutgers games into its regular schedule. That leaves two games for Rutgers to schedule as it sees fit.

Won’t that create lopsided schedules within each P5 conference? No. We can just cancel series we no longer need, such as Tennessee-Alabama.

That was definitely about Rutgers, wasn't it? I told you so.

It was fate. Michigan's most recent hockey commit is F Mark Estapa, who will be coming in… at some point. That commitment was over ND, which is a nice thing, and was ordained by hockey rules:

You've gotta be kidding, Mark Estapa... #HlinkaGretzkyCup pic.twitter.com/lqq3WsU2Vg

— USA Hockey (@usahockey) August 1, 2019

That guy's gotta go to Michigan.

Etc.: Chris Fetter is being courted by the Mets and Yankees to be their pitching coach. I'd brace for a departure. Glasgow is a Butkus semi-finalist. So is Joe Bachie! More on Collins from Orion Sang. Phillipe Lapointe profiled. Jeff Tambellini is his coach in the BCHL. Howard on DeJulius. More on Howard.