Unverified Voracity Wishes It Was Rocky And Arid Comment Count

Brian

"A fertile ground for dangerous upstarts lately." That's the accurate, expected, still painful knife Doctor Saturday gently slips between Michigan's ribs in his latest premature assessment, this of the UConn team that will inaugurate Michigan's luxury boxes and possibly clock year three of the Rodriguez era on the head before it can even kick over some MAC team's sand castle.

The assessment doesn't exactly live up the DocSat's foreboding tweet, which said he would be the first person to jump on the bandwagon of a "serious contender in the Big East." That sounds bad. It's not quite that bad in the final analysis, though:

The Huskies are a couple playmakers away from standing out as a conference favorite, and one of those guys may emerge on one side or the other. Unless they come up with more firepower on both sides, though, the existing talent level makes it hard to forecast anything better than 8-4. That's not a breakthrough, exactly, but it is a more generous guess than they've ever gotten before at this time of year.

UConn suffered through a series of painfully close losses before a breakthrough-ish game against Notre Dame launched them on a four game win streak. Syracuse, USF, and South Carolina were the other victims. In any case, UConn returns a crap-ton of starters from an 8-5 team that saw the breaks go against it last year. I don't think they'll end the year #2, but the specter of that Utah game has been duly raised.

Hypothesis damage. It's not like losing Manny Harris is going to help the team, especially if it continues to shoot zero point two percent, but I can't be the only person who has glanced at Harris's relatively meh efficiency numbers (47.7 eFG, basically equivalent to Novak) and thought that replacing him might not be the mountain it appears to be.

Here is a chart that slaps that idea in the face and tells it to sit in the corner. Presenting the top ten Big Ten players in John Hollinger's comprehensive PER stat:

RK PLAYER GP MPG AST TO USG ORR DRR REBR PER
1 Evan Turner, OSU 28 35.4 22 15.5 26.8 6.6 24.8 15.7 31.3
2 Robbie Hummel, PUR 27 30.3 12.9 6.5 19.6 6.5 21 13.7 28.31
3 Draymond Green, MSU 32 25.4 22.6 12.8 18.1 10 22.1 16.1 25.85
4 Damian Johnson, MINN 34 25.5 18.6 10.7 16.6 6.8 12.5 9.6 25.36
5 DeShawn Sims, MICH 32 32.1 5.2 8.4 23 12.7 18.6 15.6 25.2
6 Manny Harris, MICH 31 36.1 17.3 12.1 24.4 6.8 15.4 11.1 24.76
7 JaJuan Johnson, PUR 32 31.1 4.6 11.4 19.7 9.3 18.1 13.7 24.66
8 John Shurna, NW 33 36.3 12.7 9.9 21.8 6 16.1 11.1 23.68
9 Zack Gibson, MICH 32 10 6.8 13.5 15.1 12.1 16.2 14.1 23.66
10 Trevon Hughes, WIS 31 32.5 14.2 10.4 23.5 4.6 13 8.8 23.3

One-grunt observations on the three bolded folk: obvs, guh, wha?

Okay. I think that Michigan playing super small at all times skews this towards the players on the team who actually haul in rebounds. Still, this is one statistical measure that passes the sniff test—check out the top of the national leaderboard for Enter Samhan, Some UNI Guy, and Argh Running 40-Footer—that disagrees with the various Kenpom measures that declare Manny Harris a prolific but inefficient scorer.

Also… holy jeez maybe we could have figured out a way to put Gibson on the floor a bit more.

(HT: Inside The Hall.)

Money money money. Bleed Scarlet shouldn't feel too bad about missing USA Today's most recent FOIA rampage, a January database of revenue and expenses at public division I schools. It seems like the entire blogosphere whiffed on. I certainly hadn't seen it.

Anyway, this perked my ears up:

The vast majority of sports programs — even those that purport to support themselves — receive significant financial backing from their institutions to operate. Of the 99 institutions in the table below, all but four — Louisiana State, Ohio State, and Purdue Universities, and the University of Nebraska at Lincoln — reported receiving at least some revenues in the 2007-8 fiscal year from one of four categories of “allocated” revenues: student fees, direct state or government support, direct institutional support (general fund money), or indirect institutional support (facilities, energy costs, etc.).

Eh? Really? No Michigan? A quick zip over to the database provides an answer. It is not earth-shaking:

image

As of 2008, six hundredths of a percentage point of Michigan's athletic department funding comes from the university. This is not a one-time fluke, as direct support went from zero in 2005 to about 30k the next year and 50k the year after before landing at its current totally insignificant amount. What is it? I asked SID Bruce Madej:

This is how we are required to report when we receive funds to pay for work study students who assist us during the year.

That mystery solved. 

Now let us ask the eternal question: why does Eastern Michigan have a football program? 86% of athletic department "revenue" comes as a subsidy.

Etc.: Hidden in the night game announcement is a two-year break in the M-ND series in 2018 and 2019, which an mgoblog user picked out and MVictors confirmed was a new development. DocSat on the "cult of the bracket."

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