Sponsor note.

Hey folks, Wolverine Weekend is back at Grand Traverse Resort and Spa from June 9 – 11. The weekend includes:

• Meet-and-greets with Donovan Edwards, Will Johnson, Colston Loveland and Junior Colson,
• Dinner featuring John U. Bacon, Devin Gardner, Sam Webb and football players,
• Golf Outing on The Wolverine, and
• a Woodson Whiskey Tasting Event.

Great opportunity to get your Michigan on and support some NIL initiatives.

Harbaugh gonna Harbaugh. Pat Forde profiles Harbaugh, and his world champion dad status never wavers:

If Harbaugh hadn’t gone to Michigan and become a famous football player and coach, what skilled trade would he have undertaken?

“A lawnsman!” Harbaugh enthusiastically responds. “That’s what I do. Mowing the lawn is one of the great feelings I have in life.”

I don’t think this will work and I don’t think it should. Deion Sanders has detonated the Colorado roster:

Colorado recently updated its 2023 football roster. All of the names of players who are departing via the portal have been deleted. The revised roster lists 76 players: 12 returning scholarship players, 21 incoming transfers, 17 new freshmen and 26 walk-ons. Not listed are 17 more transfers who have verbally committed. …

A total of 53 scholarship players have left the program since Sanders was hired in December.

A large number of them were told to hit the bricks after spring practice, which is really doubling down on the idea that you can import a roster from whole cloth. Folks are skeptical:

“It is just absolutely unreasonable to think you can sign 25 players out of the spring transfer portal and make your team better,” the Big 12 DPP said.

There’s a reason the NFL sees far less in-season trade activity than any other major sport. In hockey, soccer, baseball, and basketball you can kind of just go play even if there’s some transition costs moving from system to system. In football one busted assignment is a touchdown. And we’ve seen transfer-heavy teams fail to live up to expectations. MSU, which recently aspired to become Portal U, seems to be cratering. Adding a few guys here and there to plug holes is reasonable. Getting a whole football team on closeout from TJ Maxx? Maybe not so much.

[After THE JUMP: how this makes me feel]

Jerk moves! It's 2023 so this feels like yellin' about World War 1, but I mean come on:

“He’s walking with me and said, ‘Hey buddy, you’re going to get cut today. I’m sorry to tell you this. I didn’t want you to hear it from Coach Prime. I wanted you to hear it from my mouth. I didn’t want to cut you, but we had to cut five offensive linemen, and you were the last one,’” Gray told The Athletic on Tuesday evening.

The most egregious one of these was still Calipari at Kentucky, who cut half the team when he could have waited a year. How you gonna tell me these aren't employees when they can be fired at will?

Matt Brown tackles this aspect of the purge on his not-a-substack. Sanders wasn't even releasing practice tape of the guys who left the portal until the coaching industry called him out on it.

Also in transfers. Waiver City is going to be shut down soon, it seems. Also from that article:

The NCAA has made it much tougher for underclassmen to gain immediate eligibility on their second transfer. In recent years, it was easy to get a waiver by citing no participation opportunity (NPO) at your previous school. That won’t work anymore. Obtaining that eligibility waiver now requires documented issues of mental health, assault, discrimination or disability.

You get the one transfer for free but hopping every year is now going to be met with sit-out years. That’s for the best. Taking the Frankie Collins high school model to college makes a mockery of the idea that you’re around to get a degree, and for all the bullshit the NCAA puts out the one thing I do think is valid is that one of the purposes of attending college on an athletic scholarship is to get a college degree. So this change is a good one as well:

Starting this year, the undergraduate transfers Sanders signs will have their financial aid guaranteed for their full five-year period of eligibility and count against Colorado’s 85-man scholarship limit until they graduate or go pro.

Get a transfer in and he bounces? He still counts against your cap. And while that cap is now a soft limit given NIL and whatnot, that's a reasonable brake to put on schools cycling through as many players as possible panning for gold.

Draft lookahead. Two Michigan players make Dane Brugler's 2024 mock first round. JJ McCarthy is 15th and Kris Jenkins is 22nd. I have a dollar that says Donovan Edwards shoots up over the course of this season. Running backs don't go high anymore but Edwards is the kind of hybrid threat that the league still likes one heckum.

 

Wouldn’t it be nice. A slight rumble from the NCAA hockey meetings a week or so back:

GRAND FORKS — The idea of playing NCAA regional games at home sites was raised again last week at the American Hockey Coaches Association convention in Naples, Fla.

Members of the National Collegiate Hockey Conference and the Big Ten were the primary supporters of the change.

Ah! Sense.

But like other times this idea has been raised in the past 10 years, there did not appear to be nearly enough consensus to make it happen, especially after a year in which attendance was strong at the regionals.

Those against the change have argued it's too big of an advantage to play at home.

This is idiotic. As of 2018, home teams in college hockey won 55% of their games. And that’s distorted by the fact that Lindenwood will play at Michigan but Michigan will never play at Lindenwood. This is more or less the same as it is in the NHL. But we’re talking about playoffs, right? Well, the extra juice in the building takes home NHL teams from a 54.6 winning percentage to a 55.4 winning percentage. That is statistical noise.

So, yes, there is some advantage to playing at home. But in every other sport in America we say that’s a good thing because the higher seed has earned it. If it was 65-35 or something maybe you could say it’s too much. 55-45? Come on. Also:

Supporters noted that some schools who are against home-site regionals award their conference's NCAA tournament automatic bid through league tournaments that are played entirely at home sites.

The regionals will stay the way they are because there are more teams like Union and Yale hoping to fluke their way into a national title than powers who would like to see the national tournament be something other than hockey plinko.

Also in things that would be good. From that same article:

Among the potential immediate rules adjustments:

1. Removing the ability to review goals for too many players on the ice. According to the rule book, a goal can be waived off if there's a "gained advantage" with the extra player, but there was ambiguity about what constitutes a "gained advantage."

2. Removing the ability for officials to review "any aspect" of a play when a coach challenges a call on the ice. It's possible the NCAA will only allow officials to look at the specific action coaches are challenging.

Please, baby Jesus, take away all coaches challenges. We need fewer majors for zaprudered head contact, fewer goals waved off for technicalities, and fewer opportunities for the Yost DJ to play—for some goddamned reason—the entire Shrek 2 soundtrack.

It would be funny. Michigan was apparently one of 59 schools to reach out to MSU transfer Keon Coleman. Do it just so the message boards all implode. Not that they won't anyway: some early win totals lines are out and MSU's is set at 4.5. At least you can sell your Tuck NFTs for a tidy profit?

 

Etc.: Do soccer managers matter? BCHL exits Hockey Canada, seemingly in an effort to be a Canadian USHL. A profile of incoming hockey transfer Josh Eernisse. Well, they did it. The stupidest take. Important Hawaii high school baseball field dimensions work.