Farewell, Justin Boren

This Saturday marks the end of the Justin Boren / Michigan / OSU saga.  Justin's last game in Columbus, his last meeting with Michigan, his last Big Ten game.

What a long, strange trip it's been with Justin.

It is, in my mind, the worst-reported and most underreported story in the history of Michigan football.  Here was a kid, a really good player and the son of one of Bo's boys, who left suddenly, inexplicably, and on his way out, was party to the strangest press release in modern memory.

It was the "famliy values" meme; which gave rise to a couple of years' worth of weird, unfounded and increasingly strange presumptions and rumors about the Rich Rodriguez football program.  All of them false.  Justin was not a lazy kid or a lazy football player.  Justin did not leave Michigan because he didn't want to run.  It wasn't about "scheme."  To think, as some did, that it was about abusive language in Rodriguez practices; that's a joke.  Mike Boren is the biggest goddamned fucking hardass in Pickerington, and Justin once recounted how his dad yelled at him so fiercely at halftimes of his high school games, he thought "somebody might call the cops."

In fact, the real weirdness was sourced in the Boren family, and the simple story behind Justin's departure from Michigan was his parents' rage when they learned that Justin's younger brother Zach was not getting a sholarship offer from Michigan.  Mike and Hope Boren yanked Justin out of school, within days of their learining that Zach was not getting a Michigan scholarship.  The story is old now, and despite the fact that no reporters ever seemed to want to touch it, the "famliy values" knock on Rich Rodriguez was inevitably defeated by the truth and the balm of time.

But as Justin's collegiate career and the story of his unprecedented transfer from Michigan to Ohio State comes to a close, it is sort of funny to have a look at this Cleveland Plain Dealer article from a year ago, giving a charming little snapshot of "Boren family values."  What a psycho-crew.

http://www.cleveland.com/osu/index.ssf/2009/08/nasty_offensive_lineman_justin.html