Freep in Alabama

Saban's record head-to-head against U of M is 2-3. Clearly "never" is probably too strong a word.

Because no program in the south has ever cheated their asses off. And counted on rich boosters to pressure the press to help them cover up. Ever.

Southern football is an entirely different animal.

Sometimes I don't know if I would rather have it that way up here, or to have someone constantly questioning and keeping our program honest.

As a fan it hurts to see someone say bad things about your team, but from an overall standpoint, it is perhaps for the better to be objective.

It was a lot easier to slam Carty because the problems with that series were so easy to point out if you actually went to Michigan. It was a one-day story stretched into 4 or 5 excruciatingly mundane articles with obvious errors, some of which could have been solved by looking at the UM Academic Calendar for 2 seconds. (for example, the whole part about athletes dropping classes late in the semester and having special privilege to do so. yeah, no, it's called a late drop, and almost everyone has done it at one time or another)

With Rosenberg/Snyder, there's a lot of murky things to be proven false that can't be proven as such by any student at the University, or any 3rd party journalist who wants to do a little homework. The University at large is a pretty public place, as it has to be. Athletics, especially the football program, isn't. I have no way of knowing, nor do most journalists, of what goes on in Fort Schembechler unless I have sources who tell me. The Freep, apparently, thought they did.

I found the Carty series to be infinitely more aggravating because, as a student at the University at the time, it was so amazingly amateurish. He certainly had a point with several things, but the realities of being a student at UM contradicted so much of what he was railing on. I knew General Studies majors who weren't athletes. I took independent studies with professors who only had time to meet with me for very small amounts of time. Carty never realized that a 3-hour independent study class didn't actually meet for 3 hours every week.

With the football articles in the Freep, I can't prove these things false, and neither can anybody else on this blog. That's why the NCAA is here to look into it. If the NCAA doesn't find anything, OK, we were all right. But if they do find something, aren't we all going to look dumb...

You had me until "happen at every school."

Worst defense for rule-breaking ever. I'm not saying we did or didn't do what the Free Press alleges, but if the NCAA does find us guilty of wrong-doing, the fact that "every other school does it" should not EVER be used in defense of Michigan.

Whatever happened to Michigan being different than everyone else? During the 80's, every other school in America had problems with drugs and steroids. Hell, there are entire books written about steroid use at Michigan State. But it didn't happen at Michigan. Why? Because we didn't need to cheat to win. And if it had happened, do you think Bo and our fanbase would be standing in front of our program saying "well, everyone else does it!"? I think not.

Now, that's an extreme example. But I'll be damned if I'm going to stand by and watch as the NCAA is in town investigating Michigan football, and the best defense we can put up is "it happens everywhere." We're Michigan. It's time to stop blaming the Free Press, and time to start expecting that there be not even the faintest question of impropriety in our athletics programs.