Recent Comments

If you are seriously considering marketing, Michigan is the better choice for that.  I'm in consumer packaged goods marketing and I've never even met a person from Columbia in my field.  I would imagine that they exist, I just never met anyone.  Full disclosure, I work in Chicago, but I did intern at J&J in New Jersey and I don't remember any Columbia people from when I was there.  Harvard, Wharton, NYU yes, but not Columbia.

Tech marketing may be slightly different, but I kind of doubt that the trend would flip.  I do know of a bunch of people that went into tech marketing from Michigan - primarily West Coast.

Management consulting probably doesn't matter either way other than location as noted by another poster.

I'm surprised that I haven't seen any mention of how after Harbaugh made his comments about Michigan academics that was later found that Stanford kept printed lists of 'easy classes' for their student athletes to take.  That makes Harbaugh a hypocrite as well.

http://www.stanforddaily.com/2011/03/09/1046687

Very frustrating.  

That's true, but last year had the whole trash tornado thing going on.  I think we should be able to score 20+ and that could easily be enough - given the new QB & receivers vs our defensive backfield.

Well, in more practical classes (read: using the material after college), this kind of thing matters.  I went to grad school for engineering at top 50 school (better than MSU) and TA'd classes that I took as an undergrad at a top 20 school (almost as good as Michigan).  

There was a shocking difference in difficulty and hand-holding.  In the top 20 school, you were required to figure things out on your own with very little help.  If you couldn't figure it out during a lab, then you fail, so you better understand what you are doing prior to showing up for the lab and be prepared to do what you had to do.  As a TA, at the top 50 school, I was 'required' to answer any question that students had, so labs became a long series of 'what do I do next' requiring no preparation or thought by the students.

Let's just say that one place teaches you to think for yourself and the other teaches you how to do what other people tell you to do and leave it at that.

Those guys are not exactly subjective.  Some of them think our game next year at Minny is a toss-up.  Sure, we could lose, but there is no way that is a 50-50 game.

Sad and it will definitely hurt us next year, but probably time to move on.

Seriously.  How about the no call block in the face on our DB on that 4th and 11 play that Logan ran for?  He almost knocked our guy's helmet off.  That would have saved the TD.

Ugh, that was Georgia-esque.  Not cool.

No way that is a catch.  Let's see if we get screwed.

Win or lose, it's going to be tough tomorrow at work.  We looked like absolute shit tonight and there is no way of arguing against that.

Well, we are really fortunate to be tied.  Let's see if we can steal one.

Getting tired of this crazy generous spots as well.

Borges:  We are averaging less than 2 yards per carry when running the ball.  Please call more pass plays.  Thanks.

Damn it!  Another 3rd and long given up

The bend but don't break is back.  Seems to be working so far.

Ridiculous pick!

I think he is the long snapper, so you are almost certainly right.

Feeling incredibly lucky to be leading this game.  It is thievery.

Thank you VT for going for the interception when you should have played the man there.  It would have done you no good to pick the ball on 3rd and 17 that deep with that little clock left.

Monster, monster stop!  Let's hope that fires up the offense!

This is going to be rough on the D tonight.  Too many plays on defense already they are going to be wiped out in the 4th quarter unless we can we can get something going on offense.

Three 3rd and 10+ conversions in a quarter.  This defensive reversion to last year after the defensive let downs in the OSU game is maddening.

Should have been another pick there.  Gruden, Cousins as an NFL QB is almost laughable. 

Knee was down.  How is the receiver so wide open?

Georgia playing not to lose.  Didn't work out so well.

So, it looks like OSU is pushing for that 0-10 record against the SEC in bowl games.  Good luck with that fellas.

It's been a while since I saw a Babylon 5 reference, nice work!

Indeed.  Posey got paid $1050 for 'alleged work' of 21.5 hours.  He really had no idea that that was fishy?  Also, what about paying taxes?  It doesn't explicity state it anywhere, but it kind of sounds like they didn't pay taxes on this income either.

Lastly, since it was a union shop, I doubt the jobs they allegedly had were available to the general public.  You could easily argue that they only got these jobs in the first place because they were student-atheletes.  I think that would be a violation as well.

I call shenanigans.

As a brand marketer for a major consumer package goods company with a Michigan MBA, I feel compelled to chime in.

Basically, as you think about customers and how you want to grow your business, typically you either try to grow household penetration (i.e. get more people to buy your products) or increase buy rate (i.e. get existing customers to buy more).  When put into this context, fans are clearly the customers as they are the only people buying anything.  The players are your employees that you use to improve your product and your brand.  Obviously, in this case the employee compensation and work contracts are non-traditional in that student-atheletes get an education, a potential shot at the NFL, and other non-material things in exchange for a somewhat binding work contract.  We are in competition with other companies (schools) for labor talent (players).  Obviously, the school does not want to refer to student-atheletes as employees which might be why they are trying to call them the customers even though they are clearly not.

Mgobloggers and other rabid fans are part of the super-loyal or super-heavy subset of consumers.  They probably already 'buy' as much Michigan football product as you can get them to.  As such, you don't do things to make them more happy.  Rather, you try to avoid pushing them away as you try to either convert light buyers into medium/heavy buyers (buy rate) or you try to add new buyers (penetration).  In reality, you do both, but from a marketing perspective, it's easier and cleaner to focus on either penetration or buy rate because the tactics you use are different.

This, by the way, explains why you see some of the things that they are doing.  They think about adding a mascot because they want to increase penetration (young kids).  This is sometimes referred to as an entry point strategy.  You want to get new buyers at the point that they are making a brand choice that will often last for life.  From a marketing perspective, that is why it’s not as insane as it sounds.  Obviously, this is horrifying to the super-loyals, but will they really go away because of it?

They need to do the quantitative market research to understand if the benefits outweigh the negative.  I use the word quantitative here on purpose – several, one-off anecdotes aren’t that helpful.  Is a mascot really all that motivating to young kids?  Will adding a mascot deteriorate the brand such that Michigan gets less buying from ‘brand switchers’ (fair weather/bandwagon fans)?  Will the super-loyals buy less?  It’s not that clear, actually.

I'd go so far as to say he deserves eleventy billion mgopoints.  This is ridiculously awesome (and by awesome, I mean tremendous, of course)

Nice double

I recognize that the line is not the same thing as our chances to win, but setting that aside for a moment, it's hard to believe that our toughest game is at Michigan State.  I like our chances to win that game a lot more than I do to beat Nebraska - at least as things stand right now.

According to Zillow.com, that house is worth $51,500.

One thing to add:

Differing abilities across levels of the secondary could account for some of the variation in the data.  So, for example, our secondary was terrible last year - lots of painful 3rd and 10+ yard conversions.  That wasted any good play by our defensive line.  A really bad line could have the same effect on  a good secondary by never getting to the QB.

So, imbalanced ability across levels of the defense could cause underperformance while a perfectly balanced defense would result in better than average performance.

Obviously, this would tremendously complicate the analysis and I'm not expecting anyone to run it, but I thought I would mention it anyway.

No doubt.  I was a little nervous when Howland left and they gave the job to Dixon, but that might have been the greatest move in recent Pitt b-ball history.

Agree with the above.  The other bonus that Pitt would bring is a great b-ball program.  They'd have to change their recruiting base as it would be tough for them to retain their NYC pipeline without the Big East tournament in MSG, but they should be able to do that.

Draconian 'security procedures' prevent me from using anything else (I had to complain just to get IE7!!!), so I guess I'm stuck with the Colors of Evil for now...

The only problem is that someone will need to convince Denard to scramble/take off more often.  He really doesn't do that all that often.  Feels like an easy thing to learn though.

I wonder if we get exclusivity on that for a while.

Also, love the Judge Dredd avatar.

The kid wants to be a QB and he has proven that he can be.  His throwing game was light years better than the previous year.  Let's not give up on him improving again yet.

Besides, if they tell him that he can't be a QB here and has to become a slot ninja/wildcat guy, he probably will transfer.  He can go just about anywhere he wants now - spread-friendly places, anyway.

...an easier schedule and something like 20 returning starters - including not having to play freshmen all over the place in the secondary, especially at corner. 

Seriously, we're set up to do well next year as long as the offense doesn't fall apart.  And before anyone freaks out, I'm not saying that it will, but it could - particularly if Denard takes his talents elsewhere.

One likely problem that we'll have (that probably benefits Michigan) is that the Wannstache was a remarkably good recruiter.  Pitt routinely pulled some skill guys at WR and RB that they really had no business getting.  I think the game management will be a lot better better with Graham but it might be with less talent in the short-term - especially with the defections to the NFL.  The Pitt athletic department has really gotten its act in gear with the b-ball team.  Now it's time to get the football team going.

Also, I can't even express how happy I was that Pitt didn't move to the Big Ten.  The last thing I wanted was a yearly matchups between Pitt and Michigan.

Probably true, but I rather doubt he'd have a shot at Michigan after this fiasco.

Assuming Michigan is anything like Pitt where I went to grad school and tutored student-athletes, they get all the help they could possibly use.  Any kid in an athletic program has free access to all the tutoring that they could want.  That includes help with homework and such - much of which is graded. 

For the record, I really didn't like tutoring most of the kids in football and men's and women's b-ball.  Many (but not all) of those kids didn't care about academics and took ridiculous classes like Pre-Algebra, the start of which was addition of three digit numbers.  Things like:  324 + 797 = ?.  Seriously?  How is 7th/8th grade math a college math class?

Pitt isn't as good of a school as Michigan, but they aren't that far apart either.  I bring all of this up because it really isn't all that difficult to get a 2.0 GPA when you are taking classes like these - even if you are practicing and working out as much as these kids do.

Very little, if anything.  UConn is brought up with some regularity this year in order to compare with Michigan, but everyone forgets (or doesn't mention) that this was the first time anyone saw this year's version of Denard.  UConn got destroyed by Denard.  Every other team had the benefit of scouting and could gameplan a bit against Denard.

For this reason, it is also troubling that many people here seem to think 'we would have gone undeated in the Big East' this year.  I don' t think that would have been the case.  The Big East is worse than usual this year, but the Big East has a surprisingly good record in bowl games in the BCS era (36-23). 

But enough about the Big East.  Let's Go Blue!