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Not going to gum up the…

EDIT: Yeah, no, I don't need to bite on this.

Apologies to the mods if it was an issue.

Major cleanup needed re: the…

Major cleanup needed re: the "I don't think Elon Musk's well-known prejudices are all that bad, but are really just misunderstood" crowd over in the SpaceX thread.

https://mgoblog.com/mgoboard/spacex-successfully-launched-super-heavy-starship

Frankly, it would be great…

Frankly, it would be great if this could have been done by anyone else but him.

Surprise! It's Pete with an…

Surprise! It's Pete with an OSU scoop!

Fun fact: The Michigan…

Fun fact: The Michigan Marching Band is a class. Band members get course credits (though whether or not the credits/grade/both count towards their degree depends on the program). Feels like a job sometimes, but it's a class.

I'll second this…

I'll second this recommendation, it's a phenomenal read.

Also, Jason donated more than $56,000 in royalties from the early sales of the book to the Trevor Project. The sales have been unheard of for a first-time novelist working without a major publisher.

I'm not in the "I've given…

I'm not in the "I've given you enough with tuition" line of argument with UM as much as the "you've continually proven yourself to be a pretty terrible institution with no self-awareness or impetus to change" camp. Especially after their tactics to crush the GEO strike last year.

I am inclined to give to specific programs that were valuable or important when I was in school, if I give at all, but the university as a whole (and the Athletic Department) will never get a cent of general donation money from me.

For 5+ years, how has no one…

For 5+ years, how has no one figured out that the Joe Milton Experience™ is practice footage of this guy bombing throws like 75+ yards, in direct contrast to what he does in an actual game experience? Seriously, it feels like another round of gauging Brent Petway's pro potential based on his windmill dunks in pregame warmups.

After all these years, truly…

After all these years, truly, how difficult is it to actually spell Chris Webber's name correctly?

Webber. Not Weber.

(Pours one out because the…

(Pours one out because the legendary 24-hour donut place in Ypsi is no longer 24 hours)

They're elected positions…

They're elected positions. This isn't that difficult to understand.

Because like it or not, MSU…

Because like it or not, MSU is a major state institution that does a lot of good for the people of Michigan, and it behooves all of us who live here to not have it be run into the ground. 

Seriously, people, look beyond sports for even one second.

"The Gretchen"?

Wittmer?

"The Gretchen"?

Wittmer?

No shame in going where you…

No shame in going where you want to go and where you feel comfortable. Ys are usually really nice gyms. The one in Ann Arbor is gorgeous.

Braylon gets a lot of hate…

Braylon gets a lot of hate from the fanbase, and he's made a lot of very public mistakes. But I have to say that in every interaction I've ever had with him, he was a legitimately nice guy. Not something you get a lot with star-player-types. Great story.

At the same time, the…

At the same time, the guiding point seems to be that this was an unprecedentedly crazy amount. What was the price tag for OSU's NIL roster said to be? $13-14M? $1.75M for one guy seems patently nuts, almost unbelievable, until you remember the crazed nature of some of these other fanbases. It's not a game of the haves and have-nots now as much as the haves and the delusional-really-haves.

Pretty much, yes. There were…

Pretty much, yes. Schools found other ways to make it cost-free. My point was (IIRC) that the AD scholarship math today works in weird ways when someone is on a couple rosters, especially if one of them is football, which is one of the reasons as to why multi-sport athletes are harder to come by today. Back in the day, none of that mattered.

I was told NIL was a more…

I was told NIL was a more preferable arrangement than the League of Extraordinary Bag Men. And yet every revelation like this makes it feel dirtier.

It was fairly common up…

It was fairly common up until the early 1960s for Michigan football players to compete in other sports, especially basketball. Looking back from a contemporary moment where specialization is the thing and multi-sport athletes are rare, it's hard to fully grasp a guy like Ron Kramer playing three sports and being a star in two of them. So I don't know if it's accurate to say that "some football players helped out" in the late 40s as much as it's true that a lot of those guys of that era were freak athletes who were used to playing all year, and without the kinds of scholarship rules that exist now that make it harder/less advantageous for an athlete to be on two rosters, were encouraged to keep competing year-round, because they were just as good in the other sports, too.

Also, basketball was still a sport gaining traction at the college level well into the 1950s. Cazzie and Buntin got to Ann Arbor right at the cusp of NCAA basketball being a major thing, just as the NCAA Tournament was surpassing the NIT as the more important/prestigious postseason event. A lot of that is why Cazzie was so important for the program. He put Michigan on the map precisely at the moment when it was critical to do so.

They're renting, not buying.

They're renting, not buying.

And there's a trickle-down…

And there's a trickle-down effect when the luxury housing goes up, because then even the slumlords think that's what they can charge. I keep hearing these A2 high-rises are going to solve the housing crisis and make everything else more affordable, but when you see that they're almost solely marketing to rich out-of-state students whose parents will write a check without thinking about it (really, their websites have "Parents" tabs) and everything else keeps going up in price, what good is it really doing to address the problem?

I see this point made all…

I see this point made all the time here, but it 100% hinges on building enough actually affordable housing to make this density and walkability actually work. If not, all of the road dieting and parking restrictions are essentially meaningless.

Also try renting an…

Also try renting an apartment anywhere near downtown. Aside from the luxury high-rises (which, halol on that crap), everything is awful units for rent on timelines and bad faith practices dictated by predatory student landlords (which city council somehow seems incapable to fully rein in) at prices that would make a Chicago renter do a double take.

We've both lived in major cities where cost of living is presumed to be high. What we're paying to live in A2, between cars and rent and insurances of all kinds, is almost double what we were paying elsewhere. It's not tenable long-term for anyone who isn't starting on third base.

It really is great, but it…

It really is great, but it could be so much better with stronger commitments to a cohesive development plan centering both on affordable housing and commensurate infrastructure so that it's not impossible to get anywhere. A2 now has a middle-to-large city workforce with the roads of a sleepy college town and apartments priced beyond Chicago.

Just imagine if the endless line of cars in and out of town three times a day at UM Hospital shift changes were people walking or biking to nearby housing they can afford. 

Teams see a RB that was…

Teams see a RB that was still very good, but never quite the same after a knee injury <18 months ago. It's unfortunate, but Corum's stock isn't what it looked like in early November 2022. Feels like a vault into the 3rd round is the best case scenario.

Part of me died when I went…

Part of me died when I went to Yost for an early-season game years ago and saw Athletic Department people giving students "Children of Yost" t-shirts from a tent in front of the arena. All issues with the name aside, you're absolutely correct–never take a name, never accept oversight, never hand over power, never create leadership or traceable power structures. Also, never give The Victors any more choreography than the fist.

Athletics tried to put the clamp down student section stuff when I was in school. They sent email surveys, held focus group meetings, the whole nine yards. I went to one of them because they promised dinner and a Yost backstage tour. It proved to be great entertainment. Veiled threats were made, alternate/bad plans put forth, more or less constituting a blueprint for the AD and Yost security to use ticket privileges and surveillance and narcing (er, self-policing) to assert soft power over the students. Our cumulative response was basically "thanks for the free dinner, loved the arena tour, but no." Figured they were just biding their time and student interest/saltiness to wane, and indeed they were.

That's using your power for…

That's using your power for good.

It's clear you have a very…

It's clear you have a very specific idea about this that cannot be changed, even when people explain to you that what you're saying is simultaneously incorrect, implausible, and/or counterfactual. 

In other words, that's just, like, your opinion, man.

For real, explain how you …

For real, explain how you "lock out visiting fans."

There is no way to do this.

Tractor Traylor, LaVell…

Tractor Traylor, LaVell Blanchard, Jamal Crawford headband mania...

Crisler was fun back then, even if the end result sucked.

The very-PG explanation olf…

The very-PG explanation of not wanting to see a band director's khakis while he danced, gosh, I wish I'd brought a tape recorder.

Glen Williams was a saint of…

Glen Williams was a saint of a man. Still miss his voice at Yost after all these years, not to mention his early-morning bird hikes at Camp Michigania.

Minor editorial note,…

Minor editorial note, because it's always funny to me: Brian Ellerbe was the head coach at Michigan for, what, 3 seasons and some change, and Michigan fans have at least twice that number of ways to spell his name.

Ellerbe.

Had to LOL at an Absopure…

Had to LOL at an Absopure water and a stale Sodexo hot dog coming in at about 13 bucks, while LOLing harder at the concept of adding a Coors Light tall boy for another 12. It's crazy town.

Not going to go look it up…

Not going to go look it up for you, but I'd venture to guess that just about every B1G school on semesters is going to be on spring break sometime in late February-early March, too. Which also happens to be the most important part of the regular season.

What do you want the ADs to do, tell the conference to suspend play for two weeks every winter?

God help me, I had the…

God help me, I had the thought yesterday that Tommy Amaker probably could have coached this team onto the bubble. Because at least he knew when his team was a bucket of spare parts that needed to be deployed accordingly.

I also tend to think that…

I also tend to think that there's not a really fair or equal comparison there, either. College hockey has always been a really specific subset of the respective fanbase that doesn't always map onto other sports, and hockey people are already different. You can go to an opposing arena in a jersey most nights and be pretty much fine, because you're gonna end up talking hockey like a dork with the mirror version of yourself. I saw a fair bit of ND fans on Saturday, but zero problems, because it's always that way. They're just as much fans of the sport as the school, I guess.

Meanwhile at Crisler yesterday, every Purdue fan felt like a meathead at a football game. Felt more like getting trolled for sport than anything else.

Really and truly, though,…

Really and truly, though, what do you want them to do? This is Southeast Michigan. You restrict ticket-buyers to MI zip codes, and you still get 5000 Purdue alum auto industry engineers and their families packing the place.

When the team is bad and tickets are for sale, especially during student breaks, all bets are off. And it's not all that easy to get into Mackey these days, either, so even if Purdue fans overpay for away game tickets, they still end up ahead.

There was a change in hockey…

There was a change in hockey band leadership before the 2005-6 season. The new hockey band director (then the assistant MMB director) didn't really want to dance, and his boss, the Director of Bands, was already looking for an opportunity to get rid of it. The view was that the director needed to be more professional, as it was a role that was going to be concretized as a duty for one of the MMB directors, and a dancing band director was not what they wanted on TV. And thus it was so.

Every time something like…

Every time something like this happens, I really wonder what folks like the OP want the Athletic Department to do. How do they control who buys which tickets? How do they know if they're a Purdue fan or a Michigan fan? (Also, IIRC, there are conference-mandated opposing team tickets behind the bench, so that section behind the Purdue bench was always going to be Purdue people. And there was a section of youth basketball players on the other end near the UM bench that they brought in through the tunnel pregame, so they did give away some of them.)

Look, it was awful in Crisler yesterday. It was no fun to sit in the arena expecting a home game and realize you're surrounded by Purdue people who will not shut up about it. But the only solution is to make sure Michigan fields a team that Michigan fans want to see. Oh, and I dunno, cancel spring break or something?

I was at Yost this weekend…

I was at Yost this weekend and while I know it's spring break, the student section did feel pretty off. Also, agree that the band felt really disjointed.

All in all, Yost didn't really feel all that much like Yost, starting with whatever that was over in the student end. Too much dancing/choreography across the board, didn't appear all that intense. Back in the day, you'd feel like the paint was going to peel off the walls when the students did just about anything.

Also, missing you, Score-O. Sorry, a sled race just doesn't cut it.

It actually started because…

It actually started because you could hear the phone ring in the press box throughout the arena. IIRC, they would call up there from the PA/scorers' box, often during play. Our seats starting in the mid-90s were right underneath it, the sound was the classic old metal bell "brrrrrrrrrrrring," clear as day ringing off the metal ceiling.

Going to get Old Man Yelling…

Going to get Old Man Yelling at Clouds for a second...

What made the Michigan hockey student section so great for so long was the fact that there wasn't a name or an identity, there wasn't clear leadership, and there wasn't anything written down. It was organic. You came, you learned, you helped invent new things, and you taught as needed.

The idea of a codified document feels... unnecessarily official.

Yep, the context for this …

Yep, the context for this (IIRC) was that other rivalries, starting with Red River, were getting sponsorships. At that time, these kinds of deals were somewhat unproven ground and UM/OSU didn't anticipate that people were going to hate it.

What this actually seems to…

What this actually seems to be: Adrian Peterson selling off a bunch of stuff from his storage units with an estate sale company, which listed things he told them not to list and led to speculation that he's broke. Which, apparently, he is not.

In short, cut the speculation. This is probably erroneous clickbait.

I was there. Braylon's acute…

I was there. Braylon's acute Dropsies showed up at the wrong time. Whole team laid an egg against an immensely beatable OSU team.

There is absolutely no…

There is absolutely no correlation at all between TV ad breaks (controlled by the networks) and in-stadium advertising (controlled by the school).

Michigan is making a decision (the right one) to limit in-stadium advertising because fans want it that way and the potential money isn't enough to outweigh that desire.

Everything about this new…

Everything about this new stadium project is a boondoggle, why not add to the fun by (checks notes) playing home games in another state?

Seriously, the whole motivation behind this stupid thing was their insecurity over having too many opposing fans at their home games, and now they're going to go do stuff like play Wisconsin at Lambeau?

Somewhere I still have a 5…

Somewhere I still have a 5-minute phone card (!) with the team helmets and SBC branding on it, they were handing them out around the stadium that fall. There was a magnificent backlash indeed, most everyone thought it was exceedingly stupid, and it got axed almost immediately.

I gotta say, the original…

I gotta say, the original museum in the 90s was a pretty cool space. Definitely dated very quickly, but they had something going.