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    national champs baby

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    Patrick Hruby is doing God's work.

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  • Cornell wrestler tops Michigan's Trey Burke for Sports Illustrated award | The Detroit News | detroitnews.com

    first comment: "EVERY ATHLETE HAS ASPIRATIONS OF WINNING AND WE HAVE OUR FAVORITES BUT IT IS ALWAYS A PLEASURE TO OTHER STUDENTS ACHIEVE THEIR GOALS, TOO!"

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    I am only motivated by people who have no opinion about me.

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    the just released schedules were a flat-out statement that the B10 doesn't believe SOS will matter in playoff selection

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Recent Comments

Date Title Body
6 weeks 4 days ago Heading

makes more sense if you read "Kill" as a noun.

7 weeks 5 days ago That's how I first read it.

Which made me wonder if the "We on" version was a reference to an incendiary airline accident.

I still don't know what the jet silhouette signifies, unless the complete thought is not parallel to the "We been on fire" construction, and reads something like "We on aerial transportation."

7 weeks 5 days ago I did.

I play one myself, and as an admirer of the instrument, I have to correct spelling --

"'Cello," or "Cello,"

is an abbreviation for the Italian "Violoncello," itself a diminutive of "Violone," augmentative of "Viola."

In Vogrich's case, I had the idea it was more the size of a contrabass.

12 weeks 4 days ago Statistically speaking

I am wondering if you are differentiating expectations based on a run-based offense v. a pass-first offense.

I imagine that there were teams in that stretch with below-average passing and running stats; the improvement in overall winning average for teams with strong running games might be accounted for merely by excluding teams that stink at everything.

Or in other words, I wonder if a look at strong passing teams would show a similar tendency toward above-average winning percentages?

If you are not trying to make a point that the running game is more predictive of winning than is the passing game, then I misunderstood you.

20 weeks 13 hours ago When

did UM go Nike? This would still leave us with the '70's and most of the 80's.

It's sort of sad that, in order to save money, we've lost control of our own uniforms.

20 weeks 13 hours ago Voice in the wilderness?

from the above:

Newberry said Toradol "makes you feel like Superman for three hours," but the 35-year-old now is suffering from Stage 3 kidney failure that doctors attribute to Toradol.

"I think they're playing Russian roulette basically," Pierce Scranton, former Seahawks team doctor, told Kremer. "You are describing a patient population of football players who on a chronic basis are using Toradal just to play, and that's outside of the FDA guideline. In essence that would be construed as off label and not used for what its intended use was."

22 weeks 2 days ago I used to care about the tradition.

And maybe it's because it was a part of the Michigan sporting culture; particularly, although I didn't know it at the time, Bo's turning down Texas AM to stay with a smaller salary at UM, and later, as AD, sending Billy Frieder packing prior to the BB championship after he signed a contract at ASU. I probably naively believed that winning came from resisting the temptations of greed and money, and it seemed that way after Fisher went on to win the championship. Someone posted that Bo wanted to ditch the helmet design when he first got to UM; I didn't know about that at the time either.

Carr appeared to continue the tradition of winning without giving in to the pressures of big-money college sports, although, in retrospect, the MNC in '97 and the seeming near-miss in '06 draw attention away from a sort of meh-ish 8-4 to 9-3 average overall, perhaps the price of resisting the pressure of big money.

Perhaps the NCAA game has given in to money in a way different from the big-money days of the '20'-60's. Perhaps TV has driven CFB away from the community-rich seeming democracy of a fans-in-attendance-driven sport to a TV-contract-advertising-revenue-driven sport, with the transition accelerating during the BCS years. The economic pressures drove cream-puff scheduling that produced 8-home-games-a-year, more fan revenue and shittier matchups.

Through all this, the new CFB economic system has forced ADs to compete to pay higher coaching salaries (look what happened going from Gerg to Mattison). Increasingly, the ditching of old niceties makes the unpaid status of athletes in revenue sports harder to look at as the role of money in determining the substance of the sport increases.

I can't predict the future. The viewership debacle for last year's MNC game gave me hope that the corporate side of CFB had at last gutted the goose with the golden eggs enough to maybe push the balance of power back to a more fan-oriented economic model, and that the pressure to abandon historic traditions and to conform to the featureless and faceless marketing of CFB without a sense of place or history would abate, but, as the latest clown uni business here shows us, we are not there yet.

Whatever happens, I think that it is natural that, as the thing I followed these past years changes to look less like what I know, that I will lose my emotional attachment to it. It is like going back to your old hometown -- the more it resembles the way you remember it, the more at home you feel, and the more it changes, the less it matters to you that you once belonged there.

I don't use tradition against other fans, I don't think. In fact, the more OSU fusses with their unis, the less that feels like The Game as I have known it since we got beat up in 1968 (I think that is the year that Woody settled on the uni that generations of M fans have grown to dread until the clowniform business got to them a few years back). Whether its ours or theirs, I am more likely to remember the black depressions that came from losing during my early teen years (unfortunately, there weren't that many big-game wins; just astronomic winning percentages capped by disappointment most years) if the unis remain reminiscent of those years. My life hinges less on these outcomes now; if modern corporate marketing tries to create a new brand identification with me now, there is a long way to go to match the passion I developed for the "tradition" over the years. This is doubly so if the new "brand" is a knock-off of the marketing precepts being used in every other geographic niche of the country.

Maybe changes in the sport will make it safe to cling to tradition before the economoic pressures of the last few decades have destroyed them all. What Michigan football's trappings and traditions will look like then, I don't know, nor do I know how I will react to it or how much attachment I will feel to it.

28 weeks 5 days ago "So, for the first time,

both teams enter the game unbeaten and untied, 10-0."

I believe both were undefeated and untied at the time of the 1970 game as well, although that year Michigan played a 10-game season and OSU played a 9-game season.

30 weeks 6 days ago I was wondering the same thing.

I can only imagine some of this info being in old newspaper articles. There must be some other form of primary documentation to which OP is privy.

RE Lantry, I can only think "1974," as well as the then-President having to take his side when questions about that failed (?) 18-yarder came up at press conferences.

30 weeks 6 days ago I think

it's more a matter of fitting his message to earthly beings bound by the limits of materialism.

30 weeks 6 days ago "Brutal,"

but it DID get there.

I was pleased by the time we left on the clock for Sparty to work with.

30 weeks 6 days ago That's what I was thinking.

I missed the first half because, for some reason, I couldn't find a sports bar with this game (in Atlanta, GA) and I only found one in time for the second half.

When I saw the 6-0 score and the stat line of one interception, I thought, "thank god this isn't ND all over again."

Conservative, boring, ineffective, maybe. But I'll take all of those over 6 turnovers.

30 weeks 6 days ago Certainly,

after three consecutive years of subsequent UM-OSU games in the last regular-season game and in the conference championship, the divisions will be correctly re-aligned.

It's true: sometimes I lie to myself to make myself feel better.

30 weeks 6 days ago I think

the title of that article should be "Does . . . ?" and not "Can . . . ?"; but, to be fair, I only had one quarter of statistics a quarter-century ago.

30 weeks 6 days ago Title should be

"Gripes ABOUT Borges." Some folks will click through thinking Borges was griping about something. This way it is more hits, but you don't want to get them this way.

30 weeks 6 days ago Just in case people are looking up old scores,

Michigan's 9-3 "Snow Bowl" victory over OSU in 1950 consisted of a TD w/ 1-point conversion and a safety.

30 weeks 6 days ago Thanks.

I saw them, but I thought they were just images there to explain the vote totals.

30 weeks 6 days ago It has been noted here in thin times

and thick times: winning makes all vexing annoyances go away.

30 weeks 6 days ago To be fair,

the commenter's first name is "Velikovsky"; we should be encouraging him to try out his English and offering correction in a friendly way.

Also, if the rest of his name is literally descriptive, he's of the canine persuasion, and we need to make allowances for the problems of typing without opposable thumbs.

30 weeks 6 days ago I don't know

how to figure this out;

can anyone tell me how to vote on a forum topic OP?

30 weeks 6 days ago They seem

pretty happy with Kenny Guiton's performance as back-up.

Apropos which, where have we heard this before?:

That's fantastic news! Unfortunately we have to worry about this kind of thing for 2 more years because he's a run first QB.

30 weeks 6 days ago Here's what the OSU OP says:

Even though he's getting released from the hospital, it's probably still a bit early to speculate about his status for next week's game against Penn State.

We'll have more information Monday with our coverage of Urban Meyer's weekly press conference.

30 weeks 6 days ago In addition to the above,

this is a mirror of Michigan's excruciating OSU loss in 1974.

32 weeks 6 days ago Bump Elliott

had to warn Bo off when Bo told him "the first thing I'm going to do is get rid of those silly helmets." Thank god for supportive former coaches in those days.

There were no wings during Yost's coaching career, although he was AD through the first three years of the Crisler (and hence, wings) era.

37 weeks 3 days ago more

bubble screens.

37 weeks 3 days ago I don't think

the '68 OSU team was as well-put-together as the '69 team, which makes the upset all the more surprising. '68 OSU had several key games by which they slithered to the MNC; '69 OSU was never in a close game until they lost to UM. So I would put the '69 team over the '68 team. It just so happens that Bo was able to get ready for them with mostly Bump's team while staying under the radar; I think Woody overlooked us.

38 weeks 1 day ago Carr

was trying to get out the door since before '06. Nothing cost him his job; he was done as soon as he could find a way out.

39 weeks 7 hours ago I read

this double negative a couple of times:

I don't think there's any question that the SEC hasn't been the best football conference for a few years now,

before deciding it doesn't mean what it's intended to mean, although it has a "You can't put too much water in a nuclear reactor" kind of pliability about it.

39 weeks 8 hours ago I think

it's about the same for the Big Ten, although UM's is better than the conference as a whole, similar to its record against the SEC.

39 weeks 5 days ago This should be

a link.

I don't see anything in there about "Beilen's take."  Is the OP mis-leadingly titled, or did I miss something?

39 weeks 5 days ago Let's try

an alternative 2006 scenario.

Let's suppose UM goes undefeated until losing in a close game to OSU, and the two are ranked #1/#2 at the end of the season.

In a four-game playoff, UM is paired with #3 U-Florida, and OSU is paired with #4 USC.

Judging by the results of the Cap-1 bowl a year later, UM pounds UF and advances to play either OSU or USC. If it's OSU, then maybe the outcome is like the outcome of previous rematches of regular-season games, such as the bowl matchup between UF and FSU after the 1996 season, or Bama and LSU in 2011-12, ie, the team that lost in a nail-biter during the season comes back and annihilates the other team in a rematch on neutral territory. If the opponent is USC, then UM loses by three touchdowns, but the outcome is nullified by an NCAA ruling four years later.

Under the BCS system, UM is talked out of its #2 ranking as part of an obvious conflict of interest between the talking heads at ESPN and the conference that the #3 team is in. The whole system revolves around the politics of money and influence with an increasingly SEC-besotted MSM, and the willingness of some coaches to cover themselves with the stench of shameless self-interest in order to advance themselves under a corrupt system poised between corrupt bowls, indifferent broadcast companies primarily concerned with money, and a strange entrenched bureaucracy at the NCAA. UM gets shafted, and loses by three touchdowns to USC in a meaningless beauty-pageant bowl, which result is nullified by the NCAA four years later.

Under this scenario, it seems UM's MNC shot is better under a playoff system, although perhaps not by much.

39 weeks 6 days ago Deliberate?

Just noting the proximity of "dick" and "showering."

42 weeks 15 sec ago Meh.

I was behind Lloyd as coach, but not sure since about his loyalty to M above personal factions. I think RR showed more loyalty to M after he got fired than Carr did after retiring.

46 weeks 5 days ago Last I checked,

there is no "no religion" rule on Mgoblog.

46 weeks 5 days ago The very word "evil"

is a step away from rational conversation, because it is a perjorative term and hence an expression of bias. It may be a useful shorthand in the absence of time for deliberation, but it belongs in the same category as "terrorist (as opposed to "insurgent," "freedom-fighter," "partisan" or "member of the resistance")" or "us and them."

My favorite movie quote regarding a breakdown in ethical behavior is from Thirteen Days, featuring Kevin Costner attempting yet another implausible regional accent in yet another JFK-related movie, in which the president muses on a meeting with his very militaristically gung-ho JCS with the following:

There has to be something morally wrong about abandoning your own better judgement.

It isn't so much good and evil as it is a question of how we respond to strong or irresistable pressure to renounce our own better judgement. I don't think "indifference of good men" is the problem; it is that sometimes doing the right thing seems like a costly, extravagant luxury. Doing the right thing comes at a price.

I think it is unlikely that whoever is in the position to investigate this scandal will ever have the authority or resources to do a full investigation. (The range of unanswered questions includes the mysterious 2005 disappearance of Ray Gricar, the prosecutor with the original jurisdiction in the Sandusky case. If this is indeed related, then suspicion could extend outside PSU to local government and law enforcement. Rooting all this out would be a titanic task that would hinder PSU operation indefinitely.) Our knowledge of what happened will probably always be incomplete and we may never know whether the culture that enabled the scandal has been rooted out. (Nation-building from outside is rarely successful.) The plausible actions, even up to the prosecution of Spanier, may still end up being merely symbolic while leaving the culture largely intact. We may never know whether doing the right thing there is merely inconvenient or whether it is an unaffordable luxury for the average person. We may decide we can't afford the expense of finding out.

The doctor who did MLK's post-mortem said he had the heart of a 65-year-old man when he died; MLK was 38 at the time. He paid a heavy toll, spiritually and healthwise, for doing the right thing. Heroic people will pay the price to do the right thing regardless.

The rest of us will hold back when it means,for instance, relinquishing or diluting our power to protect and take care of our own children; one friend of mine said "your idealism goes when you have your first child." Or as Gandhi said, "The drowning are in no condition to help others."

We can only hope we find our way to situations where we aren't consistently asked to abandon our better judgement; at best, we can only afford to stand up to a few battles and to hope they end up being worth winning. Among the people whose lives are touched by the Sandusky scandal are those who served under Spanier et alia who wanted, like any of us does, to be good but, for one reason or another, couldn't afford to avoid some share in the guilt when they realized the complicity stretched all about them.

47 weeks 7 hours ago You named two of my nominees.

1.) 1981 -- Bo's first Rose Bowl win, and M's first since 1965. thank God almighty, free at at last.

2.) 1986 Fiesta -- the championship game that should have happened in 1997/8.

I would add the 1988 Hall-of-Fame Bowl win over Alabama because, although both teams were not the most successful that year, it was M's first encounter with Bama and it ended with a win to offset the loss to Auburn in the 1984 Sugar Bowl.

And of course, the '08 Cap One Bowl. Revenge for Meyer's victory in the whine wars of '06, and a satisfactory matchup with the Heismann Trophy winner.

Michigan was hosed more than once in the Rose Bowl. On balance, I would have been happier with no Rose Bowl. I never understood the B10's strange marriage with the Pac8, which was a very unhappy one for us from 1970-92.

47 weeks 8 hours ago I read

here on some post or another long ago that Bo claimed he heard the officials gloating about throwing the game (on purpose). Disturbing they can get away with it if true.

51 weeks 1 day ago They used to be underlined

before the latest system tweak when the neg-bombs went away.

I add underlines to mine using the plain text editor and html.

51 weeks 6 days ago It takes two.

If a right note is surrounded by wrong notes on every side, then it will sound wrong also.

A note can only sound right relative to its neighbors, ie, the neighboring notes need be right for the pitch relationships to sound right.

Or, to put it another way, if you had perfect pitch, you might find that she DID hit ONE correctly, but that only someone who knows A=440 hz when they hear it would have any way to know without other correct notes for reference.

51 weeks 6 days ago I think "tone deaf"

is the flip side of the concept of "talent." Most people, for various reasons, chose to mystify and mythologize "talent," which is another word for "ability," which, in music, is usually a combination of aptitude and devoted, persistent, diligent toil.

Those who fail to achieve at the highest level prefer to think of the outcome as the result of disparities in some recondite, mystically bestowed "gift"; and from the time of Paganini, audiences looking for a good show prefer to think that they are witnessing some freakish abberation in the natural order of things rather than the outcome of painstaking devotion.

You may not be tone deaf, merely forgiving. And being "forgiving" and "congratulatory" with a girlfriend is hardly to be faulted, especially if she has breasts like Victoria Zarlenga.

But it wasn't very good music.

51 weeks 6 days ago "Francis Scott Key just shat himself in his grave."

Actually, FSK had nothing to do with the music.

The traduced composers were members of the Anacreontic Society, possibly headed up by John Stafford Smith.

Here is an instrumentally accompanied rendition of the original opus; the singer isn't terribly preoccupied with consonants, but the lyrics from the YouTube description are below:

To Anacreon in Heav'n, where he sat in full glee,
A few sons of harmony sent in a petition
That he their Inspirer and patron would be;
When this answer arriv'd from the Jolly Old Grecian "Voice, fiddle and flute, "no longer be mute,
"I'll lend you my name and inspire you to boot,
"And, besides, I'll instruct you, like me, to intwine
"The Myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's Vine."

(...)

Ye Sons of Anacreon, then join hand in hand;
Preserve unanimity, friendship and love!
'Tis yours to support what's so happily plann'd;
You've the sanction of Gods and the fiat of Jove. While thus we agree Our toast let it be:
"May our club flourish happy, united and free!
"And long may the sons of Anacreon intwine
"The Myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's Vine."

51 weeks 6 days ago I got over Michael Weinreb

after he channelled his PSU sorrows into a malicious dig at UM after the Sugar Bowl. His writing there was transparently arbitrary and agenda-driven, such as calling CFB's 15-year-old overtime rule a "loophole (!?)" mixed in with various malicious digs.

Meh.

51 weeks 6 days ago Oosterban?

..

51 weeks 6 days ago I don't know about "since 1950" --

from wiki:

Bixler endured a mediocre 4–3–2 season. Bixler resigned and talk of Ohio State being a "graveyard of coaches" became commonplace, a reputation that lingered for decades.[9]

Wes Fesler became head coach in 1947 . . . In 1950 Fesler, rumored to be resigning because of pressures associated with the position and abuse of his family by anonymous critics [emphasis mine], returned to coach the Buckeyes, who won six games in a row to move into the top ranking in the AP poll. However the season fell apart as the Buckeyes lost to Michigan during a blizzard, a game that came to be known as the "Snow Bowl". Two weeks later, citing concerns about his health and family, Fesler resigned.

I suppose it all depends on what you mean by "his own terms"; would you consider Rommel's death to be on "his own terms?"

Speaking of "health and family," this seems to be a refrain for OSU coaches, doesn't it?

51 weeks 6 days ago Woody and Bo

were bros, and they were cut from the same cloth. Perhaps that gave Bo a tolerance for things about Woody that the rest of us can't stand.

I think Woody's social disease was just a lack of self-discipline and respect for others in the heat of the moment and what I will have to call a hint of malice.

In W's best moments, he was a model of citizenship and leadership, such as the time in 1960 when he showed up to speak to and break up a crowd that had formed in protest to the Ohio Faculty Senate's decision to decline OSU's 1960-1 Rose Bowl invitation. His words at the time went to the tune of something like: "We're not talking about the rent; it's just football. Keep your focus on the big picture and stay out of trouble. Go Home." His actual words from this occasion are actually quite moving.

But from the time I started watching football in 1969, W was always in the news. He didn't lose "all restraint for a moment"; he did it over and over and over again. By this point, we have to acknowledge a complex mixture of not compatible tendencies; the restraint and good will he preached at the high point of drama in the institutional struggle between academics and football in 1960 are not visible in what looks to me like disrespect and ill will for at least some of the people around him on the football field. Not just the adversaries -- one of these days I need to go and pinpoint the place in the film of the 1969 M/OSU ABC broadcast where Woody expresses the sentiment, to an assistant, that "you're in the way, I can't see" by shoving him and knocking the beverage out of his hand. Fairly or not, that is the image of him that resonates with my recollections of the years that he personified OSU football to me.

And then there is the running-up-the-score thing. All of this together I take as a hint of malice.

To sum up, I quote Wilhelm Furtwüngler's comments about the symphonies of Anton Bruckner: "It is philistinism to suppose that greatness arises from a lack of faults." So Woody may have been a great man, just not a very nice one all the time. I think the normal hatefulness inspired by success over rival fanbases is augmented in his case by repeated instances of not-cool behavior.

This is the first I've heard about Woody speaking to the team from TSUN; the mythology seems to be that he would never stoop to do such a thing. I know Bo was tied to the OSU family by his years as an assistant there, leading to the famous "Dammit, Bo!" story. Can you lead us to more info on the subject of Woody's address to the Wolverines?

51 weeks 6 days ago I don't think that's fair.

I've slowly evolved from a Leg-Man to an Ass-Man over the years, but no Dick is involved (except mine).

51 weeks 6 days ago My take

is that he is an excellent OC who was fortuitously paired with an excellent DC at WV when he made the leap to HC, and exposed when UM cheaped out on a DC.

Would Hoke have fared better here in '08? Even without real money to hire assistants, I doubt Hoke would have ever put his secondary in the hands of someone like Gibson. He certainly would not have done as well as he did starting in '11. Anyway, I think the timing was as fortuitous for Hoke as it was shitty for RR; he got two years experience at SDSU, which was a promotion from Ball State, and the additional experience building programs. He also knew where he was headed all along, while RR found himself at an institutional dead end almost immediately after slamming the door on his first escape offer at Bama. UM was a little like Anywhere But Working for Pastilong to RR, which made everything a little unsettled for everyone. That, and a fractious and entitled UM community that was just realizing that Generalissimo Bo was no longer cracking heads and enforcing discipline -- picture Yugoslavia after Tito. As time goes on I can start to imagine how '08 could happen to either UM or RR.

From what I saw, entitled goons at WVU started making it impossible for RR to stay shortly after he gave his pledge to WVU. He built a gravy train, and then all the parasites wanted to suck off it, which is normal, and then they all wanted to get to drive it, which is also normal but intolerable. And all along, he seems to take the blowback created by the double-dealings of Pastilong, BM and MSC. (Gibson is still his fault -- here and at Arizona.)

I hope he gets a chance to set up his old formula for success from WV and to put all of the crap that fell on his head behind him. I think he showed himself to be a genuine, well-meaning and honest administrator as well as a powerful offensive mind while here, despite all the rest, which is hard to grasp after all the kerfluffle thrown up by the turkeys at WVU, the MSM smelling a "decline and fall" headline, the blame-shifting of BM and MSC covering up their own potentially firable offenses and, most of all, a rancid coalition of unethically ambitious local press and implacable RR-hating fifth-columnists inside our own AD. I hope, and we will see soon enough, that RR's departure from UM turns out to be a win for both. I can't remember if DB ever came out and said that it was all just too much to keep fighting back against even if success was on the way, but I remember getting that impression and at the time I though it was all unfair.

Now that I think about it, is was just plain true. At the time, I thought that firing RR rewarded saboteurs who put factions over program by giving them what they wanted. Now I think that it did bring the factional strife at UM to a quicker end; fighting it out would have, among other things, kept the old partisan hostilities on a permanent war footing until the battles had been fought to a restless truce, waiting to break out again. And against this, RR's potential was still unproven here and nobody was predicting an '11 season under RR that would be as good as the one Hoke actually had. I hope RR gets off to a good start at Arizona so we can all move on to greener pastures.

51 weeks 6 days ago I got one of my degrees

from FSU. Meh.

51 weeks 6 days ago I want to see

what happens after Rubinstein and Snyder publish a cowardly hit piece against the Navy SEALs.

51 weeks 6 days ago Everitt

makes Chuck Norris look like Urkel.

Looking at the money quote,

They're stuck with that quarterback (sophomore Braxton Miller) for the next two or three years, that's fine with me. He throws worse than (Tim) Tebow[;]

I wonder if this makes us Cap-One Michigan or 2009 Alabama. I hope the former.

51 weeks 6 days ago Exactly; we should all

be inspired by the example of Gilbert Gottfried:

51 weeks 6 days ago Actually,

CJ's campaign press officer, Meredith Turney, did deny that "the Google bomb excuse is the perfect cover" for cjk5h, although the confusing wording could also be construed as a denial that cjk5h.

This is somewhat compelling, because she refused to deny that CJ had ever taken the tag off a mattress; it's all here.

In case no-one else extracted the following line here, the Deadspin article linked above contains this diamond:

His campaign will come to a close on May 29, when the Texas primary takes place and James's political career gets locked in a shed.

What about his announcing/abuse-of-bully-pulpit career?

51 weeks 6 days ago I think

it's an "N" -- if you look closely, the "M" in "Mike" has three humps.

51 weeks 6 days ago I don't know --

pictures don't lie, do they? This is purportedly Indiana in 1934:

(You can see it larger by right-clicking on the image and selecting "view image" from the popup menu; the photo credit reads "Courtesy of Indiana University Arbutus Yearbook.")

From your comments about the linked site, I have trouble believing you actually looked at it. Sorry if I'm wrong about that.

52 weeks 2 hours ago Needs more

mood-altering use of light and shadow.

52 weeks 2 hours ago I don't know --

they/it have/has a sort of Hannibal Lector aura to them/it.

And there is a sort of winged-helmet look to the way the grille swerves up at the end. I bet Brandon could find a way to utilize that when he gets around to testing out marketing gimmicks on the helmets.

52 weeks 12 hours ago If there's going

to be a big change, the first thing I would do is get UM/OSU back into the same division. I don't know how deadly serious DB was about prioritizing a once-every-nine-year-or-so UM/OSU matchup in the neutral-site conference championship; for me, when the annual UM/OSU matchup ceases to be a central event in CFB, then CFB is a strange and new sport to me. You can molify me if you move the championship to the home venue of the higher-ranked division winner and UM and OSU both win their division three years in a row. In the meantime, the split into separate divisions puts our favorite game at high risk over time.

As far as VTech, I'm not sure this conforms to what we learned last go-round, which is that Universities make ten or more times the money off research grants correlated to membership in the AAU than they do off Football/TV. When speculating on conference realignment, I would consult this list first.

What's the latest on Nebraska's AAU status? Apropos which, this guy said the following, which I hadn't heard before:

The application process to the AAU, assuming initial academic standards are met, requires a vote among the existing AAU members. A relatively small block of schools can blackball a university. For example, the 12 CIC (B1G plus Chicago) members were not able to protect Nebraska's membership from the jilted Big XII schools. As such, Nebraska's membership has been put on hold.

52 weeks 12 hours ago Do you think

UTx's entitlement issues will survive the 16-team conference era?

I have trouble seeing them go gently into this dark night.

52 weeks 12 hours ago You realize

that guarantees an LSU/Bama '11 situation every year, plus Appy State or Western Michigan advancing to the semi-final every seven years or so? This is fine by me, but imagine the howling if UGA had beaten LSU in their conference championship this past season.

52 weeks 13 hours ago I think

he means CFB/TV market.

1 year 5 hours ago Or in comments

on an OSU blog, for that matter.

My feeling on the OP as a whole is that clearly the MgoCommunity hasn't worked out its feelings about where the RR era fits into the 140-year history (after all, it's still not too long ago) and posts like this serve as a huge vent for accumulated explosive gases that might be harmful otherwise.

After Bo died, we thought we were a community and found out during the RR era that some people so put their factions over the good of the program as a whole that sabotage was possible. I like having the discussion out in the open better.

1 year 6 hours ago I was a 14-year-old

expat in Atlanta that year, so I remember vividly that, other than the Rose Bowl, the MSU game was the only Michigan game televised nationally that year. It was thin gruel in those days. My dad occasionally brought back Ann Arbor News game articles from business trips up to Ann Arbor.

1 year 6 hours ago Oops, you're right.

1965 is in.

"Bunce" is already covered below, so never mind.

Plunkett was the QB in the '71 Rose Bowl v. Woody. After 41 1/2 years, I can still hear the incessant bowl hype for that one: "Jim Plunket leads the Stanford 11 against the pulverizing ground attack of Ohio State." OSU is nevertheless one of three teams honored at the official NCAA site with an MNC for 1970.

By the end, the '72 Rose Bowl had a very déjà vue feel to it.

1 year 7 hours ago Looking back to the RR transition,

my vote for the Nostradamus award goes to "Rick," writing here from the OSU point of view at the blog "Waiting for Next Year," for comments in a Feb. 4, 2008 intervew with Brian Cook, in which he saw things none of us wanted to see, including Brian, and wrote proleptically with acumen approaching hindsight:

Much of Michigan’s recent problems have been because of the defense in my opinion, how is that being addressed and will they be improved this year?

[BC] Uh… how recent? Despite a couple of rough games in ’05, that was still a lights-out unit statistically. This year it was considerably uglier.

[Rick]Well, looking at games against Ohio State and bowl opponents since 2003, Michigan is giving up 31.8 points per contest, including the 14 points that Ohio State got on a sloppy field this year.

It is dizzying to go back and read predictions, like Brian's, from that era in the harsh light of hindsight.

1 year 7 hours ago This isn't exactly a response

to your post or an argument with it in any way, but your post reminds me that we further owe RR for his part in a really seamless and quiet transition to the Hoke era; particularly his advice to his most noteworthy recruit. I think we owe him good wishes (except against UM in the Rose Bowl) just for the contrast between the saga of Mallett and D-Rob.

1 year 22 hours ago Revelli

was given a special tribute at the 1970 UM-OSU game, the last one he conducted. The rest of that game I recall as a horror, ending 20-9 with only 33 Michigan rushing yards.

1 year 22 hours ago That last drive

was the result of a Stanford kickoff return getting snuffed in the end zone for a safety; it looked for a long time like the game was going to end in a 10-10 tie.

The safety seemed to come out of nowhere, but M's next kick didn't pin Stanford nearly as far back and allowed them that last drive.

Michigan should have stopped going to the Rose Bowl after 1948.

1 year 22 hours ago And I

still hate the Rose Bowl. By the time anything positive transpired there -- 1981, 1998 -- it was too late to change my conditioning about getting hosed there nearly every time M went.

In the little footage I've seen of that game, the field looks muddy. I don't remember noticing that at the time.

1 year 22 hours ago The BANDS

were the subject of a Newsweek article prior to the Rose Bowl.

1 year 1 day ago Our chief weapon

is surprise...surprise and fear...

1 year 1 day ago There seems less difference

when you consider this:

Things were great for the first 5-6 weeks of the seasons when they were winning

As far as 3-9, even a commenter with an OSU avatar can see this from the banks of the Olentangy:

Michigan being too cheap to get Jeff Castell + No QB = Fail

This article doesn't seem like a huge amount of space to spend on a major rival. It is Spring, after all.

I thought at the time that we lucked out with RR because he actually turned out to be serious, even passionate, about creating a family atmosphere and with his focus on quality off-the-field behavior, emphasizing grades, sitting his #1 punter for OSU for disciplinary reasons, etc. I thought the lazy repetitions of the MSM meme about "sleazy" did a serious injustice to the truth about RR. I was/am also one of those who thinks three years is maybe one year too early to pull the plug on anybody who doesn't crash a motorbike with a mistress on board or something similar, maybe the opposite of giving Weiss five years, perhaps one too many. At any rate, all the coaches involved either way, and the schools that fired them, are going on with their lives.

I also think we lucked out with Hoke. I was covering my eyes when the talk was around Harbaugh and Miles; I had seen enough comments about Harbaugh from commenters over the years on this site to make me wonder how long it would be before something unpleasant happened with Harbaugh in charge, although he is very good at what he does. With the Hoke hire, UM continues an unbroken tradition of coaching with the highest ethics and concern with the welfare of the young ones under the coach's responsibility. (I'm not fooled by the Rosenberg/Snyder hit job for a minute, thanks to the detailed desconstructions we saw first on this site.)

It also turns out that Hoke is an aggressive but effective game-manager and an outstanding recruiter. And rather than cheap out on a DC for the sake of $10,000, our new AD decided to compete price-wise with the NFL to make sure the boys are ready to play.

A few breaks in scheduling helped us out last year. May the good times continue.

1 year 1 day ago He

twists their heads off.

1 year 2 days ago How about

"Charlie Bauman Director of Pugilism?"

edit: Not to worry; he's already the punchline to a joke.

1 year 2 days ago Are you sure

about "privet?"

I defer to your expertise as a scientist.

1 year 5 days ago You did see

this, didn't you?

1 year 6 days ago SI says

all your opportunistic hack journalist are belong to us.

1 year 6 days ago I think

lawyers are that way too.

I had an acquaintance try to sue their lawyer some time back; apparently this isn't very easy to do.

1 year 6 days ago I believe

this was tongue-in-cheek:

[Michigan fans] would never have been responsive to a Rosenberg column. Although, I suppose you could consider death threats to be, “responsive”.

As you can see, the adjective "responsive" is partnered with the subjunctive "would," referring to the counter-factual condition if MR had continued to write columns about UM after the hit piece.

The whole article is very sympathetic, after an initial profession of hostility-on-principal to UM. The author travels the same ground as Jon Chait in 2009:

The fact that Rosenberg’s column was absolute garbage is not my greatest concern. Even if it involved a legitimate story worthy of pursuing, he had no business being the one to investigate and deliver the story to the public. Why? Because he had demonstrated to colleagues and affiliates of the University of Michigan football program that he had a strong personal dislike for Rodriguez. THAT is the major issue here.

And arrives at this conclusion:

I will be rooting against Rosenberg so long as he holds the title of “journalist”. I have enough issues with Sam Bernstein making my future degree in law seem despicable. I don’t need Rosenberg staining my undergraduate degree as well.

Worthwhile retread of the territory we have all come to know, despite the misplaced comma in the quotation above (it is only an extended tweet, after all).

1 year 6 days ago Not sure if real.

Saw "gluta-" in there twice.

1 year 6 days ago Maybe

the lesser conferences could arrange a playoff to decide the equivalent of an "at-large" bid in order to get the pollsters out of it.

As we know, the polls aren't always right, and the transitive rule of "better" (the basis of comparison for teams that haven't played each other) in CFB is shredded on the field every Saturday.

I'm not sure about leaving a conference champion out on account of polls. What if the pollsters punish an early season loss to Alabama or Michigan in favor of an early win over Eastern Michigan or Louisiana Monroe?

1 year 6 days ago I think

it was a rare excess; maybe Craig James rises to Rosenberg's level. I'm not a professional, and I suppose it would harm the UM brand to be the plaintiff in a libel suit, but I think the story was actionably bad.

1 year 6 days ago I'll have to

try that line on my next date.

1 year 6 days ago I had forgotten it

until I googled it. It is here (actually, "Messner's relief"), under "The most helpful favorable review." (Brilliant for someone to get this to the head of the line for "favorable reviews.")

My google search first lead me to this article; apparently the author was unaware of any of the stages in Rosenberg [MR]'s apotheosis to the pantheon of sports writers. He writes as an MSU fan, without pleasure, about the weeks during which MR was exiled by the Freep to write about MSU:

The Free Press was cowardly throughout this entire process, quickly pushing Rosenberg off on Michigan State in the first weeks of the 2009 football season. Michigan fans were furious and would never have been responsive to a Rosenberg column. Although, I suppose you could consider death threats to be, “responsive”.

My fan base was stuck with the guy’s embarrassing attempts at humor for at least a month. The transparent shielding of this loser was shameful. I did not even bother reading any of the columns; Rosenberg’s writing makes people want to either shake their head or fire a bullet into it.

1 year 6 days ago "Taint,"

tentacles, testicles. I hope this is all only metaphorical.

1 year 6 days ago Call me "Mike."

1 year 6 days ago You

just gave me new respect for Drew Sharp.

I'm not sure I like this sensation.

1 year 6 days ago I'll

just look at the pictures.

1 year 6 days ago It's

onomatopœia.

(Is there a harder word to spell in the English language?)

1 year 6 days ago I don't know the magic number,

(I've heard six before), but the major point (eventually) will be to give all teams a path to the title.

In the ugly-duckling stage that CFB is going through right now, the object should be to leave out as few teams like 2004 Auburn (undefeated conference champions from a major conference) as possible; until there is a real playoff giving an avenue to all teams, it's all damage control.

1 year 6 days ago Well,

because a couple of teams lose their conference title game

is pretty much the name of competitive sports across the board.

I don't think if #17 MSU pounds the highest-rated team in the semifinal, that they will remain #17. Besides, #17 base on what? If they can beat a champion, then they are a champion.

The Atlanta Braves were the second-best team in baseball in 1983 with a .299 team batting average, but they happened to be in the same division with the best team in baseball in a time before wild cards. Is this unfair? At least they could have gotten in by beating the LA Dodgers a few more times. What do you say to a team that never had a chance because Gary Danielson doesn't like (ie, isn't paid by) their conference?

Get the competition out of the polls and on to the field. You want to be #1, then win your conference.

1 year 6 days ago As opposed to now,

where, as we see above, the greater the ESPN slurpfest over the conference, the better the chance to have the places in the national title game decided before games are even actually played.

1 year 1 week ago After 90 years

the logic of championship v. beauty pageant is not quite intuitive to many, but it comes down to whether you respect the fact that the most "deserving" team is not always the winning team.

I think the championship model is ultimately fairer because it allows teams to control their own fate (by winning when it matters most) and to have a route to the championship.

I don't think a four-team invitation-only tournament is the final answer, but it is closer than a two-team, invitation-only tournament which we call "BCS Championship." Not as many undefeated arguable #1 teams will be left out this way.

The fairest answer, in my eyes, is one in which all teams in the system have a path to the championship, unblocked by ESPN hype or the size of their television audience, which a four-team invitational is not. It is closer than the BCS thing.

But even under a "fair" system, odd things will happen. In 1983, the Atlanta Braves were the 2nd-best team in baseball with a .299 team batting average. Unfortunately, they were in the same division as the best team in baseball in a time before wild cards. I cherish that team, but I accept that, to be a champion, they would have had to beat the LA Dodgers a couple more times, which they didn't. It was still a hell of a team, just not the WS champion. At least they had a chance to try (and fail) on the field.

In other words, they let the polling determine their champion, which is clearly not fair to those with conference title games.

Assuming they didn't place any more teams in a BCS playoff than the other conferences, poll-based championships are unfair to the other teams in the same conference, but not to other conferences. Conference championship games don't add that much to the game of football that I can see, but I assume they are enormous money-makers.

I'm not a fan of playoffs for the sake of having playoffs; watching the spread of playoff creep, the later and later dates for deciding champions, and so on, is, I think, about the media profits rather than the fans, and I think it debases the regular season games, especially in baseball. I would be perfectly fine going back to a simple National and American league pennant with maybe a tie-breaker series as needed. But here, each team has always had a path to the championship, which CFB still does not have. In CFB, too little of the outcome is in the hands of the actual players.

1 year 1 week ago Merchandising?

..

1 year 1 week ago I'm not sure

about "forget"; the guys over at the Freep are still pretty much the same and apparently still stirring stuff up. This is up to personal choice, but I have trouble forgetting.

This next point isn't directed at you, but I'll just stick it here anyway rather than post another comment: I get a sense that a lot of the energy being expressed here is not of the "forgive and forget" variety; it's a little too vehement for that. Why can't we all just get along?

1 year 1 week ago You're right.

I had to recheck the title; the semi-colon is really there. Good catch.

This part:

I'm also embarassed a so-called Michigan Man has as poor of a grip on reality as Section 1 displays in every one of his thousands of bizarre, delusional missives.

I don't understand as well.

Are people saying the Freep Jihad didn't really happen, or what is this overwhelming outpouring of hostility all about?

1 year 1 week ago Texas 2008 lost 1 game and

Texas 2008 lost 1 game and beat BOTH Big XII championship teams. By any measure they were a top 4 team, but a conference tiebreaker kept them home and this system keeps them home as well.

There will always be something. I think the first priority is to stop leaving an undefeated team (Auburn, SEC, curiously enough) out of any MNC consideration. What do you do in the case of something like 1973 UM/OSU? That case and the one you cite are conference-level problems. More on that later. I think 2004 Auburn being out is a bigger deal than 2008 Texas being out. Having a good day against a good team or two isn't enough; ask Oregon State 1967 ("giant killer"). To control your destiny, you should beat everyone, and yet this wasn't good enough for Auburn 2004. That's what needs to be fixed first.

We may need to adapt the thinking of "top 4 team," which comes from 90 years of MNC-by-beauty-pageant, to "championship team," in which a good team with a bad day is out. Voting and polling requires the false application of the transitive rule ('team a beat team b which etc.etc.etc.') which is decisively disproven on the field every week.

What happens if Georgia beats LSU in the SEC title game this past season? Does anyone really believe the body of work supports UGA as being better than either LSU or Bama?

Championship, yes. If UGA beats the winner of the Bama/LSU contest, then I would be extremely leery of pronouncing the losers better than the winners. That would take the word 'better' into the realm of Tarot cards and Ouija boards. In the event we have an on-the-field result to refer to, I will take that over all the Gary Danielson hype he can huff.

Should we really leave BOTH LSU and Alabama out of a 4-team playoff because neither won the conference?

If your problem is about relative division strength, that is a hard one to do anything about. If we are to prioritize playing football over polling, talking and PRing about it, though, I don't think it's too much to ask the winner of a strong division to defeat the winner of a weak one as part of the process of winning a championship. If Ga can beat LSU as part of a championship process, then Ga goes. If LSU and Bama can't win the key games, than they are out. That, or we stay attached to the system that left 12-0 Auburn out in 2004.

What about conferences without a title game like the Big XII? 3 teams go 8-1 (in conference play) and SHARE the conference, so they are all technically eligible while the teams with title games limit their entrants to 1.

I assume that the condition reads "conference champion," not "any or all of various conference co-champions." Conferences can keep old conference championship rules, but they should have to have a way to decide which team is designated as a participant in a playoff. And hopefully do better at it than they have in the past.

Divisional alignments can force very skewed conference schedules. Going back to the Georgia team of this past season, they played in the weak East and skipped all 3 good West teams (Bama, LSU, and Arkansas). They went 7-1 in the SEC and beat one team with a non-losing conference record (4-4 Auburn). But they played in the conference title game while Bama didn't because of geography.

I wonder of the division system isn't really just an excuse to have an extra game with lots of commercial kerfloofle, because I have rarely seen a conference championship game clarify rather than merely further confuse the championship picture (Okie '03, so on). In a world not all about the money, I would eliminate divisions and have a championship game only if needed to break a tie.

There's talk about "preserving the meaning of the regular season." What does the regular season stand for if you send two conference runner-ups over the conference champion?

Probably the biggest problem playoff opponents have is that the team that wins isn't always the team that is "supposed" to win. And in a system where outcomes are alternatively driven by results on the field and by hype, money and back-room deals, it is sometimes hard to acknowledge the winner over the one who was "supposed" to win, with all the economic consequences that entails. Fans want meaningful, good ball games. Advertisers, TV, and other revenue-driven entities want splashy events involving well-known national brands in manufactured circumstances. In the end, hopefully the attempts to manufacture the outcomes will backfire and economics will drive the controlling stakeholders toward a true championship system.

1 year 1 week ago Maybe in a time

when all conference champions are included in a playoff, the Rose Bowl could be the designated playoff game for the B1G/Pac12. In the mean time, as you say, it makes no sense to try to mix tie-ins with seeding. Hollis -- well, what can you say.

1 year 1 week ago If #16

can win 4 in a row against higher-rated competition, then they are completely legit national champions. And if #1 can't prove it on the field, then they aren't. I'd rather do it that way than seeing if Osborne or Meyer has better PR skills in a loaded interview with Gary Danielson. If UM beat Bama, LSU, OkSU and Stanford last year I would have no quibbles about "deserving."

And having an argument about who is the real #16 is no where near as glaring a deficiency as having the NCAA have to acknowledge three "National Champions" on their website for 1970 or two for 2003.

All the "Rose Bowl tradition" means for me is having the Big Ten champ end the season with a loss in a meaningless exhibition for twenty straight years. I get nauseous thinking about the words "Rose Bowl."

1 year 1 week ago Michigan's record

vs. the SEC is already way over .500, including the unfortunate Gator Bowl outcome.

When M starts winning out, the SEC will be no problem.

Let the rest of the B1G fend for itself.

1 year 1 week ago Don't forget Gary Danielson.

But aside from the media as a whole, we have to blame Urban Meyer, the top wiener of them all, for being willing to play the whine game at the cost of cheapening CFB with the nauseating sound of self-interested faux outrage.

We owe him a major kick in the Buck nut to go with the belated one we gave him at the Cap One bowl. We will never be even with him for being the whiner that he is.

1 year 2 weeks ago Double entendre --

"taint?"

1 year 2 weeks ago I don't think there would be a violation

unless you swaddled your feet in actual US flags. Representations of familiar motifs from the flag are utilized all the time (I assume legally).

edit -- oops/should have kept reading the comments before commenting. Sorry for the tautology.

1 year 2 weeks ago Oops.

I thought I could get it to work, and now my temerity is recorded for posterity.

FWIW, I can't get "preview" to work with embeds.

Sorry, everybody.

1 year 2 weeks ago But Bo said

a college football game kicks off at noon. I guess people got up earlier in those days, before electricity. (You ever notice there isn't much to do on a camping trip after sunset?)

1 year 2 weeks ago Facetiousness

is a weapon of unpredictable impact.

1 year 2 weeks ago My beef with the East Germans

was always the East German judges down-voting everybody.

1 year 2 weeks ago Anybody

tracking jersey sales?

1 year 2 weeks ago Not so fast.

She was asked what her favorite memory was; she said "lunch."

Cherish your memories while you have them.

1 year 2 weeks ago "Castles" and "Sand?"

This will always be first on my list when I hear those words:

Maybe this will be the epitaph for the Meyer years.

1 year 2 weeks ago When I first saw the "cat-organ,"

I was expecting something like this:

Especially after the OP's lead-in.

1 year 3 weeks ago But every team will have a path.

And the "best" team should be able to show it by winning their conference championship.

If you make the definition of "best" metaphysical enough, no form of knowledge known to man will be enough to detect whether a team is the "best" or not.

I am happy enough leaving "best" to the theologians so that we can at least determine the identity of something resembling the definition of a "champion."

1 year 3 weeks ago It has been

observed and commented on for decades that if you are a member of a dissident (anti-war, ecologist, etc.) organization, the people advocating bombings or other violent acts are usually, almost always, the FBI infiltrators.

1 year 3 weeks ago Did the FBI

offer to help them do it?

1 year 3 weeks ago There's a term for this:

via wiki"

Security theater is a term that describes security countermeasures intended to provide the feeling of improved security while doing little or nothing to actually improve security.

1 year 3 weeks ago Michael Vick

may be a good person to explain the fallacies in that argument (although not to do with his primary line of work).

1 year 3 weeks ago cigarettes?

,,

1 year 3 weeks ago This nation

has largely banned lead-based paints and use of asbestos in building insulation, which you mentioned indirectly (or did you -- "environmental contamination") as being analogous cases of long-term continous exposure. So one way or another, these sources of long-term risk were banned; is it your argument that CFB will not end up the same way, or just that civil action for liability will not be the medium for banishment? If the former, do you think it will eventually happen?

1 year 3 weeks ago Well,

now he's somebody else's problem.

And I wonder of his shit will work for a national audience. I am quietly hoping he gets barbecued.

1 year 4 weeks ago Useful link

despite the SEC homerism. I had to look to check, and yes, there is a chart of total revenues that is the sum of expenses and profits charted above::

Football Revenue
Penn State Univ. $70,208,584.00
Ohio State Univ. $63,750,000.00
Univ. of Michigan $63,189,417.00
Univ. of Iowa $45,854,764.00
Michigan State Univ. $44,462,659.00
Univ. of Wisconsin $38,662,971.00
Univ. of Minnesota $32,322,688.00
Univ. of Illinois $25,301,783.00
Northwestern Univ. $22,704,959.00
Indiana Univ. $21,783,185.00
Purdue Univ. $18,118,898.00

All this aside, it seems to me that M has been successful for 130 years without the clown suits, Arbie's ads on the hockey uniforms, and $4.00 water. I understand the clown suits better after reading this:

In the past year, U-M has . . . drastically restructured its athletics marketing arm to include more than a dozen marketing professionals, up from three at the start of 2010.

A hammer looking for a nail?

As for not bringing the band:

"Brandon says the game will create a lot of buzz around Michigan football at the start of a crucial season." -- It has done this.

“One of the driving forces behind everything we’re doing is to enhance the experience of our student athletes,” -- not so sure not bringing the band does this.

1 year 4 weeks ago Well

I think Hoke has changed the tide on the rivalry. Hell people in Ohio are starting to believe him. Never in a million years I would have thought that. Selling Michigan jerseys is a good start.

BTW, are we bracing for some kind of appalling clown suit football uniform for this specialty game?

1 year 4 weeks ago "The going-for-it-on-4th-and-3-meme . . .

is nice, but it's not what drove the vitriol."

When you look back on the carping people were doing during the last Carr (DeBord) years, I think that Scheme and 4th-and-3 were both part of the critic's composite picture of an approach that played not to lose more than it played to win. This was both here and over at MgoBrew, at least. Predictability was half the complaint and losses following conservative play to nurse small leads was the other.

Even thought the focus after the RR hire was on the aggressive sowing of confusion and game-theory RPS choices in the spread offense, I think that the idea of losing a game after punting from the opponent's half of the field was still a part of the negative collective memory that Brian and other UM bloggers hoped to move away from. That and the ominous direction of demographic and other trends at the time pointing toward SEC dominance in a dystopian future, in the event that B1G teams continued to rely on superiority of manpower alone to win games.

I think Brian legitimately thoughtat the time that the Hoke hire was a deliberate return to the good old days of pre-RR, which to him meant both the predictability of play-calling and dysfunctional conservatism in game management imputed to the old school of coaching by him and others. The relative importance of the two aspects of the old school may have become clouded by the arguments over "the spread won't work in the Big Ten." But I think both aspects were important to the people who yearned for a change from the Carr years.

I think Brian truly thinks we have gotten a new deal with Hoke, and his change of heart couldn't be more clearly stated than this:

I could not have been more wrong about Hoke. He's not the milquetoast win-by-not-losing sort. . . . I would not want to play poker against him.

1 year 5 weeks ago "Im really pizzed about this..."

Is this a play on "pizza?"

1 year 5 weeks ago That was at the now-defunct Omni in Atlanta.

The organization for BB games is probably something other than the MMB, maybe operating under a title like "pep band."

I was at GA State U. at the time, and the GSU pep band was invited to play for free plus a hat and a shirt with the "M" logo (it wasn't "split.")

Despite my distaste at the fact that the UM pep band wasn't brought down for the games, I talked my friends in the GSU pep band into smuggling me in with them. I am a professional cellist, but I had 6 weeks experience on trombone from a summer class in Brass Methods, which was enough to get me through the trombone part to "The Victors (an M-fan-in-Diaspora's dream-come-true)" and "Tequila."

I eventually wore the hat and the shirt out.

1 year 6 weeks ago Yes but

Michigan has had success in athletics before they came and since. Michigan does not need to latch on to the fame, or infamy, that attaches to UM athletes that sources from outside the athletic activity itself. President Ford doesn't have a number retired in football because he was president. Several people believe that Michigan basketball should judge the merits of people who came through the program solely with respect to them as Michigan basketball players. As Judge Broomfield said at the Gandhi trial in 1921, "the law is no respector of persons, and is interested only in their character with respect to the law."

The place for acknowledgements concerning highlighting issues in modern collegiate sports, within the African American community and inner cities in general, and being caught up in the zeitgeist of the time is in TV specials, books, possibly college courses, and in all other media that discuss cultural history, anthropology and sociology, but possibly not the ceiling at Crisler, where many people still also have a memory of the long, painful hangover that was a part of that surreal trip through the eye of the cultural hurricane. The Fab Five, ultimately, did not necessarily help solidify or strengthen the hold of Michigan basketball on the planet, and people will differ on whether they want to remind themselves of what the Fab Five era did to the program.

1 year 6 weeks ago Just because:

1 year 6 weeks ago and that made me think of . . .

1 year 6 weeks ago Or

just post the url and let someone else do it.

1 year 6 weeks ago The comments

on the Matt Hayes article aren't very friendly to him.

Cause for pause: one commenter picked out this Matt Hayes opus from 2009 as evidence that his work fails to stand the test of time.

All this aside, I still don't think you can go wrong regarding Myer with the deepest suspicion.

1 year 6 weeks ago Is this still

from the '79 MSU game?

For some reason I get a feel that it's older, like maybe OSU in '74 (or was that with Joe Paterno?) or '73. How long did they wear the yellow jackets?

1 year 9 weeks ago Couldn't believe my ears

when I heard the "Devin Gardner Camping" vid begin with the opening horn lick from Dusty Springfield's "You don't have to say you love me." Sadly, it was over before the DS vocal enters.

For those who are interested, here is the studio version from YouTube (no video):

and, I believe, a live performance from 1967 (wretched sound, hence I gave the studio version first):

These would be good lyrics for a documentary on U-Alabama recruiting practices.

1 year 11 weeks ago Although

maybe it's time to raise the posting threshold to 14,000 points just to be sure.

1 year 12 weeks ago Seconded.

Bette Nesmith Graham:

George Kloosterhouse:

Apparently, LiquidPaper(r) smudged the ink when used on photostatic copies (?!).

1 year 12 weeks ago Certainly

they would flip to M the minute a slot in Hoke's recruiting class became available.

How are the UM T-shirt sales going in Columbus?

1 year 13 weeks ago "Problem

loading page."

Is it just me?

1 year 13 weeks ago It was

an isolated event; football emerged from 3- and 4-loss seasons (out of 9 games) for this high point between 1948 and the coming of Bo (1968 was a two-loss year, but featured the 50-14 waxing by Woody and his failed attempt for 2 at the end of the game), and then went back.

UM BB was in the NIT repeatedly in the early '70's, while Bo had us showing up undefeated and untied to the OSU game five years in a row. Bo only won one of those OSU games before losing in the Rose Bowl to Stanford. I still have nightmares about it.

Football-wise, almost the most satisfying stretch was destroying OSU's MNC hopes on an almost annual basis in the '90's, as Woody once did to us.

1 year 13 weeks ago Original wisdom

via an alternative source:

1 year 14 weeks ago Deserves embed:

btw: 15 likes, 9 dislikes.

1 year 14 weeks ago Here goes:

1 year 14 weeks ago Do you mean

"boggle the mind?"

Oops, now I find this from IMDb's "Memorable quotes [sic.]" from Blades of Glory:

Chazz: Mind-bottling, isn't it?
Jimmy: Did you just say mind-bottling?
Chazz: Yeah, mind-bottling. You know, when things are so crazy it gets your thoughts all trapped, like in a bottle?

At least the Bathroom Buckeye didn't film using a bottle.

1 year 14 weeks ago I think

I ended up here by accident while looking for the official UM football site. I was a lurker starting toward the end of the '07 season, and was here for Brian's lengthy dispute of the Harbaugh allegations and the impressive (un-moderated?) thread of comments that followed. I finally signed up shortly after the '09 season to comment on a thread about historic uniforms.

1 year 14 weeks ago I propose Nebraska.

N seems like the least vandalous fanbase, and it's a two-day trip for them anyway, is it not?

RE user name: Is IhatSEC "hate" or "heart" as in the old "I heart dog-head" bumper stickers?

1 year 14 weeks ago Thinking same thing --

Hear hear.

1 year 16 weeks ago This helps put

"never forget" and "decimated defense" in perspective.

1 year 17 weeks ago We hear

OT topics in off-season, and we hear about Woodson and Howard and other former players now in the NFL all the time, but without this backlash of hostility occasionally disguised as feigned disinterest.

RR is a part of the history of this school. Unfortunately, so is a concurrent history of covert factional hostility rising on occasion to the level of sabotage against our beloved program.

We won't rise above the dark side of this history by perpetuating the attitudes behind it, and we won't learn from it by trying to scrub our board of any reminder of it.

RR is a part of our history, as are Woodson or Howard. There are some folks here who pulled for him when he is here, and some who don't want him to be a forbidden topic in contrast to the other folks who have spent their time here and moved on.

Beating a path to put a beat-down on any board post about RR is just as much a form of obsession as posting about every U-AZ recruit is.

1 year 17 weeks ago Missed pun

opportunity:

That's the essence of Paterno's legacy: creating an unthinking paternolistic monolith that valued complete fealty to his cult of personality beyond all else.

Weinreb appears to feel differently about all this (blah blah "one of us" blah blah), but I haven't read anything worthwhile by him since at least the Sugar Bowl. I suppose that's understandable under the circumstances.

1 year 17 weeks ago Is that

how you make the cow interrupt?

1 year 17 weeks ago Politics --

and conformist familiarity.

1 year 17 weeks ago Politics --

and conformist familiarity.

1 year 17 weeks ago Imbed:

1 year 17 weeks ago In this connection,

have to give credit where credit is due: OSU 1961-2; and, much as it nauseates me to mention it after witnessing his behavior 1968-78, from Woody ca. 1961,

Yet in some ways this was Woody's finest hour. There was an ugly mood on campus. This was before the campus riots of the later sixties, but it was something of an augury of things to come. The team had played its heart out to go to the Rose Bowl. The entire Columbus establishment (and Columbus, remember, is the State capital) felt that the team belonged to them, and to Ohio, and not to the rotten outsiders who by a quirk of fate had had the power to vote them down. But Woody stood against them. Before a great rally — in the light of the bonfire in which the crowd would gladly have immolated the objects of their anger — Woody defended the faculty. They had done their duty as they saw it, and we must accept the decision of the vote, he said. What they represented in the life of the university, he told the angry crowd, was far more important than the football program. He told the crowd to disperse, and the students to go back to their books. That ended the matter. Woody was a team player, and the university was his team. There was neither bitterness nor condescension in his manner. And I never heard of him complaining about it afterwards.

1 year 17 weeks ago Garrison Keilor

made the point, in a recent book, that the U. of Minnesota students who came 30 years after him are "paying list price for a cardboard car." Politics has dis-invested in education and much of the bean-counting of modern days is presiding over a major political dis-investment in higher education. The transition from tenured faculty to adjunct faculty and graduate students teaching undergraduate courses is a long way from what was accepted 30 or 40 years ago.

1 year 18 weeks ago "Significantly"

is stronger than what the author at above link said:

However, the differences were minimal between the top two recruiting services. While many fans claim that one service is significantly better than another, actual results showed that the top two are similar, while the third is not far behind.

Edit: I guess it depends on what you mean by "signicantly."

1 year 18 weeks ago More important

is shifting the burden of resisting capricious censorship to the accused.

You can seek redress for a wrongful action -- AFTER the "offending" content or maybe the entire site has been taken down (see Brian's UFRs earlier this year under existing laws). What does it cost the purported copyright holder to just try and see what they can get away with?

We've already seen the $500,000 fines and the five(?)-year prison sentences with which people are threatened for bypassing a $7-dollar purchase, and we've seen children threatened with these draconian punishments ("cruel and unusual?). On top of this we've watched the compliant congress extend the enforced monopoly of copyright from 25 to 50 to 75 years, far beyond the point where any legitimate creator would be alive to benefit from it. This conception of "copyright" is a mockery of law and order, compelling taxpayers and public law enforcement to be more-and-more involved in protecting access to and collecting private profits on behalf of private businesses, transferring the costs of business to the taxpayers. SOPA is in this tradition.

One other time when commerce ran roughshod over human rights was in Great Britain/UK between the 1640's and, well, to pick an arbitrary cut-off, the 1850's. Hundreds of crimes against property were capital crimes. Three examples: picking up debris from a shipwreck off the shore; picking up coal that fell off a passing train from off the side of the track; reaching inside an already-broken window to nick a bottle of ink from inside the premises. For these "crimes" children as young as seven were hung by the neck until dead, in the event that a complaint was filed by the property-holder. These penalties were not mitigated until it became clear that, in an act of unconscious social protest, juries would generally no longer deliver "guilty" verdicts in property complaints where a capital punishment was a possibility; ie, until cruel and unusual punishment ceased to be profitable. I bring this up as an example of what can ultimately happen when we allow civil complaints to be turned into criminal law, and when we leave the state of our society up to people who are motivated by greed or who are controlled by people who are motivated by greed.

1 year 18 weeks ago "Never rely"

on the government to forgo increasing its power. . .

Nor the anti-democratic corporate entities that use the government as a sock-puppet and the public forum as a toilet seat.

1 year 18 weeks ago PC correction:

"congressperson or congresspersoness."

1 year 18 weeks ago Quotation

from linked article:

Third--and this may have been the point of the entire exercise--it gave Polis an excuse to insert the full lyrics of the popular Internet meme "The Internet is for Porn" into the official congressional hearing record for SOPA. (Representative excerpt: "All these guys unzip their flies / For porn, porn, porn!")

My favorite -- and maybe they couldn't quote this in the article:

"Grab your dick and double-click."

This was my first encounter with the 7.3-million-view "Internet is for Porn" on YouTube. The first two comments there are "SOPA sent me here."

1 year 18 weeks ago link:

http://mgoblog.com/links/bama-grayshirts-new-oc-after-oversigning-coaches

1 year 19 weeks ago Oh no,

my point is NOT that the BCS does anything I want.

It does expand the number of teams annointed in the polling beauty pageant from one to two; this is only enough to avoid debate about the "real" #1 about once every ten years (2005, I believe). The likelihood that BCS #3 is as credible an MNC as BCS #'s 1 and 2 is not so bad. A four-team playoff would at least push the circle of non-participants out to those below beauty-pageant finalist #5. The likelihood that people mistake #5 for a real #1 is, I think, a lot less than is the case for a #3 (USC 2003, for instance).

BCS doesn't offer a path for everyone, and it doesn't offer any consistent rules. 2006 -- no conference runner-ups/2011 -- SEC Western Division rematch. The only consistency in the rules appears to be that the MNC has to include at least one beneficiary of the ESPN SEC slurpfest. (Oops -- Auburn 2004. I was right the first time -- no consistency.)

Respecting the regular season -- covered already, except that the reliance on beauty pageants, along with the typical AD slant on $, results in parades of 8-home-game seasons liberally sprinkled with meaningless one-sided games against outmanned opponents in every major conference. At least here, relief is, and was, in sight since before the latest developments.

I think a plus-one is a step up from the incremental change BCS represents over the anarchic poll-only years. And I don't mind a homely champion as long as the rules work the same every year and give everyboday a shot. I don't think plus-one gets us there, but it's a step in the right direction.

1 year 19 weeks ago USC --

wow.

1 year 19 weeks ago Just posting

for the point; I don't want to be stuck at "666."

That's what I get for mentioning the Deity in a comment on a football blog.

1 year 19 weeks ago Only God

knows who is the "best" team on any given day. If your starting center sprains an ankle during a warm-up, then God knows your team just went from #1 to #5 in that 1/20 of a second.

The best that man-made devices can hope to determine is who is the champion, in accordance with rules everyone agrees to abide by in advance. Arbitrary? Well, what about all the times that the team with the most points is not the team with the most first downs, the most ToP, the most rushing yards, and so-on? Football isn't about who is the "best," it's about who wins. Sometimes the result is pleasing, sometimes not, but at least it's fair and both sides have a shot. A real championship should be the same way.

1 year 19 weeks ago "separates."

There was talk of sending LSU to the BCS Championship even if GA had won the SEC Championship. Two conference runner-ups vieing for the MNC -- how is that for making the regular season irrelevent?

1 year 19 weeks ago One commenter points out --

No Mackinac Bridge.

1 year 19 weeks ago "money grab by ESPN"

Hadn't thought about this aspect.

Even if true, in this one case, it might be fair to say that what benefits ESPN would also benefit fans, unlike the parasite-ridden spectacle that the bowl-driven post-season is today. Ideally, the U's, and not ESPN, would take control of the post-season environment.

The bowl system is an obsolete historical anomaly borne of an era when college football had no national organization (hence "Champions of the West"; no entity higher than the "West[ern Conference]" existed to win in those days). Bowls started with local board-of-commerce promotional schemes in the early days; the match-ups were unlikely exhibitions in the spirit of the old-timey College All-Star Game matching the NFL champ v. college seniors -- itself originally a charity benefit. With time the "charity" functions withered as money and inertia sucked the humanity out of these bizarre organisms.

I really think 2006 UM would have been infinitely better off under any post-season scheme other than the Urban-Meyer-Whiner political sludgefest that that season devolved into. Granted, UM didn't acquit itself in that Rose Bowl, but even if it had, it would barely have helped.

1 year 19 weeks ago I mention

the SEC championship b/c there was talk of advancing LSU to the MNC game even if Georgia had won.

1 year 19 weeks ago Ideally,

I think it can be considered a "championship" if all 120 teams have a path to the NC.

I think the first step would have to be through a conference championship. This year's result made a mockery both of the Bama-LSU regular-season matchup and of the SEC Championship, FWIW.

1 year 19 weeks ago You're leaving out

the 0-team playoff we used to have back in the polling days.

1 year 19 weeks ago That

would also have done in 2006 UM, but if it works the same way for everybody, then at least my head wouldn't explode at the preposterous things people say while lobbying for political points to win an entirely ungoverned beauty pageant.

1 year 19 weeks ago Much

obliged.

1 year 19 weeks ago Devil's advocate --

what about new-comers with clearly plainspoken ideas on sensitive topics? (Perhaps someone with background knowledge coming from outside the Mgoblogosphere?) Some of the most interesting albeit controversial observations from commenters came before the pos/neg-bang system, around the time of Carr's last season. There hasn't been a lot of commentary from people with deep background coming from outside the Mgoblog family since that time.

Some of the RR-related flame wars indicate that senior overlords may not be the short-cut to serene governance. One of the more distressing sights under any system is the sight of oldtimers with points in the 10,000's slinging ad-hominems at each other.

1 year 19 weeks ago I know

the old system is fairly exhaustively explained in the MgoBoard FAQ and comments there; has the new system ever been clearly explained anywhere? Part of my discomfort with the new system is just from not really understanding how it works.

Someone did finally explain the "moderate" button to me. How about "karma?"

1 year 19 weeks ago Speaking of

"King of Belch," was it neg-bangs or ban-hammers that did him in?

The neg-bang is a two-edged sword -- it can give voice to righteousness or sheep-like conformity. That said, I did enjoy the occasional meltdown or pos-bang.

1 year 19 weeks ago Was it over . . .

1 year 20 weeks ago Nobody hates

consistently losing programs.

If you're an historically winning program that is losing at the moment, the hate is 1000 times worse.

1 year 20 weeks ago Thanks.

I used to use "moderate" when I thought a comment had been overly harshly labelled "trolling" or "flamebait," thinking it meant to soften or "moderate" the label. Then, I panicked, suddenly getting the idea I had cluelessly been ringing the buzzer in the moderator's bat-cave every time I pushed the "moderate" button, and started avoiding it like the plague.

I thought I would ultimately have to bother Brian with this question, which I dreaded doing. Thank you for bringing new knowledge and skills into my life.

1 year 20 weeks ago Is there

any way to upvote comments? If so, I haven't been able to figure it out.

So anyway, imaginary +1 to you.

1 year 20 weeks ago In case you missed it,

you can experience it here.

1 year 20 weeks ago I thought

that was a domer meme.

1 year 20 weeks ago Granted, it's been awhile.

Allow me to acquaint you with an early occurrence of the relevent MgoMeme (click here).

1 year 20 weeks ago RE

Nocera never once quotes anybody like a Lloyd Carr, or David Brandon, or any other big-time college coach or administrator.

True, the paid side of CFB has carved out a sort of protected niche against the NCAA's historically aggressive lawyering, which has done such a good job of silencing any challenges from the player's side of the fence. Even so, considering where the butter for their bread comes from, I wonder whether any AD/Coach-like person would dare to go on record challenging the core tenet of the NCAA's raison-d'être. And I would also doubt that Nocera or anyone else would take any large amount of space inside his own editorial detailing the arguments of his opposition, unless he had a lot of space at his disposal.

The lack of parity in the balance between "student-athletes" and the other participants in the NCAA universe is on graphic display on a regular basis; see "DeAnthony Arnett" for a comparison of the comparitive ease with which Arnett and Derek Dooley are allowed to find their optimum location. As long as the NCAA's dated and historically deformed concept of "amateurism" (reminiscent of the IOC ca. 1968) continues to produce such an unending stream of face-palms and howlers in every aspect of the process, people like Nocera will have plenty of logs to throw on the fire, and there will be plenty of people so fed up that Nocera will always have an audience.

1 year 20 weeks ago /s,

most certainly?

1 year 20 weeks ago Amen.

One gets the idea that OP has never gotten to the defensive portion of any FFFF post, particularly the blitz analysis:

"Pressure: GERG or Greg?"

1 year 21 weeks ago OP's question answered:

From site linked by "cseeman":

Finally, Michigan has held the record for most wins in college football but only for the past decade (2001-2010). Prior to that Yale held that record for 113 consecutive seasons and 115 of the 142 seasons listed in the college football record book. Princeton led for 16 seasons and Rutgers for 7. Princeton, Yale, and Rutgers were often tied during the first 20 years.
How did Michgan pass Yale? Through 1977, Yale had 95 more wins, a better winning percentage (0.76229 to Michigan's 0.73853) and played 108 more games and 5 more seasons than Michigan. In 1978, NCAA split Division I into I-A and I-AA (aka FBS and FCS). Since the split, MIchigan has chipped away at the lead with 0.72153 WL% to Yale's 0.55077, but also, since 1978, has averaged 2.3 games per year (112 total games) more than Yale. Had Yale played as many games as Michigan since the 1978 split and taking into account its lower winning percentage, Yale would still have a 2 win lead. Had Michigan played 112 fewer games (rather than Yale playing more games), the answer would substantially favor the Wolverines.

1 year 21 weeks ago That

may be incommodious getting the band on and off the field.

If that's not a consideration, you could always put them in the parking lot outside the field, or have their performance close-circuit-broadcasted in from their practice field back home.

1 year 21 weeks ago That

was in 1961; it was the OSUfaculty senate, and in paricular, Jack Fullen, secretary of the OSU Alumni Association, nemesis of Woody Hayes and of big-time college football, who kaboshed OSU's rematch with UCLA in the 1962 Rose Bowl (Minny subbed).

Fullen was eventually retired in 1967; I don't know if any AD's or presidents, let alone faculty senates, remain who can break the hold of the bowl system's web of bribery and psychological terrorism.

1 year 21 weeks ago It's

hard to find.

1 year 21 weeks ago (No subject)

1 year 21 weeks ago needz moar

ad-hominem.

1 year 21 weeks ago You can

if you "Switch to plain text editor" and then use the html commands ("Raoul" excavated ShockFX's old html post from google cache, search under "html").

I have two grievances:

1.) If you try to edit a comment you entered under the plain text editor, it comes back translated into rich text editor and is unreadable, forcing you to start over again. It also turns all line breaks into [horizontal] double spaces. This can happen anytime, for instance, you overlook a quotation mark in a long html command. As of yet I still haven't had a pleasant experience with the "Preview" command, either.

2.) I don't know where to look for an explanation of the new board set-up [how to pos-bang, what is a "karma point," etc.]; the Mgoboard FAQ has nothing to say about the new system.

1 year 21 weeks ago I don't see

this "block M" as something new. I see it as a restoration of order after the unwelcome "Split M (r)" ran its marketing-motivated course and happily went away.

1 year 21 weeks ago Yes, but

it was also his idea at Princeton and they discontinued the winged helmet the first year after he left. (They revived/reclaimed it again in 1998 (per "Helmet Project") presumably based on the reputation it has acquired at M.)

MSU apparently used a gold-and-black version of the same thing in the '30's, back when the wings were a part of the physical structure of the leather helmet. I think M was the only one to retain it after the switch to plastic helmets.

1 year 22 weeks ago Sports . . .

Rocket Science?

1 year 22 weeks ago It appears

it was Carr's faction that conspired with Rubinstein to give us the first sanctions ever off the field. And it appears the Carr faction's non-support of the team, extending to endless betrayals and intrigues, contributed heavily to the worst three-year period on the field.

Groban is all on RR. This is the real crux of the issue. I think the dyed-in-the-wool RR haters really hated him all along for being more country than country-club. There is also no question that more wins would have held them at bay.

Among the many double-standards and inversions of common sense RR haters deploy to rationalize their spleen beyond W-L is their overlooking the fact that, if Elliot had treated Bo the way Carr treated RR, then Bo might have ended the same way.

1 year 22 weeks ago Would this work both ways?

If RR had recommended and signed DRob's transfer last January, would you be as deeply moved by his over-riding sense of loyalty to the athletes he recruited?

I'm reacting more to other posts I've seen here than to this one. From other posts on this board I have a sense that there are people here who hope to maintain in their minds a comforting narrative that RR was the only thing that ever went wrong with M and that no real factional disloyalty to and betrayal of the program ever occurred. This necessitates the implacable RR hatred, the hypersensitive hostility to and trolling of any discussion of the RR years, and a double standard reflected in the endless repetition of misleading or even incorrect assertions.

I say we move on quicker if we give RR his due, acknowledge the breakdown of program loyalty in the RR years and move on knowing the difference between loyalty to M and over-riding loyalty to personalities or factional sects whoever they might be.

If RR pre-Hoke had done as Carr did, would everyone here truly not hold it against him? Have any of the RR haters here stopped to thank RR for the night-and-day contrast of the smoothness of the transition to Hoke?

1 year 22 weeks ago Don't forget

the real point of S1's post, which is that the people who keep saying "SHUT UP We don't want to hear about it" are the ones clinging to, repeating and spreading discredited MSM lies as if they still hoped they could get anyone else to believe them.

1 year 22 weeks ago If you don't have Chrome,

you can still cut-and-paste the image url into Google image search.

1 year 22 weeks ago Wow,

was that a useful comment. I never heard of searching by image before now. I owe you a beer.

1 year 22 weeks ago NSFW/language: So says

(NSFW/language) Mr. Garrison:

1 year 22 weeks ago It's sort of hard to tell

with the way Startpage and Mozilla are interacting with my URL line, but I don't think Mgoblog has a "www." in the URL; I ran across this when editing the URL directly.

1 year 23 weeks ago Um...

It's seems you RR guys secretly want us to lose

No, you mean the skunks in the AD who sold us out to Michael Rubinstein and the Freep.

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