Am I missing something here or is it abject absurdity to make a rule restricting conversation between a potential recruit and a coach, i.e. a dead period? That the University rolls over and accepts punishment for such a heinous crime makes a case that Warde needs to go along with the Regents who support accepting punishment for something so ridiculous.
From the perspective of antitrust law, I suspect a strong case could be made that regulations such as this are unduly restrictive.
OMG! Coaches talked to a few recruits during Covid. What a horrible crime!!
Yet, the FBI investigates and finds all sorts of issues with paying players pre-NIL, and nothing from the NCAA. Why do we continue to support this organization and why does Michigan keep falling on its sword?
i don't think it works that way. I'm saddened by this news as working as part of the Michigan team was an opportunity that might not come again sometime soon.
Perhaps Moore will show some pity and get him help but I would guess he is likely gone.
Speaking of dark places, I live in Frisco, TX, a northern suburb of Dallas and we had about four minutes of totality. We also got lucky in that a partly cloudy day had clear skies when totality hit.
What I found most interesting was that the onset of darkness did not seem "linear," i.e., it was not much darker until right before totality and it became light very quickly right after totality. I took some interesting pictures although I'm not sure it was good for my iPhones CCD. We all observed a brief drop in temperature.
I found the experience to be an interesting one but not one of deep emotion.
I'd agree...I thought Iowa's loss today was likely because I felt that SC was a better team with better athletes who could make it tough on Clark and they did.. Connecticut figured out how to guard Clark as did SC and she was not the same player as she was against lesser teams. Obviously she is incredibly talented but your competition matters.
Sadly, free speech rights have been rolled back at many universities for quite some time now. The days of giving a platform for opposing points of view has been usurped due to the political leanings of significant numbers of faculty and students and this has been going on for years.
I assume most people have heard about the debacle at Stanford Law School when a conservative judge was invited to speak. Things did not go well. It was a major embarrassment to Stanford.
I suspect one salient reason behind what Ono is doing relates to alumni contributions. Many older alumni don't see what is happening on campuses as something they choose to support and they protest by not writing checks.
Regardless, a right to protest does not give one an inherent right to disrupt. I don't believe Ono's comments suggest anything beyond not allowing disruption, a position I would agree with.
That's a big bummer that you missed the game due to weather. We drove to Houston from Dallas the morning of the game and hit a little rain but it wasn't until game time that a serious storm blew in. It was nice most of the afternoon.
Thunderstorms in Texas are not for the faint of heart. Between the hail, wind and possibility tornados you have to take them seriously. My biggest concern is hail. Homeowners policies here typically have a 1% deductible for hail.
We live in Frisco, TX, a northern burb of the Dallas metroplex. We get 4+ minutes of total eclipse but a weather forecast that calls for partly cloudy in the morning and then thundershowers in the afternoon. Fingers crossed!
We have 8 million people in this region - can't imagine what traffic will be like surrounding this event.
Speaking of Signgate, has there ever been any evidence of an actual Michigan violation, other than Scalion being “more likely than not” on the sideline of the Central Michigan game?
I wonder when your 4.4L V8 BMW's were purchased? That engine was completely redesigned a few years ago. I just returned a 2020 M559 after almost four years of leasing and the car never once needed a drop of oil and had zero engine problems. The performance was a thing of beauty. Having said that, I would not own a BMW without a warranty. Ditto for Audis.
I have been buying all-wheel drive cars for close to 20 years. I had an Audi A8L Quatro and a bunch of BMW AWD's. I like AWD performance in snow and rain.
I now live in TX and just bought a 2024 BMW 540 iX AWD. The powerplant is a twin-Turbo in-line six cylinder with 375 HP. BMW has had great success with their straight six powerplants.
I never quite understood the issue after the Wisconsin game where the University quickly fell on its sword. Please correct me if I'm wrong but didn't Greg Gard grab Juwan after the game to talk to him when Juwan was looking to exit and was hot over a Wisconsin timeout and then when a scuffle broke out Juwan lashed out after an assistant shoved a Michigan player?
If that's the case, I'd be in lots of trouble as I would do the same thing if I were a coach. You don't push another team's players.
Two seasons ago, who would have expected that with three incredibly talented players, DIckinson, Howard and Bufkin, that the team would not have performed better.
Then things went to hell this season and the Sanderson episode occurred.
Sometimes things just don't work out. Whatever chemistry the team had in its first four years evaporated.
I wish Juwan well and hope he knocks it out of the park with whatever he does next.
It's the great Michigan academics double standard again. If an athlete were to attend Michigan as a freshman with SAT/ACT scores well below what the average student needs for admission, that's OK if the kid goes into one of Michigan's academic program. But if a kid transfers into the same program from other universities, sorry, your credits from another school are worthless.
If you were an up and coming coach, would you accept the Michigan job with one hand tied behind your back due to the academic roadblock to say nothing about NIL money?
Successful use of the portal can rebuild program quickly but not if the deck is stacked against you as it is at Michigan. This program will be starting at ground zero.
I thought this was the best game against top competition, start to finish, Michigan played all year. If they can continue to play future games like they did last night, they are going to be hard to beat.
I finished watching the series last night. I thought the depiction of Brady's trip to Michigan and his history was fairly accurate. From what I have heard, he almost left Michigan. There is the story with pictures about the episode relating to fan appreciation and how Brady had almost no one in his line while Drew Henson had a long line.
I also thought that the story of how Brady and Bill Belichick grew apart was likely an accurate depiction of what took place.
I don't think you need to be an insider to realize that in addition to the players having checked out, so have a majority of the fans. An empty Crisler and no one watching on TV is not a good thing when it comes time to pay the bills.
In this day and age where major college sports are all about the money, the revenue stream may talk loudly.
Having a lesser team win happens periodically. It's been happening in the B1G West for as long as I can remember the B1G with divisions.
What I like about it is that there is competition in the conference right up to the last game or two.
There is no way a team like PSU, having lost to us and OSU, should have another opportunity to be in a playoff. That is going to be the case with probably 2/3 of the teams that are selected.
I'm one of those people who has thought less is more when it comes to the playoffs. That Michigan-OSU game every year was for all the marbles. Going forward that will no longer be the case. While my anxiety level may be lower, the importance of the game will be diluted.
Have a conference playoff. Do something akin to the NFL model of four team divisions and have the division winners play. It would have been easier with sixteen teams. Or go to 20 and have five team divisions with four divisions or 24 teams and six divisions. Have the winners of the SEC and B1G play each other,
If you had 24 team conferences, you could have 12 teams in a playoff that matters and then the winners from each conference play.
And if ND is not in one of those conferences, they can tune in and watch.
JJ's accomplishments speak for themselves. College football fans are a fickle bunch, particularly when they have had gotten their asses kicked the last few years.
I believe JJ has all the tools to be an excellent pro. Let us not forget, he is only 21, If you want to talk about toughness, the Maryland game is an example of just how tough he is.
Time will tell of course, but JJ has all the tools, the physical skills and the intangibles that are much harder to develop.
i have to believe that it wouldn't be Ono. The direction being taken for the football and basketball programs' handling of NIL likely involves the top leadership of the University including legal, the AD and the ultimate decision makers - the Regents - a bunch of largely older people who fail to see how the athletic world has changed after the Supreme Court handed down its opinion re NIL.
With Michigan's stance on NIL and our policies on transfer students, I'd suggest that our regents have exhibited dysfunction with respect to a few areas of college athletics.
The last two years have gone from bad to worse. Sometimes things just don't work out and this is one of those times. There is no justification for Manuel to give Juwan another year. The program has reached embarrassment stage.
Between the results, Juwan's temper issues and now Sanderson leaving after a long, successful stint working with the program maintaining a status quo would be hard to justify.
I say this with no malice of any kind towards Juwan. His tears of joy when he got the coaching job were very real, the tears of someone who loves his alma mater. I am sure the pain he feels is deeper than ours. Having said that, change is necessary.
Devin yes, but Denard was never an accurate passer in HS...something in the mid 40% range if I remember right. He did a bit better at Michigan but his passing skills were limited (relatively speaking.) I always saw him as a slot receiver who would get lots of usage because of his running ability once he had the ball in his hands.
It might be the taxes but it sure as hell isn't the weather, Take 23 into Ohio and the road quality is instantly smooth and well maintained as soon as you leave Michigan. I've driven through Iowa and Nebraska many times and have visited much of the Midwest on business and you just don't see the same problems as Michigan. Whitmer's efforts have helped a bit but there is still a long way to go.
For a quality town, Ann Arbor roads seem to be some of the worst to say nothing about the unpaved roads in Ann Arbor and Washtenaw County.
I say it all depends. After I finished my education, and this goes back a bit, I took two years off and moved to Aspen where I skied almost every day from Thanksgiving to mid-April. I had skied for six years before then and was a decent skier. I started skiing shortly after college graduation.
I like lessons, particularly group lessons. Obviously group lessons are a bit more generic than private lessons but I found them lots of fun and met lots of fun people. In Aspen, they used to have inexpensive clinics in January for local people who were advanced skiers. I took weeks of them over the time I lived there and afterwards. A good ski school will place you in a group consistent with your ability. Some folks advance faster than others.
As for snowboarding and skiing, I have done both. As an expert skier it took three days of lessons and lots of butt time on the snow to get the hang of snowboarding. I snowboarded for a while but then went back to skiing, not that I didn't like snowboarding but it seemed like I had reached an ability peak which I never felt skiing.
Both of my kids started skiing at age three and before they were teenagers were excellent skiers. They switched over to snowboarding for a couple of years but both went back to skiing.
I recently moved from Ann Arbor, What I always liked about the town was that an awful lot of good things were very easy to get to including the Stadium, Yost and other athletic facilities. Until you need it, you don't appreciate how nice it is to have world class healthcare a few minutes away. The food scene is obviously quite good for a small city.
Globe Life Field is a beautifully done indoor stadium where the World Series winner Texas Rangers play in Arlington, TX, which is part of the Dallas Metroplex. There is also the old Rangers stadium close by.
The weather should be beautiful although if they are indoors, it won't matter. 70's and 80's which is only 20+ degrees above normal for this time of year.
Very true, BKBlue, particularly when Michigan's war chest is a mere pittance compared to many schools including OSU.
I thought that things might change after Signgate and the the way Petitti treated Michigan. I guess not. Not only are we going back to falling on our sword instead of fighting as has been our history but our Regents are living in another age. In the business world a dysfunctional board of directors can be voted out.
Maybe we should be looking at getting some new and more modern thinking regents elected.
This year was an exception until the 4th quarter of the NC game when we got tired of Washington hanging around. Over the years too many playoff games are blowouts.
The problem with so many teams is you will get lots of bad games. It has seemed for quite some time that only a handful of teams are at an elite level and even then, perhaps only one or two teams are truly elite.
Don't know about anyone else but for my family December is a month where we have many social engagements to say nothing of how the NFL plays Saturday games on a couple of weekends. 16 teams? Are they planning on playing four games the same day? How is this going to work?
I think the best way to do a playoff would be to have the first few rounds in each conference to crown a conference championship. Then have the conference winners do a four team playoff like what we have experienced for several years now.
And if ND is not in a conference, then screw 'em. Do like everyone else or forfeit your right to participate.
A couple of things scheduling can do. Obviously a harder schedule could keep you out of playoffs and a loss of the financial upside as well as recruiting advantages that go with it. A weak schedule keeps viewership down. This last point doesn't mean much in a conference with equal revenue sharing, but I'd make a bet that when it comes time to pay players, revenue may be increased as a function of viewership.
We have a hard schedule and OSU has the second easiest schedule and I'm sober enough to wonder if the fix is in. This difference in strength of schedule makes me wonder again why we want to continue to be part of the B1G.
Is this another way Tony Petitti sticks it to Michigan? Where the F is Warde when it comes to making his voice heard?
I suspect many players have opportunities to leave which they don't exercise. It continues to feel that Michigan is still fighting with one hand tied behind its back due to the continued presence of Manuel and a bunch of Regents still living in another time.
Speaking of Manuel, I just received from our AD an email catching me up on Michigan Athletics including the latest bit on NIL.
I hear you. I was and remain incredibly angry about the way signgate went down. It besmirches a team that was where it was because of talent and hard work along with tarnishing the reputation of my university. It seriously pains me to be called a cheater.
I have no love for Ryan Day and the rest of the coaches who joined him with Petitti. Letting it go gets us nowhere. I wonder how those schools would feel if their TV revenue were reduced by 1/5.
Having said that, you are right. Negative thoughts are not a good thing to hold on to but I have never been good turning the other cheek when I feel I have been unjustly wronged. After cursing out Petiti I went on to celebrate. It took a week to get the smile off my face.
With the new playoff schedule, teams playing in those games will skew the average viewership numbers way up. If you included Michigan's two playoff games in those weekly averages, I suspect Michigan would have .been at the top.
During the middle of the signgate mess someone posted the percentages of viewership each team in the B1G was contributing to the conference total. I think OSU was at 22% and Michigan at 18% and then things fell off quickly, even with PSU.
What this tells me is that from a financial perspective, if you really want to make the big dollars, you need to create a superconference from within college football and say goodbye to the B1G.
I'm in the Windows world at work but for everything else it is a Macbook Pro, iPhone and iPad. Working on the same platform makes everything easy, although going back and forth to something on Windows is NORMALLY not an issue.
What Petitti did will never be over for me. Screw that MFer.
I was at the NC game in Houston. When the scoreboard went down to zero and we were the champs, after hugging my son, another Michigan alum, the first words I said were "screw you, Tony Petitti!"
I remain of the opinion that there is no reason to stay in the B1G and if we do stay, we should be asking for our fair share of revenue.
Fully agree. JH pissed me off by taking a few people who could have stayed at UM, like an S&C coach, but Harbaugh put in nine years and got us the ultimate prize which I never expected to see.
I wish him well. I'll probably follow the Chargers more closely now than before.
I'm not sure how state laws could protect donors in Southern states from from Federal tax liability if donations were deducted and the entity receiving the gift didn't have Federal charitable status.
I was thinking of a $100 million gift and go from there. Endowment funds are typically invested a a certain percentage of the fund is distributed annually. It would take some work but over a few years there would be lots of money being generated annually.
The advantages this would provide would be significant as you wouldn't have to go begging every year once your funding is established.
I believe Ross has given slightly less than half a billion to U of M.
I have thought for a while that one way to pay players would be to set up an endowment specifically for that purpose. A $100 million gift to the endowment would be a good start, A couple of generous donors could give Michigan great recruiting and player retention advantages.
You need someone with a vision running the show to do something different and better, and our current regents along with our AD may have other ideas, or no ideas,
For me, in addition to looking at the price, it is always about the quality of the image. Seems that while there is a fair amount of 4K content available on various networks, when you compare what we get streaming to the 4K content on a 4k Blu-ray, it is night and day.
I like YTTV and would have subscribed some time ago but the quality is not great. Quality images (and sound) take more bandwidth and that seems to be in short supply.
Even with a salary cap, would a player not be able to earn money outside of his "employment" as a student-athlete?
As an example, we see Pat Mahomes and Kelce in all sorts of ads these days for which they are handsomely compensated. I simply can't envision players voting to exclude outside income.
Recent Comments
Am I missing something here or is it abject absurdity to make a rule restricting conversation between a potential recruit and a coach, i.e. a dead period? That the University rolls over and accepts punishment for such a heinous crime makes a case that Warde needs to go along with the Regents who support accepting punishment for something so ridiculous.
From the perspective of antitrust law, I suspect a strong case could be made that regulations such as this are unduly restrictive.
Didn't Harbaugh say he didn't remember?
Unless what I recollect is incorrect, why are you not giving him the benefit of the doubt?
OMG! Coaches talked to a few recruits during Covid. What a horrible crime!!
Yet, the FBI investigates and finds all sorts of issues with paying players pre-NIL, and nothing from the NCAA. Why do we continue to support this organization and why does Michigan keep falling on its sword?
i don't think it works that way. I'm saddened by this news as working as part of the Michigan team was an opportunity that might not come again sometime soon.
Perhaps Moore will show some pity and get him help but I would guess he is likely gone.
Speaking of dark places, I live in Frisco, TX, a northern suburb of Dallas and we had about four minutes of totality. We also got lucky in that a partly cloudy day had clear skies when totality hit.
What I found most interesting was that the onset of darkness did not seem "linear," i.e., it was not much darker until right before totality and it became light very quickly right after totality. I took some interesting pictures although I'm not sure it was good for my iPhones CCD. We all observed a brief drop in temperature.
I found the experience to be an interesting one but not one of deep emotion.
I'd agree...I thought Iowa's loss today was likely because I felt that SC was a better team with better athletes who could make it tough on Clark and they did.. Connecticut figured out how to guard Clark as did SC and she was not the same player as she was against lesser teams. Obviously she is incredibly talented but your competition matters.
Sadly, free speech rights have been rolled back at many universities for quite some time now. The days of giving a platform for opposing points of view has been usurped due to the political leanings of significant numbers of faculty and students and this has been going on for years.
I assume most people have heard about the debacle at Stanford Law School when a conservative judge was invited to speak. Things did not go well. It was a major embarrassment to Stanford.
I suspect one salient reason behind what Ono is doing relates to alumni contributions. Many older alumni don't see what is happening on campuses as something they choose to support and they protest by not writing checks.
Regardless, a right to protest does not give one an inherent right to disrupt. I don't believe Ono's comments suggest anything beyond not allowing disruption, a position I would agree with.
That's a big bummer that you missed the game due to weather. We drove to Houston from Dallas the morning of the game and hit a little rain but it wasn't until game time that a serious storm blew in. It was nice most of the afternoon.
Thunderstorms in Texas are not for the faint of heart. Between the hail, wind and possibility tornados you have to take them seriously. My biggest concern is hail. Homeowners policies here typically have a 1% deductible for hail.
We live in Frisco, TX, a northern burb of the Dallas metroplex. We get 4+ minutes of total eclipse but a weather forecast that calls for partly cloudy in the morning and then thundershowers in the afternoon. Fingers crossed!
We have 8 million people in this region - can't imagine what traffic will be like surrounding this event.
Is violating the spirit of sportsmanship an actionable offense? That phrase is definitely subject to interpretation.
Speaking of Signgate, has there ever been any evidence of an actual Michigan violation, other than Scalion being “more likely than not” on the sideline of the Central Michigan game?
I wonder when your 4.4L V8 BMW's were purchased? That engine was completely redesigned a few years ago. I just returned a 2020 M559 after almost four years of leasing and the car never once needed a drop of oil and had zero engine problems. The performance was a thing of beauty. Having said that, I would not own a BMW without a warranty. Ditto for Audis.
Here's a link about the engine:
https://www.bmwblog.com/2024/01/02/bmw-n63-engine-pros-cons-and-reliability/#:~:text=The%20N63's%20reliability%20is%20a,reliability%20compared%20to%20its%20competitors.
I have been buying all-wheel drive cars for close to 20 years. I had an Audi A8L Quatro and a bunch of BMW AWD's. I like AWD performance in snow and rain.
I now live in TX and just bought a 2024 BMW 540 iX AWD. The powerplant is a twin-Turbo in-line six cylinder with 375 HP. BMW has had great success with their straight six powerplants.
I never quite understood the issue after the Wisconsin game where the University quickly fell on its sword. Please correct me if I'm wrong but didn't Greg Gard grab Juwan after the game to talk to him when Juwan was looking to exit and was hot over a Wisconsin timeout and then when a scuffle broke out Juwan lashed out after an assistant shoved a Michigan player?
If that's the case, I'd be in lots of trouble as I would do the same thing if I were a coach. You don't push another team's players.
Two seasons ago, who would have expected that with three incredibly talented players, DIckinson, Howard and Bufkin, that the team would not have performed better.
Then things went to hell this season and the Sanderson episode occurred.
Sometimes things just don't work out. Whatever chemistry the team had in its first four years evaporated.
I wish Juwan well and hope he knocks it out of the park with whatever he does next.
It's the great Michigan academics double standard again. If an athlete were to attend Michigan as a freshman with SAT/ACT scores well below what the average student needs for admission, that's OK if the kid goes into one of Michigan's academic program. But if a kid transfers into the same program from other universities, sorry, your credits from another school are worthless.
If you were an up and coming coach, would you accept the Michigan job with one hand tied behind your back due to the academic roadblock to say nothing about NIL money?
Successful use of the portal can rebuild program quickly but not if the deck is stacked against you as it is at Michigan. This program will be starting at ground zero.
I thought this was the best game against top competition, start to finish, Michigan played all year. If they can continue to play future games like they did last night, they are going to be hard to beat.
Megumin, I think your synopsis is accurate,
I finished watching the series last night. I thought the depiction of Brady's trip to Michigan and his history was fairly accurate. From what I have heard, he almost left Michigan. There is the story with pictures about the episode relating to fan appreciation and how Brady had almost no one in his line while Drew Henson had a long line.
I also thought that the story of how Brady and Bill Belichick grew apart was likely an accurate depiction of what took place.
Maybe Alford likes winning...hasn't happened in Columbus for quite a while.
I don't think you need to be an insider to realize that in addition to the players having checked out, so have a majority of the fans. An empty Crisler and no one watching on TV is not a good thing when it comes time to pay the bills.
In this day and age where major college sports are all about the money, the revenue stream may talk loudly.
Having a lesser team win happens periodically. It's been happening in the B1G West for as long as I can remember the B1G with divisions.
What I like about it is that there is competition in the conference right up to the last game or two.
There is no way a team like PSU, having lost to us and OSU, should have another opportunity to be in a playoff. That is going to be the case with probably 2/3 of the teams that are selected.
I'm one of those people who has thought less is more when it comes to the playoffs. That Michigan-OSU game every year was for all the marbles. Going forward that will no longer be the case. While my anxiety level may be lower, the importance of the game will be diluted.
Have a conference playoff. Do something akin to the NFL model of four team divisions and have the division winners play. It would have been easier with sixteen teams. Or go to 20 and have five team divisions with four divisions or 24 teams and six divisions. Have the winners of the SEC and B1G play each other,
If you had 24 team conferences, you could have 12 teams in a playoff that matters and then the winners from each conference play.
And if ND is not in one of those conferences, they can tune in and watch.
I think Klatt calls it right on lots of issues. I listen to many of his podcasts and almost always agree with his perspective.
When you go 15-0 and 40-3 over the last three years, there are a lot of positives or you would not have had that level of success.
If you sued that miserable organization and included a TRO, I'd bet you would win.
A kid wants to go back to college and get better educated while playing for another year.
How Awufl!
I could write a long list of things that could be worse.
The NCAA is a dumpster fire that needs to meet a quick demise.
JJ's accomplishments speak for themselves. College football fans are a fickle bunch, particularly when they have had gotten their asses kicked the last few years.
I believe JJ has all the tools to be an excellent pro. Let us not forget, he is only 21, If you want to talk about toughness, the Maryland game is an example of just how tough he is.
Time will tell of course, but JJ has all the tools, the physical skills and the intangibles that are much harder to develop.
I would not bet against him.
If not them, who, Warde? Ono?
i have to believe that it wouldn't be Ono. The direction being taken for the football and basketball programs' handling of NIL likely involves the top leadership of the University including legal, the AD and the ultimate decision makers - the Regents - a bunch of largely older people who fail to see how the athletic world has changed after the Supreme Court handed down its opinion re NIL.
With Michigan's stance on NIL and our policies on transfer students, I'd suggest that our regents have exhibited dysfunction with respect to a few areas of college athletics.
If cost were not part of the equation, would DJ's have the better product?
Zingermans also makes crullers and they are the best I have ever tasted. I think they were $4.
The last two years have gone from bad to worse. Sometimes things just don't work out and this is one of those times. There is no justification for Manuel to give Juwan another year. The program has reached embarrassment stage.
Between the results, Juwan's temper issues and now Sanderson leaving after a long, successful stint working with the program maintaining a status quo would be hard to justify.
I say this with no malice of any kind towards Juwan. His tears of joy when he got the coaching job were very real, the tears of someone who loves his alma mater. I am sure the pain he feels is deeper than ours. Having said that, change is necessary.
Devin yes, but Denard was never an accurate passer in HS...something in the mid 40% range if I remember right. He did a bit better at Michigan but his passing skills were limited (relatively speaking.) I always saw him as a slot receiver who would get lots of usage because of his running ability once he had the ball in his hands.
If you don't like snakes, particularly venomous snakes, a good portion of the US is off the map. .
It might be the taxes but it sure as hell isn't the weather, Take 23 into Ohio and the road quality is instantly smooth and well maintained as soon as you leave Michigan. I've driven through Iowa and Nebraska many times and have visited much of the Midwest on business and you just don't see the same problems as Michigan. Whitmer's efforts have helped a bit but there is still a long way to go.
For a quality town, Ann Arbor roads seem to be some of the worst to say nothing about the unpaved roads in Ann Arbor and Washtenaw County.
I say it all depends. After I finished my education, and this goes back a bit, I took two years off and moved to Aspen where I skied almost every day from Thanksgiving to mid-April. I had skied for six years before then and was a decent skier. I started skiing shortly after college graduation.
I like lessons, particularly group lessons. Obviously group lessons are a bit more generic than private lessons but I found them lots of fun and met lots of fun people. In Aspen, they used to have inexpensive clinics in January for local people who were advanced skiers. I took weeks of them over the time I lived there and afterwards. A good ski school will place you in a group consistent with your ability. Some folks advance faster than others.
As for snowboarding and skiing, I have done both. As an expert skier it took three days of lessons and lots of butt time on the snow to get the hang of snowboarding. I snowboarded for a while but then went back to skiing, not that I didn't like snowboarding but it seemed like I had reached an ability peak which I never felt skiing.
Both of my kids started skiing at age three and before they were teenagers were excellent skiers. They switched over to snowboarding for a couple of years but both went back to skiing.
I recently moved from Ann Arbor, What I always liked about the town was that an awful lot of good things were very easy to get to including the Stadium, Yost and other athletic facilities. Until you need it, you don't appreciate how nice it is to have world class healthcare a few minutes away. The food scene is obviously quite good for a small city.
If they would only fix the Fing roads.
Globe Life Field is a beautifully done indoor stadium where the World Series winner Texas Rangers play in Arlington, TX, which is part of the Dallas Metroplex. There is also the old Rangers stadium close by.
The weather should be beautiful although if they are indoors, it won't matter. 70's and 80's which is only 20+ degrees above normal for this time of year.
Very true, BKBlue, particularly when Michigan's war chest is a mere pittance compared to many schools including OSU.
I thought that things might change after Signgate and the the way Petitti treated Michigan. I guess not. Not only are we going back to falling on our sword instead of fighting as has been our history but our Regents are living in another age. In the business world a dysfunctional board of directors can be voted out.
Maybe we should be looking at getting some new and more modern thinking regents elected.
This year was an exception until the 4th quarter of the NC game when we got tired of Washington hanging around. Over the years too many playoff games are blowouts.
The problem with so many teams is you will get lots of bad games. It has seemed for quite some time that only a handful of teams are at an elite level and even then, perhaps only one or two teams are truly elite.
Don't know about anyone else but for my family December is a month where we have many social engagements to say nothing of how the NFL plays Saturday games on a couple of weekends. 16 teams? Are they planning on playing four games the same day? How is this going to work?
I think the best way to do a playoff would be to have the first few rounds in each conference to crown a conference championship. Then have the conference winners do a four team playoff like what we have experienced for several years now.
And if ND is not in a conference, then screw 'em. Do like everyone else or forfeit your right to participate.
A couple of things scheduling can do. Obviously a harder schedule could keep you out of playoffs and a loss of the financial upside as well as recruiting advantages that go with it. A weak schedule keeps viewership down. This last point doesn't mean much in a conference with equal revenue sharing, but I'd make a bet that when it comes time to pay players, revenue may be increased as a function of viewership.
We have a hard schedule and OSU has the second easiest schedule and I'm sober enough to wonder if the fix is in. This difference in strength of schedule makes me wonder again why we want to continue to be part of the B1G.
Is this another way Tony Petitti sticks it to Michigan? Where the F is Warde when it comes to making his voice heard?
I suspect many players have opportunities to leave which they don't exercise. It continues to feel that Michigan is still fighting with one hand tied behind its back due to the continued presence of Manuel and a bunch of Regents still living in another time.
Speaking of Manuel, I just received from our AD an email catching me up on Michigan Athletics including the latest bit on NIL.
I hear you. I was and remain incredibly angry about the way signgate went down. It besmirches a team that was where it was because of talent and hard work along with tarnishing the reputation of my university. It seriously pains me to be called a cheater.
I have no love for Ryan Day and the rest of the coaches who joined him with Petitti. Letting it go gets us nowhere. I wonder how those schools would feel if their TV revenue were reduced by 1/5.
Having said that, you are right. Negative thoughts are not a good thing to hold on to but I have never been good turning the other cheek when I feel I have been unjustly wronged. After cursing out Petiti I went on to celebrate. It took a week to get the smile off my face.
With the new playoff schedule, teams playing in those games will skew the average viewership numbers way up. If you included Michigan's two playoff games in those weekly averages, I suspect Michigan would have .been at the top.
During the middle of the signgate mess someone posted the percentages of viewership each team in the B1G was contributing to the conference total. I think OSU was at 22% and Michigan at 18% and then things fell off quickly, even with PSU.
What this tells me is that from a financial perspective, if you really want to make the big dollars, you need to create a superconference from within college football and say goodbye to the B1G.
I'm in the Windows world at work but for everything else it is a Macbook Pro, iPhone and iPad. Working on the same platform makes everything easy, although going back and forth to something on Windows is NORMALLY not an issue.
What Petitti did will never be over for me. Screw that MFer.
I was at the NC game in Houston. When the scoreboard went down to zero and we were the champs, after hugging my son, another Michigan alum, the first words I said were "screw you, Tony Petitti!"
I remain of the opinion that there is no reason to stay in the B1G and if we do stay, we should be asking for our fair share of revenue.
Fully agree. JH pissed me off by taking a few people who could have stayed at UM, like an S&C coach, but Harbaugh put in nine years and got us the ultimate prize which I never expected to see.
I wish him well. I'll probably follow the Chargers more closely now than before.
I'm not sure how state laws could protect donors in Southern states from from Federal tax liability if donations were deducted and the entity receiving the gift didn't have Federal charitable status.
I was thinking of a $100 million gift and go from there. Endowment funds are typically invested a a certain percentage of the fund is distributed annually. It would take some work but over a few years there would be lots of money being generated annually.
The advantages this would provide would be significant as you wouldn't have to go begging every year once your funding is established.
Don't share this with your insurance agent - your rates could rise.
I believe Ross has given slightly less than half a billion to U of M.
I have thought for a while that one way to pay players would be to set up an endowment specifically for that purpose. A $100 million gift to the endowment would be a good start, A couple of generous donors could give Michigan great recruiting and player retention advantages.
You need someone with a vision running the show to do something different and better, and our current regents along with our AD may have other ideas, or no ideas,
Couldn't agree more...so what do we do to expedite having Manuel removed?
That's the bottom line.
EDIT: Where do the U of M Regents fit into this picture?
For me, in addition to looking at the price, it is always about the quality of the image. Seems that while there is a fair amount of 4K content available on various networks, when you compare what we get streaming to the 4K content on a 4k Blu-ray, it is night and day.
I like YTTV and would have subscribed some time ago but the quality is not great. Quality images (and sound) take more bandwidth and that seems to be in short supply.
Even with a salary cap, would a player not be able to earn money outside of his "employment" as a student-athlete?
As an example, we see Pat Mahomes and Kelce in all sorts of ads these days for which they are handsomely compensated. I simply can't envision players voting to exclude outside income.