It seems like that is a good motivator. Kind of like the OSU women's hockey team winning another national championship finally pushed Michigan to get serious about adding a women's varsity team.
It doesn't just seem like that. It is exactly that. It is pay for play. It has nominally been a pro sport for a while, but now there is no doubt. Good for getting the kids paid, but crazy that there are no tampering restrictions or salary caps.
I mean, it probably works to a certain degree. You can just out-talent mediocre teams, even with mediocre coaching. Then you just pray that you get enough bounces from the oblong football to go your way to overcome your coaching deficiencies in the few games that matter.
If the talent gap is wide enough, it certainly can narrow the margin for error for your opponents. Even the worst pro teams would smoke the best college teams, simply on talent level alone. Miss a tackle on a 5* speedster and it is a TD. Miss it on a 3* guy and it is a 15 yard gain and a first down.
Kentucky doesn't even bother to scout. They just offer anybody Michigan offers, and then promise to add a zero to the NIL amount, knowing they will never actually pay that amount.
I wouldn't say never, but I wonder how many of the guys that go somewhere only for the money end up maximizing their potential. Michigan won it all last year because the whole was way more than the sum of its parts. I would say that we have seen plenty of teams that are loaded with guys chasing the money that end up being less than the sum of their parts.
If you take a job that you don't like because the money is a little better, you have a pretty decent chance at being miserable at that job. If you are only at UK for money, what happens when things get tough? Are you the guy willing to get blown up with a big hit to make a play, or are you worried just about paychecks?
It is a crazy concept that people competing at a high level would not care about actually winning games (or in UK's case, playing in front of tiny crowds that are just waiting for basketball season to start). It seems that most of the top players in any given sport are highly driven and absolutely hate to lose.
That is how I took it as well. Michigan won with team play and development, rather than just starz and dollars. Yes, NIL helped keep some guys around that otherwise would have gone pro, but we were not throwing millions at kids on signing day and focusing on kids with a mercenary mindset. The title of the video is a little bit of hyperbole, but isn't too far off.
Even at Michigan you can see how things are changing going forward. We have already seen a player decide that he would rather get paid a little more (if UK even follows through on their promises) to play for a mediocre SEC team than play on one of the best defenses in the country and defend our national championship. And it looks like that is going to become more common across the sport until some major changes are made (contracts, revenue sharing, etc.).
Unrestricted transfers have definitely exacerbated the existing issue, as has tampering. You could always pay a kid under the table, but now you can promise to pay a kid and still have him walk to a higher bidder, even before his first season, apparently.
Michigan should offer him (or some other high profile kid being courted by everyone) a $2M book deal to write about his experiences being tampered with as an athlete. Keep the receipts of those offering money to kids that are not in the portal, and then publish them and dare the NCAA to ignore it. Probably would get him blackballed by the league, so it won't happen, but it would be fun to see.
Yeah, those actually seem like the right priorities to me. Making fans pony up to pay players still seems odd. Kids should be able to get paid, and I hope that the NIL collectives are well funded and the kids get lots of sponsorship deals, but I will keep contributing to the hospital fundraisers. Revenue sharing would go a long way to fixing this issue, but I am sure that is still a ways off. So we continue in the Wild West of NIL.
Except that the ones offering the world are also not delivering on what they promised NIL would be any more than we are. Because NIL has become "NIL" for many schools and so much is still under the table or in the grey area of the rules, it is not like signing a contract for an endorsement deal, where would be legal recourse for breach of contract for not making the promised payments.
Yeah, but tampering with someone not in the portal is not legal. Tampering is highly illegal even in pro settings. So if tampering is not punished, and players are not able to be under contract, the current system is many orders of magnitude worse than pro free agency.
Yeah, I wouldn't mind seeing another Warren-style defenseman from the portal. Bigger and more physical, to complement our smaller, speedier offensive-defensemen.
Well, we had an elite goalie committed and then MSU hired his coach. Otherwise Augustine would have been here, right? And predicting goalie success is like predicting QB success in the NFL draft. So much of it goes beyond simple measurables, that it can be a bit of a crapshoot. Look at the goalies that have gone from elite to mediocre (and sometimes back again) in the NHL.
Still seems like very small potatoes. If they are going to nitpick every school out there for the same petty crap, then fine. But they are the kings of selective enforcement, and we are the ones on which they are focusing. They could find these infractions elsewhere, but choose not to. Or they are so bad at enforcement that they have to wait until a pathetic ex-employee hands them what they need.
That is my concern as well. Stupid, silly penalties have been levied for stupid, silly allegations, but going on probation when the NCAA clearly has it in for Michigan is dicey. We run a relatively clean program (at least in comparison to our peers), but being monitored by an organization with lots of power and no scruples is not a good feeling. I would hope that we would come at them with both barrels if they tried to stack punishments, and I would hope that our lawyers would be smart enough to have the probation only apply to future claims not know as of this time, but I have absolutely ZERO faith in Warde to do anything that involves being proactive. How did we end up with such a boot-licking buffoon in charge?
Yeah, I think that lots of kids are being shown Shedeur's NIL earnings, without thinking about the fact that he is the QB and he is Deion's kid. Most kids at CU will never see NIL anything like that.
It was a tough play because it was not too late, was not OOB, and was not spearing with the helmet. It was a little late, close to the sideline and there was head contact (even though Crable turned his body to lead with the shoulder). I hate giving mobile QBs too much benefit of the doubt, because if you pull up and he pump-fakes instead of throwing, he might run right by you. It doesn't help that it happened right on the OSU sideline.
I also drove down to Findlay. The light cloud cover cleared just in time for the totality, and it was pretty incredible. I am really glad that my daughters got to see it, even if the traffic was unfathomably bad on the way back up. Like nearly 4 hours to do a 90-minute drive.
Didn’t they lose a play-in game one year? I guess it depends if you call it “First Four” or “play-in game” as to whether that streak continues. And were it not for Izzo’s name, they might not have made it in years like this one. If you are around for 25 years, you are bound to have some good teams, but they often underachieved compared to their recruiting.
Buffalo has been consistently beating playoff teams for the last couple of months. Once the pressure was off and they looked like they had no shot, they caught fire. Too bad it is likely too little, too late. Such is the nature of a young team.
As soon as teenagers and their parents stop liking money, their recruiting will slow down. So basically, never, unless Day gets canned or they get sanctioned somehow.
Yeah, they are much improved, but it is hard to overestimate how much of an impact Augustine has had on that team. They trust that he will bail them out on OMRs, so they can play their very aggressive style of offense where they throw lots of bodies at the rush and gamble a lot. They made it work for much of the season, but it is a lot like OSU playing cover zero against us in football. It puts a lot of pressure on the other team, but when it doesn't work you can get blown up.
Well, if you are setting the bar at “directly responsible for a two goal swing in our opponents’ favor” then yeah, I guess they cleared it. I do fear that if the refs check out against Sparty then we are likely to see cheapshots.
Lots of credit to the team for realizing that the refs were not going to call anything and changing up their game a bit. I hate that these refs would rather have seen 1990’s NJ Devils hockey rather than skill and speed, but we made it work.
I have helped coach girls teams and coached girls that play with the boys. I have also coached girls that went on to play DI hockey, and it’s sad for them to know that if they want to play at the highest level, they have no choice but to leave the state.
This was my thought. Hell, let’s build a new facility to house both a Michigan varsity team and a PWHL franchise. Make it the place to be for Women’s hockey.
The one where the puck was under his pads for a few seconds, before having his pad pushed into the net after the whistle? Or the one where the team was reeling from the aforementioned BS goal?
They are not going anywhere, but that is kind of the point. The annual Izzo Lifetime Achievement Award Overseeding deprives some other deserving team of an opportunity.
Limiting to only serious replies would knock out about 90% of the traffic on MGoBlog. We are good at producing produce snark and detailed statistical analyses, and not much in between.
I hope he is able to find success elsewhere. It felt kind of bad to keep piling on a guy who loves the school but is not a good fit for what the program needs. But it also shows the lack of confidence in Warde that we all felt the need to keep making the case.
Does he have some dirt on Warde or something? Other than Warde being the personification of inaction, why is he even considering keeping Juwan? His love of the program is not enough to justify his shortcomings, and there is seemingly no upside to retaining him.
Heavy emphasis on "run" in that last sentence. I don't know why top backs would want to play at OSU and be second fiddle to the receivers and passing game.
They had better start learning the news signs now. You know it takes Buckeyes a good 2-3 seasons to learn something new. And it will take a while to convert the new plays into crayon drawings that their players can understand.
Washtenaw United beat a Cranbrook team that featured two Tier 1 (AAA) girls and yet was still playing in Division 2.
Also, congrats to Grosse Pointe South who defeated two-time defending champion University Liggett for the Division 1 championship. It was a big upset, considering that Liggett was undefeated on the season going into the Championship game and had a +132 goal differential at that time (in only 24 games).
I think the truth lies somewhere in between. Augustine covers up a lot of warts for them, considering that we outplayed them in probably 3 of the 4 games, and went 1-3. And Augustine already had a strong connection to Nightingale, so we will see if he can continue to bring in top guys that are not already connected to him.
However, they were really bad before he got there, so the improvement clearly goes beyond just the goaltender.
I can understand the frustration from Saban, even though he had no problem getting players paid when it benefitted him. He is still, by many accounts, the best coach in CFB history, and it has to be frustrating to try to talk to players about football for next season and all they want to talk about is the money.
It would be like going to a job interview and refusing to talk at all about the job duties and your fit in the organization, and instead only asking about the salary and bonus structure. I want my people to be well-paid, but I also want them to actually care about doing the job and benefitting the organization as well.
Recent Comments
It seems like that is a good motivator. Kind of like the OSU women's hockey team winning another national championship finally pushed Michigan to get serious about adding a women's varsity team.
It doesn't just seem like that. It is exactly that. It is pay for play. It has nominally been a pro sport for a while, but now there is no doubt. Good for getting the kids paid, but crazy that there are no tampering restrictions or salary caps.
I mean, it probably works to a certain degree. You can just out-talent mediocre teams, even with mediocre coaching. Then you just pray that you get enough bounces from the oblong football to go your way to overcome your coaching deficiencies in the few games that matter.
If the talent gap is wide enough, it certainly can narrow the margin for error for your opponents. Even the worst pro teams would smoke the best college teams, simply on talent level alone. Miss a tackle on a 5* speedster and it is a TD. Miss it on a 3* guy and it is a 15 yard gain and a first down.
Kentucky doesn't even bother to scout. They just offer anybody Michigan offers, and then promise to add a zero to the NIL amount, knowing they will never actually pay that amount.
Graham looks like a steal at #8.
I wouldn't say never, but I wonder how many of the guys that go somewhere only for the money end up maximizing their potential. Michigan won it all last year because the whole was way more than the sum of its parts. I would say that we have seen plenty of teams that are loaded with guys chasing the money that end up being less than the sum of their parts.
If you take a job that you don't like because the money is a little better, you have a pretty decent chance at being miserable at that job. If you are only at UK for money, what happens when things get tough? Are you the guy willing to get blown up with a big hit to make a play, or are you worried just about paychecks?
It is a crazy concept that people competing at a high level would not care about actually winning games (or in UK's case, playing in front of tiny crowds that are just waiting for basketball season to start). It seems that most of the top players in any given sport are highly driven and absolutely hate to lose.
So now it is pre-tampering season? I lose track.
That is how I took it as well. Michigan won with team play and development, rather than just starz and dollars. Yes, NIL helped keep some guys around that otherwise would have gone pro, but we were not throwing millions at kids on signing day and focusing on kids with a mercenary mindset. The title of the video is a little bit of hyperbole, but isn't too far off.
Even at Michigan you can see how things are changing going forward. We have already seen a player decide that he would rather get paid a little more (if UK even follows through on their promises) to play for a mediocre SEC team than play on one of the best defenses in the country and defend our national championship. And it looks like that is going to become more common across the sport until some major changes are made (contracts, revenue sharing, etc.).
Unrestricted transfers have definitely exacerbated the existing issue, as has tampering. You could always pay a kid under the table, but now you can promise to pay a kid and still have him walk to a higher bidder, even before his first season, apparently.
Michigan should offer him (or some other high profile kid being courted by everyone) a $2M book deal to write about his experiences being tampered with as an athlete. Keep the receipts of those offering money to kids that are not in the portal, and then publish them and dare the NCAA to ignore it. Probably would get him blackballed by the league, so it won't happen, but it would be fun to see.
Yeah, those actually seem like the right priorities to me. Making fans pony up to pay players still seems odd. Kids should be able to get paid, and I hope that the NIL collectives are well funded and the kids get lots of sponsorship deals, but I will keep contributing to the hospital fundraisers. Revenue sharing would go a long way to fixing this issue, but I am sure that is still a ways off. So we continue in the Wild West of NIL.
Except that the ones offering the world are also not delivering on what they promised NIL would be any more than we are. Because NIL has become "NIL" for many schools and so much is still under the table or in the grey area of the rules, it is not like signing a contract for an endorsement deal, where would be legal recourse for breach of contract for not making the promised payments.
Yeah, but tampering with someone not in the portal is not legal. Tampering is highly illegal even in pro settings. So if tampering is not punished, and players are not able to be under contract, the current system is many orders of magnitude worse than pro free agency.
Yeah, I wouldn't mind seeing another Warren-style defenseman from the portal. Bigger and more physical, to complement our smaller, speedier offensive-defensemen.
Well, we had an elite goalie committed and then MSU hired his coach. Otherwise Augustine would have been here, right? And predicting goalie success is like predicting QB success in the NFL draft. So much of it goes beyond simple measurables, that it can be a bit of a crapshoot. Look at the goalies that have gone from elite to mediocre (and sometimes back again) in the NHL.
Frozen 4^2
Stick with hamburgers, lest the NCAA put us on probation.
Still seems like very small potatoes. If they are going to nitpick every school out there for the same petty crap, then fine. But they are the kings of selective enforcement, and we are the ones on which they are focusing. They could find these infractions elsewhere, but choose not to. Or they are so bad at enforcement that they have to wait until a pathetic ex-employee hands them what they need.
That is my concern as well. Stupid, silly penalties have been levied for stupid, silly allegations, but going on probation when the NCAA clearly has it in for Michigan is dicey. We run a relatively clean program (at least in comparison to our peers), but being monitored by an organization with lots of power and no scruples is not a good feeling. I would hope that we would come at them with both barrels if they tried to stack punishments, and I would hope that our lawyers would be smart enough to have the probation only apply to future claims not know as of this time, but I have absolutely ZERO faith in Warde to do anything that involves being proactive. How did we end up with such a boot-licking buffoon in charge?
Yeah, I think that lots of kids are being shown Shedeur's NIL earnings, without thinking about the fact that he is the QB and he is Deion's kid. Most kids at CU will never see NIL anything like that.
It was a tough play because it was not too late, was not OOB, and was not spearing with the helmet. It was a little late, close to the sideline and there was head contact (even though Crable turned his body to lead with the shoulder). I hate giving mobile QBs too much benefit of the doubt, because if you pull up and he pump-fakes instead of throwing, he might run right by you. It doesn't help that it happened right on the OSU sideline.
It's the inverse of the Sabres game. Got outplayed but not outscored for much of the Sabres game. This time they got goalied despite playing well.
I also drove down to Findlay. The light cloud cover cleared just in time for the totality, and it was pretty incredible. I am really glad that my daughters got to see it, even if the traffic was unfathomably bad on the way back up. Like nearly 4 hours to do a 90-minute drive.
Didn’t they lose a play-in game one year? I guess it depends if you call it “First Four” or “play-in game” as to whether that streak continues. And were it not for Izzo’s name, they might not have made it in years like this one. If you are around for 25 years, you are bound to have some good teams, but they often underachieved compared to their recruiting.
Replied in wrong place. But will root for Purdue over the others. Painter seems like a good coach and a decent guy.
Buffalo has been consistently beating playoff teams for the last couple of months. Once the pressure was off and they looked like they had no shot, they caught fire. Too bad it is likely too little, too late. Such is the nature of a young team.
As soon as teenagers and their parents stop liking money, their recruiting will slow down. So basically, never, unless Day gets canned or they get sanctioned somehow.
The crappy camera work giveth and it taketh away (high stick vs. offsides). I am also glad they did not review it.
Yeah, they are much improved, but it is hard to overestimate how much of an impact Augustine has had on that team. They trust that he will bail them out on OMRs, so they can play their very aggressive style of offense where they throw lots of bodies at the rush and gamble a lot. They made it work for much of the season, but it is a lot like OSU playing cover zero against us in football. It puts a lot of pressure on the other team, but when it doesn't work you can get blown up.
The lack of discipline on the PK is a killer.
Sparty is going to have to change their chant to “Go green, go stripes.”
Well, if you are setting the bar at “directly responsible for a two goal swing in our opponents’ favor” then yeah, I guess they cleared it. I do fear that if the refs check out against Sparty then we are likely to see cheapshots.
Lots of credit to the team for realizing that the refs were not going to call anything and changing up their game a bit. I hate that these refs would rather have seen 1990’s NJ Devils hockey rather than skill and speed, but we made it work.
I have helped coach girls teams and coached girls that play with the boys. I have also coached girls that went on to play DI hockey, and it’s sad for them to know that if they want to play at the highest level, they have no choice but to leave the state.
This was my thought. Hell, let’s build a new facility to house both a Michigan varsity team and a PWHL franchise. Make it the place to be for Women’s hockey.
We could, but they would probably just take one of our goals off the board from a previous period.
The one where the puck was under his pads for a few seconds, before having his pad pushed into the net after the whistle? Or the one where the team was reeling from the aforementioned BS goal?
They are not going anywhere, but that is kind of the point. The annual Izzo Lifetime Achievement Award Overseeding deprives some other deserving team of an opportunity.
Limiting to only serious replies would knock out about 90% of the traffic on MGoBlog. We are good at producing produce snark and detailed statistical analyses, and not much in between.
I hope he is able to find success elsewhere. It felt kind of bad to keep piling on a guy who loves the school but is not a good fit for what the program needs. But it also shows the lack of confidence in Warde that we all felt the need to keep making the case.
Now we can all move on.
Does he have some dirt on Warde or something? Other than Warde being the personification of inaction, why is he even considering keeping Juwan? His love of the program is not enough to justify his shortcomings, and there is seemingly no upside to retaining him.
I was thinking maybe a youth YMCA team, but "anywhere but here" is also an acceptable answer.
Heavy emphasis on "run" in that last sentence. I don't know why top backs would want to play at OSU and be second fiddle to the receivers and passing game.
They had better start learning the news signs now. You know it takes Buckeyes a good 2-3 seasons to learn something new. And it will take a while to convert the new plays into crayon drawings that their players can understand.
Washtenaw United beat a Cranbrook team that featured two Tier 1 (AAA) girls and yet was still playing in Division 2.
Also, congrats to Grosse Pointe South who defeated two-time defending champion University Liggett for the Division 1 championship. It was a big upset, considering that Liggett was undefeated on the season going into the Championship game and had a +132 goal differential at that time (in only 24 games).
Wait, basketball season is still going on? Huh.
I think the truth lies somewhere in between. Augustine covers up a lot of warts for them, considering that we outplayed them in probably 3 of the 4 games, and went 1-3. And Augustine already had a strong connection to Nightingale, so we will see if he can continue to bring in top guys that are not already connected to him.
However, they were really bad before he got there, so the improvement clearly goes beyond just the goaltender.
I will probably donate to the women's hockey team, since they have to do fundraisers to even have a season.
https://www.michigandaily.com/sports/women-month/diving-into-the-costs-the-michigan-womens-club-hockey-team-faces-with-pay-to-play-setup/
I can understand the frustration from Saban, even though he had no problem getting players paid when it benefitted him. He is still, by many accounts, the best coach in CFB history, and it has to be frustrating to try to talk to players about football for next season and all they want to talk about is the money.
It would be like going to a job interview and refusing to talk at all about the job duties and your fit in the organization, and instead only asking about the salary and bonus structure. I want my people to be well-paid, but I also want them to actually care about doing the job and benefitting the organization as well.