My son and I are enjoying these shirts. In general, the Underground Printing shirts are soft and hold up reasonably well, but the true test will come this year, as I cycle through all my M shirts to celebrate The National Champion Michigan Wolverines.
TL,DR: Yes, there was a large talent imbalance, but it's smoothed out somewhat, and even before that imbalance the women could play.
I disagree with this, to a degree.
For a long time, the women's game was more skill dependent than the boys, because they did not have the jump-out-of-the-gym, above-the-rim athletes. They had to play as a team, and you saw a lot more games that looked like the Princeton constant-motion offense than the NBA-style "I will drive to the hoop and you cannot stop me" variation.
With the advent of Title IX and greater overall acceptance (and money!) for women's sports, there was an influx of talent, distributed unevenly. Well-coached teams like Tennessee could now get dominant players who could explode for buckets whenever they wanted, and the rich got richer.
Then the tide started lifting more boats, and teams other than UConn and Tennessee started getting more talent. The last tournament's TV ratings were largely driven by Clarke, and they'll fall back some, but some of the fans who tuned in to watch Clarke will stay to watch Watkins and the next generation.
I think Blake Corum will be successful at whatever he does and wherever he goes. He's a Michigan Legend and Favorite Son. But!
Given how RBs are used in the NFL, and how short their careers are, I think I would rather see my favorite team take Zinter/Keegan/Henderson in the 3rd round over Corum.
I too would pick "Take Us Home, Blake" or "6-5", or "2023 National Champions", but I have enough to revel in due to the National Champion Michigan Wolverines, that I don't feel like I need to revel in OSU schadenfreude.
"some allowance needed to be made for profitable programs" is an example of a systemic bias. It basically says that money is more important than opportunities.
Title IX, on the other hand, explicitly makes opportunities the most important factor, and mandates that access to those opportunities be provided no matter the cost.
The top football schools don't have a problem here - they can fund football and all the other sports they want. It's the schools that are breaking even on football at best that should consider radical changes (drop down a level in competition, halve your football scholarships, and so forth).
Then those schools should move football down a level and (literally) stop playing with the big boys. It's not like those schools are using football to fund other sports; those are the schools that lose money trying to keep up.
No more surprise onside kicks or squibs (the ball has to land in the red zone). I predict a lot more of the high hang time kickoffs to try to nerf the return.
This seems relatively fair. Blaming Warde because Harbaugh dreamt of winning a Super Bowl and not of building Michigan into Alabama-Redux+Georgia-Part-Deux seems pointless. I also share your opinion that trying to make Michigan baseball happen is not the best use of resources at a school where three other men's sports (and arguably the women's softball team) come first.
The Pearson farrago, however, is all on him. Whether he was trying to wait it out, or was vigorously defending Pearson behind the scenes but failing, the situation left Michigan hockey twisting in the wind, and kept the story in the news if on the back burner.
You don't win without talent. Michigan did not acquire much of the obvious-to-everyone talent available, but they still had tons of elite players - Graham, Grant, etc. Zinter and Mikey were All-Americans but not 5-stars, Blake Corum made a team, and so on.
So either Michigan out-scouted the recruiting services to find five-stars-in-the-rough, or coached up 3/4 stars to play like 5 stars. (Or both.)
The key going forward is for the new coaching staff to continue that trend. One way or another - portal, scouting, coaching them up - you gotta have Jimmies and Joes.
No, it isn't. Brian, Seth and Ace all got to that point before the OSU game-that-wasn't, and the louderelements of the board were howling well before that.
Thanks for this. The main caution I would bring is that we're using "JJ McCarthy" as a proxy for "JJ McCarthy, with Corum/Edwards/Mullings as backs, Loveland/Barner/Brederson as TE, Wilson/Johnson/Morgan as WR and an OL fit for the Zombie Apocalypse". One way to visualize that is to recall Cade McNamara in 2021 against OSU: his non-end-of-half drives went TD/INT/punt/punt/TD and then TD/TD/TD/TD.
The higher he gets drafted, the less likely he is to have that kind of high-level support. Ideal for him would be to go lower but to a team with a decent-to-good-OL that needs a QB to take the next step.
This is not meant to denigrate JJ in any way. It's merely a reminder of how difficult it is in football analysis to untangle all the synergies and dependencies, and how much it's a team game.
Without a great QB on a long-term deal, all NFL team success windows are "tight". It's a consequence of the salary cap and the escalating salaries of your players. The Lions will have major decisions coming up on Brown, Goff, Sewell, etc.
We like to rag on Cousins for rivalry reasons, and it is an overpay, but not as much as you'd think given the salary cap and the limited number of even average NFL QBs.
The ideal/likely spot would have been Pittsburgh, but they signed Wilson.
I'm not averse to the idea of landing in Detroit(!), as I still have lingering Goff-will-turn-into-a-pumpkin vibes.
In general, his needs are the same as any non-all-time-great-QB looking to start right away - a coach who will support him and change their system to suit him best, good-to-great lines on both sides of the ball, and a few playmakers for synergy. Detroit, Seattle, Minnesota and maybe LA are the spots for that, I think.
If he's willing to be a backup at first (and risk the Chad Henne career path, which while rewarding, is not exactly covered in glory), then you want to go to one of the league's top franchises - SF, KC, etc.
If Warde Manuel is doing the job his bosses want him to do, he will not be fired. We're not his constituency; the President and Regents are the people he has to please. So what do they want?
They want a zero-scandal, profitable AD that supports all the sports, perhaps especially the non-revenue sports, has full compliance with Title IX and all relevant laws/regulations, and generally keeps on kicking a bunch of money into the general fund without their having to get involved so they can focus on the University's greater mission.
Look at his tenure through that lens, and the "appeasement/repairs" becomes more understandable.
The Howard situation is a bit more complex. There is a cost to firing Howard - he's a legendary alum, with a serious medical issue that's impacting his performance, and there are any number of (white) coaches who got equal or longer leashes. A negotiated settlement would likely be best, but both sides have to want that.
While it doesn't look like you need a top 5 squad on both sides, it does look like you need one best-in-class squad. Every champion on your list ranked #1/#2 in SP+ on offense or defense except 2018 Clemson ... which was #3 on offense *and* #1 in PPD on defense.
Those 2021-2022 Georgia teams were utterly loaded and these rankings (and their performance on the field) reflect that.
It often helps to examine these situations from the point of view of the various (other) sides. If nothing else, it often moves us off positions like "Person X should act against their own self-interest and to the detriment of others so that I can get what I want without sacrifice".
The fan position is (of course) that they want Michigan to win all the things, and the way to do that is to have other people spend their money to make it happen.
Michigan's AD also wants to win all the things, but they also want to keep their bosses happy and abide by relevant laws - probably more than winning all the things, tbf. So even if Warde was a dynamic figure seen scaling walls and crushing ice, he wouldn't be telling donors to give to NIL any more than he'd tell them to give to charity:water; that would piss off his bosses.
Michigan's Regents and President probably want a great university which attracts top students and provides a quality education a lot more than more dust-gathering sportsball trophies. So they're not going to encourage more NIL donations, especially not on behalf of the sports program serving the smallest number of students per dollar spent, while also severely distorting the Title IX equation. That's not, should not, and hopefully will never be their priority.
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TL,DR: You want Michigan to continue to field championship football teams? Design a system where that's in the best interests of the University as a whole, the AD and all its programs, and the players. Likely in that order, as getting the Regents and Presidents convinced will grease a lot of wheels. As far as I can see, that system will not be "wheedle other people to spend money on Bryce Underwood".
Ironically, universal free agency is what's best for the players, because it gives them more money and more options - in the short term. (In the medium term, the superstars still get more money, but likely at the cost of everyone else. In the long term, the teams collude/cartel to control salaries and fix the market. The players sue, and we start the cycle anew.)
Marvin Miller famously feared that owners would listen to Charles Finley who, when the death of the Reserve Clause was nigh, said "Hell, make 'em all free agents! Every year!" because he thought that the way to increase salaries was to constrict supply. Make a handful of stars available each year, and drive the bidding up for those players. That approach has governed MLB ever since, with teams building around cheap, cost-controlled talent supplemented by expensive free agent signings, and the players were amenable to getting their payday later. (Of course, the devil always cheats, and now fewer and fewer players are getting the big money contracts as owners have stopped being willing to hand out long-term deals. Even Ohtani's new deal comes with his deferral of 97+% of his earnings until after the deal expires.)
All of which is to say, yes, the current extravagance is not going to last. What that mostly means is that players will get a rude shock as, say, the 2026 class gets half of what the 2025 class got.
And that happens whether or not Michigan encourages its big money donors to give to NIL or itself. In fact, they're likely better off if the donors give to them, as their cost projections are much more reliable and deliver a better ROI (at least, as far as they will look).
I read two-three at a time, although it depends on the book (and usually only one fiction book for the first time, at a time). One things is that I often read during meals, and occasionally those books are chosen based on likely I am to spill food on them :<)
As an example, I am currently reading Why We Love Baseball (but that has no real plot or memory requirements, plus short chapters, so easy to pick up and put down), Deadly Game (novel) and rereading the Michigan National Championship SI issue.
P.G. Wodehouse was a staple of mine growing up. The Jeeves books are perhaps the epitome of English-idle-rich-comedy, and the Blandings books (Mr. Blandings Builds his Dream House in particular) are also quite good.
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, and The Little Drummer Girl are very well known (and deserving), but I also really liked Call for the Dead. For a first novel, it's exceptional, and introduces George Smiley in an effective and efficient way.
While I love the Dresden Files, I would not characterize them as "fun". As Harry Dresden levels up, he goes from facing "local" villains to world-destroying threats, and the books get increasingly darker as the casualties mount up.
Terry Pratchett, otoh, is definitely fun. His best Discworld book is probably Night Watch, but the one I reread most often is Going Postal - Moist von Lipwig is a delightful character.
I try to never be ashamed of enjoying a book. There's a time and a place for most things, but life's too short to be ashamed of your likes and dislikes.
My favorite Stephen King is probably The Dark Tower, if only for the opening line:
"The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed."
Speaking of opening lines, there's William Gibson's Neuromancer:
"The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel."
I do like that one, but of the three books around the fall of Sarantium (alternate-history Byzantium), my favorite is probably Children of Earth and Sky. Villani the Younger is perhaps my favorite character.
I'll second the recommendations for John Scalzi. Kaiju Preservation Society and Starter Villian are both laugh-out-loud funny.
I would also recommend nearly anything by Guy Gavriel Kay - Under Heaven is my favorite. It's set during his alternate-history Tang Dynasty, and the sense of the characters knowing that their world is at its peak and about to come crashing down is poignant and brilliant.
These are great. You may also like her Wayfarers series - they're loosely connected, but worth the read. There are parts of The Galaxy And The Ground Within that are just brilliant and reminded me very much of how communities pulled together during the pandemic.
If you have concern over Tuttle, Orji or Denegal - and it might be warranted, mind you - Davis or Warren would probably call for panic.
Michigan will not have an established, high-ceiling starter at QB next year. The one QB who has demonstrated a useful talent is Tebow-esque, of which people are understandably leery.
On the other hand, Michigan will have many more pieces for its complex running game, and passing as a constraint with a bruising, QB-led run game would be easier to set up.
I will watch their future progress with considerable interest.
Not lesser talent, but "lower-ranked-out-of-high-school talent". The difference is indicative - either Michigan is/was great at identifying scouting misses, or is able to develop lower-ranked players into their higher-ranked equivalents, or both.
The point to remember is that it's not lesser talent and a worse team. The recruiting rankings are an attempt to grade the clay with an eye towards what it will become, but the proof is in the finished product.
Two-back sets at Michigan usually involve an H-back/fullback, rather than two true running backs. One way to mash Mullings/Edwards into that mindset is to have Edwards motion to a slot or flanker spot, or Mullings to the wing-TE spot.
Both backs likely mean that Brederson is off the field, too, so it's a tricky mix to manage, but essential to getting the most out of the offense.
1. Goldfinger, although the opening sequence from The Spy Who Loved me is excellent, and the parkour sequence from Casino Royale is one of my favorites.
"The Stride ‘dog’ (single LB blitz) is an example of Martindale’s overall plan that keeps pressures simple for the defenses but complicated for the offense."
The key will be keeping the defense's decision tree simple and clear while forcing the offense to account for multiple branches which require mutually exclusive responses.
And, of course, in making sure that you're not asking your players to do things that only their NFL counterparts can do. Michigan's D has a tremendous amount of talent, but it's not like everyone out there will be a regular NFL starter; even if that were true, they're not there today. He doesn't have to face the Mahomes and Hurts of the world any more, but he doesn't have peak Earl Thomas back there either.
Adjusting to the skills and limits of the talent on hand is the true test of any coach, particularly one moving down the talent curve.
Sorry, I kid, but I did want to say I was today years old when I learned that Chiune Sugihara had been honored by Israel as one of the Righteous, so thank you for that.
Michigan will not have an NFL-passing game next year. They have to replace the OL, QB, both WR, Corum, and TE2.
Michigan does return Brederson, Edwards, Mullings, and Hall, and adds Cabana and Marshal.
Given that, there's no way Michigan is going to install any sort of pass-first offense until they're absolutely sure they can't win with the running game and a passing offense as constraint (QBOhNoes, screens, RB flares, RPO's, TE leaks and so forth).
If I'm SF, I want to limit the number of times Mahomes can win the game. That means taking the ball first as long as I think I can score - and in this game, they clearly should believe that.
If SF gets the TD, then worst-case KC gets the matching TD and has to decide between the 96% extra point and possibly never seeing the ball again, or the 45% do-or-die for two.
If SF gets the FG, then both teams know they're in 4-down territory and play accordingly.
The bottom line is that if you don't think you can stop the Chiefs, then it doesn't much matter what you pick. It's similar to the when-to-go-for-two analysis - if you *know* KC is scoring, your chances of winning are small, so the choices are merely very small deltas to a small number.
Really, the only certainty is that the losing side will get armchair-second-guessed to oblivion.
I don’t care one way or another about 1; if the players agree it was egregious they’ll set up the offender for embarrassment later.
#2 is lecture-worthy because victory formation is an implicit agreement to end the game without further effort. If they really wanted to get their guy the TD they should line up in a real play.
Look at our 2022 game against OSU. Without our best DL (Morris), Minter consistently rushed four - but almost never the same four. We were blitzing from all over and dropping people into the hot routes. The key was not the maniacal "Leeeeroy Jenkins!" rush, but the fact that Stroud didn't know what he was looking at. There were quite a few plays where he had all day, but Harrison was doubled, Johnson was locked on the next read, a DL had dropped into the hot route, and no one had leverage.
Finally, look at the 2023 National Championship (boy, that's never getting old) game. We confused Penix in the same way, but more so, because we were crushing the OL. Double the "unleash the dragon" read, drop someone into the hot route, and read 3 is Mason Graham.
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If the offense executes perfectly, it always wins. This implies that the defense either has to hope the offense isn't perfect, or it has to take its chances. Every defense has a hole. The key to blitzy defenses - "solving your problems with aggression" - is putting pressure on the offense to find the hole before they find the ball. The more flexible your personnel, the more you can hide your weakness and trap the offense into playing to your strengths rather than the reverse.
The difference between Brown's defense and the Ravens iterations is that flexibility. Brown would not give up the middle of the field and make the offense make plays out wide. This puts a premium on those corners because that's where the under-pressure throws will go.
These defenses will put the weakness anywhere, which is a bigger burden all around. The defense has to be smart and execute the call with all the complex drops and coverage rules, but when they do the processing burden on the QB is huge. Even Stroud and Penix struggled with it.
Next year was always going to be a step back, for two reasons:
1. This team was unique, and uniquely positioned. We had so many players come back - Michigan legends - and now they're gone. We won't really appreciate that until we look at an improved Edwards running behind a merely-pretty-good-OL, against a much harder schedule, and realizing how good we had it with Corum and an NFL road-grading unit, backed by almost-two elite defenses.
2. Michigan went from (emotionally speaking) the Mariana Trench during 2020 to climbing Everest in 2023. Even if we miraculously kept the band together, the odds would have been hugely against us staying there; even if we won another CFP playoff game it wouldn't feel this sweet.
Now, we're looking a steeper drop-off than before, but practically speaking it won't matter a lot unless we start shedding more players. It was always going to be a sharp drop, but mostly because the peak was so very high.
But in both those cases, Harbaugh was the head coach and (presumably) had final say. SM may not want a first-time play caller on that side of the ball with an first-year head coach, who knows he's going to have to pay more attention to the offense that is losing 10/11 starters including the top 6 OL, the unit which more than any other drove the offense's success.
I was 10 when we moved to Ann Arbor. I was showing some interest in football, and my dad had a coworker who was moving. He bought their season tickets and figured it might be fun for us to go to games together.
I had never been to anything like that before - even pro baseball games and the one NFL game I'd seen to that point were nothing like the experience of 100K plus people packed into The Big House cheering for Michigan. By the end of the year, when Leach stretched the ball across the goal line for the TD, I was hooked. (And by the time I left Ann Arbor for college, I had been part for 8 of the 10 largest sports crowds in US history :<)
To this day, my favorite sports memories are Michigan related - Carter v. Indiana, Wheatley v. Washington, and so many more. Yeah, the Phantom Touchdown and a host of others sucked, but the highs are worth the ride.
I don't think they will be able to push the passing game very much, if it all. All the returning offensive talent points towards the run, with maybe *five* capable running backs in Edwards, Mullings, Hall, Cabana and Marshall, no QB with any experience or instant-starter-hype, and little returning wide-receiver passing (Morris and Morgan, with Loveland at TE).
I suspect the passing attack will be complementary to the run game, with more screens, swings, flares, RPOs and the occasional deep shot a la QBOhNoes.
And that's workable - particularly if they can coach up the OL to the standard of the last three years. Getting that right is job 1, because you can win a lot of games by dominating the line of scrimmage on both sides of the ball.
The donor-based model is unsustainable for most, because the endgame is effectively universal free agency every year, and most donors aren't so attached to their school's athletic success that they want to dump money in and get soupçons of fleeting glory as their only reward.
Of course, then there's T. Boone Pickens, who gave over a quarter of a billion dollars to OSU athletics. He might have been willing to outspend and outlast most others.
The ultimate solution is to move to a world where the athletes are employed by the schools. Yes, that means negotiating state laws, employment laws, Title IX and all the rest. Yes, it will be messy. Yes, it will suck some of the joy out of college athletics for a few.
But the genie is out of the bottle, and we will never get it back in. The only way out is through.
What do you do when the opportunities are not equally available, because of gender-biased markets? Title IX has traditionally been interpreted to be market-agnostic in terms of inputs - if you want a men's underwater-basket-weaving team, that's just fine as long as you provide a women's stunt-parachuting team with approximately equal rosters. Whether the athletic opportunities are in popular sports or not is irrelevant.
Now, Title IX does not require that equal dollars be spent - parachutes can be more expensive than reeds-for-baskets - but that "opportunities" and "benefits" be the same, and that scholarship dollars be proportional to representation. Courts have ruled that "benefits" + scholarships cover total compensation provided, but doesn't include facilities.
So, buying platinum toilet seats for the football team is fine, but paying players from the University would likely not be, without spreading around a proportional amount to the women's athletes.
And frankly, that would be great! The University should be more than willing to take the stream of money flowing into the AD, and redirect it out away from the AD staff - how many times has the size of the AD and salaries thereof been pointed out here? - both to the athletes and back to the University. Use those dollars to lower tuition and offer a baseline lifetime health care package to all former student-athletes.
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My son and I are enjoying these shirts. In general, the Underground Printing shirts are soft and hold up reasonably well, but the true test will come this year, as I cycle through all my M shirts to celebrate The National Champion Michigan Wolverines.
TL,DR: Yes, there was a large talent imbalance, but it's smoothed out somewhat, and even before that imbalance the women could play.
I disagree with this, to a degree.
For a long time, the women's game was more skill dependent than the boys, because they did not have the jump-out-of-the-gym, above-the-rim athletes. They had to play as a team, and you saw a lot more games that looked like the Princeton constant-motion offense than the NBA-style "I will drive to the hoop and you cannot stop me" variation.
With the advent of Title IX and greater overall acceptance (and money!) for women's sports, there was an influx of talent, distributed unevenly. Well-coached teams like Tennessee could now get dominant players who could explode for buckets whenever they wanted, and the rich got richer.
Then the tide started lifting more boats, and teams other than UConn and Tennessee started getting more talent. The last tournament's TV ratings were largely driven by Clarke, and they'll fall back some, but some of the fans who tuned in to watch Clarke will stay to watch Watkins and the next generation.
I think Blake Corum will be successful at whatever he does and wherever he goes. He's a Michigan Legend and Favorite Son. But!
Given how RBs are used in the NFL, and how short their careers are, I think I would rather see my favorite team take Zinter/Keegan/Henderson in the 3rd round over Corum.
I too would pick "Take Us Home, Blake" or "6-5", or "2023 National Champions", but I have enough to revel in due to the National Champion Michigan Wolverines, that I don't feel like I need to revel in OSU schadenfreude.
"some allowance needed to be made for profitable programs" is an example of a systemic bias. It basically says that money is more important than opportunities.
Title IX, on the other hand, explicitly makes opportunities the most important factor, and mandates that access to those opportunities be provided no matter the cost.
The top football schools don't have a problem here - they can fund football and all the other sports they want. It's the schools that are breaking even on football at best that should consider radical changes (drop down a level in competition, halve your football scholarships, and so forth).
Then those schools should move football down a level and (literally) stop playing with the big boys. It's not like those schools are using football to fund other sports; those are the schools that lose money trying to keep up.
For all that LSU is ferociously cleaning the glass and blocking shots, they're either forcing shots or missing layups at the other end.
Clarke with the dagger to push the lead to 11 with a little over 5 minutes to go.
Will there be a way to send books to multiple addresses? Not a big issue, but it comes up every time I get these things for me and my brother-in-law.
No more surprise onside kicks or squibs (the ball has to land in the red zone). I predict a lot more of the high hang time kickoffs to try to nerf the return.
This seems relatively fair. Blaming Warde because Harbaugh dreamt of winning a Super Bowl and not of building Michigan into Alabama-Redux+Georgia-Part-Deux seems pointless. I also share your opinion that trying to make Michigan baseball happen is not the best use of resources at a school where three other men's sports (and arguably the women's softball team) come first.
The Pearson farrago, however, is all on him. Whether he was trying to wait it out, or was vigorously defending Pearson behind the scenes but failing, the situation left Michigan hockey twisting in the wind, and kept the story in the news if on the back burner.
You don't win without talent. Michigan did not acquire much of the obvious-to-everyone talent available, but they still had tons of elite players - Graham, Grant, etc. Zinter and Mikey were All-Americans but not 5-stars, Blake Corum made a team, and so on.
So either Michigan out-scouted the recruiting services to find five-stars-in-the-rough, or coached up 3/4 stars to play like 5 stars. (Or both.)
The key going forward is for the new coaching staff to continue that trend. One way or another - portal, scouting, coaching them up - you gotta have Jimmies and Joes.
No, it isn't. Brian, Seth and Ace all got to that point before the OSU game-that-wasn't, and the louder elements of the board were howling well before that.
Check out the When Can We Fire This Guy blog tag for further reading.
When I was in college, it was quite literally "Get a bag of Fritos, and a cup of chili. Pour the chili into the Frito bag. Stir and serve."
Surprisingly tasty and you could eat it while walking.
Thanks for this. The main caution I would bring is that we're using "JJ McCarthy" as a proxy for "JJ McCarthy, with Corum/Edwards/Mullings as backs, Loveland/Barner/Brederson as TE, Wilson/Johnson/Morgan as WR and an OL fit for the Zombie Apocalypse". One way to visualize that is to recall Cade McNamara in 2021 against OSU: his non-end-of-half drives went TD/INT/punt/punt/TD and then TD/TD/TD/TD.
The higher he gets drafted, the less likely he is to have that kind of high-level support. Ideal for him would be to go lower but to a team with a decent-to-good-OL that needs a QB to take the next step.
This is not meant to denigrate JJ in any way. It's merely a reminder of how difficult it is in football analysis to untangle all the synergies and dependencies, and how much it's a team game.
Without a great QB on a long-term deal, all NFL team success windows are "tight". It's a consequence of the salary cap and the escalating salaries of your players. The Lions will have major decisions coming up on Brown, Goff, Sewell, etc.
We like to rag on Cousins for rivalry reasons, and it is an overpay, but not as much as you'd think given the salary cap and the limited number of even average NFL QBs.
That said, Cousins is a perfectly cromulent NFL QB, especially if he has a good OL.
Yes, Denver will pay $38M for next year, and will take an $85M(!) hit against the cap.
The ideal/likely spot would have been Pittsburgh, but they signed Wilson.
I'm not averse to the idea of landing in Detroit(!), as I still have lingering Goff-will-turn-into-a-pumpkin vibes.
In general, his needs are the same as any non-all-time-great-QB looking to start right away - a coach who will support him and change their system to suit him best, good-to-great lines on both sides of the ball, and a few playmakers for synergy. Detroit, Seattle, Minnesota and maybe LA are the spots for that, I think.
If he's willing to be a backup at first (and risk the Chad Henne career path, which while rewarding, is not exactly covered in glory), then you want to go to one of the league's top franchises - SF, KC, etc.
If Warde Manuel is doing the job his bosses want him to do, he will not be fired. We're not his constituency; the President and Regents are the people he has to please. So what do they want?
They want a zero-scandal, profitable AD that supports all the sports, perhaps especially the non-revenue sports, has full compliance with Title IX and all relevant laws/regulations, and generally keeps on kicking a bunch of money into the general fund without their having to get involved so they can focus on the University's greater mission.
Look at his tenure through that lens, and the "appeasement/repairs" becomes more understandable.
The Howard situation is a bit more complex. There is a cost to firing Howard - he's a legendary alum, with a serious medical issue that's impacting his performance, and there are any number of (white) coaches who got equal or longer leashes. A negotiated settlement would likely be best, but both sides have to want that.
While it doesn't look like you need a top 5 squad on both sides, it does look like you need one best-in-class squad. Every champion on your list ranked #1/#2 in SP+ on offense or defense except 2018 Clemson ... which was #3 on offense *and* #1 in PPD on defense.
Those 2021-2022 Georgia teams were utterly loaded and these rankings (and their performance on the field) reflect that.
It often helps to examine these situations from the point of view of the various (other) sides. If nothing else, it often moves us off positions like "Person X should act against their own self-interest and to the detriment of others so that I can get what I want without sacrifice".
The fan position is (of course) that they want Michigan to win all the things, and the way to do that is to have other people spend their money to make it happen.
Michigan's AD also wants to win all the things, but they also want to keep their bosses happy and abide by relevant laws - probably more than winning all the things, tbf. So even if Warde was a dynamic figure seen scaling walls and crushing ice, he wouldn't be telling donors to give to NIL any more than he'd tell them to give to charity:water; that would piss off his bosses.
Michigan's Regents and President probably want a great university which attracts top students and provides a quality education a lot more than more dust-gathering sportsball trophies. So they're not going to encourage more NIL donations, especially not on behalf of the sports program serving the smallest number of students per dollar spent, while also severely distorting the Title IX equation. That's not, should not, and hopefully will never be their priority.
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TL,DR: You want Michigan to continue to field championship football teams? Design a system where that's in the best interests of the University as a whole, the AD and all its programs, and the players. Likely in that order, as getting the Regents and Presidents convinced will grease a lot of wheels. As far as I can see, that system will not be "wheedle other people to spend money on Bryce Underwood".
Ironically, universal free agency is what's best for the players, because it gives them more money and more options - in the short term. (In the medium term, the superstars still get more money, but likely at the cost of everyone else. In the long term, the teams collude/cartel to control salaries and fix the market. The players sue, and we start the cycle anew.)
Marvin Miller famously feared that owners would listen to Charles Finley who, when the death of the Reserve Clause was nigh, said "Hell, make 'em all free agents! Every year!" because he thought that the way to increase salaries was to constrict supply. Make a handful of stars available each year, and drive the bidding up for those players. That approach has governed MLB ever since, with teams building around cheap, cost-controlled talent supplemented by expensive free agent signings, and the players were amenable to getting their payday later. (Of course, the devil always cheats, and now fewer and fewer players are getting the big money contracts as owners have stopped being willing to hand out long-term deals. Even Ohtani's new deal comes with his deferral of 97+% of his earnings until after the deal expires.)
All of which is to say, yes, the current extravagance is not going to last. What that mostly means is that players will get a rude shock as, say, the 2026 class gets half of what the 2025 class got.
And that happens whether or not Michigan encourages its big money donors to give to NIL or itself. In fact, they're likely better off if the donors give to them, as their cost projections are much more reliable and deliver a better ROI (at least, as far as they will look).
I read two-three at a time, although it depends on the book (and usually only one fiction book for the first time, at a time). One things is that I often read during meals, and occasionally those books are chosen based on likely I am to spill food on them :<)
As an example, I am currently reading Why We Love Baseball (but that has no real plot or memory requirements, plus short chapters, so easy to pick up and put down), Deadly Game (novel) and rereading the Michigan National Championship SI issue.
P.G. Wodehouse was a staple of mine growing up. The Jeeves books are perhaps the epitome of English-idle-rich-comedy, and the Blandings books (Mr. Blandings Builds his Dream House in particular) are also quite good.
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, and The Little Drummer Girl are very well known (and deserving), but I also really liked Call for the Dead. For a first novel, it's exceptional, and introduces George Smiley in an effective and efficient way.
While I love the Dresden Files, I would not characterize them as "fun". As Harry Dresden levels up, he goes from facing "local" villains to world-destroying threats, and the books get increasingly darker as the casualties mount up.
Terry Pratchett, otoh, is definitely fun. His best Discworld book is probably Night Watch, but the one I reread most often is Going Postal - Moist von Lipwig is a delightful character.
I try to never be ashamed of enjoying a book. There's a time and a place for most things, but life's too short to be ashamed of your likes and dislikes.
My favorite Stephen King is probably The Dark Tower, if only for the opening line:
"The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed."
Speaking of opening lines, there's William Gibson's Neuromancer:
"The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel."
I do like that one, but of the three books around the fall of Sarantium (alternate-history Byzantium), my favorite is probably Children of Earth and Sky. Villani the Younger is perhaps my favorite character.
The Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells are amazing and generally brisk reads.
I'll second the recommendations for John Scalzi. Kaiju Preservation Society and Starter Villian are both laugh-out-loud funny.
I would also recommend nearly anything by Guy Gavriel Kay - Under Heaven is my favorite. It's set during his alternate-history Tang Dynasty, and the sense of the characters knowing that their world is at its peak and about to come crashing down is poignant and brilliant.
These are great. You may also like her Wayfarers series - they're loosely connected, but worth the read. There are parts of The Galaxy And The Ground Within that are just brilliant and reminded me very much of how communities pulled together during the pandemic.
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It was Barzini all along.
If you have concern over Tuttle, Orji or Denegal - and it might be warranted, mind you - Davis or Warren would probably call for panic.
Michigan will not have an established, high-ceiling starter at QB next year. The one QB who has demonstrated a useful talent is Tebow-esque, of which people are understandably leery.
On the other hand, Michigan will have many more pieces for its complex running game, and passing as a constraint with a bruising, QB-led run game would be easier to set up.
I will watch their future progress with considerable interest.
Not lesser talent, but "lower-ranked-out-of-high-school talent". The difference is indicative - either Michigan is/was great at identifying scouting misses, or is able to develop lower-ranked players into their higher-ranked equivalents, or both.
The point to remember is that it's not lesser talent and a worse team. The recruiting rankings are an attempt to grade the clay with an eye towards what it will become, but the proof is in the finished product.
Two-back sets at Michigan usually involve an H-back/fullback, rather than two true running backs. One way to mash Mullings/Edwards into that mindset is to have Edwards motion to a slot or flanker spot, or Mullings to the wing-TE spot.
Both backs likely mean that Brederson is off the field, too, so it's a tricky mix to manage, but essential to getting the most out of the offense.
1. Goldfinger, although the opening sequence from The Spy Who Loved me is excellent, and the parkour sequence from Casino Royale is one of my favorites.
2. The Iron Giant ("Super-man!"), or Samaritan.
3. Ozymandius. "I did it twenty-five minutes ago." Possibly Infidel. "Am I the eagle, or the mountain?"
4. False. Team 144 - Business is Finished!
"The Stride ‘dog’ (single LB blitz) is an example of Martindale’s overall plan that keeps pressures simple for the defenses but complicated for the offense."
The key will be keeping the defense's decision tree simple and clear while forcing the offense to account for multiple branches which require mutually exclusive responses.
And, of course, in making sure that you're not asking your players to do things that only their NFL counterparts can do. Michigan's D has a tremendous amount of talent, but it's not like everyone out there will be a regular NFL starter; even if that were true, they're not there today. He doesn't have to face the Mahomes and Hurts of the world any more, but he doesn't have peak Earl Thomas back there either.
Adjusting to the skills and limits of the talent on hand is the true test of any coach, particularly one moving down the talent curve.
Remember when Clark was the second-best freshman in the nation?
Clark is amazing, but I'm a little wistful for Bueckers - two season-ending knee injuries is a bit much.
Hopefully, the team can build on their strong performance and shake off the loss to a superstar at the top of her game.
Sorry, I kid, but I…
Who?
Sorry, I kid, but I did want to say I was today years old when I learned that Chiune Sugihara had been honored by Israel as one of the Righteous, so thank you for that.
Michigan will not have an NFL-passing game next year. They have to replace the OL, QB, both WR, Corum, and TE2.
Michigan does return Brederson, Edwards, Mullings, and Hall, and adds Cabana and Marshal.
Given that, there's no way Michigan is going to install any sort of pass-first offense until they're absolutely sure they can't win with the running game and a passing offense as constraint (QBOhNoes, screens, RB flares, RPO's, TE leaks and so forth).
If I'm SF, I want to limit the number of times Mahomes can win the game. That means taking the ball first as long as I think I can score - and in this game, they clearly should believe that.
If SF gets the TD, then worst-case KC gets the matching TD and has to decide between the 96% extra point and possibly never seeing the ball again, or the 45% do-or-die for two.
If SF gets the FG, then both teams know they're in 4-down territory and play accordingly.
The bottom line is that if you don't think you can stop the Chiefs, then it doesn't much matter what you pick. It's similar to the when-to-go-for-two analysis - if you *know* KC is scoring, your chances of winning are small, so the choices are merely very small deltas to a small number.
Really, the only certainty is that the losing side will get armchair-second-guessed to oblivion.
I don’t care one way or another about 1; if the players agree it was egregious they’ll set up the offender for embarrassment later.
#2 is lecture-worthy because victory formation is an implicit agreement to end the game without further effort. If they really wanted to get their guy the TD they should line up in a real play.
#3 is stupid and Reilly should get suspended.
Brian, I hope you loved writing this a thousandth as much as we did reading it.
UFR of an Alabama demolition (almost undone by special teams TBF) will never get old.
Look at our 2022 game against OSU. Without our best DL (Morris), Minter consistently rushed four - but almost never the same four. We were blitzing from all over and dropping people into the hot routes. The key was not the maniacal "Leeeeroy Jenkins!" rush, but the fact that Stroud didn't know what he was looking at. There were quite a few plays where he had all day, but Harrison was doubled, Johnson was locked on the next read, a DL had dropped into the hot route, and no one had leverage.
Finally, look at the 2023 National Championship (boy, that's never getting old) game. We confused Penix in the same way, but more so, because we were crushing the OL. Double the "unleash the dragon" read, drop someone into the hot route, and read 3 is Mason Graham.
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If the offense executes perfectly, it always wins. This implies that the defense either has to hope the offense isn't perfect, or it has to take its chances. Every defense has a hole. The key to blitzy defenses - "solving your problems with aggression" - is putting pressure on the offense to find the hole before they find the ball. The more flexible your personnel, the more you can hide your weakness and trap the offense into playing to your strengths rather than the reverse.
The difference between Brown's defense and the Ravens iterations is that flexibility. Brown would not give up the middle of the field and make the offense make plays out wide. This puts a premium on those corners because that's where the under-pressure throws will go.
These defenses will put the weakness anywhere, which is a bigger burden all around. The defense has to be smart and execute the call with all the complex drops and coverage rules, but when they do the processing burden on the QB is huge. Even Stroud and Penix struggled with it.
Next year was always going to be a step back, for two reasons:
1. This team was unique, and uniquely positioned. We had so many players come back - Michigan legends - and now they're gone. We won't really appreciate that until we look at an improved Edwards running behind a merely-pretty-good-OL, against a much harder schedule, and realizing how good we had it with Corum and an NFL road-grading unit, backed by almost-two elite defenses.
2. Michigan went from (emotionally speaking) the Mariana Trench during 2020 to climbing Everest in 2023. Even if we miraculously kept the band together, the odds would have been hugely against us staying there; even if we won another CFP playoff game it wouldn't feel this sweet.
Now, we're looking a steeper drop-off than before, but practically speaking it won't matter a lot unless we start shedding more players. It was always going to be a sharp drop, but mostly because the peak was so very high.
But in both those cases, Harbaugh was the head coach and (presumably) had final say. SM may not want a first-time play caller on that side of the ball with an first-year head coach, who knows he's going to have to pay more attention to the offense that is losing 10/11 starters including the top 6 OL, the unit which more than any other drove the offense's success.
I was 10 when we moved to Ann Arbor. I was showing some interest in football, and my dad had a coworker who was moving. He bought their season tickets and figured it might be fun for us to go to games together.
I had never been to anything like that before - even pro baseball games and the one NFL game I'd seen to that point were nothing like the experience of 100K plus people packed into The Big House cheering for Michigan. By the end of the year, when Leach stretched the ball across the goal line for the TD, I was hooked. (And by the time I left Ann Arbor for college, I had been part for 8 of the 10 largest sports crowds in US history :<)
To this day, my favorite sports memories are Michigan related - Carter v. Indiana, Wheatley v. Washington, and so many more. Yeah, the Phantom Touchdown and a host of others sucked, but the highs are worth the ride.
I don't think they will be able to push the passing game very much, if it all. All the returning offensive talent points towards the run, with maybe *five* capable running backs in Edwards, Mullings, Hall, Cabana and Marshall, no QB with any experience or instant-starter-hype, and little returning wide-receiver passing (Morris and Morgan, with Loveland at TE).
I suspect the passing attack will be complementary to the run game, with more screens, swings, flares, RPOs and the occasional deep shot a la QBOhNoes.
And that's workable - particularly if they can coach up the OL to the standard of the last three years. Getting that right is job 1, because you can win a lot of games by dominating the line of scrimmage on both sides of the ball.
The donor-based model is unsustainable for most, because the endgame is effectively universal free agency every year, and most donors aren't so attached to their school's athletic success that they want to dump money in and get soupçons of fleeting glory as their only reward.
Of course, then there's T. Boone Pickens, who gave over a quarter of a billion dollars to OSU athletics. He might have been willing to outspend and outlast most others.
The ultimate solution is to move to a world where the athletes are employed by the schools. Yes, that means negotiating state laws, employment laws, Title IX and all the rest. Yes, it will be messy. Yes, it will suck some of the joy out of college athletics for a few.
But the genie is out of the bottle, and we will never get it back in. The only way out is through.
What do you do when the opportunities are not equally available, because of gender-biased markets? Title IX has traditionally been interpreted to be market-agnostic in terms of inputs - if you want a men's underwater-basket-weaving team, that's just fine as long as you provide a women's stunt-parachuting team with approximately equal rosters. Whether the athletic opportunities are in popular sports or not is irrelevant.
Now, Title IX does not require that equal dollars be spent - parachutes can be more expensive than reeds-for-baskets - but that "opportunities" and "benefits" be the same, and that scholarship dollars be proportional to representation. Courts have ruled that "benefits" + scholarships cover total compensation provided, but doesn't include facilities.
So, buying platinum toilet seats for the football team is fine, but paying players from the University would likely not be, without spreading around a proportional amount to the women's athletes.
And frankly, that would be great! The University should be more than willing to take the stream of money flowing into the AD, and redirect it out away from the AD staff - how many times has the size of the AD and salaries thereof been pointed out here? - both to the athletes and back to the University. Use those dollars to lower tuition and offer a baseline lifetime health care package to all former student-athletes.