Michigan Fans: our definition of erudite starts with references right out of 10th-grade literature class.

I asked this to Brian over email once, but I never saw it come through: 

What happens if Beilein lands just one or two of the prospects he went after (and was close to getting) post 2013-run?

I see players like Jalen Brunson, Trevon Blueitt, Kevon Looney, Keita B-D, Jaylen Brown, Mo Bamba, Devin Booker, Derryck Thornton, Tyus Battle, Vincent Edwards, Miles Bridges, Joshua Langford, etc. having terrific careers (or not so terrific) at their respective schools and wonder. 

Which one would have made the biggest difference for Michigan?

Which one would have been most fun if they'd come here?

Who made the worst decision, and why is it Mo Bamba?

We have learned our lesson.

Stanford-USC are in the same conference, so it's the first intra-conference rivalry. Like intra-murals.

I'm pretty disappointed with SBNation in general because they've genericized every team's page to the point where there's very little unique left.

*sniffs*

but I just don't see the need to evoke that imagery. Beatdowns don't have to be associated with, you know, that. 

It's a bit like having another GA on the coaching staff.

For me, it's Gareon Conley.

was to question the withdrawal. It just makes him look petty and completely uninterested in benefit to the community. It makes his original gift a transparent name-grab.

Are you going for the team exclusively built from current M players and former M recruits? Conley, McDowell, etc.?

December 2005. The previous winter, the team had gone to the Rose Bowl, so we South Quadders won. But in 2005, Carr let the football players play for West Quad, and we were completely obliterated. 

During that fight, I was picked up into the air and thrown into a snowbank by Prescott Burgess. 

Most of what you're working with (I'm guessing) boils down to some comma separated value (CSV) files, or maybe a few of them linked together based on some primary key. 

You're applying transformations to the data (functions in excel), then you're visualizing the results. 

There is an open-source statistical programming language called "R" that is basically designed for this use-case (almost all the code has been written by statisticians, for better or for worse).

It would require a bit of a learning curve, but I'm guessing your overall productivity would increase if you were using R rather than Excel, since there are are steps in your Excel process you could automate. 

In particular, the "dplyr" package is valuable for data transformations, you can write your own functions (that you can name and call as often as you'd like), and you can visualize (I love the "ggplot2" package).

Seth, I really think you would love using something like R for your analyses. You could make it reproducible so it builds and updates everything for you. (and R has the ggplot2 package which makes all plots prettier).

not the most fun Michigan Monday he's ever written, but if you recall, yesterday was full of bombshells (Sark out at USC, Spurrier out at USC, etc.).

I don't know why I'm surprised he pronounces it "nucular."

Nailbiter.

highly ironic.

It's not a perfect match, but a pretty successful Power 5 coach leaving for another Power 5 school. Stoops would be more of surprise, but not exponentially so.

I think what this preview really boils down to is ethics in games journalism.

You provide an interesting template.

_Human_ knows a lot about the game. It's a shame he wastes _sport-I'm-passionate-about_ posts on an increasingly irrelevant entity like _league-I-don't-particularly-care-for_ and the mediocre _team-I-don't-particularly-care-for_ instead of _the-vastly-Superior-League-I-care-about_.

Seems like a lot of opinion-bashing for something a person has decided to care about. Let's try it out on something a bit closer to home:

Brian clearly knows a lot about the game. It's a shame he wastes football posts about an increasingly irrelevant entity like the B1G and the mediocre Michigan team instead of the Glorious SEC.

EDIT: The post I was originally replying to appears to have gone the way of the buffalo.

We want Brunson for point and Coleman for SG, so if they were both interested, we'd take them. I don't think we'll get both, but it's not an either/or situation.

He already roots for Virginia.

this?

The defense was better last year, and even though scoring is more balanced this year, last year's team would have a healthy McGary. And that team's three-headed center would have five additional fouls to give.

If McGary was healthy on this team, though, I might give the edge to this year's iteration.

from a talent development standpoint. "Come to Michigan, play for a great coach and maybe get to the NBA in a year or two."

The "two-and-done" model is one that I think will increase over thenext few years. Most of those players will probably end up going to Kansas, Kentucky, UNC, and Duke. But not all of them.

show up based on a threshold. Since downvotes are costly, a post with a below-zero point total is probably not all that worthwhile, and you could set it at -2 or -3 to counteract occasional accidental downvotes and squabbles. That way you'd have a very good chance of not seeing the worst posts.

It should minimize vendetta-posting.

If you downvote someone else, you lose a point.

I'm a bit sad to lose the editorializing available in the previous(ly functional) iteration, but this is really great to have back.

Or is it just a fantasy?

That's what he gets for angering the Seth.

the bias does come through a bit. We lost major, major pieces in Tim and Trey, and I don't think anyone can overestimate what they brought to the table.

But we were one of the youngest teams in the country last year, and we managed to do ok. We also have five pretty talented candidates for the sophomore leap, including at least player with no discernable ceiling.

so it must be true.

:(

My favorite thing about TOC, thoguh is KJ's rampant affection for scatterplots.

Don't care.

There's not much you can do when someone's dream school comes calling.

I feel half as ready as I did a few seconds ago, for some reason...

Failing to identify what is clearly the best rap album of all time:

It represents schematic advantage between the offensive and defensive coordinators.

I don't have quite the same "Michigan basketball is going to be better than it has been in at least fifteen years" feeling that we had before last year, partially because of how great last  year was. But it's a great feeling.

.

They Are.

so he may be off the table by that point.

this Grantland article is much more interesting.

Grantham, possibly?

Not super tall for a college two guard.

to close the class.