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Date Title Body
Last night I re-watched the…

Last night I re-watched the end of the Rose Bowl and dipped through my DVR recording of the title game. Recommend.

THREE JIM HARBAUGH!

THREE…

THREE JIM HARBAUGH!

THREE JIM HARBAUGH!

THREE JIM HARBAUGH!

Michigan fans are taking…

Michigan fans are taking over that stadium in 7 days. I may or may not have purchased 96 pairs of blue binoculars for the bus full of Wolverines coming from NoVA. Go Blue!

I was a member of the '93…

I was a member of the '93 team and "I been down that road", as they say.

Rubbing of wheel fairings against the wheels is one of the great scourges of these races. We had problems with it too, just attempting too tight a tolerance for the abuse the car gets over the race. It's an aerodynamic cost to widen the opening around the wheel, but the bigger loss is power from the unplanned rubbing and then the time you have to take to stop mid-race and basically cut pieces of the car off to stop it.

The last place starting time cost them officially 30 minutes (caused by an electrical problem in qualifying) but the time lost to passing other cars might not have been trivial since all 3 vehicles (lead, car, chase) have to pass all 3 of the other team's cars at once. At least in 1993 the Stuart Highway wasn't all that wide and you had to contend with road trains (18 wheelers with 3 trailers) coming the other way. Maybe different now, not sure.

Overall this team had once of the best chances to win this race as any team Michigan has had. The Dutch are a juggernaut in this event and it was good to beat at least one of their teams (Top Dutch was 7th), and see the Belgians win.

Great kids, great result. Go Blue!

Karma is patient and cruel…

Karma is patient and cruel. Ill-gotten 1 score win in 1997 is here to collect its due.

Peanut butter jelly time,…

Peanut butter jelly time, 2019 edition?

Vegas (-1) and Power Rank (…

Vegas (-1) and Power Rank (-3.4) both like ND although Ed has said he thinks his own 3.4 point margin might be a bit high. Sagarin has the game as essentially pick'em.

It is saying something that…

It is saying something that Louisville (LOUISVILLE! on round 2 with Petrino) appears have to agreed with this sentiment, or at least realized the pointlessness of trying to determine what was known or not. And in that case the issue was improper (partially legal?) NCAA benefits, not domestic abuse.

This moment is going to be remembered for a long time based on what the administration in Columbus chooses to do. The Big 10 fanbase has turned its nose at the SEC for years and accused it of cheating in recruiting and putting wins above all else at any cost. Penn State....Michigan State...Ohio State in the last ~5 years, and all coincidentally now in the top 10 preseason rankings. Appears the shoe is on the other foot.

Elite Eight Evisceration

That is all

Helpful...

Thanks for the info, it is helpful. You could be right about the trust factor, although that strikes me as a bit ironic given that eBay used to be the only option for stuff like this. I haven't sold tickets online in a number of years, admittedly.

I did wind up buying Wisconsin tickets on eBay, and if there were significant fees the seller is paying them. Also advertised free shipping, but I think they are downloads so that's obviously not a benefit. Perhaps the seller is doing worse on eBay than he could be doing on StubHub, not sure.

I've never had an issue on eBay, but if I did I would assume I would get my money back somehow. The only real issue is not seeing the game, but if you are buying from a 1-off seller that you don't know personally you take that risk, whether you get your money back or not, and regardless of what site you use.

It does seem crazy...

...but also true, and I paid close attention. I am not sure the location of the seats would impact SH fees but to answer your question I was not buying club seats.

I also saw high (but not that high) fees when I bought Utah road game tickets last year, albeit on a different site. It seems to be the norm for all the ticket sites anymore, and you really have to look at total cost versus ticket cost.

Tickets

Somewhere in the mgoarchives are the last 2 years' posts on the secondary ticket market for Michigan games beyond just stubhub. Worth a read.

Season openers in general seem to be in higher demand regardless of opponent because optimism is at its peak and people just want to see some football. If Hawaii was week 2 you could probably get tickets outside the gate for 50-80% of face, or worst case, face value.

Having said all that, I sure wish sellers chose alternatives to stubhub to list tickets. Looking for Wisconsin tickets yesterday, I saw at checkout that stubhub wanted $154 (!) in fees to deliver 4 instant download tickets. That is basically massive scalping, made legitimate by its status as a "marketplace". At some point you would think sellers would realize that stubhub is pocketing most of, if not all, extra money they were planning to make on selling tickets.

Personally, I would love to see sellers make more use of eBay and craigslist, which charge essentially nothing to list/sell your tickets as compared to stubhub et al. eBay especially seems a much better choice with its PayPal integration. End rant.

Let it not be so

Last game for Pavel? Last playoff game in a great playoff run of all time? Sent home by the Captain's team again? Let it not be so.

The Hailing Wall?

Little bit noisy there...

But man "Bar Mitzvah" is pretty damn funny.

Oasis Hot Tub Gardens?

That's still there, right?

UM Solar

The U-M Solar Car Team is in Darwin right now for WSC, and the race starts just about during the  4th quarter of MSU-Michigan (Sunday morning in Darwin). Race ends mid-week in Adelaide, if you want to meet some top-notch Michigan kids doing well. I am sure they would love local support. If you have already connected with them, then great!

@UMSolarCarTeam

#UMSolar25

 

I think everyone is forgetting...

...they sell beer in Byrd Stadium during games.

Which is nice. All is not lost, although each Maryland craft beer sets you back $8, and you can't buy more than one at a time.

 

Doubt that DC is evacuated

I think it is pretty unlikely they are going to evacuate anyone. No hint of that for Sandy, which passed within 50 miles of the city when it came ashore, and it didn't happen either when Isabel came right up the Bay as a 2/3 in 2003.

DC is above sea level after all, and inland enough that storms don't hold as much power if/when they arrive. No one is getting evacuated from their roof.

The biggest impacts from Isabel were from storm surge up the Potomac (Old Town) and the Bay (City Dock area in Annapolis). And that was with 70-80 mph winds and a couple inches of rain. The people who will be busiest are the guys that fix downed power lines. This is also not like locking down a Michigan game, Byrd Stadium holds half as many people.

Clear Skies. Full Harbaugh. Can't Lose.

Clear Skies. Full Harbaugh. Can't Lose.




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Link is for Indiana game...

...on October 10th.

 

Probably a crack performer

I bet he will seem like glue-to-us in that offense by the end of the year.

 

Beat me to it...

What I was going to say...

Some learnings (according to Quantcast):

1) The all-time universal armageddon of pageviews: "The Process", with 10.7m pageviews that month, and that doesn't count mobile. No other month tops 8m, including mobile.

2) This here is a football blog. The NCG run for hoops garnered only 5.9m pageviews, with this April 4.5m. These are outpaced by a couple of run-of-the-mill football months, and also well-outpaced by traffic around the dates of signing Hoke's first full recruiting class, with the latter the 2nd highest month at 7.6m views.

3) When you look at uniques, "The Process", "A New Hoke" (Sept 2011), and Denard over Neb/Ohio (Nov 2011) stand out as all-time highs. 

You can play around with different views. Tried to compare to mgoblue.com, but not easy to do since it isn't directly measured by quantcast.

 
Probably unpopular, but not necessarily wrong

I love the math, stats and defendable arguments you see here so frequently, and I love that someone took the time to do the math on our odds. Great OP.

 

Having said that, I also agree with the notion behind your possibly-unpopular comment despite spending an entire career in the analytics business. What models like KenPom, Sagarin, et al are great at is evaluating a lot of data to get to an empirical ranking of how teams have performed relative to each other. One should predict the same thing as KenPom does every time merely because anything else is guessing.

 

Statistical models aren't as great though at predicting the very next outcome based on the last 27 because the forecasted sample set is small. If we had 27 other games to play against the remaining teams on our schedule, the KenPom outcome is likely to be a lock. But we don't. Look no further than yesterday's gut-churner - obviously did not unfold like KenPom would have predicted.

 

The brass ring here is the first outright Big Ten title since 1986. The players know that, the coaches know that, and so do the rest of us. KenPom can't factor in the pressure on these guys and the myriad other factors that can lead to let-downs, etc. It also can't factor that into how hard Staee is going to play to see if they can prevent it. That is why we play the games.

 

Ultimately, it is pretty comforting to know that if we play the way we have played for the last 27 games we should expect to be the only school hanging a banner this year. What a testament to the team and its coaching staff that they are in this position. Beat the Gophers!

 

 

 

 

 

Ravens

Wasn't Cam Cameron the OC for the Ravens while Mattison was the DC for the Ravens?

 

New OC?

 

 

Air?

Too soon? No TFLs up in there.

 

Malcolm Gladwell speech

Given at Penn, addresses this very subject. He asks a legitimate question: how much proof do you need to know if something is bad for you?

For those that haven't watched it (not a short speech, like 30-45 min I think), this is a pretty interesting take on this subject, and it is concerning. Not saying I agree or disagree, but it is one of the more thoughtful discussions of this subject I have seen, perhaps there are others.

Speech is here. Comparison is black lung disease and coal miners. Obviously not an analogy intended to disprove a problem.

[UPDATE]: Woah, this was just front paged on cnn.com. More Gladwell, now comparing football to dog fighting.

Photoshop beckons...

...and someone must answer. This .gif has potential.

Student seats

While my memory is not perfect, when I was a student from 88-92 everything was effectively GA seating except for senior seating. We had assigned seats, and no one sat in them. Fraternities regularly sent pledges to save seats and they did so in whatever rows they could get when they got there. Unless you were absolutely last the seats really aren't bad.

This was right after they stopped allowing full coolers to be brought into games, and right before they outlawed marshmallow wars. Bottom line is that as long as I can remember students have showed up late for average to uninteresting games, and mostly on time for the likes of Michigan State, Notre Dame, etc.

In some ways it was worse then because we were all spoiled during the multi-year Big Ten title streak and our opponents were mostly unranked even in conference.

 

Outstanding...

...and funny.

1988 vs. #1 Miami

The Canes had just crushed #6 FSU 31-0, probably in retailation for the Deion Sanders-led "Seminole Rap" released in the offseason. Link presented without comment, viewer prepare for pain (but work computer friendly).

We dominate the first 3.5 quarters and lead 30-17. Then, in fashion typical of much of the 80s, 90s and 2000s, we start running up the middle and punting. Steve Walsh then proceeds to hit all of the passes in the last 8 minutes, and we lose 31-30.

Just the week before, in South Bend, Ricky Watters returns a punt for TD, Reggie Ho hits 4 FGs, and Mike Gillette misses a 48-yarder at the gun. We wind up losing to that year's #1 and #2 teams by a combined 3 points, but winning the Big Ten and beating #5 USC in the Rose.

Now that was an OOC schedule!

 

 

It's like the Tour de France

Everyone started within the same hour or so in Ann Arbor this morning. It's a little bit like the Tour de France where time is kept in the aggregate but stages have starts and ends where everyone is in the same place.

Amazing diversity...

...of experiences here. I am continually impressed at the diversity of ages and memory of Michigan football in the readership here. I suppose if you have over 100 years of something that lots of people care about, it shouldn't be that surprising.

Whenever talk of bowl games comes up, I am sometimes reminded of how much Bo struggled in the postseason. And then that reminds me of Bo, and possibly my favorite Bo obit written by Joe LaPointe, then of the New York Times. While he wasn't quoting him directly, Joe imagined Bo might say something like this:

 

If you grow up in the Midwest, you know that New Year’s Day is cold and the sun sets early and it’s dark and there might be snow on the ground and the wind is rattling the windows. And you sit in your house and turn on the television in the late afternoon and there it is, the Rose Bowl, in color, the warm sunshine, the green grass, the blue sky, the trees and the mountains around the field. And you think, “Darn it, that’s where I want to be!”

 

It's a pretty good read.

 

Any Rose Bowl victory...

...especially if you have attended it.

1) For me, the 1/1/98 Rose Bowl has to be the standard.

2) Beating #5 USC in the 1/1/89 Rose Bowl has to be right up there. A great Bo team, lost to the #1 and #2 teams that year by less than 5 points total, and we were ranked #11 going into the game. That team was so close to a national championship season, they certainly had the talent.

3) 1/1/2000 Orange Bowl. That game was unbelievably epic despite the strange ending.

4) 1/1/2008 Capital One Bowl. At the time we desperately needed that win after the way that season started, as a good end to LC's career, and to shut up the SEC homers again.

 

The facts as Dana relayed them...

Dana was on Erin Burnett (CNN) last night, as commented as follows (her words):

1) This happened when she was 6 years old, and the offender was a teenage babysitter.

2) She was not able to deal with the issue herself until she was in her mid 20s.

3) The statute of limitations is 10 years, which we are well past.

 

She  commented that she wished that her ability to prosecute hadn't expired given how difficult it is to deal with this, especially when it happens when you are 6 years old. I thought it took a lot of guts to do even that.

 

Release the McQuay-ken?

Release him.

 

Seems to me...

...that a picture of Brian would photoshop nicely with Jerry Garcia.



Just sayin'

1989

I was a freshman, and M won the Big Ten, beat #5 USC in the Rose Bowl and won the hoops national championship. Great year. There were in fact 2 riots that year.



What prompted the first riot was Sean Higgins' put back at the buzzer to beat Illinois in the semifinal. Charleys and Ricks emptied onto the corner in less than 5 minutes.



Once that happened, the 2nd riot after the championship game was obviously happening. As riots go it wasn't pretty. A car parked on South U was overturned and crushed an ATM. All traffic signs were uprooted and landscaping destroyed. Someone tried to go hand over hand from a building out the wire to the blinking red light over the intersection. People were dancing on the china gate roof having scaled the awning.



All of the massive concrete planters and sign poles near Charley's and on south u were put in after 1989 destroyed it all. Thankfully there was no Internet or cell phones, so no lasting evidence other than a few newspaper reports and local news spots.

Opponent winning %

I would think this would also mean this team played against a schedule featuring one of the highest (if not the highest) overall winning percentages in recent memory. Given the era of reduced scholarships, that might be an interesting stat. Anyone have that handy?

How about...

Beat VPI? Sufficiently old school.

 

Old school crowd noise rule

Maybe I just sound old here, but IIRC in the 90s there was a regularly enforced crowd noise rule where if the fans were too loud and the opposing offense couldn't hear, they just had to appeal to the referee who gave a warning to the crowd and then a 5-yard penalty. I seem to remember this being enforced in Michigan Stadium, without any benefit of skyboxes. The funny thing of course being that it just made the crowd louder.

If you've been to a PSU game...

...you could see why they are not selling out. Happy Valley is a long way from somewhere, there are woefully too few hotel rooms (see the first point), the stadium resembles a giant erector set in a pasture, the in-game experience is overwhelmed by pom-poms and cheesy piped-in music and PSU really hasn't been very good of late. I am sure price is part of it (2x U-M for that experience?), but it's still cheaper than Steelers season tix.

Stoppage destroys strategy planning

No matter what the stoppage affects the race substantially. Potential for different weather than originally planned if the race is delayed, or (as I see above) teams use the stoppage time to recharge batteries in full sun. Smoke over the route obviously impacts amount of energy reaching ground, etc. The strategy guys are going to earn their pay...er...accolades.

I. Drink. Your. MILKSHAKE!

 

http://youtu.be/RKQ3LXHKB34

 

 

Agreed

I live in DC and have a number of friends who are VT grads, been to a few games at Lane Stadium. Heard the VT band bust out the Hokie Pokey and did my best not to spit out my bourbon laughing. Terrible. Then they shot off fireworks. With eye lasers. Almost as bad as a Penn State game.

Jim Tressel

I think RR should be given another year. My initial reaction when I heard that DB would wait until after the bowl game was basically thart it helped RR's chances of staying due to potential impact of the lateness of such a change, the chance of a protracted search messing with recruiting, etc.

However, after thinking about it a bit you only have to go so far as our opposing coach today to see a successful change made after the bowl game. Cooper was let go after a 2nd straight bowl loss to an average South Carloina team, and then there was his record against us. As much as Harbaugh seems like a layup as a potential successor now, so too was The Lesticles in 2007. That didn't work so well. There is a nonzero risk of Harbaugh not working out for one reason or another, and failing to get Harbaugh in a January change could be potentially disastrous indeed. Guess that brings me full circle.

Can we picture page the 2006 defense against similar?

Penn State had to be running these same plays in 2006, when we had our last really good defense. It would be interesting to see a similar play from the 2006 season picture paged to get a sense of how a "traditional front" defense with more experienced players would handle this particular situation, or at least similar situations. Wouldn't surprise me if there was more than one 2nd and long.

Freep has the JT Floyd story

Supposedly not as bad as Woolfolk, but didn't sound good.

You can get drunk...

You can bring a daaaate...

You can hang out and taaaiillgaaaate....

Tressel in today's presser

Jim Tressel on getting carries for all the backs: "I wish we had more balls. ... That didn't sound good."