My thought is that they're feeling like revenue sharing is coming in the next few years. If that's true why not go all the way in on NIL now before its impact is muted?
Holding back publicly also makes sense here. We're arguing that people doing things like this shouldn't be punished. If the punishment is not revoked for our guy on Friday that would be the time to release things to the world and then demand punishment in kind for their guy. Especially since we'd rather both coaches be on the sidelines 11/25 than neither.
If the U was dead set on this I doubt it would be hard to get everyone in Washtenaw county on board. Maybe they'd do it on Jeff's front lawn. Stalions can make a case to the HOA.
Let them go, but then the morning of hire local counsel to file a motion stopping them when it is too late to go somewhere else.
After all, having signs could be a safety issue. They incite cheering which could damage ears and I'm reading many people think it could be a serious noise violation. I know you're thinking don't all preview shows have signs? Won't people everywhere be cheering? You don't understand, it isn't about having signs or cheering it's how those signs are collected and organized.
We can probably use that you're asking the second question to answer the first. Probably not, and the difference is probably one or both of body weight and lower body strength, at least at the NFL level. Dude is still going to bowl over fools in college.
The NFL bench press is a test of one's ability to focus and prepare for the combine and not much else, since it's mostly a test of recently trained work capacity when everyone in the room is strong as hell and big. That's not worth nothing though as some guys can't do so which tells you something.
Well that and it let's me allege that I'm a better athlete than both Tom Brady and Kevin Durant by virtue of being able to bench 225 while neither of them "could." Pay no attention to neither of them needing to do so at all, Durant having the worst body shape for benching humanly possible, etc.
From a combine perspective those didn't quite look like locked out reps. I imagine most people see their triceps get exhausted first, exacerbated by locking out, lowering the overall number at the combine by a few. But repping like this is probably better in a training context for exhausting the chest since we're training for football not for powerlifting? We can't quite see, they might transition to him doing full lockout near the end just to make sure the triceps don't go early. Or it's just a thing they're doing for fun haha.
Despite any of that the main message of this video is that he is preposterously strong. Especially at an off-season body weight probably in the low-mid 200s. Just purely bullying the bar up through raw ridiculous strength. This for a guy shaped like his lower body weights are even more impressive. The camaraderie is something else too. You won't see that anywhere in life once you leave college sports.
I have 6 months of expenses in cash and have a very secure job (government). Outside of that I am 100% stocks, about 70/30 domestic to international. I invest every $ above the 6 months of expenses every paycheck just like I always have. When I get closer to retirement I'll probably go 90/10 stock/bond or maybe 80/15/5 with 5 percent cash or a small rental property. I invest in low cost index funds. I don't stress about money or make rash changes on the expenses side and see no reason to do so on the investment side. I have resisted changing jobs lately to avoid being the new guy in a potential recession, but that's only because I only need a handful more years... Keeping expenses modestly low and boring investing works folks.
Aside from what everyone else has said I want to put a pin on this, particularly the injury part.
If the kid is liable to go too hard physically in future pursuits...
I wish someone had taken me aside and told me that your body in your late 20s is not your body in your 18-22 range. I wish someone had sent me this link https://www.cnbc.com/2019/04/12/billionaire-warren-buffett-greatest-advice-to-millennials-the-1-thing-in-life-you-need-to-prioritize.html. You can still be an athlete, but the ultimate goal now needs to be injury prevention and overall life health. Prepare them for how in rec sports, everyone hits a period where the 'casuals' are better than your body will let you be, but focusing on injury prevention means they'll be in their 70s instead of 1 bad day in the gym away from being the best softball player in rec league. It's way easier to take after 50 years of winning any game you want to =).
This can pair well with a "welcome to the next stage of adulthood" conversation. The highs and lows and endless to-do lists of an adult job can be very different from being an athlete. Maybe with your guidance you can help them take the lessons they've learned so far into this new, different domain gracefully. If necessary you might talk them out of making << minimum wage in single A, or at least doing so for more than a year or two. They might need to stare in the face the fact that they won't ever be a truly great baseball player on a world level, but the opportunity to be truly great at something else is staring them in the face and they shouldn't walk away from it. Send them this link https://www.michigandaily.com/uncategorized/man-who-built-michigan-hockey-red-berenson-player-coach-and-teacher/
On the other hand, if they're liable to walk away completely from athletic pursuits...
I would talk to them about the concepts in this book. It is focused on finance, but applies here. Basically, there are things you aren't going to want to do in your 40s-60s. Make time for them now. Especially while your body is athletic
You're probably right that we have the most number of fans willing and able to regularly donate 1k to win. Maybe the most fans making 100k in MCOL areas and maybe overall. Don covered that we probably don't have as many fans willing to put 50% of their nonessential spending into the team. Really though, none of the little guys matter because it is about the big fish, where Don, as I'm sure he also means, points out they're willing to spend what they're willing to spend but not throw money away despite how much they have. A person with 1 billion dollars donating 1% of their money is 10 million dollars. Invested, a person can easily spend 4% of their current money each year, forever, even without a job, and of course many of these people still have a job. Phil Knight is worth 60 billion dollars, so every year if he wants to he can spend about a quarter of a billion dollars, sustainably before accounting for things like his job, accounting frippery (real estate), and 'why does it have to be sustainable again, I'm 83 years old?' That means Phil Knight alone can match the first $500 of donations per person if every single one of our 500,000 alumni chipped in every year. Of course, Oregon has 200,000 alumni of their own.
Michigan has our billionaires but we're far from alone in that. Oregon, A&M, Texas, Nebraska, Michigan State with two prominent names, Stanford with at least one that cares about sports (they share one of ours!)...the list goes on even just in prominent and historically successful football schools (plus MSU). The Walton family, of Walmart fame, have 3 of the 15 richest people on the Forbes list and all went to Arkansas, which also has football-crazed 8.5 billion net worth Jerry Jones (more than Stephen Ross by google's inaccurate estimate) and a rich football history. MSU has one that played for Izzo and another that owns professional sports teams, and they are business rivals in the same industry with functionally unlimited personal money so the word is they're competing over donating the most to MSU sports..
We talked about this in threads before NIL went live. Old days were about getting an extra $5,000 from the local car dealer and 2-5 more of them to participate than your rival. Then you added a zero and maybe a Nevin Shapiro for Miami for a few years here and there. If the wild west continues all it takes for a team is one billionaire to drown that out in an instant. Hell, Harvard has a 55 billion dollar endowment and 400,000 alumni if they really wanted to change the landscape...
Further, as always, if both schools have great coaches and similar offers, are more kids moving from the small town in Florida they've always known to Gainesville or all the way up to Michigan?
I agree with this, but I'd have put the emphasis on WR improvement more than QB play. We all know "freshman WRs suck", unless they're the type headed towards the first half of the first round. I think it's reasonable, without looking at the numbers, to assume improvement from there is smooth but faster the earlier they are in their careers, as this post does. What I'm not sure is if that's really true withinseason or if this post is actually unintentionally listing evidence for why we might expect a big year nextyear from that position group. I think our brains like linear incremental improvement but I think (guess) a lot of that improvement happens in the offseason.
I have no idea how it works for QBs especially anymore. But I think the WR group could improve enough, this year or next, that with Cade's floor already where it is we don't need much improvement out of the QB spot to get to "coin flip game against OSU" away from b1g champs the next few years.
"I wouldn’t be surprised if NIU finishes in the bottom 130 of FBS teams in defense this year,"
Should this be "surprised if NIU finishes in the top 130"? (A team finishing #20 is outside the bottom 130)
Can you clarify what this means, about JJ? "That’s a very good day, plus an extant read game that set up another goal line grind/TD."
I'm wondering if this is meant to mean "existing" instead of "extant". Or do you mean, football-wise, to emphasize that e.g. we think they've takenaway the read from Cade (as opposed to just not using it?) or that we don't expect it to continue to exist for JJ (it still existing is surprising)?
Ugh. Dude was All D-League defense and an all-star in 2016 and got a couple of 10 day contracts that year. Even if he was never going to break through, even after missing 2 seasons of play due to jail time he could easily have made a great living overseas as he was scoring lots of buckets in Mexico and the Italian second division.
These guys make good money in these leagues these days too. Way down the rungs in Mexico and Argentina we're talking 90k a year for an average player. European countries well into six figures and then there's China at 2 million.
I really appreciate this post. I started reading this blog in my middle teenage years. Through college, the phrase "people in charge of things are just in charge" elicited psuedo-cheers probably not uncommon among "fight the man" young people. As that turned to mid-20s and finally early 30s, and I stepped into middle management roles, that phrase more and more caused me to roll my eyes instead, in the admittedly less common times it was brought out in a not light-hearted way. I felt that sometimes it made sense but sometimes it was really just reflected that the author had perhaps not been in a leadership position in a large company and generally just had not experienced the nuances involved behind the scenes of events and decisions behind public-facing items that were being targeted. Sometimes, you make bad decisions when you've spent 50 hours this week dealing with employees dealing with significant emotional trauma, domestic abuse, or life-threatening illness. It's okay to have sympathy for leaders who might be exhausted, and who externally it might look like accomplish almost nothing. It's okay to be frustrated with their output too, but be careful judging them too harshly when you don't know their inputs or why they aren't being more transparent. Sometimes them making a C- move is wildly above what they should be capable of after the week/year they've had.
The story around mgo staff with this post would have been easy to bury from the blog. It's difficult. Being as transparent as you can when it is hard or might reflect poorly on yourself or members of your team is leadership. I do hope there's understanding that in some cases being transparent would've made it much worse, and people might've thrown a "people in charge are just in charge" without knowing the behind the scenes.
EDIT: the first paragraph could read as applying to Bo. It does not. We know this because he fielded good football teams. That is, he couldn't have been, unbeknownst to us, so incredibly exhausted that he failed, but was successful at football, without putting football ahead of the victims.
Some of these names I could see and I appreciate you bringing up other sports. That said, some of these would really benefit from a graph where you can really see how far they stand out from even the others in this list.
Something like this:
I think if you did that you'd see that e.g. Lidstrom is top 5, probably top 3, but not #1, among defensemen. Though admittedly defensive stats are not going to be as pretty on a graph as an Orr. Assuming you didn't mean overall, since you have to bend the stats 5 ways to get just Lemieux in the same conversation as the great one =).
Similarly, while Reggie Bush was magical Barry's final college season was likely a standard deviation or more beyond his. Internationally you'll always hear about the cricket guy who is like twice as good as anyone else.
Overall a fun list and fun to think through the memories associated with these names so thanks for sharing it!
That makes complete sense today. But will it, if they can be assured of not getting their hands dirty? I'm thinking of the thought that a single booster paid for all the Michigan overseas trips to Rome etc., rumors of boosters paying of Saban's mortgage after winning a title.. Why couldn't they tack a 0 on that and hand it off to someone to disburse as Harbaugh sees fit, especially if all the funny business went away?
Even if those are brand new entrants to the bag world, getting just one of them is worth 1000 bagmen or more.
I kind of wonder about the whole "no one wants to pay a DT 10k" side of things. I mean, don't they? They already are. The point of NIL is not going to be profit for your local company - these people are already spending money with zero immediate financial return today. What's stopping a billionaire fan from providing 5 million a year to a NIL-coordinator to spend on recruiting as they see fit each year, with zero expected financial return? That's how I'd do it, and if we're paying players for their labor on the backs of a "free market" approach I have zero issue with anyone else approaching it this way. Maybe have an annual recruiting class team photo and pay six figures to all of them for that. I imagine you'll eventually see relative numbers for positions similar to what you see in the NFL, adjusted down only due to differences (e.g. no QB is playing for ten years in college, maybe running backs are relatively more important to your winning a given game, variance in OL/kickers out of HS vs out of college is much higher or something).
Why won't fanbases with very rich alumni make their teams immediately dominant? One Ross or Haslem could indefinitely fund a 40-50 million dollar annual budget in perpetuity, with zero financial return, for a billion dollars. All the construction companies in Tuscaloosa aren't holding a candle to that.
That said, this is probably going to massively degrade my interest in college football, but that's already happening. Better outcome than the players not getting paid, but there's a reason I don't follow my local AAA team. No way to satisfactorily unring the bell that I can see, though.
You're saying: offense is more efficient this way and teams are doing it to win
He's saying: Ok, I agree. that doesn't objectively make games better for fans
hold up a piece of paper (or your hand) covering the teams with 1+ losses, and then read aloud what conferences the teams are in order top to bottom. Then, do the same covering teams with 2+. Then the same with 3+.
Spoiler, basically every time it is SEC, SEC, anyone else, as far as each group with identical records. Don't worry though SEC bias isn't real.
I'm bored, so I went casually looking around for data-driven thoughts on weather and football. A lot of people overstate things with statistics regarding sports or overstate the "coaches are so DUMB" to a hilarious degree as many people do when attempting to apply population statistics to individual cases but looking at the data is still the right first step.
Post 1
Background: This post does a decent job outlining how difficult it is to really talk about precipitation and football data right now, with things such as "raining in the first and third quarters and half of the fourth quarter" not really being recorded in publicly available data and other caveats (coaches adjusting play calling mix -> reset in expected play outcomes e.g. if you only pass once a game you might expect a really high YPA due to the surprise factor). Think along the lines of MSU-UM last year and "passing while we've got a break from the rain." Not a lot of data and not high quality data.
Conclusions: The heavier the rain, starting with light rain, the worse a passing offense is by completion percentage and YPA. Teams also pass less than they usually do.
Post 2
Background: Actually an expansion on the above post, this post dives a little further into how rain impacts performance in the passing game and some numbers on how running games are impacted.
Conclusions: Again we see completion percentage and YPA drop, and some data supporting a theory that this is due to it being harder to throw and it being harder to catch. Interestingly, we also see that yards per carry and avoided tackles per carry for running backs go up the more intensely it rains, though they also fumble much more often.
Post 3
Background: This at first brush looks like it might be a perhaps poor application of complicated statistical models by Stanford undergrads in a sports analytics statistics class in a powerpoint, not a paper, so nothing to write home about as at best we're missing a lot of context. They do present the detailed level outputs of their models if you want to look. This presentation was actually referenced by a WaPo article by their sports analytics person. Does use fancystats as input which could make conclusions more meaningful.
Conclusions: Statistics are hard, so papers are much better than powerpoints. Their results show rain and turf helping a home team score more and an away team score less, and increasing the amount of more points a home team scores than an away team, all with various levels of statistical significance. Also, all of that home-vs-away might just be meaningless from an actionable conclusion standpoint if the fancystat inputs don't account for generic home field advantage.
What I'm about to say has nothing directly to do with if USC is deserving or not, nor whether the committee might actually put them in or not, but a possible reason why you aren't hearing about them much. You may have noticed that Wannstedt mentioned USC once during halftime and no other Fox commenters acknowledged that but instead returned to OSU and Bama, and then after the game Wannstedt didn't mention USC at all when asked basically the same question.
From Wikipedia:
"It {The Pac 12 Network} is the third sports network to be devoted to a specific collegiate athletic conference (after the Big Ten Network and the now-defunct MountainWest Sports Network) and the first to be owned by a conference outright without support from outside companies (Fox Entertainment Group owns 49% of Big Ten Network, while MountainWest Sports Network had CBS and Comcast as partners, and SEC Network is wholly owned by ESPN)."
I don't think this is happening here, but it's also possible that he personally couldn't be as effective as a CB at the higher weight and that was his main goal. David Boston in the pros as one example.
I think the idea is that if it wasn't the Michigan defense causing them to go 4-21 it was something else, and people are reading that as "because they just suck at shooting" instead of "randomly having an off-day" because that's the most fun way to read it.
Somewhat similar to some of the people who didn't like "winning is just a statistic" because they chose to read it uncharitably. In that case Funchess probably meant "don't be a results-ist," which is a completely reasonable thing to say, even if he was also wrong about the underlying situation.
Also one of the offsides penalties, i think on Hurst, the center clearly shook his upper body before Hurst launched into him. And on OSU's first big zone read run, our DT (Glasgow or Godin) saw their guard or center jump on his back after we broke through the line right at the mesh point. I get missing calls, but these are either the person holding the ball or the play 5 feet away from it...
Well this is unrelated, but i'd be down to watch Woodson, Moss, and Manning on the same NFL show. That'd be pretty wild. It's not often that most of the heisman finalists share that kind of professional success.
My background: I'm from the Lansing area so most of my friends and classmates were MSU fans. My friend's uncle or cousin was attending U of M when I was 6 or 7, so my one friend and I became Michigan fans. My whole extended family is from Ohio or near it and are huge OSU fans. Growing up, Michigan State was my second favorite team, we would call my uncle if MSU beat OSU etc. I was closer to neutral in hockey actually and attended many games at Munn as I grew up. I've never cared about the sport of basketball, but was more for Michigan than MSU, and football was always definitely Michigan but I cheered for MSU in their other games. My rivalry fun with MSU was mostly betting pops on the game type of thing.
Why I hate MSU: I was a sophomore at Michigan in 2008. I'd always had a friendly rivalry with MSU fans, not really talking too much trash because I liked their team and at that point we were 10-2 against MSU since I knew what was going on (I was 7 in 1996). The turning point for me was after the MSU game when I received > 30 texts from the MSU fans I knew talking nasty, immature, vitriol-filled smack, including from people I barely talked to. I was kind of in shock and had fun reading all those texts that I didn't remember sending in years prior, and that was that for me.
To expand on this a little more, the average QB2 makes something like 2 million per year and the average QB3 is making 600-700 thousand. I don't know that they have that long of a shelf life though, their contracts aren't very guaranteed and they still have to pay agents etc. Not that I'd be sad to find myself in those shoes :).
Thing is, Wisconsin knows that just as much as we do, and they might have timing on their side. If they've got a few candidates that a relatively even in their eyes, they might give an offer with a deadline attached that might be problematic give our (Harbaugh) timeline. Not that this would work, and I'm sure they wouldn't do this to a candidate high on our board. But if you were the OC at Ohio State and Wisconsin gave you an exploding offer while U of M said "wait til we hear from Harbaugh in January" you'd certainly have to think about it.
I don't really agree with this. I liked Brandon's statement (I'm not a Brandon supporter in general by any means). What would you have him say? He said a lot of the things that people were complaining Hoke didn't say in his press conference as far as changes being implemented and what exactly happened.... I don't know, this still feels like people are mad that the football isn't good so we have to be mad at something.
In the last game I remember walking away from the TV after we turned the ball over, only to run back in as my friend excitedly shouted that we were kicking for the win! I'm looking forward to playing them again.
Before you scold me for walking away, I'll note that I was about 8 and didn't really know what was going on.
I like Man United because they were the team I could watch on TV / highlights as a kid, and I never looked back from there. I play a lot but don't watch regularly although I enjoy it. I think I might be an interesting case for watching though - I think watching hockey and soccer in person is 1000x better than watching on TV and I'd much prefer watching football at home or the bar than at the big house. Weird!
My favorite part of these threads is so many people are posbanging so hard that when you click the up arrow on a post near the bottom of thread it goes up like 10 points cuz so many people have hit it since you loaded the page.
Recent Comments
My thought is that they're feeling like revenue sharing is coming in the next few years. If that's true why not go all the way in on NIL now before its impact is muted?
Holding back publicly also makes sense here. We're arguing that people doing things like this shouldn't be punished. If the punishment is not revoked for our guy on Friday that would be the time to release things to the world and then demand punishment in kind for their guy. Especially since we'd rather both coaches be on the sidelines 11/25 than neither.
If the U was dead set on this I doubt it would be hard to get everyone in Washtenaw county on board. Maybe they'd do it on Jeff's front lawn. Stalions can make a case to the HOA.
Let them go, but then the morning of hire local counsel to file a motion stopping them when it is too late to go somewhere else.
After all, having signs could be a safety issue. They incite cheering which could damage ears and I'm reading many people think it could be a serious noise violation. I know you're thinking don't all preview shows have signs? Won't people everywhere be cheering? You don't understand, it isn't about having signs or cheering it's how those signs are collected and organized.
We can probably use that you're asking the second question to answer the first. Probably not, and the difference is probably one or both of body weight and lower body strength, at least at the NFL level. Dude is still going to bowl over fools in college.
The NFL bench press is a test of one's ability to focus and prepare for the combine and not much else, since it's mostly a test of recently trained work capacity when everyone in the room is strong as hell and big. That's not worth nothing though as some guys can't do so which tells you something.
Well that and it let's me allege that I'm a better athlete than both Tom Brady and Kevin Durant by virtue of being able to bench 225 while neither of them "could." Pay no attention to neither of them needing to do so at all, Durant having the worst body shape for benching humanly possible, etc.
From a combine perspective those didn't quite look like locked out reps. I imagine most people see their triceps get exhausted first, exacerbated by locking out, lowering the overall number at the combine by a few. But repping like this is probably better in a training context for exhausting the chest since we're training for football not for powerlifting? We can't quite see, they might transition to him doing full lockout near the end just to make sure the triceps don't go early. Or it's just a thing they're doing for fun haha.
Despite any of that the main message of this video is that he is preposterously strong. Especially at an off-season body weight probably in the low-mid 200s. Just purely bullying the bar up through raw ridiculous strength. This for a guy shaped like his lower body weights are even more impressive. The camaraderie is something else too. You won't see that anywhere in life once you leave college sports.
I have 6 months of expenses in cash and have a very secure job (government). Outside of that I am 100% stocks, about 70/30 domestic to international. I invest every $ above the 6 months of expenses every paycheck just like I always have. When I get closer to retirement I'll probably go 90/10 stock/bond or maybe 80/15/5 with 5 percent cash or a small rental property. I invest in low cost index funds. I don't stress about money or make rash changes on the expenses side and see no reason to do so on the investment side. I have resisted changing jobs lately to avoid being the new guy in a potential recession, but that's only because I only need a handful more years... Keeping expenses modestly low and boring investing works folks.
Aside from what everyone else has said I want to put a pin on this, particularly the injury part.
If the kid is liable to go too hard physically in future pursuits...
I wish someone had taken me aside and told me that your body in your late 20s is not your body in your 18-22 range. I wish someone had sent me this link https://www.cnbc.com/2019/04/12/billionaire-warren-buffett-greatest-advice-to-millennials-the-1-thing-in-life-you-need-to-prioritize.html. You can still be an athlete, but the ultimate goal now needs to be injury prevention and overall life health. Prepare them for how in rec sports, everyone hits a period where the 'casuals' are better than your body will let you be, but focusing on injury prevention means they'll be in their 70s instead of 1 bad day in the gym away from being the best softball player in rec league. It's way easier to take after 50 years of winning any game you want to =).
This can pair well with a "welcome to the next stage of adulthood" conversation. The highs and lows and endless to-do lists of an adult job can be very different from being an athlete. Maybe with your guidance you can help them take the lessons they've learned so far into this new, different domain gracefully. If necessary you might talk them out of making << minimum wage in single A, or at least doing so for more than a year or two. They might need to stare in the face the fact that they won't ever be a truly great baseball player on a world level, but the opportunity to be truly great at something else is staring them in the face and they shouldn't walk away from it. Send them this link https://www.michigandaily.com/uncategorized/man-who-built-michigan-hockey-red-berenson-player-coach-and-teacher/
On the other hand, if they're liable to walk away completely from athletic pursuits...
I would talk to them about the concepts in this book. It is focused on finance, but applies here. Basically, there are things you aren't going to want to do in your 40s-60s. Make time for them now. Especially while your body is athletic
https://www.diewithzerobook.com/welcome
Jerome Ford, the only one in the top 1000, transferred from Alabama. So in some ways it's even more of an outlier draft class.
You're probably right that we have the most number of fans willing and able to regularly donate 1k to win. Maybe the most fans making 100k in MCOL areas and maybe overall. Don covered that we probably don't have as many fans willing to put 50% of their nonessential spending into the team. Really though, none of the little guys matter because it is about the big fish, where Don, as I'm sure he also means, points out they're willing to spend what they're willing to spend but not throw money away despite how much they have. A person with 1 billion dollars donating 1% of their money is 10 million dollars. Invested, a person can easily spend 4% of their current money each year, forever, even without a job, and of course many of these people still have a job. Phil Knight is worth 60 billion dollars, so every year if he wants to he can spend about a quarter of a billion dollars, sustainably before accounting for things like his job, accounting frippery (real estate), and 'why does it have to be sustainable again, I'm 83 years old?' That means Phil Knight alone can match the first $500 of donations per person if every single one of our 500,000 alumni chipped in every year. Of course, Oregon has 200,000 alumni of their own.
Michigan has our billionaires but we're far from alone in that. Oregon, A&M, Texas, Nebraska, Michigan State with two prominent names, Stanford with at least one that cares about sports (they share one of ours!)...the list goes on even just in prominent and historically successful football schools (plus MSU). The Walton family, of Walmart fame, have 3 of the 15 richest people on the Forbes list and all went to Arkansas, which also has football-crazed 8.5 billion net worth Jerry Jones (more than Stephen Ross by google's inaccurate estimate) and a rich football history. MSU has one that played for Izzo and another that owns professional sports teams, and they are business rivals in the same industry with functionally unlimited personal money so the word is they're competing over donating the most to MSU sports..
We talked about this in threads before NIL went live. Old days were about getting an extra $5,000 from the local car dealer and 2-5 more of them to participate than your rival. Then you added a zero and maybe a Nevin Shapiro for Miami for a few years here and there. If the wild west continues all it takes for a team is one billionaire to drown that out in an instant. Hell, Harvard has a 55 billion dollar endowment and 400,000 alumni if they really wanted to change the landscape...
Further, as always, if both schools have great coaches and similar offers, are more kids moving from the small town in Florida they've always known to Gainesville or all the way up to Michigan?
I agree with this, but I'd have put the emphasis on WR improvement more than QB play. We all know "freshman WRs suck", unless they're the type headed towards the first half of the first round. I think it's reasonable, without looking at the numbers, to assume improvement from there is smooth but faster the earlier they are in their careers, as this post does. What I'm not sure is if that's really true within season or if this post is actually unintentionally listing evidence for why we might expect a big year next year from that position group. I think our brains like linear incremental improvement but I think (guess) a lot of that improvement happens in the offseason.
I have no idea how it works for QBs especially anymore. But I think the WR group could improve enough, this year or next, that with Cade's floor already where it is we don't need much improvement out of the QB spot to get to "coin flip game against OSU" away from b1g champs the next few years.
We're gonna win the fucking Superbowl
Ah! That's really funny then ?
"I wouldn’t be surprised if NIU finishes in the bottom 130 of FBS teams in defense this year,"
Should this be "surprised if NIU finishes in the top 130"? (A team finishing #20 is outside the bottom 130)
Can you clarify what this means, about JJ? "That’s a very good day, plus an extant read game that set up another goal line grind/TD."
I'm wondering if this is meant to mean "existing" instead of "extant". Or do you mean, football-wise, to emphasize that e.g. we think they've taken away the read from Cade (as opposed to just not using it?) or that we don't expect it to continue to exist for JJ (it still existing is surprising)?
Ugh. Dude was All D-League defense and an all-star in 2016 and got a couple of 10 day contracts that year. Even if he was never going to break through, even after missing 2 seasons of play due to jail time he could easily have made a great living overseas as he was scoring lots of buckets in Mexico and the Italian second division.
https://www.proballers.com/basketball/player/38619/keith-appling
These guys make good money in these leagues these days too. Way down the rungs in Mexico and Argentina we're talking 90k a year for an average player. European countries well into six figures and then there's China at 2 million.
https://europrobasket.com/overseas-basketball-salaries/#:~:text=Average%20Italian%20Serie%20A%20salaries,%24180k%2D350k%20USD%20range.
Probably would have been for the best to stay away from home?
I really…
Strictly Meta:
I really appreciate this post. I started reading this blog in my middle teenage years. Through college, the phrase "people in charge of things are just in charge" elicited psuedo-cheers probably not uncommon among "fight the man" young people. As that turned to mid-20s and finally early 30s, and I stepped into middle management roles, that phrase more and more caused me to roll my eyes instead, in the admittedly less common times it was brought out in a not light-hearted way. I felt that sometimes it made sense but sometimes it was really just reflected that the author had perhaps not been in a leadership position in a large company and generally just had not experienced the nuances involved behind the scenes of events and decisions behind public-facing items that were being targeted. Sometimes, you make bad decisions when you've spent 50 hours this week dealing with employees dealing with significant emotional trauma, domestic abuse, or life-threatening illness. It's okay to have sympathy for leaders who might be exhausted, and who externally it might look like accomplish almost nothing. It's okay to be frustrated with their output too, but be careful judging them too harshly when you don't know their inputs or why they aren't being more transparent. Sometimes them making a C- move is wildly above what they should be capable of after the week/year they've had.
The story around mgo staff with this post would have been easy to bury from the blog. It's difficult. Being as transparent as you can when it is hard or might reflect poorly on yourself or members of your team is leadership. I do hope there's understanding that in some cases being transparent would've made it much worse, and people might've thrown a "people in charge are just in charge" without knowing the behind the scenes.
EDIT: the first paragraph could read as applying to Bo. It does not. We know this because he fielded good football teams. That is, he couldn't have been, unbeknownst to us, so incredibly exhausted that he failed, but was successful at football, without putting football ahead of the victims.
There have been 2 different Martinez QBs at Nebraska recently and both have played for several years.
Some of these names I could see and I appreciate you bringing up other sports. That said, some of these would really benefit from a graph where you can really see how far they stand out from even the others in this list.
Something like this:
I think if you did that you'd see that e.g. Lidstrom is top 5, probably top 3, but not #1, among defensemen. Though admittedly defensive stats are not going to be as pretty on a graph as an Orr. Assuming you didn't mean overall, since you have to bend the stats 5 ways to get just Lemieux in the same conversation as the great one =).
Similarly, while Reggie Bush was magical Barry's final college season was likely a standard deviation or more beyond his. Internationally you'll always hear about the cricket guy who is like twice as good as anyone else.
Overall a fun list and fun to think through the memories associated with these names so thanks for sharing it!
That makes complete sense today. But will it, if they can be assured of not getting their hands dirty? I'm thinking of the thought that a single booster paid for all the Michigan overseas trips to Rome etc., rumors of boosters paying of Saban's mortgage after winning a title.. Why couldn't they tack a 0 on that and hand it off to someone to disburse as Harbaugh sees fit, especially if all the funny business went away?
Even if those are brand new entrants to the bag world, getting just one of them is worth 1000 bagmen or more.
I kind of wonder about the whole "no one wants to pay a DT 10k" side of things. I mean, don't they? They already are. The point of NIL is not going to be profit for your local company - these people are already spending money with zero immediate financial return today. What's stopping a billionaire fan from providing 5 million a year to a NIL-coordinator to spend on recruiting as they see fit each year, with zero expected financial return? That's how I'd do it, and if we're paying players for their labor on the backs of a "free market" approach I have zero issue with anyone else approaching it this way. Maybe have an annual recruiting class team photo and pay six figures to all of them for that. I imagine you'll eventually see relative numbers for positions similar to what you see in the NFL, adjusted down only due to differences (e.g. no QB is playing for ten years in college, maybe running backs are relatively more important to your winning a given game, variance in OL/kickers out of HS vs out of college is much higher or something).
Why won't fanbases with very rich alumni make their teams immediately dominant? One Ross or Haslem could indefinitely fund a 40-50 million dollar annual budget in perpetuity, with zero financial return, for a billion dollars. All the construction companies in Tuscaloosa aren't holding a candle to that.
That said, this is probably going to massively degrade my interest in college football, but that's already happening. Better outcome than the players not getting paid, but there's a reason I don't follow my local AAA team. No way to satisfactorily unring the bell that I can see, though.
You're saying: offense is more efficient this way and teams are doing it to win
He's saying: Ok, I agree. that doesn't objectively make games better for fans
…
want to try something fun?
hold up a piece of paper (or your hand) covering the teams with 1+ losses, and then read aloud what conferences the teams are in order top to bottom. Then, do the same covering teams with 2+. Then the same with 3+.
Spoiler, basically every time it is SEC, SEC, anyone else, as far as each group with identical records. Don't worry though SEC bias isn't real.
I'm bored, so I went casually looking around for data-driven thoughts on weather and football. A lot of people overstate things with statistics regarding sports or overstate the "coaches are so DUMB" to a hilarious degree as many people do when attempting to apply population statistics to individual cases but looking at the data is still the right first step.
Post 1
Background: This post does a decent job outlining how difficult it is to really talk about precipitation and football data right now, with things such as "raining in the first and third quarters and half of the fourth quarter" not really being recorded in publicly available data and other caveats (coaches adjusting play calling mix -> reset in expected play outcomes e.g. if you only pass once a game you might expect a really high YPA due to the surprise factor). Think along the lines of MSU-UM last year and "passing while we've got a break from the rain." Not a lot of data and not high quality data.
Link: https://www.profootballfocus.com/news/fantasy-football-the-factors-week-11-2017
Conclusions: The heavier the rain, starting with light rain, the worse a passing offense is by completion percentage and YPA. Teams also pass less than they usually do.
Post 2
Background: Actually an expansion on the above post, this post dives a little further into how rain impacts performance in the passing game and some numbers on how running games are impacted.
Link: https://www.profootballfocus.com/news/fantasy-football-the-factors-week-12-2017
Conclusions: Again we see completion percentage and YPA drop, and some data supporting a theory that this is due to it being harder to throw and it being harder to catch. Interestingly, we also see that yards per carry and avoided tackles per carry for running backs go up the more intensely it rains, though they also fumble much more often.
Post 3
Background: This at first brush looks like it might be a perhaps poor application of complicated statistical models by Stanford undergrads in a sports analytics statistics class in a powerpoint, not a paper, so nothing to write home about as at best we're missing a lot of context. They do present the detailed level outputs of their models if you want to look. This presentation was actually referenced by a WaPo article by their sports analytics person. Does use fancystats as input which could make conclusions more meaningful.
Link: https://web.stanford.edu/class/stats50/files/Houghton-BerryParkPierce-slide.pdf
Conclusions: Statistics are hard, so papers are much better than powerpoints. Their results show rain and turf helping a home team score more and an away team score less, and increasing the amount of more points a home team scores than an away team, all with various levels of statistical significance. Also, all of that home-vs-away might just be meaningless from an actionable conclusion standpoint if the fancystat inputs don't account for generic home field advantage.
hundredth percentile you say. Hmm.
I'm guessing this person is replying on the app to a user that's been banned and the non-app people can't see the post they are replying to
What I'm about to say has nothing directly to do with if USC is deserving or not, nor whether the committee might actually put them in or not, but a possible reason why you aren't hearing about them much. You may have noticed that Wannstedt mentioned USC once during halftime and no other Fox commenters acknowledged that but instead returned to OSU and Bama, and then after the game Wannstedt didn't mention USC at all when asked basically the same question.
From Wikipedia:
"It {The Pac 12 Network} is the third sports network to be devoted to a specific collegiate athletic conference (after the Big Ten Network and the now-defunct MountainWest Sports Network) and the first to be owned by a conference outright without support from outside companies (Fox Entertainment Group owns 49% of Big Ten Network, while MountainWest Sports Network had CBS and Comcast as partners, and SEC Network is wholly owned by ESPN)."
I'll allow it.
EDIT: oops, too many beers. sadly, "too many" is like 2 these days, and shitty sam adams
I don't think this is happening here, but it's also possible that he personally couldn't be as effective as a CB at the higher weight and that was his main goal. David Boston in the pros as one example.
I think the idea is that if it wasn't the Michigan defense causing them to go 4-21 it was something else, and people are reading that as "because they just suck at shooting" instead of "randomly having an off-day" because that's the most fun way to read it.
Somewhat similar to some of the people who didn't like "winning is just a statistic" because they chose to read it uncharitably. In that case Funchess probably meant "don't be a results-ist," which is a completely reasonable thing to say, even if he was also wrong about the underlying situation.
Friendlier link: https://www.outsideonline.com/2067281/wolverines-future-search-and-rescue
it's possible that's not a preferred throw for our QB(s) or WR(s) too, not every QB or tall WR are (is?) the same
Also one of the offsides penalties, i think on Hurst, the center clearly shook his upper body before Hurst launched into him. And on OSU's first big zone read run, our DT (Glasgow or Godin) saw their guard or center jump on his back after we broke through the line right at the mesh point. I get missing calls, but these are either the person holding the ball or the play 5 feet away from it...
the neutrals seem to agree with harbaugh...
https://www.reddit.com/r/CFB/comments/5f1kwq/post_game_thread_ohio_stat…
AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH
They don't usually let the janitors weigh in on draft strategy
Well this is unrelated, but i'd be down to watch Woodson, Moss, and Manning on the same NFL show. That'd be pretty wild. It's not often that most of the heisman finalists share that kind of professional success.
Could you clarify your opinion on Morris as a quarterback? Not sure you've made it clear yet in this thread. Thanks, I'll hang up and listen.
For me this is somewhat simple.
My background: I'm from the Lansing area so most of my friends and classmates were MSU fans. My friend's uncle or cousin was attending U of M when I was 6 or 7, so my one friend and I became Michigan fans. My whole extended family is from Ohio or near it and are huge OSU fans. Growing up, Michigan State was my second favorite team, we would call my uncle if MSU beat OSU etc. I was closer to neutral in hockey actually and attended many games at Munn as I grew up. I've never cared about the sport of basketball, but was more for Michigan than MSU, and football was always definitely Michigan but I cheered for MSU in their other games. My rivalry fun with MSU was mostly betting pops on the game type of thing.
Why I hate MSU: I was a sophomore at Michigan in 2008. I'd always had a friendly rivalry with MSU fans, not really talking too much trash because I liked their team and at that point we were 10-2 against MSU since I knew what was going on (I was 7 in 1996). The turning point for me was after the MSU game when I received > 30 texts from the MSU fans I knew talking nasty, immature, vitriol-filled smack, including from people I barely talked to. I was kind of in shock and had fun reading all those texts that I didn't remember sending in years prior, and that was that for me.
To expand on this a little more, the average QB2 makes something like 2 million per year and the average QB3 is making 600-700 thousand. I don't know that they have that long of a shelf life though, their contracts aren't very guaranteed and they still have to pay agents etc. Not that I'd be sad to find myself in those shoes :).
http://overthecap.com/position/quarterback
Do you have a mustache?
Thing is, Wisconsin knows that just as much as we do, and they might have timing on their side. If they've got a few candidates that a relatively even in their eyes, they might give an offer with a deadline attached that might be problematic give our (Harbaugh) timeline. Not that this would work, and I'm sure they wouldn't do this to a candidate high on our board. But if you were the OC at Ohio State and Wisconsin gave you an exploding offer while U of M said "wait til we hear from Harbaugh in January" you'd certainly have to think about it.
I don't really agree with this. I liked Brandon's statement (I'm not a Brandon supporter in general by any means). What would you have him say? He said a lot of the things that people were complaining Hoke didn't say in his press conference as far as changes being implemented and what exactly happened.... I don't know, this still feels like people are mad that the football isn't good so we have to be mad at something.
Source:
In the last game I remember walking away from the TV after we turned the ball over, only to run back in as my friend excitedly shouted that we were kicking for the win! I'm looking forward to playing them again.
Before you scold me for walking away, I'll note that I was about 8 and didn't really know what was going on.
I like Man United because they were the team I could watch on TV / highlights as a kid, and I never looked back from there. I play a lot but don't watch regularly although I enjoy it. I think I might be an interesting case for watching though - I think watching hockey and soccer in person is 1000x better than watching on TV and I'd much prefer watching football at home or the bar than at the big house. Weird!
My favorite part of these threads is so many people are posbanging so hard that when you click the up arrow on a post near the bottom of thread it goes up like 10 points cuz so many people have hit it since you loaded the page.
Montoya starting for the Jets tonight against Detroit too!