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I assume the answer is no…

I assume the answer is no since MDen doesn't have them, but is there anywhere you can get the rose bowl shoulder patches we wore? Would love to add those to my new Sainristil jersey.

My assumption was that it…

My assumption was that it didn't have much to do with keeping McCarthy from being injured, but was actually another effort to avoid turnovers that could have let Iowa into the game.

McCarthy has fumbled it a couple of times as a runner in his career, and as has been discussed, the fact that Iowa had no chance to win this game so long as we didn't turn it over was clearly a factor in our game-planning. Telling JJ to bias his runs toward the sideline makes it less likely they could force a fumble, and more likely that we would keep the ball if they do jar it loose.

I spent a little time…

I spent a little time reading the agent's website (which is here: http://boniksports.com/devin-bonik), and based on the writing style the email to UF is definitely from him.

But does he actually represent Mike Gundy? Did Gundy actually tell him to reach out to UF on his behalf? I'm pretty skeptical of that. Feels a lot like a guy taking a shot in the dark to try and create a transaction so he can be in the middle of it.

It’s a perfect comparison…

It’s a perfect comparison for Brown, too. Obviously Smart is the superior player, but those two are cut from exactly the same cloth in terms of aggressive and tenacious defense, going 100% hell-for-leather at all times, Making Winning Plays, timely shooting when the team needs it most, etc. 

I’m sure it intersects with…

I’m sure it intersects with other forms of pathology and ignorance too, but racism has to be a big part of it.

If you wander over to the…

If you wander over to the seedy side of opponent message boards you'll get a consistent message: Juwan Howard is a figurehead and Phil Martelli is really running things.

 

I don’t love to go there since it’s sports and hopefully shouldn’t be that serious, but every time I encounter this argument, it strikes me as so ridiculous that it almost has to be racist.
 

With no disrespect to Martelli, he may be vastly more experienced as a head coach than Howard, but that experience means he has a track record. And in over 20 years as a head coach, he never produced a team even a fraction as good as Michigan is right now.  There is simply no basis to think Martelli is really running the show other than, for a certain type of fan, he is a better fit for the mold of what a college basketball coach “should” look like.

 

The defensive communication…

The defensive communication and synchronization is what really stands out most to me. It’s amazing, and something I don’t think we even saw to this level in the Yaklich era. How many other teams, even at the NBA level, are capable of executing the zone-that-switches-to-man like this? I watched a lot of the Raptors and Heat last playoffs—probably the two best zone teams in the NBA—and for all the exotic zones they threw out, I don’t remember them even trying one where everyone switched to man mid-possession. Incredibly well-coached team.

Another thing in this vein: they are very good at scram-switching the guards out of mismatches against opposing bigs. This is another factor in their 2-point defense: you can try to scheme up a way to put Smith or Brooks on your big man in the post, but Michigan is very organized at getting them out of that situation before the ball can be entered to take advantage it. The best NBA switching defenses focus on this capability a lot, and Juwan has our boys well-drilled on it too.

Imagining Brian’s face as…

Imagining Brian’s face as everyone else insisted on continuing to talk about football in the first segment is a tremendous source of amusement

The Heat are the best team…

The Heat are the best team in the league at developing late picks and undrafted players into quality NBA contributors. Besides Robinson, their track record includes guys like Kendrick Nunn, Josh Richardson, and Hassan Whiteside...it's really an incredible amount of success that they have with cast-offs and dregs who might have washed out of the league anywhere else (and, in some cases, did wash out before Miami got hold of them). 

Robinson caught on with the perfect situation and has made the absolute most of it. Big credit to him. Stauskas was unlucky to get drafted by the most dysfunctional team in the league and then get traded to the Sixers at the nadir of the Process, but he also didn't maximize his chances. Plenty of guys have come out of those situations and built useful NBA careers; sadly Stauskas wasn't one of them.

God-tier lede, phenomenal.

God-tier lede, phenomenal.

Great post Craig.

One way I…

Great post Craig.

One way I'd love to see this extended is if it could by normalized according the average/median EPC of the season being played? It seems to me like, with the offensive rebound component at least, comparing a player from one year to a player from another might produce some wonky results because how differently the game is played now. I don't have data to back this up, but modern players seem like they would get fewer OREBs than players from the past because (1) more shots are coming from distance, leading to longer rebounds that a center is less likely to get than a miss from up close; (2) as you pointed out in the Oden-Teske comparison, a modern center is more likely to be the one shooting from the outside, reducing OREB opportunities; and (3) teams these days seem to put a higher premium on getting back on defense to prevent transition as opposed to crashing the offensive glass. So it strikes me as plausible that Player A posting a given OREB% in 2019 is providing a different marginal value to his team than Player B posting the same OREB% in 2009, or Player C in 1999, and so on.

People say "cheating will go…

People say "cheating will go on no matter what the rules are"...but I can't help but notice that I've never heard a story about how an NBA team signed a star free agent by paying him extra money illegally under the table. I also haven't heard a story like that in the NFL or the MLB, and while I don't follow the NHL or any other of the domestic pro leagues, I would be very surprised to learn that cheating of this type is common there either.

been a minute since sports…

been a minute since sports had a famous Mookie

Red Sox OF Mookie Betts currently leads the majors in BA and OPS, is 3rd in WAR, and came in second overall in All-Star votes.

My dad holds a couple of

My dad holds a couple of Master's degrees from Chicago (MPP and M.Div)...based on his description of what campus life was like, I never even considered UoC for either undergrad or law school. Granted that he got those degrees in the 80s, so things could have changed, but I'm given to understand that it's still more or less the same.

Seth’s comment is mostly

Seth’s comment is mostly spot-on for bankruptcy liquidations, but kind of misses the mark for reorganizations like the one Toys R Us is attempting. In these cases, executive bonuses like the one Brandon is gonna get are typically done with the full knowledge and consent of the major creditors. They do it for a couple of reasons, but the major reason is that the executives in place have the best understanding of how the business works, which of its assets or business lines are most valuable and should be retained as part of the reorganized company and which can safely be sold off to provide a cash recovery to creditors. (Creditors care about this kind of thing because most of their recovery will come in the form of equity in the reorganized company, so making sure the company’s assets remain as strong as possible is critical to them). That kind of information could be reverse-engineered by outsiders, but it’s cheaper and easier to just give bonuses to existing executives to make sure they stay on board and keep doing their jobs.

I’m not saying there’s any justice in this, because there isn’t. A lot of people who can’t afford to lose anything will lose everything, and a lot of already-rich people are going to keep getting richer. If you want to see something that will make you immediately either turn into a socialist or want to change careers to get in on the action,, spend some time reading the fee provisions in the debtor-in-possession financing contracts and fee applications submitted by the investment bankers and restructuring advisors in these cases; you will be shocked at how much money can be made from companies that are broke. But bonuses like these really aren’t thievery, at least not any more than everything else in our economy is.

Which might or might not be

Which might or might not be true, but is definitely pretty rich coming from Saudi Arabia

This is my non-MGoPodcast

This is my non-MGoPodcast rotation right now:

Sports:

- Deadcast

-The Solid Verbal

-Rich Eisen Show

Entertainment:

-The /Filmcast

-Various Game of Thrones podcasts during the season for that, but mostly Game of Owns

Politics:

-Chapo Trap House

-The Dig

Misc:

-Radio Lab

-The Age of Napoleon Podcast

-a16z

You should reread the post. I

You should reread the post. I didn't say the debate is bad; quite the opposite, I'm glad Peters is providing real competition. I'm saying that the part of the debate where Peters "supporters" (for lack of a better term) say "Speight is bad, look at how Iowa, OSU, and FSU went," and then Speight supporters say "no, Speight played well enough to win those games, it was X's fault we lost," followed by relitigation of 2016's ending, misses the point and is counterproductive. I also think it is worth putting this debate in its broader context, which is that the fanbase has been arguing about Speight since at least a year and a half before he arrived on campus, with many of us who have been his doubters (myself very much included) coming out wrong each time.

If you find that to be condescending or "board refereeing," well, that's your prerogative.

The argument is that the

The argument is that the back-and-forth dominating a lot of the Peters/Speight discussion -- the degree to which Speight is to blame for the team not winning the Big Ten/making the CFB last year -- misses the point and is unconstructive. 

If the post is misplaced in Diaries, then of course I'm fine with mods moving or deleting.

My family moved from Boston

My family moved from Boston to Ann Arbor when I was 6 for my mom to get her Ph.D at Michigan. One of the first things we did was go to the Big House for a game, and every other kid I knew was a big Michigan fan so it wasn't hard to fall in. Then, a couple years later, 1997 happened and that's the kind of thing that'll hook you for life.

This is true, but the

This is true, but the advantage would not be as large simply because money has declining marginal utility. "I can get 40k at Ole Miss or 20k at Michigan" offers a different scenario than "I can get 20k at Ole Miss or nothing at Michigan." I'd bet that given the other advantages a Michigan degree/experience offers, there are some players we've lost to southern bagmen that we could have gotten if we were letting them get their beak wet a little bit, even if it wasn't quite as much as the Ole Misses and LSUs were throwing around.

Really awesome

Really awesome discovery.

There may or may not be any kind of life on these particular planets, but findings like this reinforce my certainty that there is absolutely, positively no way we are alone in this universe. A couple hundred billion stars in this galaxy alone, itself just one of a hundred billion or more galaxies in the observable universe...

I hope that there is some secret to cracking interstellar/intergalactic travel, that we can discover it use it to find what else is out there.  And that what we find is sufficiently similar to us that we can recognize it for what it is and find a way to communicate. That's a lot of things to hope for, but I've been a good boy this year.

Amen, my thoughts exactly.

Amen, my thoughts exactly. One day, we will get to a point where it is illegal for humans to pilot cars on public roads...and on that day, I will throw a huge party.

The jobs thing is obviously very unfortunate, but I'll take the lives/jobs tradeoff without too much consternation. 

"The first road win of the

"The first road win of the season couldn't have come at a better time."

Counterpoint: @UCLA would have been a better time for the first road win of the year.

I don't understand the

I don't understand the argument that conference championships have to be a big factor in the playoff in order to make conference championships and the conference championship games worth something. Winning your conference has intrinsic value in and of itself. Literally never in the history of college football has "winning your conference" had any kind of direct relationship to winning a national championship. Today, at least one Power 5 champion (and all of the Group of 5 champions) will be left out of the playoff, and the chance that a non-champion would get in has been present every single year (and OSU looks like a really strong bet to actually do it this year). Before that was the BCS, which crowned a national champion that had not won its conference in 2011. Before that were the polls, which operated under absolutely no formal constraints.

The goal of a playoff should be to put the best X teams in, and settle who's best on the field. Period. (I personally like 6 as a number, with first-round byes for the top 2 squads, but that's just me). If 2 or 3 of the best X teams happen to be in the same conference, the playoffs should reflect that. If none of the best X teams happen to be in one or more conferences, the playoffs should reflect that too. 

...she did...

...[i]she[/i] did...

I like how Seth was at least

I like how Seth was at least 9000% more into this than the others

And teams must go for two

And teams must go for two after any touchdown from the beginning. NFL games are already interminably long; let's decide these things in one OT as much as possible.

And teams must go for two

And teams must go for two after any touchdown from the beginning. NFL games are already interminably long; let's decide these things in one OT as much as possible.

Very much agree, Harris was

Very much agree, Harris was more like a foot short rather than two yards

Um, actually, *adjusts glasses*

"At the end of his presser, Harbaugh asked whether anyone had seen a replay of the late review—on which Harbaugh challenged the spot on a third-down run with two minutes left, up 41-8."

That was actually a Drake Harris catch, not a run.

If Denard and Jabrill are on

If Denard and Jabrill are on the same team, I might have to become a Jaguars fan.

Please don't do this to me, universe.

These statements ("Vegas is

These statements ("Vegas is simply setting the line such that there is 50% of the money on either side of the equation" and "Fandom doesn't change the odds")  are contradictory. If the books don't change the lines in response to fandom, they won't even out the money bet on each side.  The fact that they do try to even out the money is why people think large fanbases can move lines.

To demonstrate:

Suppose it is known for a fact that the fair line on the game between Team A and Team B is Team A -7.5; which is to say, 50% of the time Team A will win by 8 or more, and 50% of the time the opposite will be true. So the book sets the line at Team A -7.5. In this situation, we expect sharp bettors not to bet (because there is no edge to be had in the line, so they are just losing money to the juice), and the general public to roughly even out on its own because there are no special reasons to bet either side.

Now add the supposition that Team A has a huge fanbase of homers who will bet on Team A regardless of what the line is, so a ton of money pours in on the Team A side.   Unless the books move the line in response, they will wind up with a huge exposure to the 50% of the time Team A -7.5 hits, which means they lose money in the long run.

Accordingly, they **have** to move the line, in order to give sharps a reason to bet to even out the sides. If they leave it static, sharps still aren't betting anything because there's no expected profit; you have to move the line to give them expected profit in order to induce enough bets to counteract the homers' action. And because the books know that's how it will go, and because they don't want to middle themselves, they will try move lines against homer teams from the start.

(and because sharps know this, they may load up against homer teams regardless, which may pull the line back in the other direction because the books can anticipate *that* too, and this process can iterate to infinity, which is why blindly betting one way or another on homer teams based on trying to guess which level of meta-analysis books and sharps are operating on is probably not a profitable strategy)

ITS THAT WHOOP WHOOP

ITS THAT WHOOP WHOOP

This is a very good call;

This is a very good call; most people never think about Japanese whiskies so it's next to guaranteed to be a new thing...and its also really, really good

"Not many really know what

"Not many really know what goes on in coach Harbaugh's mind"

Early understatement of the year contender

But the end of stoppage time

But the end of stoppage time is the end of the game; you're not prejudicing anyone by cutting things off at that point, because the game is over.  If you blow the whistle to go review an offside, however, you're invariably gonna hurt one of the teams: if the scoring opportunity ends because the attacking team loses possession, blowing the whistle kills the other team's chance chance for a counterattack; if the scoring opportunity ends because the attacking team slows down and tries to run offense, you're ruining their shot to do that before the defense can dig into position.

I don't think just allowing

I don't think just allowing offsides and then going back to review it later works, because too often there's not going to be an immediate deadball opportunity after the offsides to do the review, and the game will get too far ahead of the infraction.

Example: Player 1 of Team A plays a through-ball to Player 2, who may or may not have been offside. Ref makes the "offside advantage" signal.  Player 2 receives the ball near the edge of the box and dribbles forward to get into shooting position, but his touches are sufficiently poor that a defender from Team B is able to get back to cut off his advance (and, unless Player 2 is Messi, this is going to be the outcome a high % of the time). Player 2 breaks off his run and passes it to either Player 3 at the top of the box or Player 4 on the wing, and Team A begins to run its normal last-third offense, which may or may not even result in a shot, let alone a goal.  

At what point does the ref blow his whistle to go review the offside? If he blows as soon as the immediate goalscoring opportunity is blown/passed up, he's ruining Team A's opportunity to run offense in the final third before Team B's defense gets dug in.  If he waits until Team A loses possession, he's ruining Team B's opportunity at a counterattack.  If he waits until a traditional deadball event (the ball goes out of bounds or someone is fouled), as he would do to give someone a yellow card after playing advantage, play might continue for 5 or 10 minutes before he gets the chance, and all that play might have to be erased if it turns out Player 2 was offside.  If it's just up to his discretion when to blow the whistle, the result will be arbitrary, invariably unfair to one side or another, and open more opporunities for corruption, which soccer has had a significant problem with.

I don't think officials are getting offsides calls wrong often enough to justify this kind of disruption.

I could be on board with a rule that offside is reviewable if the player receives the ball in shooting position and immediately scores a goal, because then the offsides error is directly to blame for a goal that shouldn't have been scored, and that's a big deal.  I could also be on board with an immediate review when offside is called, with the attacking team getting a free kick at the spot if the call is overturned (although that gets tricky for offsides called in the box). But I can't see playing "advantage" on potential offsides calls and then going back to see what should have happened after the action is over.  That way lies madness.

What a bizarre take. We're

What a bizarre take. We're talking about a technology that could make massive progress in preventing 30,000 deaths a year that disproportionately affect younger people, hundreds of thousands of injuries, and God only knows how many billions of dollars in direct and indirect economic damage...and your response is to bemoan the lack of risk in life? Do you also get upset about the polio vaccine? LIFE WAS SO MUCH MORE EXCITING WHEN YOU NEVER KNEW IF YOU MIGHT GET CRIPPLED AND DIE AT ANY MOMENT. WHEN DID WE GET SO SOFT?

I promise you, if you're still looking for ways to risk your life unnecessarily once autonomous cars take over, you'll not be wanting for options.

I welcome any and all

I welcome any and all developments in autonomous cars.  Some day in the future, there will not be even a single human piloting a car on public roads; I fully intend to throw a massive party on that day.

FTR, road traffic accidents are the #1 cause of death for Americans age 15-24, #3 among ages 25-34, #4 among ages 35-44, and #10 among ages 45-54.  If autonomous cars can take the kind of chunk out of these numbers that the early returns suggest, we can make huge gains in cutting down early deaths.

Or, better, why pay $1.50 an

Or, better, why pay $1.50 an hour in a garage when your car can just go turn on Uber and earn money for you being a taxi while you're at work?

Why on earth would you assume

Why on earth would you assume that there won't be communication/protocols between cars?

Google's cars made it through 1.3 million miles of driving before they caused an accident; a quick search says that the average person drives 13,476 miles per year, so that's roughly equivalent to an average person going 96 years of driving without causing an accident.  So, Google bested your mark by 400%.  

For reference, human drivers average an accident every 165,000 miles.  And that accident Google caused? A fender-bender where a bus hit the car at 15 mph; hardly the stuff of nightmares.

 

 

I'll be there, love it when

I'll be there, love it when Michigan comes to NYC

One of the perversities in

One of the perversities in the system is that colleges bear none of the risk of their students defaulting on their loans; they get paid up front and get to keep the tuition you paid no matter what happens later.  If you changed the system so that universities themselves became liable when their students defaulted on loans, schools would find ways to control their costs right quick.

As is, there are many "schools" that exist for absolutely no reason other than to suck up student loan dollars, and they contribute hugely to the crisis.  This is especially bad in my industry (law), where an absolute ton of law schools have popped up over the last decade, admitting tens of thousands of people who have no business whatsoever going to law school and enticing them to go by pushing misleading or outright fraudulent "statistics" about their graduates' career prospects.  As a result, there are legions of people who took on 6-figure debt loads thinking they could pay it off with solid $80-$90k jobs and found themselves unable to get any work at all -- legal employers looked at their degrees and said "that's a shitty school, we don't hire attorneys from there"; and non-legal employers looked at their degrees and said "this person has a JD, they'll probably bail on me as soon as they can find a job as a lawyer." But the schools rake in millions regardless because the loan checks cash no matter what and there's always a new group of suckers to prey on.

Also (though I don't have

Also (though I don't have direct evidence of this in front of me) I have to imagine that even for people who can afford their loan payments, carrying a debt that will take 10-20 years to pay off makes it more difficult to get financing for things like mortgages or small business loans.

Definitely shady and relevant

Definitely shady and relevant to whether FD was engaged in fraudulent behavior.

Doesn't seem especially relevant to whether DFS games are a prohibited form of gambling though.

This issue is very annoying because it's hard for many people to disaggregate those two things.

Don't discount the chance of

Don't discount the chance of the Big 12 cannibslizing itself. Oklahoma State is the only unbeaten left in that conference, and by my estimation they are the third best of the bunch. They could easily fall to one or both of Baylor and Oklahoma. I think Baylor was eliminated tonight even if they do come back to win the conference...no one will believe they could hang with Alabama or Clemson after falling to Oklahoma at home. And Oklahoma, although they looked really good tonight, are on dicey ground...that loss to Texas was **bad** and is only getting worse.

In an ideal world, you could see something like:
TCU > Oklahoma
OSU > Baylor

Oklahoma > OSU
Baylor > TCU

For
11-1 OSU who lost the last game of the year
10-2 Oklahoma
10-2 Baylor
10-2 TCU

I can imagine the Big 12 getting left out in that scenario; could give us another way in if ND tops Stanford

But what's a goon to a

But what's a goon to a goblin?

And a sequel in stageplay

And a sequel in stageplay form.

Also, the idea that people should be "over" something three (actually 4 if we're talking the movies, 8 if we're talking books) years after it "ends" seems pretty ridiculous.  The last Lord of the Rings book was 60 years ago, people are still plenty into that, and were before the movies came out too.  We're talking about one of the most popular stories of all time, and one that the ascendant generation quite literally grew up alongside.  No idea why it would be expected to go away.

Prefer Peppers at Beater tbh

Prefer Peppers at Beater tbh