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Yes - D'Antonio looked very proud after that 2 point conversion succeeded. And then, subsequent in time, he fell. I have this weird feeling that there's a saying in there somewhere.

You think what we saw in Rosenberg/Snider's "Practicegate" hitpieces from the Free Press was "sunshine"? 

I would assume that the issue the amicus curiae brief addresses is the question of whether the information ESPN wants to get from OSU is protected from Freedom of Information requests. You cannot, for example, force schools to disclose student grades, or health information, or other things covered by confidentiality guarantees. OSU is arguing that these confidentiality rules should be interpreted broadly, ESPN that they should be interpreted narrowly. Of course an association of universities is going to argue for less exposure to FOI requests rather than more, no matter how the requested information is meant to be used. 

Mattson has done the best he could with the players available. They've improved spectacularly well. But the secondary is not Posey-calibre fast. So you can either leave a huge cushion, and give OSU medium-distance passes for easy short gains (that Miller doesn't have that much trouble throwing) whenever they want one, or you can try to take those away, accepting that Posey will often break open, and count on Miller only hitting a couple of those at best. That's what Mattison chose. And he was right. We gave up a couple of touchdowns on long strikes, but mostly Miller missed them. Including the one at the end of the game. Mattison made a calculated risk, based on the observed strengths and weaknesses of Miller as a QB and our secondary, and it seems to have been the correct decision.

But I'm no expert on football, so feel free to correct me. 

I really think that meeting their team bus as it pulls in, unannounced and without warning, with police dogs to sniff them all for bomb-making material etc. was an incredibly classless thing to do. A player could have had a phobia about dogs, the dogs might have slipped their leash.... And generally it was a greasy way to get a cheap psychological advantage.

Oh, sorry. My mistake. That was the classy Saint Tressel. But calling Ohio State "Ohio" is of course much worse.

Right out of the door we had signs that some newspeople were gunning for Rodriguez. Those "pay $x (huge number) if you take another job" clauses are legally very hard to enforce. You have to demonstrate that this sum is a plausible representation of the actual harm to you of the contract's being broken, so that the money can be represented as compensation for harm. Otherwise it would be closer to involuntary servitude, which contracts are not allowed to establish. That's why every single time in the history of coaches taking new jobs, the settlement is negotiated down to some fraction of the contractual number. I assume Brady Hoke did it, that's what Beilen did when he left WV, etc. Going to court just costs a lot of money for both sides and the result would be some smaller number. 

But this time, because all of the state of West Virginia was whipped into a state of outrage, not just about the leaving but about all sorts of bulls**t (OMG he shredded files! Yes, if they are confidential personal files with academic and personal information about athletes, that is what you are supposed to do. Are you going to put them in a caretakers bin out in the hall?) some elected judge decided to grandstand and insist on the whole amount. The ruling would never hold up on appeal, but it would be a p.r. catastrophe to drag things out (and expensive) so the U. said - look, just pay up and let's put this behind us. 

From this, lazy journalists got licence to make snide remarks about alleged "contractual controversies" every time RR was mentioned.

I say this not as any particularly huge RR fan, but to be fair: The spinning of that episode was an intentional hatchet job by people who had it in for him. 

Journey isn't the only one with this problem. An English group called Paper Lace had a minor hit in the 70s with a song called "The Night Chicago Died". It starts "(Spoken - portentious voice) Daddy was a cop. On the East side of Chicago..." Which would be Lake Michigan. Always check a map when you're writing songs about places you don't know.

There is no way to hide the fact that Tressel has been caught doing something very bad. And that people within the program are breaking the rules. What's the best possible PR strategy? Concentrate on one guy (suggesting that there was just one rule-flaunter) and present it as if Tressel's downfall was due to his failure to recognize the evil of that single guy.

So: Pryor is the Satan, Tressel is just such a noble and fine character that evil is beyond his comprehension: it was impossible for him to see that Pryor wasn't the upstanding young man that every last one of the other OSU players were. 

No, rule breaking in the program was an epidemic, and it was that way because Tressel made sure he could never be tagged with knowing anything. A strategy that worked brilliantly until now.

Sorry - don't know why the post was multiply duplicated.

from that school in Montréal. I can't remember the name of one of them offhand - he was a phenomenally physically gifted kid at DE who never quite seemed to get it completely together but showed amazing stuff at moments. In particular I remember him taking a fumble away from Rex Grossmann in the Citrus Bowl against the Gatorzooks. The shotgun snap got behind Grossmann and this DE seemed to move at the speed of light to get it from him. 

from that school in Montréal. I can't remember the name of one of them offhand - he was a phenomenally physically gifted kid at DE who never quite seemed to get it completely together but showed amazing stuff at moments. In particular I remember him taking a fumble away from Rex Grossmann in the Citrus Bowl against the Gatorzooks. The shotgun snap got behind Grossmann and this DE seemed to move at the speed of light to get it from him. 

"His father, Michael, said that Tate didn’t fail his classes, but instead was ineligible because he had two incomplete grades. He said that all Tate needed was a “chance” from at least one professor to make up the work."

Well, I've given a few incomplete grades over the years, and the dad's remark doesn't sound right. Giving someone an "I" involves the understanding that the grade can be converted. Presumably what he means is that Tate got a couple of F's because he didn't complete the required work. 

The U has very explicit policies on assigning "I" instead of "F". In particular, it has to be cleared with the professor *in advance*. Profs are not supposed to just give "I" grades if the deadline for grading has passed and work just hasn't appeared. Now it does happen that profs will cheat a bit, and give someone an "I" instead of "F" if the student seems to be going through personal troubles, or has been putting in a good-faith effort but has just screwed up, That's the reasonable and understanding thing to do, and it is simply humane to allow people to recover from troubles that come from familiar undergraduate stresses and mistakes. But this is against the letter of the rules, and generally comes as a bit of sympathy and human understanding toward a young person who has let things get out of control. If someone just blows off the work, and makes it clear that they couldn't care less, then I am not going to be enthusiastic about violating university rules to allow them to recover.  

But that said, I have no idea what the actual facts of the case are, beyond what the father has said, and Tate's on-the record pronouncements about just needing to show up.

A word of advice to all you young 'uns out there: if you might find yourself hoping that a professor will violate UM policies in order to cut you a break, calling his/her class a joke in a widely distributed newspaper is unwise.

I'm guessing maybe he got into one of the satellite campuses, like UNC Greensboro or Charlotte or Pembroke. That, or maybe UNC stands for University of Northern Colorado.

For all the people like me who were confident that RR would turn it around until finally the bowl game was the breaking point:

("Valerie" and "Vivian" are of course Dylan-speak for Mattison and Hoke. Those Minnesota boys can be obscure at times.)

Too much of nothing
can make a man ill at ease.
One man's temper rises
where another man's temper might freeze.
Now it's the day of confessions
and we cannot mock the soul.
Oh when there's too much of nothing
no one has control.

Say hello to Valery,
say hello to Vivian.
Give her all my salary
on the waters of oblivion.

Well too much of nothing
can cause a man to weep.
He can walk the streets and like most and boast,
but would he like to keep?
But it's all been done before,
it's all been written in the book.
And when there's too much of nothing
nobody should look.

Say hello to Valery,
say hello to Vivian.
Give her all my salary
on the waters of oblivion.

Now too much of nothing
can make a man a liar.
It can cause some men to sleep on nails,
it can cause others to eat fire.
Everybody's doing something,
I heard it in a dream.
But when there's too much of nothing
it just makes a fellow mean.

You can only bring the 3rd string in (before the 4th quarter) if the other two QBs are out.

Since people sometimes roll their eyes at the "student" part of "student-athlete" I'd add that one of the best students I've taught in the last few years - serious, smart, organized, clear, disciplined writer - was on the women's water polo team.

I heard we didn't get any of those guys because Sir Topham Hatt didn't get along with RR.

He causes a couple of fumbles. Energetic football player.

If I remember the story correctly, the quotes from Brock were all of the "I don't know what will happen" variety. But what's he supposed to say when some newspaper guy calls out of the blue a couple days after Barwis is let go? It was the newspaper writer's choice not to contact the AD or the new staff, which suggests he had already decided where he wanted the story to go and he figured that getting a denial from them would derail it.

He was basically a guy who wanted to go to the Olympics and wasn't nearly good enough in anything. He was OK as a downhill skiier but far from Olympic standard. But Great Britain didn't have any ski jumpers, so he adopted that as his sport and went as Britain's representative in the event. It was a fiasco. Even people who knew nothing about ski jumping (i.e. basically everyone outside maybe Finland and Norway) could see that his form was atrocious. But the media wove an "ordinary geek tastes his dream" narrative, and it caught on. The Jamaican bobsled team was at the same Olympics, and it seemed like 50% of the coverage was either them or Eddie. 

They changed the eligibility rules for the next winter Olympics to prevent this sort of thing.  

Brian would probably have been among the sane people saying that the Navarre bashing was getting ridiculous. At least, that seems to be the message to draw from his classic article in the E3W humor mag in the pre-mgoblog days:

http://www.everythreeweekly.com/pdf/volume4/nov02.pdf

One of the caterers passed by as he was talking and asked if he wanted some steer organs and viscera. I can't blame him for declining.

If Mattison/Davie fixed problems on the ND defense, you'd think that Mattison would have to get a lot of the credit, since Davie would have been responsible for the problems developing in the first place. 

I was an RR supporter, though with a lot of reservations about player development, staff choices, fundamentals, etc. I was surprised by and disappointed by the Hoke hire, for lots of reasons. But it's done. Finished. Alea Jacta Est. Sincere best wishes to RR, but Hoke's the coach now, and I hope my reservations are unfounded. (And since I know much less about football than any former player, the chances that I'm mistaken are non-trivial.) I sincerely hope he turns out to be a Tressel-type sleeper. One thing that will help him do that is if the press, fans, former players, etc are enthusiastic, and we can avoid PR catastrophes like those that plagued RR. If DB's experience selling pizzas has taught him a thing or two about controlling the message - all the better.

the Soccer team still to be playing in December. If the team lost early in the B10 tournament and didn't make the NCAAs he might have been able to play in the last few games.

I would be watching this very carefully. Do I want my kid to be in a place where a group of 15 to 20 adults, most if not all of them well over six feet tall and at least 220 pounds, who in the last several years have spent several hours a day working on increasing their strength, agility and physical size, can burst into a private party and start manhandling some of the participants? Especially when one of them has the history that Winston had. (Why was he even allowed back on campus? If he was just an ordinary student, rather than one who could potentially make a major contribution to winning the Michigan game, he would have been banned from campus for at least a year for what he did, if he were ever allowed back on at all.)

I expect you're more or less right as far as the legal niceties are concerned. But setting that aside, even if only three or four are actually striking people, the rest of the twelve to sixteen are making the actions of the four possible. Three or four people are not going to be able to invade a party like that - the partygoers en bloc could overwhelm them and throw them out. They need the glowering nuclear arsenal behind them to go around hitting people unmolested. It's more than just saying "hell yeah" as far as the practical effect is concerned.

Point of information: I'm no lawyer, and so I'm curious about what the law of trespass says in a case like this. I assume that had this fraternity had its own frathouse, and the party was a private party in the house, the players could and probably would be charged with trespass in addition to everything else. What is the legal status of a student dorm? Can students of the university who aren't residents of a university dorm be charged with tresspass if they march uninvited into that dorm bent on mayhem? Or is this just a situation that's sufficiently foggy that the DA would prefer to stick to uncontroversially applicable charges?

I'm confident Rodriguez will turn things around and build an excellent program. But I don't know much about these things, so I'm prepared to be wrong.

But either way, we're going to need strong opposition: if our team Returns to Glory (TM) then we'll want to display that by beating strong teams. With the Big Ten down, that means our ND game is going to have to be a quality win, if we win it. And if the team remains weak, then playing and beating a weak Notre Dame team will just serve to paper over problems. It's good for a team if the bar is set really high: good teams and coaches will rise to the occasion, and bad teams and coaches will show what they are made of.

Kelly seems like an excellent coach. Let Notre Dame hire him and let's get down to business.

The wascally wapscallions from Caltech hacked into the scoreboard at the 1984 Rose bowl (UCLA-Illinois)and changed the score to "Caltech 38 - MIT 9". Impressive, though the original card-replacing hack is simply astonishing in its conception and execution. Lots of people can hack badly secured systems when nobody expects it.

Excellent job. I'd add one more: the lazy groupthinking journos on deadline. Every week there will be a pile of writers for ESPN, etc who save time by just bashing out a column saying what they see everybody else saying. Once there is a critical mass of people in the assembled anti-rrod factions, these hacks will be writing "RRod sucks and Michigan will build a time machine just to be able to fire him yesterday" columns. If (when) RRod and the team turn things around the same people will be writing "boy aren't you glad you didn't fire him" columns.

I think of the "decided schematic advantage" bit, and the "now it's x's and o's time", and all his other pompous comments over the last few years, and I think - yeah, that is one insufferable gasbag they got down there.

But you'd have to have a heart of stone not to see that guy walk out on to the field, blank face and dead eyes, knowing that his last fragile hope of survival had just vanished with the UConn loss. This was his life's dream job and in five short years he completely f***ked it up.

Of course, $18 million will buy him some pretty fine single malt scotch to soften the blow....

Brian, I've been a fan of yours since long before this blog even began (specifically with the classic "Navarre responsible for the great depression etc." piece in the E3W). But here I think you're making a misstep by republishing the picture and name. You're augmenting the very invasion of privacy that you're condemning.