This is my informed guess on the transfer policy. Institutions like Michigan rely on distribution courses to make the financial numbers work on undergraduate instruction. Basically they are relatively cheap to offer (large courses and/or non-tenure-line instructors) and you charge virtually the same tuition (some places charge an upper year add-on but it's usually not large due to the optics of that).
If you let people transfer in credits, it's not just a question of community college transfers-in, which you can limit on the admissions side. A lot of true-freshman students come to places like Michigan with a bunch of dual-enrollment credit from HS. If /those/ credit transfers are allowed to satisfy distribution requirements, you lose potentially a whole year's worth of tuition that way.
If they start letting football players transfer in those credits, they have to do it for everyone.
Being under par is generally considered better than being above it, but I appreciate the Other Sports references. "Flat track bully" from yesterday scores high, as the ultra rare cricket nod.
Would be very interesting to look at whether past worst-to-first teams did it with an established top-level (or at least high-competent) QB, or whether a QB leap is also part of the equation.
The only US-based entry on this list that anyone in the rest of the world will have heard of is Yankees-Red Sox. Army/Navy, Duke/UNC, even UM/OSU all have huge resonance for Americans but would draw blank stares from all but the nerdiest of sports fans elsewhere. Lakers/Celtics would probably be closer to having international cachet.
A similarly high proportion of tenure track faculty in the US went to the "obvious" list of highly selective institutions, if that's what you mean.
Anecdotally, though, the system does a good job of weeding out the legacy morons. Pater's checkbook might get you in to Harvard, but it doesn't have much sway with the Berkeley Physics Department's PhD admissions committee.
Thanks for the factual contribution. It's unsurprising to find out that a bunch of people camping overnight in a school parking lot in Michigan, late November, are at risk of various health-threatening mishaps.
These people comment on how good people are at sports for a living. I think it's reasonable to comment on how good they are at writing.
I wish the MGoBlog staff all the best, but frankly the situation is analogous to Michigan football. If the people you have aren't getting it done, you need new people. It's doubly ironic given that one of Brian's constant complaints is that people in charge of stuff are no good at it.
"There is no question that the Super League would have been the best for their teams..."
This right here is why American fans are unlikely to follow the European path - you immediately frame this as "what's good for the team", meaning, "what makes the owner the most money" (you may quibble about "owner" but note that the University acts in more or less the same way as a for-profit enterprise in this case).
European fans on the other hand thought the Super League would be shit for their teams because it would be shit for football. Money is/was a secondary consideration.
I was probably being a little unfair, and the game was wildly entertaining. But top-level teams are going to score more than two goals against that defense. People are talking about "mental toughness" but they nearly gave a second goal away through a total meltdown on a goal kick.
Until the defense can play out from the back, the US should probably add some more beef up front, as you say, and try to play off that target. That can feel regressive but it works and would take some of the pressure off McKennie who I agree was solid. It would also fit with the current strength of the team in terms of winning and converting set pieces.
I logged in just for this. I watched the whole game and was laughing pretty much throughout. The US are just so bad in defense: slow (esp. Ream) and prone to terrifying lapses of concentration. Their most effective course of action was often to hammer the ball into the stands.
To be scrupulously fair to them, the midfield looked OK and corners were obviously a huge threat, but other than that there was just a general lack of creativity and nous. Pulisic did well with the penalty but looks limited when he doesn't have quality around him.
Mexico on the other hand... I have maybe never seen a team that's more "explodes in every direction". They were going past the US back six at will, but then seemed happy to blaze the ball at random stewards behind the goal. And the sequence that led to the US's second equalizer was priceless.
The commentators were calling it an instant classic and I would agree, although I think we mean different things by that.
Yup, my kids can't go to school, my relatives in the midwest are getting COVID, and I can't travel abroad to see the rest of my family, but some manbabies got to pretend that fall was just the same as always. Go us.
I don't think it's a 100% foregone conclusion that it can't work to have the students back. On the positive side so far we have:
- Duke
- MIT
- Cornell
On the negative side:
- Notre Dame
- UNC
Presumably a lot of this has to do with strictness/enforcement of campus protocol, prevalence in the local community, and level of isolation from that same local community. I do agree that even in the apparent positive cases above, it's too early to say with certainty that it's "working".
Worth pointing out that the negative spin ("the AD's were left out of key decisions") is almost entirely this hack McKewon's take. The quotes are essentially from one AD (Moos/Nebraska, which seems to be on the dysfunctional end of the President/AD/communications combination).
Why compare Sweden to those particular countries, and not the many developed countries that have had a) better plans and b) far fewer deaths?
The UK delayed its lockdown far too long, resulting in significant community spread (for example at the Liverpool-Atletico game on March 11). Since the lockdown they've done a pretty good job of restricting things though.
The US could have had things under control, except that (mostly) the southern states refused to shut down. So now we have ~1,000 deaths a day. For no good reason.
Except libertarians aren't "fiscally conservative", because for many societal problems (public health, education, utility infrastructure etc.) it's actually much more cost-effective to have the government provide an acceptable baseline service than the Ayn Rand fantasy.
Being "fiscally conservative" and socially liberal is probably closer to being an old-school New England Republican. But there aren't any votes for that in Jesusland.
I actually quite like the approach. Important to remember that most Russians are actually normal people just like us, and that the main problem is with the kleptocracy at the top. So this way, non-cheating athletes get to compete but people are reminded at events that the country's leadership is extremely corrupt.
Obviously that's the positive spin, reality is a bit messier but still closer to that than the extreme view that all Russians are bad.
The only logical conclusion to draw from this development is that State will go 1-11 in 2022, with their only win coming against us in a trash tornado. This plucky kid will inexplicably throw for 450 yards and 10 touchdowns while our 5-star all-everything fumbles the ball 17 times.
The experience of watching college football is dogshit due to commercials. Talk about killing the goose, golden egg etc. My kids are very into sports and won't watch it for this exact reason.
I have little time for FIFA but for the 1994 World Cup (my understanding is that) the US networks wanted to have in-game commercial time and FIFA said no way. Smartest decision ever in the history of sports-as-a-business.
I don't disagree with you except that IMO the Monday columns usually have a fair amount of insightful analysis - I don't find them to be particularly meta. Obviously the analysis is based on initial impressions but that's what makes them interesting in relation to the UFR's.
As for "I don't envy him that task", whatever - it's his job, and we're talking about re-watching a football game here, not something serious like being a teacher or a nurse. We beat Wisconsin by almost exactly the same score last year.
Meanwhile, I don't go on cruises because I spend my summers at the family's still-rustic cabin in the pristine UP, re-reading great books, fly fishing and [insert other thing which crusty old Michigan types do here].
Truth. My kids are on a pretty diverse travel soccer team. Every single Black family has a story about being stopped by the cops because they "fit a description," often on the way to/from a soccer game.
It also blows my mind that people are downvoting comments like yours. I mean, talk about not wanting to face reality.
nooses are not a hate symbol toward any specific group
is just so obviously wrong I don't know where to start.
Obviously this particular story turns out to have been a misunderstanding, but a noose is very specifically a threat to African Americans, in addition to whatever other message it may be trying to convey.
There's a whole slew of comments on this very post to the effect of "see, I told you so, it wasn't a noose, I knew it all along."
Now, that's not /quite/ the same as saying "racism doesn't exist," but you do have to wonder how all these people "knew it all along" if racism was a plausible explanation for the initial event (which it was, IMO).
BTW, the point of my comment is simply to point out that the cause of the steep increases in tuition/cost at U-M over the past 30 years is that the US has chosen to provide higher education under a certain (broadly speaking, neoliberal) funding model. Neither U-M nor the State of Michigan can unilaterally opt-out of the model, because the ease of movement around the US would lead to the departure of the most-qualified academics and students to other states.
This is something of a problem in Europe (top academics moving to the US for the higher salaries) but immigration restrictions and the desire to stay in one's own country act as a brake.
As with healthcare, there are two principal options for providing (higher) education in a given country:
1) The state-driven model, preferred by left-wing people (disclaimer: this is my preference), in which the state controls a large (90%+) share of the sector, sets prices and employee compensation, and generally holds costs down. Germany and France do this in higher ed. Nearly all developed countries other than the US do this in healthcare.
2) The market-driven model, preferred by right-wing people, in which the state provides subsidies to individual institutions and students but otherwise largely stays out of the way, leaving institutions to set prices and (mostly) determine employee compensation. The US and now to some extent the UK do this in higher ed.
Observably (i.e., by looking at countries that do one or the other, either in healthcare or education), the second option leads to significantly higher costs, either as a share of GDP or in terms of cost (either from all sources or as tuition/co-pays passed on to the end-user). Tuition in Germany and France is close to zero; in the UK it's rapidly moving up, I think now to ~$20K per year; in the US we're talking expenditures (not tuition) in the range of $80K per student per year at elite 4-year institutions, which is far, far higher than in continental Europe.
The first option is claimed to lead to worse outcomes: the question I ask in this context is: are Germans less well-educated at age 25 than Americans? Or, to put it differently, which country has the more appropriately-trained workforce? If the answer isn't obviously America, then that at least raises the question of whether the extra money is well-spent.
The "Hey, man, we should do a podcast, it'll just be me and you talking about shit" idea is one of those bar conversations that should never, ever, actually lead to the said thing happening.
I am almost as hardcore anti-replay as it's possible to be. The only way I would allow it is if you had a guy in the booth who was allowed to overrule any call made by the ref as long as: a) the overrule happens within some small fixed time window (10 seconds); b) play is not interrupted for that period and c) any overrule is final.
That allows you to correct things that arise purely because of ref ignorance (e.g., view of ball clearly crossing the line blocked by other players) but otherwise lets the game proceed.
I mean, there are loads, right? Soccer being the most obvious. In fact, it's really just football where there's any comparison, because there isn't really a "world level" in existence.
Actually, one of the really intriguing things about electric vehicles is that if you upgrade the grid, you can use them as local storage buffers to increase the output of fluctuating renewables, especially wind and solar (since most people aren't commuting during peak solar power windows, aka mid-day).
I logged in just to laugh at the wrap-up of this comment. ELITES! We do run everything from our secret caves you know. And we smile evilly at the thought of a "reduced economy" of Americans huddled around candles in their now-useless McMansions.
But back in reality, I wrote a white paper for a major consulting firm on vehicle pollution (gas vs. electric, "well to wheel") and the stats are, um, not close. It's roughly a wash if the electricity comes from 100% coal but as soon as you start mixing in anything less polluting electric is a clear winner.
Plus if you think there are no bad side effects from mining coal and/or fracking, comparable to the scary rare earth thing, then you probably haven't been spending much time in central PA or WV.
Football is particularly bad because of the small sample size, but the vast, VAST majority of sports "analysis" is post-hoc rationalization. It's ironic that this blog mostly exists because it rejects that kind of bullshit and yet its readers continue to post it anyway.
If you need a yard and your fullback dive goes for a yard, you're a flex-TE-wielding genius. If it goes for 0.9 yards you're a dinosaur and FIRE THAT MAN.
College football needs to take a hard look at itself. Crap fan experience (both stadium and TV), lack of meaningful games and absurdly random season success conditions.
On the other hand, vast numbers of people continue to line up for the same shit sandwich, so maybe not.
Recent Comments
We were so spoiled with JB.
…
Fall is football time
But still Brian Kelly weeps
For him it's despair
This is my informed guess on the transfer policy. Institutions like Michigan rely on distribution courses to make the financial numbers work on undergraduate instruction. Basically they are relatively cheap to offer (large courses and/or non-tenure-line instructors) and you charge virtually the same tuition (some places charge an upper year add-on but it's usually not large due to the optics of that).
If you let people transfer in credits, it's not just a question of community college transfers-in, which you can limit on the admissions side. A lot of true-freshman students come to places like Michigan with a bunch of dual-enrollment credit from HS. If /those/ credit transfers are allowed to satisfy distribution requirements, you lose potentially a whole year's worth of tuition that way.
If they start letting football players transfer in those credits, they have to do it for everyone.
Again, informed guess only.
I read too quickly! Mea culpa.
Being under par is generally considered better than being above it, but I appreciate the Other Sports references. "Flat track bully" from yesterday scores high, as the ultra rare cricket nod.
Would be very interesting to look at whether past worst-to-first teams did it with an established top-level (or at least high-competent) QB, or whether a QB leap is also part of the equation.
The only US-based entry on this list that anyone in the rest of the world will have heard of is Yankees-Red Sox. Army/Navy, Duke/UNC, even UM/OSU all have huge resonance for Americans but would draw blank stares from all but the nerdiest of sports fans elsewhere. Lakers/Celtics would probably be closer to having international cachet.
Mexico/US in soccer - don't get me started.
Fin
A similarly high proportion of tenure track faculty in the US went to the "obvious" list of highly selective institutions, if that's what you mean.
Anecdotally, though, the system does a good job of weeding out the legacy morons. Pater's checkbook might get you in to Harvard, but it doesn't have much sway with the Berkeley Physics Department's PhD admissions committee.
Thanks for the factual contribution. It's unsurprising to find out that a bunch of people camping overnight in a school parking lot in Michigan, late November, are at risk of various health-threatening mishaps.
XLOOKUP, chief. Welcome to the future.
These people comment on how good people are at sports for a living. I think it's reasonable to comment on how good they are at writing.
I wish the MGoBlog staff all the best, but frankly the situation is analogous to Michigan football. If the people you have aren't getting it done, you need new people. It's doubly ironic given that one of Brian's constant complaints is that people in charge of stuff are no good at it.
This is decent quality. I hate to break it to the other FP writers, but this is what the site is missing at the moment.
"There is no question that the Super League would have been the best for their teams..."
This right here is why American fans are unlikely to follow the European path - you immediately frame this as "what's good for the team", meaning, "what makes the owner the most money" (you may quibble about "owner" but note that the University acts in more or less the same way as a for-profit enterprise in this case).
European fans on the other hand thought the Super League would be shit for their teams because it would be shit for football. Money is/was a secondary consideration.
I was probably being a little unfair, and the game was wildly entertaining. But top-level teams are going to score more than two goals against that defense. People are talking about "mental toughness" but they nearly gave a second goal away through a total meltdown on a goal kick.
Until the defense can play out from the back, the US should probably add some more beef up front, as you say, and try to play off that target. That can feel regressive but it works and would take some of the pressure off McKennie who I agree was solid. It would also fit with the current strength of the team in terms of winning and converting set pieces.
I logged in just for this. I watched the whole game and was laughing pretty much throughout. The US are just so bad in defense: slow (esp. Ream) and prone to terrifying lapses of concentration. Their most effective course of action was often to hammer the ball into the stands.
To be scrupulously fair to them, the midfield looked OK and corners were obviously a huge threat, but other than that there was just a general lack of creativity and nous. Pulisic did well with the penalty but looks limited when he doesn't have quality around him.
Mexico on the other hand... I have maybe never seen a team that's more "explodes in every direction". They were going past the US back six at will, but then seemed happy to blaze the ball at random stewards behind the goal. And the sequence that led to the US's second equalizer was priceless.
The commentators were calling it an instant classic and I would agree, although I think we mean different things by that.
Yup, my kids can't go to school, my relatives in the midwest are getting COVID, and I can't travel abroad to see the rest of my family, but some manbabies got to pretend that fall was just the same as always. Go us.
Also that other sporting great, Mick the Miller:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mick_the_Miller
It's OK, though, because the virus isn't real and no-one importa...
Oh.
I disagree. "Stupid" is not doing anything to prevent tens of thousands of people dying from a contagious but ultimately controllable disease.
Ranking teams in the absence of games is just some light-hearted tomfoolery to distract us from the ongoing clusterfuck.
I don't think it's a 100% foregone conclusion that it can't work to have the students back. On the positive side so far we have:
- Duke
- MIT
- Cornell
On the negative side:
- Notre Dame
- UNC
Presumably a lot of this has to do with strictness/enforcement of campus protocol, prevalence in the local community, and level of isolation from that same local community. I do agree that even in the apparent positive cases above, it's too early to say with certainty that it's "working".
Worth pointing out that the negative spin ("the AD's were left out of key decisions") is almost entirely this hack McKewon's take. The quotes are essentially from one AD (Moos/Nebraska, which seems to be on the dysfunctional end of the President/AD/communications combination).
This is an OK analysis but pretty thin on some key points (including the role of gov't subsidies which he gets totally wrong IMO).
There are plenty of actual education specialists out there who cover this stuff a lot more thoroughly.
9. Instead of actually playing, everyone *pretends* they're playing.
FWIW I would pay to watch football players compete to push cars up hills the fastest.
Why compare Sweden to those particular countries, and not the many developed countries that have had a) better plans and b) far fewer deaths?
The UK delayed its lockdown far too long, resulting in significant community spread (for example at the Liverpool-Atletico game on March 11). Since the lockdown they've done a pretty good job of restricting things though.
The US could have had things under control, except that (mostly) the southern states refused to shut down. So now we have ~1,000 deaths a day. For no good reason.
Except libertarians aren't "fiscally conservative", because for many societal problems (public health, education, utility infrastructure etc.) it's actually much more cost-effective to have the government provide an acceptable baseline service than the Ayn Rand fantasy.
Being "fiscally conservative" and socially liberal is probably closer to being an old-school New England Republican. But there aren't any votes for that in Jesusland.
Love it that someone does an English accent and the only place in England that anyone can think of off the cuff is "somewhere... like... London".
Leaders and Best!
I actually quite like the approach. Important to remember that most Russians are actually normal people just like us, and that the main problem is with the kleptocracy at the top. So this way, non-cheating athletes get to compete but people are reminded at events that the country's leadership is extremely corrupt.
Obviously that's the positive spin, reality is a bit messier but still closer to that than the extreme view that all Russians are bad.
I'm making a funny and yet at the same time I am deadly serious.
The only logical conclusion to draw from this development is that State will go 1-11 in 2022, with their only win coming against us in a trash tornado. This plucky kid will inexplicably throw for 450 yards and 10 touchdowns while our 5-star all-everything fumbles the ball 17 times.
The experience of watching college football is dogshit due to commercials. Talk about killing the goose, golden egg etc. My kids are very into sports and won't watch it for this exact reason.
I have little time for FIFA but for the 1994 World Cup (my understanding is that) the US networks wanted to have in-game commercial time and FIFA said no way. Smartest decision ever in the history of sports-as-a-business.
I don't disagree with you except that IMO the Monday columns usually have a fair amount of insightful analysis - I don't find them to be particularly meta. Obviously the analysis is based on initial impressions but that's what makes them interesting in relation to the UFR's.
As for "I don't envy him that task", whatever - it's his job, and we're talking about re-watching a football game here, not something serious like being a teacher or a nurse. We beat Wisconsin by almost exactly the same score last year.
Eh. As the column sort-of-acknowledges, not everything is about you.
Team not so good this year. It happens.
Defense is still fighting. If the O was anything other than brutal this would be an OK team.
All the +1s to you good sir.
Meanwhile, I don't go on cruises because I spend my summers at the family's still-rustic cabin in the pristine UP, re-reading great books, fly fishing and [insert other thing which crusty old Michigan types do here].
Truth. My kids are on a pretty diverse travel soccer team. Every single Black family has a story about being stopped by the cops because they "fit a description," often on the way to/from a soccer game.
It also blows my mind that people are downvoting comments like yours. I mean, talk about not wanting to face reality.
nooses are not a…
This:
is just so obviously wrong I don't know where to start.
Obviously this particular story turns out to have been a misunderstanding, but a noose is very specifically a threat to African Americans, in addition to whatever other message it may be trying to convey.
There's a whole slew of comments on this very post to the effect of "see, I told you so, it wasn't a noose, I knew it all along."
Now, that's not /quite/ the same as saying "racism doesn't exist," but you do have to wonder how all these people "knew it all along" if racism was a plausible explanation for the initial event (which it was, IMO).
If Kyle Kalis hadn't existed I would feel much better about this one.
Please don't kill me Kyle. Just do that thing of running straight past me and looking for someone else instead.
BTW, the point of my comment is simply to point out that the cause of the steep increases in tuition/cost at U-M over the past 30 years is that the US has chosen to provide higher education under a certain (broadly speaking, neoliberal) funding model. Neither U-M nor the State of Michigan can unilaterally opt-out of the model, because the ease of movement around the US would lead to the departure of the most-qualified academics and students to other states.
This is something of a problem in Europe (top academics moving to the US for the higher salaries) but immigration restrictions and the desire to stay in one's own country act as a brake.
As with healthcare, there are two principal options for providing (higher) education in a given country:
1) The state-driven model, preferred by left-wing people (disclaimer: this is my preference), in which the state controls a large (90%+) share of the sector, sets prices and employee compensation, and generally holds costs down. Germany and France do this in higher ed. Nearly all developed countries other than the US do this in healthcare.
2) The market-driven model, preferred by right-wing people, in which the state provides subsidies to individual institutions and students but otherwise largely stays out of the way, leaving institutions to set prices and (mostly) determine employee compensation. The US and now to some extent the UK do this in higher ed.
Observably (i.e., by looking at countries that do one or the other, either in healthcare or education), the second option leads to significantly higher costs, either as a share of GDP or in terms of cost (either from all sources or as tuition/co-pays passed on to the end-user). Tuition in Germany and France is close to zero; in the UK it's rapidly moving up, I think now to ~$20K per year; in the US we're talking expenditures (not tuition) in the range of $80K per student per year at elite 4-year institutions, which is far, far higher than in continental Europe.
The first option is claimed to lead to worse outcomes: the question I ask in this context is: are Germans less well-educated at age 25 than Americans? Or, to put it differently, which country has the more appropriately-trained workforce? If the answer isn't obviously America, then that at least raises the question of whether the extra money is well-spent.
The "Hey, man, we should do a podcast, it'll just be me and you talking about shit" idea is one of those bar conversations that should never, ever, actually lead to the said thing happening.
I am almost as hardcore anti-replay as it's possible to be. The only way I would allow it is if you had a guy in the booth who was allowed to overrule any call made by the ref as long as: a) the overrule happens within some small fixed time window (10 seconds); b) play is not interrupted for that period and c) any overrule is final.
That allows you to correct things that arise purely because of ref ignorance (e.g., view of ball clearly crossing the line blocked by other players) but otherwise lets the game proceed.
That's probably right. I guess the common factor is whether the pro level is dominated by the US (football, basketball, baseball) or not.
I mean, there are loads, right? Soccer being the most obvious. In fact, it's really just football where there's any comparison, because there isn't really a "world level" in existence.
Maybe I misunderstood the question.
Actually, one of the really intriguing things about electric vehicles is that if you upgrade the grid, you can use them as local storage buffers to increase the output of fluctuating renewables, especially wind and solar (since most people aren't commuting during peak solar power windows, aka mid-day).
I logged in just to laugh at the wrap-up of this comment. ELITES! We do run everything from our secret caves you know. And we smile evilly at the thought of a "reduced economy" of Americans huddled around candles in their now-useless McMansions.
But back in reality, I wrote a white paper for a major consulting firm on vehicle pollution (gas vs. electric, "well to wheel") and the stats are, um, not close. It's roughly a wash if the electricity comes from 100% coal but as soon as you start mixing in anything less polluting electric is a clear winner.
Plus if you think there are no bad side effects from mining coal and/or fracking, comparable to the scary rare earth thing, then you probably haven't been spending much time in central PA or WV.
Football is particularly bad because of the small sample size, but the vast, VAST majority of sports "analysis" is post-hoc rationalization. It's ironic that this blog mostly exists because it rejects that kind of bullshit and yet its readers continue to post it anyway.
If you need a yard and your fullback dive goes for a yard, you're a flex-TE-wielding genius. If it goes for 0.9 yards you're a dinosaur and FIRE THAT MAN.
College football needs to take a hard look at itself. Crap fan experience (both stadium and TV), lack of meaningful games and absurdly random season success conditions.
On the other hand, vast numbers of people continue to line up for the same shit sandwich, so maybe not.