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Since the place burned down…

Since the place burned down I'm guessing none of the photos are up.

It wasn't a crash--we pushed…

It wasn't a crash--we pushed an update yesterday. But we forgot to QA active threads and I noticed it just this morning as well. Devs are aware now.

I just hadn't updated from…

I just hadn't updated from February when I grabbed most of the ratings. This thing takes constant maintenance.

The kind that fairly…

The kind that fairly routinely lead to quotes about Michigan coaches being "refreshingly honest." Who's where on a depth chart, which guys are expected to be moving on, things they've heard about programs they're recruiting against. A few classes made it through the program after promises from Franklin that Harbaugh would be gone before they're playing.

Because I screwed it up. I…

Because I screwed it up. I read one thing that said it was THAT Bo and didn't check another.

They have a good staff full…

They have a good staff full of strong recruiters. Franklin himself is excellent at recruiting, though they've gotta learn to bring him in later so his tendency to lie won't get exposed.

fixed.

fixed.

Dad played baseball, had…

Dad played baseball, had some options but came to Michigan and was a team mgr instead. Kid is best friends with mine and is really sporty. Honestly wouldn't be surprised if she ends up an athlete at M.

There were also two kids of an MSU hockey player who would be at the preschool when dad wasn't playing in Germany. Really nice family.

Bo knows.

Bo knows.

Banned badandboujee, who may…

Banned badandboujee, who may indeed be called an anti-semite now.

Regarding the rest of that thread, the decision of whether it's politics or on-topic has to be made on a case-by-case basis. I may have come down differently but I stand by the mods on how they handled that one.

Speaking in terms of moderation policy, it isn't feasible anymore to ban everything that everyone thinks is "politics" anymore, because what's considered political is now itself much more of a political battlefield. Americans are engaging with extremism much more than when we set the policies for this message board*, and a tentpole strategy of any kind of extremism in a democracy is to code more and more things in our daily lives as political, thus decreasing the potential for people who live different lives to agree they hate the extremists more than each other.

I'll give you a recent example from moderation: About a year ago a reader posted that they're rooting for a mostly white non-Michigan WBB team over a mostly Black one. Another user said they agreed because Iowa is more "wholesome." A user responded to that saying they think "wholesome" meant "white." And off we go: now your WBB fandoms are politically coded. Individually, this happens all the time, and we're not going to change that nor do we want to. But where do you draw the line? If you delete just the user who called out the word choice of "wholesome" you ignore that this is a reasonable interpretation of the comment. If you delete the "wholesome" reply too you, it  could be reasonably interpreted that you're validating the racist interpretation of the comment. If you delete the OP rooting for Iowa over South Carolina, you're validating the idea that Iowa vs South Carolina WBB is politically coded. Answer: I deleted the "wholesome" comment (along with everything that came of it) because however it was meant it was going to illicit a racist interpretation. I then reviewed the posting history of the "wholesome" person, found nothing remotely racially coded, and let it be at that. There's a ton of subjectivity in that process, and that subjectivity is subject to my biases and my knowledge, both of which I am going to be extremely conscious of. It's also going to mean we get people mad that I went too far or didn't go far enough, based on their own biases and knowledge. Clearly whatever I did was going to piss off someone. But I don't think anyone can argue what I did wasn't in the best interest of the message board.

As I've said before, we're not going to adhere to meaningless policy minutiae at the expense of common sense. If you embrace ideas like "This group of people deserve to die" and want that idea treated the same way as "This group of people deserve to play sports" it's not going to happen that way. The more your politics veer away from facts, morality, and patriotism, the more you're going to find your ideas unwelcome among the vast majority of people you're communicating with on this board, and therefore less welcome in a digital space where the goal is for a community to have a good experience while communicating. Intent can matter, but it's not going to matter more than outcome. If that falls short of your ideal of a free exchange of ideas, perhaps consider the effect on that market if it were to stop caring about the quality of the goods.

*No, not equally on both sides; if you've convinced yourself otherwise I strongly recommend you do what badandboujee above didn't, and keep that stupid wrong opinion to yourself.

Banned BlueRude for…

Banned BlueRude for peppering the eclipse thread with the boob eclipse. 13-year account with no track record of this, so they may penitently petition for a Boliviation instead. But need to stop them from posting boobs immediately.

I pulled both of my kids…

I pulled both of my kids from school but the boy got sick before we left so it was just me and the girl. We spent an extra hour in traffic around Monroe on the way down, but picked a perfect spot.

My goal was to get to the US-23/OH-224 junction south of Fostoria. But I was on the lookout for a nature preserve to stop at, and we saw one at Bradner, about 20 minutes north of the goal, and I made an executive decision to pull over. It cost us maybe 45 seconds of totality, which is a lot considering how much driving and traffic we went through for a few minutes of corona, but was the only way we were getting home for dinner considering most Michiganders stopped in Toledo or Sylvania.

Shout-out to the ranger at the Bradner nature center, who had bug spray (for the ticks) and was handing out extra glasses to those who needed them (nobody did).

On the way back I skipped I-75 for Dixie Hwy and some back roads I last drove through when I had a learner's permit and my dad took me to see him give his powerpoint to a couple of farm fairs. My daughter got to see a little of America that she doesn't normally get exposed to, and we got home around 6pm, only really getting bottled up when a river meant we had to do some easting to get back to I-75.

I am joined by many history…

I am joined by many history nerds in this dorkdom. The '32 team's schedule:

  1. MSU. Finished 7-1, only loss was to Michigan.
  2. Northwestern. Coming off a 7-1-1 season when they were #4.
  3. At Ohio State. Finished #6 then were #5 in 1933
  4. Illinois. Team of sophomores that would go 7-1, finish #6 in 1934
  5. Princeton. Crisler's first year. Would go 9-0 in 1933 (#7) and go 7-1 and finish #5 in 1934
  6. at Indiana. They weren't that good.
  7. Chicago. Late term Stagg, mediocre
  8. At Minnesota. Team Crisler built, would be #3 in 1933 and win the NC in 1935

And the 1932 team was all defense and special teams, with Bennie Friedman doing everything. Punt and a Prayer and win 7-0.

After the 2021 game I ran…

After the 2021 game I ran down behind their bench to try to give him props.

Close. Etta is playing the…

Close. Etta is playing the Moore position in their base, and is also battling Brandt for a DE/DT hybrid role in their 5-2 package. This becomes a defensive end if they have to shift to an over. 

                    R


WR                  Q       TE----->            
          TE  T  G  C  G  T              WR
         E     T    N    T     O         CB

CB              M       W

          SS                FS

Becomes...

                    R


WR                  Q             TE            
          TE  T  G  C  G  T               WR
         E      T     N     E             CB

CB              M      W           O
  
          SS                  FS

This was a role that Jenkins filled the last few years, but Mike Morris had the job in 2021, and Wormley often played for the Ravens. Jenkins wasn't a great fit for it though, because his pass rushing wasn't quick enough to make him an effective edge rusher as a 4-3 WDE, and this got exploited at times. Ideally you use that role on someone the offense doesn't want pass-rushing so they have to stay in a tight formation and test your interior.

Via PFF Benny only played 8 snaps outside of the tackle last year, a distribution closer to Mason Graham than Jenkins. Benny's primary role was to back up Jenkins in his other role as DT#1 in their base nickel (with Grant and Goode backing up Graham at nose). Benny did sometimes also play the 5-2 DT role, but they also used Derrick Moore at that spot ~50 times, so I think D-Mo was technically the backup to Jenkins there. Like I said in the piece, it gets more confusing when you see this in terms of how Michigan creates "positions" in their packages that players can go out for.

It would be a miracle if he…

It would be a miracle if he returns for the Playoff, and then he'd still be pretty rusty. Remember he gave up an awful TD on a slant vs Rutgers when he came back last year, and was only truly playing like himself again by OSU.

I don't know about next year, and I'm guessing neither does Rod Moore. It will depend on draft status, team status, Rod status ... a lot. It may be he heals fully and wants to show the NFL that it's all behind him after not playing for a season. Or he may find it more beneficial to his future goals to heal up, get well, and train for the draft because he's already shown enough to be a good bet for a smart team, whereas playing another season could only subject him to injury and pop him out a year older. I think his injury last year played a role in returning this year, for what it's worth.

wait

wait

https://www.mgoblog.com…

https://www.mgoblog.com/content/business-finished

$650,000. We are making some…

$650,000, and most of it's going to making and mailing and storing and shipping books. We are making some incredible outlays for this blog's history. I think the biggest expense before this was something like $40k for the new servers. Looking at shipping rates times 5,000 books we're going to blow by that at the post office. The covers alone are going to cost 5x what it costs to print a normal HTTV.

And y'all better appreciate this thing because I turned down a free opening day ticket behind home plate today to work on it.

Yes. In fact you'll be able…

Yes. In fact you'll be able to paste a twitter link and it should embed automatically.

I want to beat MSU hockey…

I want to beat MSU hockey all the way, but I don't hate their hockey fans relative to other MSU and B10 fanbases. Other than the Tropp/Conboy incident, which attracted the toxic trash from RCMB, their hockey fans have always represented the better part of their fanbase to me. When their football team assaulted a dorm the first time, the hockey fans were the ones appropriately aghast at how unseriously the school was taking it. When the rivalry was at its height they were welcoming to Michigan fans freezing our asses off with them in the first outdoor game, and appropriately smug about Ryan Miller's evident awesomeness. If they failed to appreciate the manifest superiority of wide open Berenson hockey, we were dismissive of how hard it was for Mason to teach their skilled players to be as disciplined as they were.

I liked Wisconsin fans too. They left me a major false impression as to who their basketball and football fanbases were. Oddly Bowling Green, WMU, and Notre Dame hockey fans came off as worse to me.

Yeah. We talked about how a…

Yeah. We talked about how a woman even stepping on the field was treated as verboten. They would even at times put it out that it was going to happen only for a man in drag to appear. Of course Dooley and the Bentley guys have sleuthed out plenty of photos of women on the field before '71, like in the first photo of the banner, for example.

Behee wrote about this, in…

Behee wrote about this, in quite some detail, in HTTV 2022. Canham's record on women's participation in varsity sports is awful, the polar opposite of his record on Black participation, for which he was a primary mover.

Yeah that's the plan. I just…

Yeah that's the plan. I just boarded my flight to Detroit.

Clemson & Florida St…

Clemson & Florida St. joining the B1G in ‘25

Please stop interrupting my first vacation in 6 years for April Fools jokes. Another was taken down at the subject's request fyi. What may seem funny to the board becomes very not funny when people see MGo as a source of misinformation, or see the same about themselves.

Done. Seth Fisher 2 is my…

Done. Seth Fisher 2 is my daughter's.

What I hate most about this…

What I hate most about this isn't Izzo trying to situate his bubble-ass program for the future, but how you know Tony Petitti heard it, believed it, and is right now trying to strongarm the NCAA into giving the Big Ten a dozen autobids at the expense of the low majors.

It is insane to me that…

It is insane to me that anyone can watch 34 seconds of useless hockey and be okay with the system. A puck that goes a millimeter offsides over than half a minute before the goal was scored is an irrelevant advantage. Are you going to review for the curvature of the Earth too? What is the offensive team supposed to do after the ref signals onsides? If you want to review an offsides within 5 seconds I'm listening, but the rule is there because you have to give the defense an opportunity to get back, and after 34 seconds if you're over 4 years old and have skated over 4 times in your life you've had time to get back.

As Alex pointed out, this was an overreaction to one egregious call. But how many offsides that were that ugly have been overturned by replay, versus how many goals where the relevance to the play was nil? It's one of the easiest calls to get right; we shouldn't be stopping the game and taking away good goals for this pedantic shit.

Daily person: "I am so sick…

Daily person: "I am so sick of editing; if I never see another Word doc on a 3.5 floppy again it'll be too soon."

Same Daily person, 1 minute later: "Here, let me see that."

Yeah I haven't kept up w her…

Yeah I haven't kept up w her either, other than passive facebook whatnots. Her family was indeed wonderful.

Dude, I didn't see you there, but I did definitely ask Heather to drive me home in 2000, and I don't remember the reason she gave why she couldn't but it was probably your goy ass, haha! That was the only year neither I nor my brother at State had a car to get home, so I think I just stayed in Ann Arbor and played Playstation.

We did Seder at my aunt's in Birmingham in '99 (my frat brother from NJ so bored at work came to that one w me), but I knew the cast at your Seder: Seigels, Ribitwers, the lady from the brown house who gave out the massive candy bars at Halloween, possibly the Schwartzes.*

*(you got the upside, we got the downside. You see there's two sides to every Schwartz).

To your point, some of her…

To your point, some of her journalists have improved immensely since she was edit/approving our stuff.

Did you date Heather long…

Did you date Heather long enough to see her childhood home? I grew up a few doors down from her.

42-27 and 45-23 also work.

42-27 and 45-23 also work.

I have the Rams (or Virginia…

I have the Rams (or Virginia, you can't say on the ESPN bracket) rolling through Texas AND Tennessee. I have Creighton coming out of that bracket. I hate most of that bracket so Nedved could make a run.

I got to the end and…

I got to the end and realized I liked the Big East way too much. I also hate Houston's bracket.

https://fantasy.espn.com/games/tournament-challenge-bracket-2024/bracke…

Creating good online content…

Creating good online content is literally my job. But I do put a tip jar on it because I work 3 days and nights straight to pump it out in time.

Feature not a bug. It's not…

Feature not a bug. It's not meant to be a list. It triggers a vlookup that matches what you typed to a team. So if you type in "27-20" you will get Alabama, etc. The other team search area is a list of you want one but I got rid of data validation for the main selection box on purpose so you could write "UConn" and get Connecticut, or UH to get Houston, UNC for North Carolina, etc. It makes navigation must faster imo, and I wanted that because I found when I used it I wanted to flip to another team quickly.

If you want to try it early:…

If you want to try it early: https://drive.google.com/uc?export=download&id=1yEsg8SL6mqxzETN91KE3TFu…

And here's a tutorial:

It's almost ready. Actually…

It's almost ready. Actually it's done but I have to publish it.

Appreciate your…

Appreciate your understanding. Good luck!

Why? Who would know better…

Why? Who would know better than us?

We talked about this on the show. We all still love Don Brown--he was a great coach--but Michigan couldn't be the program Harbaugh needed it to be with Don Brown as a de facto HC of the defense, and that caused culture problems, for which Mattison's departure was an early warning. There's a report that got the hockey coach fired that was about culture problems; that is just fact. And I'm sure there's going to be plenty to say about Howard's basketball program.

When we say Day's program might have similar issues, we're not saying it's just an Ohio State thing at all. We're saying we've seen this kind of thing in all three major sports within the last five years, and that OSU's football program is showing signs that we recognize from our own history.

It's an open secret that…

It's an open secret that Hart and Harbaugh didn't get along. I don't think there was any chance Hart was coming back if Harbaugh returned. It's also not hard to figure out that Hart had high ambitions, because you'd get the insiders he talks to floating his name for future HC and stuff as far back as when Harbaugh was talking to the Vikings.

I can tell you in no uncertain terms Harbaugh isn't easy to work for. He's demanding as hell, and weird as hell--enough that a lot of people suspect he's a little bit on the spectrum. We used to talk about "Harbaugh Guys" in his program, people who got who he was and saw that he goes way deeper than the weird guy, and also people who got a chance to because they performed up to Harbaugh's freakish standards. I think a part of the 2020 turnaround was he started focusing on finding more people like that, until everyone in the program was a "Harbaugh guy." The Harbaugh guys tend to adore him. Go figure.

That's the end of shit I know.

My understanding of what went down is Hart wanted to be more than RB coach, Sherrone couldn't offer that, they couldn't come to terms somewhere in the middle, and that was why they parted ways.

I also think this would have gone down in January but something came up in Hart's personal life that caused the leave of absence and paused talks. Michigan wasn't going to move on without him while he was dealing with that, so we waited, and he waited, and then things progressed as they were going to.

I don't know how things ended but hopefully they ended well. I think Hart's going to be a great head coach one day.

There's a reason we don't…

There's a reason we don't allow the message board to be used as kiosk. I recognize the board is a community, and that people want to ask the community for help in times of need. But I cannot confirm that need for everyone, and if we don't regulate this it's going to overwhelm the board.

SalvatoreQuattro's gofundme is here: https://gofund.me/117349cd

Darker Blue's is here: http://spot.fund/rs2pssc

I ask that future calls for help be taken down more quickly.

No. Even basketball THIS bad…

No. Even basketball THIS bad is better than anyone who's not focusing on basketball. Kendrick Bell and Jason Hewlett, off the top of my head, were D-I basketball prospects, but at best you're adding true freshman Jace and T-Will who haven't played more than HS ball, and never focused on their techniques.

It's weird we have one of…

It's weird we have one of the few jobs where you could absolutely get blazed as much as you like if you wanted, and nobody on our staff even uses pot.

fuck this should have been…

fuck this should have been the preview.

So I don't feel guilty…

So I don't feel guilty starting our new campaign tonight instead of watching the last basketball game of the season.

Yeah, I hit publish instead…

Yeah, I hit publish instead of publish to draft. Meyer/Day was a typo, the other was a thing Sam said that I was still looking up and couldn't confirm. Day had two stints at BC a decade apart so if it happened it was probably in the early 2000s. Had it fixed in 5 mins. Sorry about that.

EE's got a bit too much…

EE's got a bit too much psychology for us, which isn't a bad thing except my wife's a psychologist, and when we're turning on a Youtube we're trying to escape work.

My referenced challenge to…

My challenge to the guys before we started recording was to name a historical figure (no relations) whose profligate sex life was more profitable to your quality of life. I for one am grateful to the man who fucked his way through Versailles for naval support against the British that also bankrupted the ancien regime.