Very good pulling this back up. Like it a lot and hits home for sure!
My personal favorite from that period is still the story 2015, though:
Harbaugh is part of Michigan's DNA, arrogant and weird and irascible and unable to suffer fools. The Bo drips off him. And he is good. So damn good. His goal after coaching is to die. He is of Michigan; now he is Michigan. I thought about that, and Atlanta suddenly having a national anthem, and about how it wasn't cold enough yet, and about Jim Harbaugh's Bo hat. I put on A Saturday Tradition. I turned it up.
Despite living in Seattle the past 5+ years and formally adopting the Huskies as my second team before it was cool - "Won't it be fun to have a team in two different conferences!", he said - the answer to your question is no. I am not in any way pulling for the Huskies or tempted to do so.
I do respect the hell out of their team, their coaches, and (similar to Michigan) their many senior players who came back with the explicit goal of making a title run. Losing to them would be less painful than pretty much any other team in the country.
But god damn do I want to see Michigan win a title.
Not a bad direction. I'm intrigued by your idea of tying the earlier round bowls to conferences again.
But if it were up to me we'd pare it down to just three bowls (let's say Rose, Sugar, Orange) and rotate those as the semifinals on NYD or the championship a week later (Rose Bowl just has to suck it up some years). All other first/second round games are on campus. Stupid that the teams with a bye don't get to play a home game, and I expect this will get corrected after a couple years.
Living in Seattle I've watched the team closely this year and unfortunately for M it's not as simple as shutting down Odunze. Polk (5/122, 1 TD tonight) and McMillan (5/58, 1 TD) are major threats as well that would deserve lockdown corner treatment if Odunze weren't there. I expect both to outperform what we saw from someone like Egbuka earlier this year. On top of that they have a solid receiving tight end in Westover, plus both Bernard and Jackson as very capable slot/reverse type threats. This is something like the 2021 OSU receiving corps but with an unflappable 6th year senior firing the ball to them.
That said I am pretty confident M will win, especially if Johnson is out. The Huskies haven't seen a defense on the level of Michigan's, and without a month of rust on the offense and special teams like Alabama benefitted from tonight I don't think they can hang with M for 60 minutes. Their defense is better than credited but definitely not great. And, they tend to consistently make a few bad mistakes as well... they had their own muffed punt tonight and some killer bonehead penalties like the kick catch interference. This is entirely in character for UW.
Maybe I'm missing something but this doesn't seem as big an issue with 18 teams. You'd need M and OSU to both be undefeated with every other team having at least 2 losses, so that the loser of The Game is the only 1 loss team. Otherwise you can just 90% solve this by making the first tiebreaker for #2 "drop all the tied teams who already lost to the #1 team". Most years that will leave a team who didn't already play the M/OSU winner.
If M or OSU loses for their only loss and all 16 other teams have at least two losses - PSU, Oregon, USC, Washington, Wisconsin etc - then I'm ok with a rematch. Wouldn't love it but ok with it.
As someone who has watched the Huskies closely the past two seasons living in Seattle ... I agree that it's statistically unlikely that a team would win all the close games they've won. And they don't tend to look dominant unless they're really playing a bad team.
But, they went 11-2 last year, not to mention 3 straight over Oregon. At some point I think you're just a good team that finds ways to win, even if you don't blow other teams out much. I know that's kinda feelingsball sounding, but having a bunch of unflappable upperclassman on offense who are dead certain they're gonna make the last score/drive they need to win in a close game has to be a non-luck part of pulling those out.
Please no. I hate to say it but in that case OSU has the "best loss". But I have to imagine they would get an SEC rep in there, the outcry would be too much otherwise... Right?
Given that the CFP is not the NCAA, and given that advanced scouting wasn't against CFP rules until this year, what exactly would be the CFP's angle to ban Michigan and why would they be motivated to come up with one?
Couple days late but saw this and yeah, you're right lol. I phrased that really poorly, "in many ways deserved to win" is just wrong. What I was trying to say was "in contrast to previous years, they played well enough that they were in the game and could have won with the right breaks, but they ultimately lacked Michigan's playmaker and leadership at QB (among other things)."
OSU in many ways deserved to win today. Watching the way you ran the ball and (mostly) bottled up our run game had me nervous, and when you got the ball back I was certain we were gonna watch the Buckeyes go down the field and win the game.
In some ways it reminded me of 2016. You could say M deserved to win but was let down by Wilton Speight's ceiling. Felt similar today with McCord. You pull for those kids as fans but it's tough seeing the gap between "good" and "elite" play out to your disadvantage.
Anyway - well played, and definitely not the team M walked over in the 2nd half the last two years but not quite enough. See you in 2024.
Had the same impression of noise at UW and this was with something like a 70% full stadium last year for the Arizona game. They claim to have the loudest recorded decibal reading in college football history and I'm inclined to believe them.
Really looking forward to next year's game though and highly recommend the experience. Fans seemed good, stadium is nice, views are incredible.
Isn't the actual setup "6 highest ranked conference champs", not "all 5 P5 champs and then highest G5 champ"? So if 2 G5 champs were ranked higher they could jump WSU/OSU.
Just use an ad blocker. I do that and also send what I think is a fair contribution directly to the site each year.
If college football TV broadcasts had a beveled guilt for me to smash that would turn off the ads (and change the clock rules back), I absolutely would.
We had a group reunion planned for that 2020 game since, after Michigan, the second most common home among my group of college friends is the Seattle area and west coast... Sad to miss it then but excited to have more chances now!
We also went to the UW-Arizon game last year and I have to say, that stadium was rocking with only about 55-60k fans in the stadium. Great place to see a game and super loud. Look forward to seeing some high stakes matchups on the shore of Lake Washington in the coming years.
The 9 has a bit better performance just by virtue of being a gen newer, but grab an 8 if you need a headphone jack. Otherwise they'll be very comparable.
If you're looking at the 9 and trying to decide between the ARM and Intel models, Intel will still give you better performance across the board in Windows and you get Thunderbolt 4 ports for expandability. The tradeoff is that the ARM version appears to get about 10% better battery life.
Disclaimer that I'm still rocking a 6 and haven't used the 8 or 9 as a daily driver, but I've been very pleased with my 6. And we have a few other personal Surface devices we've been happy with (laptop and laptop go).
Well said. My freshman year was 2004. In case I need to spell it out, that means that before last year I got to see 7 straight OSU wins (incl of course my entire undergrade career), one close win over a sad OSU team by Denard, and then 8 more OSU wins to go along with 0 Big Ten titles.
So uh, let's just say that the idea that my current state of mind regarding the 2022 season would be "disappointment" doesn't really compute. This has been an incredible two year run! Let's make it a threepeat! Go Blue!
That's geometrically impossible. Think about it for a few seconds - automated buses in your L4/L5 lanes would smoke individual cars for transport capacity.
Whatever your other thoughts on the pros and cons of different transport options, it's physically impossible for individual 2 ton cages to ever be as space efficient as 50 people on a bus or 1000 people on a subway train. There's nothing about removing the driver that changes this.
It's certainly a charitable take, since they would have had to prevent KSU from scoring a TD and/or played additional overtimes. No guarantee they win if they score the TD there.
Yep. Found out about this some weeks ago and it's tough for me to defend Harbaugh's comment knowing that. I'm sure he meant it in the spirit of the football programs (i.e. "inheriting" from Urban) and the rivalry, not as a comment on Day's life, but it hits different once you know Day's backstory and I don't blame any OSU fan who thinks it was low.
Lol yep. My 18 month old daughter is probably wondering why daddy is so much more fun than usual despite no increase in sleep haha. Been a high energy couple of days!
- I really like the idea of a 4 champion playoff field with Big Ten, SEC, Pac 12, Big 12 all represented.
- After five years in Seattle I've picked up on the Huskies through friends and general affinity. Great stadium by the way, come out in 2027 or whatever if you haven't been. Anyway, if USC wins UW are probably a lock for the Rose Bowl... Where I could then potentially watch my second favorite team hand OSU another loss just to cap the year off right.
I wasn't able to watch the game live but was checking in on the game tracker every 5 to 10 minutes. As soon as I saw them start moving the ball on that drive I thought to myself "no shit, they're just gonna do it again like they did last year." And that was it. Take the ball all the way down the field, burn 8 minutes of clock, put another 7 on the board, and that's ballgame. 11 points felt like 21, even in Columbus.
After all the buildup, OSU hadn't done a thing to make up the difference from 2021.
Yes indeed. If high school/UM Shakespeare knowledge serves, "Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo" = "Romeo, why must you be Romeo?" = "Why must the person I have fallen in love with be this particular person from our opposing blood feud family?" Like falling for an OSU girl/guy.
I agree in principal, but when your main competitor for B1G championships is a perennial CFP contender, that effectively means we need to be too. If not perennially, then at least more often than not.
Watch the Tigers win the world series in person, with my dad. And maybe my son (but we left Michigan and he isn't gonna live or die by the Tigers like my dad does).
Being one of 5 universities that together produce one out of 8 tenure track professors means that M is responsible for 2-3% of tenure track professors nationally. Is this supposed to be shocking for a large school with many highly-rated departments?
If it were evenly 2.5% per university that would mean we were still looking at around 40 schools. Candidates from outside the top 40 universities have a really hard time getting a tenure track position.... No shit, you were in a very middling program. I'm surprised it's not higher, 2-3% being a high value means there's a long tail of low-ranked programs that still manage to get some candidates into tenure track positions despite their low rankings.
Source: undergrad at M, got a PhD from a good-but-not-great top 20ish social science program, earned an Ivy League postdoc, still wasn't very competitive on the academic market and went into industry (thank God).
Yeah, I mispoke. I meant every team every time they are down 21 points. So just to be clear, you would argue that any team down 28-7, at any point in the game, should go for 2 if they score to make it 28-13?
That's interesting and I understand the math - your overall win prob goes up, at a much higher risk of losing in reg. I don't think I've ever seen a team do what you're suggesting though.
Fair enough - maybe Tuck is actually the only smart coach!
Disagree. Remember the situation here: kicking the XP puts them down 14.
Saying they should go for 2 there is the same as saying every team should go for 2 every time.
Instead, by missing it, he puts himself in position of needing another low-probability 2 point conversion just to make it to that dreaded overtime you were trying to avoid. Miss it again and you've worked your way into a loss all on your own.
On the punt - three scores with 14:40 left is not at all the time to go for it from your own 24 on 4th and 6, and I'd be embarrassed for Michigan if they did something that stupid. You're nearly guaranteeing the other team the points that will ice the game. If you kick it, get the ball back, and score, you're now in a two score game with something like 10:00-13:00 left on the clock. Keeping the ball there is hardly your last chance to stay in the game. And indeed MSU demonstrated that as they dominated the 4th quarter- if they hadn't handed UW that field position and 3 points, UW probably doesn't score again, which means it comes down to a single possession in a game where MSU tried two onside kicks.
If it had been 4th and 2 from their own 34? Maybe, I guess I could see it. 4th and 6 from your own 24 with a quarter to play is just dumb, IMO.
Recent Comments
I'm picturing it sort of like this, but without the interference...
Very good pulling this back up. Like it a lot and hits home for sure!
My personal favorite from that period is still the story 2015, though:
Harbaugh is part of Michigan's DNA, arrogant and weird and irascible and unable to suffer fools. The Bo drips off him. And he is good. So damn good. His goal after coaching is to die. He is of Michigan; now he is Michigan. I thought about that, and Atlanta suddenly having a national anthem, and about how it wasn't cold enough yet, and about Jim Harbaugh's Bo hat. I put on A Saturday Tradition. I turned it up.
I turned it up all the way.
Despite living in Seattle the past 5+ years and formally adopting the Huskies as my second team before it was cool - "Won't it be fun to have a team in two different conferences!", he said - the answer to your question is no. I am not in any way pulling for the Huskies or tempted to do so.
I do respect the hell out of their team, their coaches, and (similar to Michigan) their many senior players who came back with the explicit goal of making a title run. Losing to them would be less painful than pretty much any other team in the country.
But god damn do I want to see Michigan win a title.
Just under 1/2 in eastern time, but point taken and I agree. Finishing after midnight is crazy.
Not a bad direction. I'm intrigued by your idea of tying the earlier round bowls to conferences again.
But if it were up to me we'd pare it down to just three bowls (let's say Rose, Sugar, Orange) and rotate those as the semifinals on NYD or the championship a week later (Rose Bowl just has to suck it up some years). All other first/second round games are on campus. Stupid that the teams with a bye don't get to play a home game, and I expect this will get corrected after a couple years.
40-31, Michigan.
Living in Seattle I've watched the team closely this year and unfortunately for M it's not as simple as shutting down Odunze. Polk (5/122, 1 TD tonight) and McMillan (5/58, 1 TD) are major threats as well that would deserve lockdown corner treatment if Odunze weren't there. I expect both to outperform what we saw from someone like Egbuka earlier this year. On top of that they have a solid receiving tight end in Westover, plus both Bernard and Jackson as very capable slot/reverse type threats. This is something like the 2021 OSU receiving corps but with an unflappable 6th year senior firing the ball to them.
That said I am pretty confident M will win, especially if Johnson is out. The Huskies haven't seen a defense on the level of Michigan's, and without a month of rust on the offense and special teams like Alabama benefitted from tonight I don't think they can hang with M for 60 minutes. Their defense is better than credited but definitely not great. And, they tend to consistently make a few bad mistakes as well... they had their own muffed punt tonight and some killer bonehead penalties like the kick catch interference. This is entirely in character for UW.
Should definitely be a good game though.
Maybe I'm missing something but this doesn't seem as big an issue with 18 teams. You'd need M and OSU to both be undefeated with every other team having at least 2 losses, so that the loser of The Game is the only 1 loss team. Otherwise you can just 90% solve this by making the first tiebreaker for #2 "drop all the tied teams who already lost to the #1 team". Most years that will leave a team who didn't already play the M/OSU winner.
If M or OSU loses for their only loss and all 16 other teams have at least two losses - PSU, Oregon, USC, Washington, Wisconsin etc - then I'm ok with a rematch. Wouldn't love it but ok with it.
They absolutely used to do that as "recently" as late Lloyd era. My friends and I would stay and sing the words after the game.
As someone who has watched the Huskies closely the past two seasons living in Seattle ... I agree that it's statistically unlikely that a team would win all the close games they've won. And they don't tend to look dominant unless they're really playing a bad team.
But, they went 11-2 last year, not to mention 3 straight over Oregon. At some point I think you're just a good team that finds ways to win, even if you don't blow other teams out much. I know that's kinda feelingsball sounding, but having a bunch of unflappable upperclassman on offense who are dead certain they're gonna make the last score/drive they need to win in a close game has to be a non-luck part of pulling those out.
Indeed. One of favorite memories is the MMB playing Livin on a Prayer during Braylonfest and the students singing along.
Please no. I hate to say it but in that case OSU has the "best loss". But I have to imagine they would get an SEC rep in there, the outcry would be too much otherwise... Right?
Given that the CFP is not the NCAA, and given that advanced scouting wasn't against CFP rules until this year, what exactly would be the CFP's angle to ban Michigan and why would they be motivated to come up with one?
Couple days late but saw this and yeah, you're right lol. I phrased that really poorly, "in many ways deserved to win" is just wrong. What I was trying to say was "in contrast to previous years, they played well enough that they were in the game and could have won with the right breaks, but they ultimately lacked Michigan's playmaker and leadership at QB (among other things)."
Hope so. For the "last" Rose Bowl vibes, and also because I think UW would be a more than winnable matchup for this team.
OSU in many ways deserved to win today. Watching the way you ran the ball and (mostly) bottled up our run game had me nervous, and when you got the ball back I was certain we were gonna watch the Buckeyes go down the field and win the game.
In some ways it reminded me of 2016. You could say M deserved to win but was let down by Wilton Speight's ceiling. Felt similar today with McCord. You pull for those kids as fans but it's tough seeing the gap between "good" and "elite" play out to your disadvantage.
Anyway - well played, and definitely not the team M walked over in the 2nd half the last two years but not quite enough. See you in 2024.
Play. Fight. Win. Please.
Had the same impression of noise at UW and this was with something like a 70% full stadium last year for the Arizona game. They claim to have the loudest recorded decibal reading in college football history and I'm inclined to believe them.
Really looking forward to next year's game though and highly recommend the experience. Fans seemed good, stadium is nice, views are incredible.
Isn't the actual setup "6 highest ranked conference champs", not "all 5 P5 champs and then highest G5 champ"? So if 2 G5 champs were ranked higher they could jump WSU/OSU.
How'd the students do with the wave?
Just use an ad blocker. I do that and also send what I think is a fair contribution directly to the site each year.
If college football TV broadcasts had a beveled guilt for me to smash that would turn off the ads (and change the clock rules back), I absolutely would.
Mentioned it above but definitely worth a visit, great stadium, nice campus, cool city and chill fans.
We had a group reunion planned for that 2020 game since, after Michigan, the second most common home among my group of college friends is the Seattle area and west coast... Sad to miss it then but excited to have more chances now!
We also went to the UW-Arizon game last year and I have to say, that stadium was rocking with only about 55-60k fans in the stadium. Great place to see a game and super loud. Look forward to seeing some high stakes matchups on the shore of Lake Washington in the coming years.
Uh, Denard did beat OSU. Also won a BCS bowl. Which is why he absolutely gets one of the spots, IMO.
Harbaugh, Denard, Hutch, Haskins.
The large bottle of ketchup on the right is a nice touch.
I'd say Wings is too small but then given regionals attendance...
The 9 has a bit better performance just by virtue of being a gen newer, but grab an 8 if you need a headphone jack. Otherwise they'll be very comparable.
If you're looking at the 9 and trying to decide between the ARM and Intel models, Intel will still give you better performance across the board in Windows and you get Thunderbolt 4 ports for expandability. The tradeoff is that the ARM version appears to get about 10% better battery life.
Disclaimer that I'm still rocking a 6 and haven't used the 8 or 9 as a daily driver, but I've been very pleased with my 6. And we have a few other personal Surface devices we've been happy with (laptop and laptop go).
Avoid the Surface Go like the plague, however.
Ehhh... M totally ducked that game. But given WMU still got a #1 seed last year it hardly held them back, I don't know why they'd need to cling to it.
... Wait, where are you going that you actually hear from Western hockey fans?
Well said. My freshman year was 2004. In case I need to spell it out, that means that before last year I got to see 7 straight OSU wins (incl of course my entire undergrade career), one close win over a sad OSU team by Denard, and then 8 more OSU wins to go along with 0 Big Ten titles.
So uh, let's just say that the idea that my current state of mind regarding the 2022 season would be "disappointment" doesn't really compute. This has been an incredible two year run! Let's make it a threepeat! Go Blue!
There is no point to 8K TVs except to help TV companies sell a few more high end TVs.
That's geometrically impossible. Think about it for a few seconds - automated buses in your L4/L5 lanes would smoke individual cars for transport capacity.
Whatever your other thoughts on the pros and cons of different transport options, it's physically impossible for individual 2 ton cages to ever be as space efficient as 50 people on a bus or 1000 people on a subway train. There's nothing about removing the driver that changes this.
Holy shit is that what the site looks like without an ad blocker?
It's certainly a charitable take, since they would have had to prevent KSU from scoring a TD and/or played additional overtimes. No guarantee they win if they score the TD there.
Thanks for changing our fortunes, Trace! Here's to many more wins with your dad. Nothing better than sharing joy and love with family.
Yep. Found out about this some weeks ago and it's tough for me to defend Harbaugh's comment knowing that. I'm sure he meant it in the spirit of the football programs (i.e. "inheriting" from Urban) and the rivalry, not as a comment on Day's life, but it hits different once you know Day's backstory and I don't blame any OSU fan who thinks it was low.
Lol yep. My 18 month old daughter is probably wondering why daddy is so much more fun than usual despite no increase in sleep haha. Been a high energy couple of days!
Well, yes. He's not just any old Ohioan, he's a lawyer after all.
Uh, 3. But to add some color:
- I really like the idea of a 4 champion playoff field with Big Ten, SEC, Pac 12, Big 12 all represented.
- After five years in Seattle I've picked up on the Huskies through friends and general affinity. Great stadium by the way, come out in 2027 or whatever if you haven't been. Anyway, if USC wins UW are probably a lock for the Rose Bowl... Where I could then potentially watch my second favorite team hand OSU another loss just to cap the year off right.
I wasn't able to watch the game live but was checking in on the game tracker every 5 to 10 minutes. As soon as I saw them start moving the ball on that drive I thought to myself "no shit, they're just gonna do it again like they did last year." And that was it. Take the ball all the way down the field, burn 8 minutes of clock, put another 7 on the board, and that's ballgame. 11 points felt like 21, even in Columbus.
After all the buildup, OSU hadn't done a thing to make up the difference from 2021.
Thanks very much! Still enjoying last year's :)
Yes indeed. If high school/UM Shakespeare knowledge serves, "Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo" = "Romeo, why must you be Romeo?" = "Why must the person I have fallen in love with be this particular person from our opposing blood feud family?" Like falling for an OSU girl/guy.
I agree in principal, but when your main competitor for B1G championships is a perennial CFP contender, that effectively means we need to be too. If not perennially, then at least more often than not.
Watch the Tigers win the world series in person, with my dad. And maybe my son (but we left Michigan and he isn't gonna live or die by the Tigers like my dad does).
Went to my first game there a couple weeks ago and had similar observations... That was the loudest 35-40k crowd I ever heard. Nice stadium also.
Fwiw, had a good experience with the park+shuttle setup when we went to the 78-0 game in 2016. Pretty easy and fans were sociable and welcoming to us.
Small typo, I think you meant "thirteen"
Yeah, political science and sociology are frequently ranked top 3 or even #1 for their graduate programs.
Being one of 5 universities that together produce one out of 8 tenure track professors means that M is responsible for 2-3% of tenure track professors nationally. Is this supposed to be shocking for a large school with many highly-rated departments?
If it were evenly 2.5% per university that would mean we were still looking at around 40 schools. Candidates from outside the top 40 universities have a really hard time getting a tenure track position.... No shit, you were in a very middling program. I'm surprised it's not higher, 2-3% being a high value means there's a long tail of low-ranked programs that still manage to get some candidates into tenure track positions despite their low rankings.
Source: undergrad at M, got a PhD from a good-but-not-great top 20ish social science program, earned an Ivy League postdoc, still wasn't very competitive on the academic market and went into industry (thank God).
Yeah, I mispoke. I meant every team every time they are down 21 points. So just to be clear, you would argue that any team down 28-7, at any point in the game, should go for 2 if they score to make it 28-13?
That's interesting and I understand the math - your overall win prob goes up, at a much higher risk of losing in reg. I don't think I've ever seen a team do what you're suggesting though.
Fair enough - maybe Tuck is actually the only smart coach!
Disagree. Remember the situation here: kicking the XP puts them down 14.
Saying they should go for 2 there is the same as saying every team should go for 2 every time.
Instead, by missing it, he puts himself in position of needing another low-probability 2 point conversion just to make it to that dreaded overtime you were trying to avoid. Miss it again and you've worked your way into a loss all on your own.
On the punt - three scores with 14:40 left is not at all the time to go for it from your own 24 on 4th and 6, and I'd be embarrassed for Michigan if they did something that stupid. You're nearly guaranteeing the other team the points that will ice the game. If you kick it, get the ball back, and score, you're now in a two score game with something like 10:00-13:00 left on the clock. Keeping the ball there is hardly your last chance to stay in the game. And indeed MSU demonstrated that as they dominated the 4th quarter- if they hadn't handed UW that field position and 3 points, UW probably doesn't score again, which means it comes down to a single possession in a game where MSU tried two onside kicks.
If it had been 4th and 2 from their own 34? Maybe, I guess I could see it. 4th and 6 from your own 24 with a quarter to play is just dumb, IMO.