One of my favorite announcers ever. I always, always watched CBC instead of American broadcasts and he was the main reason (though guys like Chris Cuthbert are also great).
His voice, his meter, his delivery, all great. But though he did not lose his cool, there was a genuine passion for the sport that made you love what you were watching. He made you feel good about the game you watched him call, feel good about the players.
When it was the Wings, or the Leafs. Or that epic game when Mario Lemieux came back and was on a line with Jagr and they absolutely hummed on offense as Cole proclaimed, “This line is dynamite!”
Agree here. Harvesting football players isn’t a be-all strategy, and to their credit USA rugby’s personnel strategy for the World Cup focuses on ground-up development.
Even world-class 15 players need some acclimation to 7s; France brought Antoine DuPont on to their 7s squad for Olympic prep this spring and initially used him only as a sub.
Of course, as soon as he got on the pitch he was the best player on the field.
But looking to football players isn’t a fool’s errand. There is a lot to learn, but you’re also looking for people accustomed to contact sports in excellent physical shape who have the body size and tools to be successful. It would take time to develop them, which is where the infrastructure problem comes into play; you need teams and games that exist, and there’s just not a lot, and there’s little or no money in it. A guy who wants to play a competitive sport with football experience can try rugby and might get good. But they also are already good at football and there’s the XFL (or whatever it’s called now) and arena football and the CFL and you don’t need to learn a new sport to play them and they pay a bit.
Deveon Smith is a good example of a guy with a body type and some skills that could translate to rugby, at least, 15s. But why commit to a sport you don’t know with a long learning curve with a “professional” league in the States that nobody has heard of and makes little money with few fans in attendance when you can keep making actual football rosters and play the game you’ve known and loved for your whole life, even in a lower level league?
Unlike full 15-man, the US is at least competitive at this level. And the fact that Perry Baker, a D-2 football player that got one camp with the Eagles and played a couple years of arena, has had a long elite-level career does suggest that there are ex-football athletes who could thrive at sevens if given the opportunity.
The problem is that the infrastructure of the sport just isn’t strong enough to draw those guys in. At least, not yet. I think USA rugby would do well to make recruiting football players one prong of a multi-faceted recruiting strategy for both 7s and 15s, but the fact that there really aren’t good prospects for a decently paying pro career dampens the pull.
Still, I’d love to see some more players come through. The US hosts the Rugby World Cup in eight years and it would be nice if the US was good enough to win a game in pool play. In Sevens it is not unrealistic for the US to produce a team that can medal in the Olympics; as it stands they aren’t favorites to do so this year but it’s not impossible, as they’ve played in semifinals of a tournament or two already this season. Sevens has a lot of untapped potential for athletes to come in and be really good.
Chris Smartfootball Brown retweeted a clip from Bill Belichick that was very interesting to me: If it's a big-money position and you really like the player, you think he'll be around: you get a fifth year option on a first-rounder, don't get that on a second-rounder. So if Legette is a hit, you save huge money in a pivotal year.
Of course Bill would know that off the top of his head.
I like the pick a lot. But don't listen to me, I was (along with many here) dissatisfied with the Lions drafting last year and that turned out to be completely wrong.
But hard not to love this pick.
Love the crowd.
In 2023 Michigan played against 9 of the top 24 draft picks in this year's draft and beat all of them.
Yeah, combine our best-in-the-country defense with Penn State's putrid offense and Robinson's always-on explosiveness off the corner, the best chance Penn State had to win that game was for JJ to drop back and get destroyed.
The one area Michigan's O was a bit questionable was tackle pass protection. But if you don't spend a lot of time trying to pass from the pocket you don't get that questionable area exploited much. Moore and Harbaugh's decisions were rational.
BTW people often wring hands about Michigan's tendency to be a touch conservative on offense, and I certainly wanted to see more aggression on occasion, but we've seen a couple of opposing DEs go in the first round, and Michigan's defense was shutting down all these offensive players; it was a reasonable choice.
I'm still not over the Packers apparently hitting on a QB again.
The North is absolutely loaded. Maybe the best it (or its Central precursor) has ever been, though we'll obviously have to see the product on the field first.
Murderer's row. Whomever wins is going to earn it and the division might finally produce a SB winner or two.
I'm not saying they're right, but there's some logic here both from a "keeping the staff is defensible because they're developing a QB" and from a "we're building the rest of the team around a rookie QB contract."
I don't think Fields would work at all; there's a reason he went to Pittsburgh to be a backup. Howell doesn't impress me but I don't know his game well enough to evaluate that as a legit option.
I'm just glad that Denver didn't get JJ. To me, the absurd QB pick here is Atlanta, though ironically the Nix pick could sting more long-term since Penix won't be expected to play for two years and Nix could be gone by then. If Penix flames out, the pain will be lessened because it won't be painfully over his first couple of seasons.
Depends on how it goes, I guess. The counter-argument here from Bill Connelly is that TEs remain relatively undervalued and you can get a good one for not much money. But Denver needs a QB, period. And a young one can buy you a year even if he's not great in year one IF the rest of the team shows progress.
Hard to say that they are alone in that position, particularly if one includes the D1 sport they’re playing up in. Minnesota State and UMD both have hockey programs that shade Ferris, particularly in the last decade, with nationally competitive football and basketball teams as well. If we’re talking d2 only, Northwest Missouri State is a monster and has been for decades.
But as a UMD non-hockey fan I’d definitely take Ferris’ non-hockey results in the last decade and it’s not really close. But UMD fans who cheer for the hockey team? No way.
Weighting D1 sports for D2 schools is just tricky business. But Ferris is definitely one of a small handful of premiere schools in D-2 athletics no matter how small you want that category to be.
I have no argument that they made bad choices. That’s part of the point; there have been multiple owners and multiple failures, and the one common theme has been the NHL doggedly determined that the NHL will work there without considering that it might not. And, if necessary, mitigating the challenges.
The move of the Coyotes to Arizona is almost 30 years old and never been anything but a colossal failure.
I've read this article detailing the meltdown of their relationship with Whatever-it's-now-called Arena in Glendale and it still makes no sense. The arena would still be the ninth newest arena in the NHL if they were still playing there, and they couldn't even make that work. They tried everything. They sank and lost hundreds of millions of dollars. The NHL did not work in Arizona.
It is in its essense a tribute to massive hubris, and another black mark on the ink-stained ledger of the mad fool Gary Bettman.
I feel about how I thought I would feel: sad that it's over. Happy that it happened.
It really looked like this team was going to crash out without a tourney bid not that long ago. But then they put some things together, went on another good B1G title run, and performed brilliantly in a stacked (but not elite elite) regional. Beating our arch-rival to go to the FF? Always wonderful.
And the hope is that, after many years where the flukes went against us, maybe it's our turn?
Nope, still not. And there were some bad breaks in there; the ice around the blue lines appeared to be terrible, directly affecting Michigan's gameplan of getting long-ish pucks in on goal looking for bounces and deflections. Had to be 10+ whiffs and blown tires out there, and one of them led directly to the third BC goal.
That was also on that unjust 4-on-4 after they called the phantom penalty on Duke, taking away a PP. A 1-0 tight game turned into a 3-0 shellacking. I don't like that, and I'm annoyed at whiffing issues...
But you can't complain that the breaks and a bad call cost you a game where you scored 0 goals. The better team won. As David says, sometimes it's good for the sport when the better team wins. Like in football this year.
Is it a cope to keep going back to the football team and remembering that?
No. It's real, and it's spectacular. Michigan hockey is, once again, Sisyphus watching the rock roll back down the hill. This time, though, we're looking at the other hill, the bigger and harder one, and there's a massive boulder anchored on top, carrying an inscription that says "15-0."
No matter. I got to go, take my daughter. Her second time ever hearing a Michigan band in person; they gave her a picture, too. Saw a few mgobloggers, including (for the first time) Craig and David. My gratitude to those who made this possible is significant.
For the “put pucks on net” crowd: it was clear that this was a big part of Michigan’s gameplan from the beginning. Lots of shots from the blue line and high slot, into traffic, looking for deflections and bounces.
They’ve lost at least a half-dozen of these shots to whiffs and wipeouts. No idea if it’s the ice or just bad luck. But now they’re working lower and BC is clogging the house.
I'll be there. I'm quite tall and I'll be wearing a dazzle maize Tim Cook jersey from 2004. Section 211 nominally, might be around a bit as I already have a couple people to say "hi" to. More are always welcome.
One area of significance is that NIL totally flips the already-changing field with Major Junior. Leaving aside that powers-that-be are thinking of making Major Junior players eligible for college, it used to be that the cash packages favored Major Junior, since they didn't have the sort of boundaries that NCAA teams did. Now, though, you have some significant programs and fanbases able to throw around real cash in a way that that the CHL just can't. Major Junior teams just don't have the sort of substance that a major college athletic program has, especially now with network revenue.
Add in that big-time college programs increasingly look like legitimate places to develop for future NHL talent and you have a situation where the personnel dynamic in college hockey is changing rapidly. An NHL team can stash a player in college for extra years, count on him to get developed, and he can actually make reasonable money (so, not impatient) while doing so.
Frankly, I think this is *already* a big factor. The big change coming is how it affects recruiting and transfers.
And in that realm it feels like Minnesota and North Dakota are poised to dominate the hockey world. Michigan (and Michigan State and the Boston schools; a program like Maine can also benefit significantly) can be competitive too, but this is one area where having a really good program in another sport drawing NIL money can be a bit of a detriment. NoDak is a premiere sports program in its state; Minnesota is a big deal statewide in a way unlike any other college hockey program, as well.
How imbalanced kind of depends on how some smaller programs that potentially serve as the one major program of a smallish market make the transition. I'm in Duluth, and NIL could potentially be a game-changer here, or it could be a nothingburger. Marquette has that potential for NMU, too. Small tv markets with no other major-level sport--fertile ground for some interesting dynamics.
Not nothing. I absolutely do not want to fall behind Denver, and I loathe the other two schools. So one of the other teams winning will be a bitter pill to swallow (BU the least of these).
But... this is an underdog rebuild sort of year, albeit with some excellent players. It's not a generational talent collection or a generational player like the last two.
And:
If you had asked me to choose between a hockey title (or a good basketball season or a basketball title or, well, literally name any other feat in sports that I could care about) and a football title, well...
Let's just say I've gotten choice #1 already. Everything else is gravy.
*I will disclaim both knowledge of and agreement with this post if Michigan loses 3-2 in overtime this weekend.
No argument with the premise, but going to gently disagree with the category of a couple of the teams. I don't think one can really call a #1 seed a team that has "no chance," even if both OSU and Purdue had the bad luck to face dominant repeat champions; that OSU team was 30-3, and this Purdue team was an underdog but hardly a walkover.
They're not at all in the same category as the Indiana team that had no business making the final (against, uh, Maryland) or that MSU team that everyone knew would get steamrolled in Detroit.
It's pretty remarkable how many different B1G teams have gone to the finals and lost. For that reason alone I figured Purdue's demise was inevitable.
A fitting end to this era of the B1G in basketball.
Indiana, Illinois, Ohio State, Michigan State, Michigan (twice), Wisconsin, and Purdue all on the wrong side of one shining moment. Every three years a new Big Ten team gets put to the sword.
Probably? Sure. But Howard was also conscious of recruiting and momentum.
Let's face it, people were cranky before he made the Sweet Sixteen in 22. After last year most people didn't want him gone, but a few made noise like they did, and when the blowup with Sanderson happened (which, it must be said, happened before it became clear that the season was a disaster; probably contributed to the collapse, honestly) a lot of people were ready to axe him in no small part because they were frustrated with the win-loss record as much as the contested behavior issues.
We can say, in retrospect, that if he had sat the whole season or most of it, he'd still have the job. But for how long? The team might not have had such a collapse this year, but it probably misses the tournament. That's two in a row. And he still isn't getting great guys into the program. So... where would he be next year? How many recruits and transfers can he get, and can he forge into a team, that are ready to sign up for a coach that would unquestionably be in a win-or-die season that's really more of the same?
Now, maybe he could do something with that. But it's important to understand that his desperation to return is not unfounded. If I were in his position I would feel like I had to coach for my job, and it would be really hard for me to just lay low as the team, inevitably, struggled at times.
He was caught in a bad place. Hindsight may seem like it's 20-20, but sometimes it's 50-50.
Sort of, sort of not. The NCAA has made a mess of things, and that directly contributes to sustained bad regionals.
I’ve been banging the drum on this long enough: years ago, before the B1G formed for hockey, the WCHA sold out the X for the Final Five regularly. One year they had a regional at the X the week after. Minnesota and North Dakota, the two biggest WCHA draws, both played in the regional.
And the arena was only half full for the regional, despite the games being substantially more important. Because the NCAA has trained its fans that regionals aren’t worthwhile.
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One of my favorite announcers ever. I always, always watched CBC instead of American broadcasts and he was the main reason (though guys like Chris Cuthbert are also great).
His voice, his meter, his delivery, all great. But though he did not lose his cool, there was a genuine passion for the sport that made you love what you were watching. He made you feel good about the game you watched him call, feel good about the players.
When it was the Wings, or the Leafs. Or that epic game when Mario Lemieux came back and was on a line with Jagr and they absolutely hummed on offense as Cole proclaimed, “This line is dynamite!”
He did it as good as it could be done.
Agree here. Harvesting football players isn’t a be-all strategy, and to their credit USA rugby’s personnel strategy for the World Cup focuses on ground-up development.
Even world-class 15 players need some acclimation to 7s; France brought Antoine DuPont on to their 7s squad for Olympic prep this spring and initially used him only as a sub.
Of course, as soon as he got on the pitch he was the best player on the field.
But looking to football players isn’t a fool’s errand. There is a lot to learn, but you’re also looking for people accustomed to contact sports in excellent physical shape who have the body size and tools to be successful. It would take time to develop them, which is where the infrastructure problem comes into play; you need teams and games that exist, and there’s just not a lot, and there’s little or no money in it. A guy who wants to play a competitive sport with football experience can try rugby and might get good. But they also are already good at football and there’s the XFL (or whatever it’s called now) and arena football and the CFL and you don’t need to learn a new sport to play them and they pay a bit.
Deveon Smith is a good example of a guy with a body type and some skills that could translate to rugby, at least, 15s. But why commit to a sport you don’t know with a long learning curve with a “professional” league in the States that nobody has heard of and makes little money with few fans in attendance when you can keep making actual football rosters and play the game you’ve known and loved for your whole life, even in a lower level league?
Agree, it’s a blast, and quick.
Unlike full 15-man, the US is at least competitive at this level. And the fact that Perry Baker, a D-2 football player that got one camp with the Eagles and played a couple years of arena, has had a long elite-level career does suggest that there are ex-football athletes who could thrive at sevens if given the opportunity.
The problem is that the infrastructure of the sport just isn’t strong enough to draw those guys in. At least, not yet. I think USA rugby would do well to make recruiting football players one prong of a multi-faceted recruiting strategy for both 7s and 15s, but the fact that there really aren’t good prospects for a decently paying pro career dampens the pull.
Still, I’d love to see some more players come through. The US hosts the Rugby World Cup in eight years and it would be nice if the US was good enough to win a game in pool play. In Sevens it is not unrealistic for the US to produce a team that can medal in the Olympics; as it stands they aren’t favorites to do so this year but it’s not impossible, as they’ve played in semifinals of a tournament or two already this season. Sevens has a lot of untapped potential for athletes to come in and be really good.
Chris Smartfootball Brown retweeted a clip from Bill Belichick that was very interesting to me: If it's a big-money position and you really like the player, you think he'll be around: you get a fifth year option on a first-rounder, don't get that on a second-rounder. So if Legette is a hit, you save huge money in a pivotal year.
Of course Bill would know that off the top of his head.
Final first-round tally: nine vanquished enemies, one program legend.
What a great football year this has been. Go Blue. Go Lions.
Ah well. I don't like them either, and I also hate the Yankees, and I still hate the Avs, and so on...
But it's OSU.
Maybe now he'll finally find some success in the League.
Ok a make-a-wish teen announcing his team's first-round draft pick is cool.
I like the pick a lot. But don't listen to me, I was (along with many here) dissatisfied with the Lions drafting last year and that turned out to be completely wrong.
But hard not to love this pick.
Love the crowd.
In 2023 Michigan played against 9 of the top 24 draft picks in this year's draft and beat all of them.
BTW Michigan faced all 8 of these players in the last 6-game stretch run, several of them without their head coach.
And we still won.
Yeah, combine our best-in-the-country defense with Penn State's putrid offense and Robinson's always-on explosiveness off the corner, the best chance Penn State had to win that game was for JJ to drop back and get destroyed.
The one area Michigan's O was a bit questionable was tackle pass protection. But if you don't spend a lot of time trying to pass from the pocket you don't get that questionable area exploited much. Moore and Harbaugh's decisions were rational.
BTW people often wring hands about Michigan's tendency to be a touch conservative on offense, and I certainly wanted to see more aggression on occasion, but we've seen a couple of opposing DEs go in the first round, and Michigan's defense was shutting down all these offensive players; it was a reasonable choice.
8 of the first 21.
Michigan beat 7 of the top 20 picks of the NFL draft and was QBd by the eighth this year.
Great. Now I'm positive that this is what is going to happen.
I'm still not over the Packers apparently hitting on a QB again.
The North is absolutely loaded. Maybe the best it (or its Central precursor) has ever been, though we'll obviously have to see the product on the field first.
Murderer's row. Whomever wins is going to earn it and the division might finally produce a SB winner or two.
That's six guys taken in the first round that Michigan has beaten this year, plus Michigan's QB. So far.
I'm not saying they're right, but there's some logic here both from a "keeping the staff is defensible because they're developing a QB" and from a "we're building the rest of the team around a rookie QB contract."
I don't think Fields would work at all; there's a reason he went to Pittsburgh to be a backup. Howell doesn't impress me but I don't know his game well enough to evaluate that as a legit option.
I'm just glad that Denver didn't get JJ. To me, the absurd QB pick here is Atlanta, though ironically the Nix pick could sting more long-term since Penix won't be expected to play for two years and Nix could be gone by then. If Penix flames out, the pain will be lessened because it won't be painfully over his first couple of seasons.
Depends on how it goes, I guess. The counter-argument here from Bill Connelly is that TEs remain relatively undervalued and you can get a good one for not much money. But Denver needs a QB, period. And a young one can buy you a year even if he's not great in year one IF the rest of the team shows progress.
Defenders aren't getting drafted because the top defenders teams want are still on Michigan's roster.
Who covered MHJ and Rome Odunze in their losses this year?
So far, so good. Michigan beat 4 of the first 12 picks and was QBd by a fifth.
I'm thoroughly a Lions fan, but I don't mind the Vikes and I like JJ there. Way better for him than the other likely options.
Will Johnson.
Congrats JJ. I'll root for him 15 games a year.
Great having him in-state. I hope he's great.
Hard to say that they are alone in that position, particularly if one includes the D1 sport they’re playing up in. Minnesota State and UMD both have hockey programs that shade Ferris, particularly in the last decade, with nationally competitive football and basketball teams as well. If we’re talking d2 only, Northwest Missouri State is a monster and has been for decades.
But as a UMD non-hockey fan I’d definitely take Ferris’ non-hockey results in the last decade and it’s not really close. But UMD fans who cheer for the hockey team? No way.
Weighting D1 sports for D2 schools is just tricky business. But Ferris is definitely one of a small handful of premiere schools in D-2 athletics no matter how small you want that category to be.
I have no argument that they made bad choices. That’s part of the point; there have been multiple owners and multiple failures, and the one common theme has been the NHL doggedly determined that the NHL will work there without considering that it might not. And, if necessary, mitigating the challenges.
Instead, hubris.
The move of the Coyotes to Arizona is almost 30 years old and never been anything but a colossal failure.
I've read this article detailing the meltdown of their relationship with Whatever-it's-now-called Arena in Glendale and it still makes no sense. The arena would still be the ninth newest arena in the NHL if they were still playing there, and they couldn't even make that work. They tried everything. They sank and lost hundreds of millions of dollars. The NHL did not work in Arizona.
It is in its essense a tribute to massive hubris, and another black mark on the ink-stained ledger of the mad fool Gary Bettman.
I feel about how I thought I would feel: sad that it's over. Happy that it happened.
It really looked like this team was going to crash out without a tourney bid not that long ago. But then they put some things together, went on another good B1G title run, and performed brilliantly in a stacked (but not elite elite) regional. Beating our arch-rival to go to the FF? Always wonderful.
And the hope is that, after many years where the flukes went against us, maybe it's our turn?
Nope, still not. And there were some bad breaks in there; the ice around the blue lines appeared to be terrible, directly affecting Michigan's gameplan of getting long-ish pucks in on goal looking for bounces and deflections. Had to be 10+ whiffs and blown tires out there, and one of them led directly to the third BC goal.
That was also on that unjust 4-on-4 after they called the phantom penalty on Duke, taking away a PP. A 1-0 tight game turned into a 3-0 shellacking. I don't like that, and I'm annoyed at whiffing issues...
But you can't complain that the breaks and a bad call cost you a game where you scored 0 goals. The better team won. As David says, sometimes it's good for the sport when the better team wins. Like in football this year.
Is it a cope to keep going back to the football team and remembering that?
No. It's real, and it's spectacular. Michigan hockey is, once again, Sisyphus watching the rock roll back down the hill. This time, though, we're looking at the other hill, the bigger and harder one, and there's a massive boulder anchored on top, carrying an inscription that says "15-0."
No matter. I got to go, take my daughter. Her second time ever hearing a Michigan band in person; they gave her a picture, too. Saw a few mgobloggers, including (for the first time) Craig and David. My gratitude to those who made this possible is significant.
Memories forever. Michigan forever. Go Blue.
Thought about you today, Ckersh, and the old Yost Crew. Saw a couple tonight.
Welp.
For the “put pucks on net” crowd: it was clear that this was a big part of Michigan’s gameplan from the beginning. Lots of shots from the blue line and high slot, into traffic, looking for deflections and bounces.
They’ve lost at least a half-dozen of these shots to whiffs and wipeouts. No idea if it’s the ice or just bad luck. But now they’re working lower and BC is clogging the house.
And it’s a part of the ice BC isn’t using a lot.
And that whiff, something like the 10th, gives up a goal.
Ugh.
Happened a lot in the first, too. Starting to be really noticeable.
Mobile linking to Twitter isn’t as easy as it used to be. But you can see my view if you want.
My daughter’s second ever time hearing a Michigan band in person; they enthusiastically gave her a pic.
Here. Got to see several mgofolks in person.
It’s all gravy now. Go Blue.
I haven't been to the science museum in 22 years.
Almost exactly. I went there on the day off at the 2002 FF.
I'll be there. I'm quite tall and I'll be wearing a dazzle maize Tim Cook jersey from 2004. Section 211 nominally, might be around a bit as I already have a couple people to say "hi" to. More are always welcome.
Thankful I get to go. God is good. Go Blue.
The last time I was this terrified reading an Alex Drain scouting report on an opposing offense was November 2021. Future pros, all of them.
I get to go. Excited and thankful.
I hope we win.
Go Blue.
I loved how Red pulled that line back out after the North Dakota game in 2011.
Could happen again.
One area of significance is that NIL totally flips the already-changing field with Major Junior. Leaving aside that powers-that-be are thinking of making Major Junior players eligible for college, it used to be that the cash packages favored Major Junior, since they didn't have the sort of boundaries that NCAA teams did. Now, though, you have some significant programs and fanbases able to throw around real cash in a way that that the CHL just can't. Major Junior teams just don't have the sort of substance that a major college athletic program has, especially now with network revenue.
Add in that big-time college programs increasingly look like legitimate places to develop for future NHL talent and you have a situation where the personnel dynamic in college hockey is changing rapidly. An NHL team can stash a player in college for extra years, count on him to get developed, and he can actually make reasonable money (so, not impatient) while doing so.
Frankly, I think this is *already* a big factor. The big change coming is how it affects recruiting and transfers.
And in that realm it feels like Minnesota and North Dakota are poised to dominate the hockey world. Michigan (and Michigan State and the Boston schools; a program like Maine can also benefit significantly) can be competitive too, but this is one area where having a really good program in another sport drawing NIL money can be a bit of a detriment. NoDak is a premiere sports program in its state; Minnesota is a big deal statewide in a way unlike any other college hockey program, as well.
How imbalanced kind of depends on how some smaller programs that potentially serve as the one major program of a smallish market make the transition. I'm in Duluth, and NIL could potentially be a game-changer here, or it could be a nothingburger. Marquette has that potential for NMU, too. Small tv markets with no other major-level sport--fertile ground for some interesting dynamics.
Are you press level tomorrow?
100% agree.
This is way different than the last two years.
Not nothing. I absolutely do not want to fall behind Denver, and I loathe the other two schools. So one of the other teams winning will be a bitter pill to swallow (BU the least of these).
But... this is an underdog rebuild sort of year, albeit with some excellent players. It's not a generational talent collection or a generational player like the last two.
And:
If you had asked me to choose between a hockey title (or a good basketball season or a basketball title or, well, literally name any other feat in sports that I could care about) and a football title, well...
Let's just say I've gotten choice #1 already. Everything else is gravy.
*I will disclaim both knowledge of and agreement with this post if Michigan loses 3-2 in overtime this weekend.
Mike Sainristil made the key closing argument, didn’t he.
No argument with the premise, but going to gently disagree with the category of a couple of the teams. I don't think one can really call a #1 seed a team that has "no chance," even if both OSU and Purdue had the bad luck to face dominant repeat champions; that OSU team was 30-3, and this Purdue team was an underdog but hardly a walkover.
They're not at all in the same category as the Indiana team that had no business making the final (against, uh, Maryland) or that MSU team that everyone knew would get steamrolled in Detroit.
It's pretty remarkable how many different B1G teams have gone to the finals and lost. For that reason alone I figured Purdue's demise was inevitable.
A fitting end to this era of the B1G in basketball.
Indiana, Illinois, Ohio State, Michigan State, Michigan (twice), Wisconsin, and Purdue all on the wrong side of one shining moment. Every three years a new Big Ten team gets put to the sword.
I don't understand why everything was focused on an eclipse in Ohio. Ohio has been eclipsed by Michigan since 2021.
Probably? Sure. But Howard was also conscious of recruiting and momentum.
Let's face it, people were cranky before he made the Sweet Sixteen in 22. After last year most people didn't want him gone, but a few made noise like they did, and when the blowup with Sanderson happened (which, it must be said, happened before it became clear that the season was a disaster; probably contributed to the collapse, honestly) a lot of people were ready to axe him in no small part because they were frustrated with the win-loss record as much as the contested behavior issues.
We can say, in retrospect, that if he had sat the whole season or most of it, he'd still have the job. But for how long? The team might not have had such a collapse this year, but it probably misses the tournament. That's two in a row. And he still isn't getting great guys into the program. So... where would he be next year? How many recruits and transfers can he get, and can he forge into a team, that are ready to sign up for a coach that would unquestionably be in a win-or-die season that's really more of the same?
Now, maybe he could do something with that. But it's important to understand that his desperation to return is not unfounded. If I were in his position I would feel like I had to coach for my job, and it would be really hard for me to just lay low as the team, inevitably, struggled at times.
He was caught in a bad place. Hindsight may seem like it's 20-20, but sometimes it's 50-50.
It does, in fact, appear to be true. God is good.
Probably in a Tim Cook jersey from 2004; only one from that year that I could find that would fit.
Sort of, sort of not. The NCAA has made a mess of things, and that directly contributes to sustained bad regionals.
I’ve been banging the drum on this long enough: years ago, before the B1G formed for hockey, the WCHA sold out the X for the Final Five regularly. One year they had a regional at the X the week after. Minnesota and North Dakota, the two biggest WCHA draws, both played in the regional.
And the arena was only half full for the regional, despite the games being substantially more important. Because the NCAA has trained its fans that regionals aren’t worthwhile.
In the famous 1998 regional the Yost crowd was heavy for OSU against top seeded Michigan State.