Portillo is a weird case. He had great stretches at Michigan but struggled a bit in his last season, mostly due to a struggle adjusting to where the puck was when it left his field of vision, particularly to the side or behind the net. This was visible for most of the season, distinct to me after the major sickness issue in the fall and never really resolving, and it was ruthlessly exploited by Quinnipiac in the Frozen Four loss.
But if that one particular issue is something that can be solved, he had the tools to be a terrific goaltender. He’s huge and has a disciplined butterfly style and his positioning was great when he had a good idea of where the puck was.
So if he can just develop techniques to deal with that particular issue, he has a high ceiling.
Mocks all over the place have Johnson and Graham in the top ten (or, at worst, just outside of it for Graham--hilariously, the mock I read that placed him there dinged him for "lack of production," which is a nice way of saying that they haven't actually watched Michigan's defense play much without saying it directly) with Loveland and Grant both featuring prominently.
We're going to be talking about these guys for generations, and amazed that they were on the same team together. Graham might be the best DT to ever play at Michigan, and Johnson... isn't, but he's getting slated for the top five on the regular, and that's really impressive.
I've increasingly found this line of questioning tiring. I mean, I understand why people think about it, but things are more complicated than that.
For starters, a player usually doesn't learn their full height until well after they've started down the path toward being an elite player. There are stories of a few late bloomers, of course, but a guy like Simpson almost certainly had already begun building the tools and skills to be an excellent basketball player before he found out how tall he would get.
Second, as others above me say, the skills are different. There is more to being good at a sport than size and generic athleticism.
Third, while "nurture" can make one a good player in a lot of sports with enough time, the best of the best are generally a combination of hard work, lifelong quality development, and 99.99th percentile physical tools.
There are so many players that attempt to play sports and spend a lot of time at them that just don't make it that far. A tiny percentage is ever good enough. Yet a much larger number dedicate their lives to it; a rotation guy on the local D-2 team I watch, UMD, is a guy that spends hours a day in a gym, works out in the offseason, labors relentlessly to develop their skills and add new ones... and because of accidents of genetics and development, will never sniff a D-1 scholarship much less a professional contract. Guys like this are five inches too short, or have just the wrong level of peripheral awareness, or have a hand/arm structure that means they can never quite shoot consistently enough, or whatever.
Elite sports are so elite that they get the best combinations of physical giftedness and preparation. In the best cases you're looking at, not really exaggerating, 1-in-a-billion combinations of lifelong training, personal character, mental aptitude, and physical genetics. The guys who play at the highest levels are prepared for it and born to do it.
It was a common conversational trope that Lebron James would make a great football tight end. But he probably wouldn't, honestly. Maybe he'd be ok, but he'd also have a lot of weaknesses. And the reality is that he was born to play basketball. Barry Sanders was born to play football. Leo Messi was born to play soccer. Get those guys in a different sport and they're not elite; they're athletic and ok. Maybe minor league level, middling college, whatever. Michael Jordan was a minor league baseball player at best, but the best basketball player in the world.
Z is good at what he does. He's a basketball player.
On the one hand, I love Z/X. Great player for us, great player, and the way he has developed his hook and now this is just spectacular and fun. And, it's a great article in general, a deep dive into an emerging technique with good detail, quotes, and analysis.
On the other hand, the article says that Simpson is 27 years old.
I haven't been to a huge number of parks, but I've been to a few and to be honest the high ranking you have for Dodger is a bit mystifying to me. Ah well, different strokes for different folks.
Haven't been to Skydome in decades. The renovations look modestly encouraging, but there's only so much you can do with that shell.
I mean, yeah. One of the three best college football defenses in this century. Two of the top ten picks were receivers that Michigan barely noticed because Will Johnson was covering them. They were so good that once Michigan got a lead at Penn State Sherrone Moore tossed the passing portion of the playbook in the trash. They were so good that Big Ten quarterbacks spent entire games scrambling in panic.
The players were/are great. The scheme was/hopefully is great. The defensive line is the stuff that dreams are made of.
Uh, can you back that up? I've watched his routes quite a bit and I've almost always seen them be terrific. He has better precision and a better repertoire than, for example, Roman Wilson, though Roman Wilson obviously has better speed.
CJ could have gotten much higher stats on a team less balanced and focused than Michigan. But he won a title here and I think he's going to stick in the NFL and do well, with better-than-I-thought speed, great routes, and a willingness to work hard and do well at literally everything he is asked to do.
Sorry, wasn't suggesting that nobody was good before 1997 (I'm a Des guy! AC! Harmon! Etc!) and I don't think I really implied it. The program has been around for a long time. You'll note I did reference "Heisman winners and candidates" which necessarily has to include guys before Woodson. And when you're compiling a top 5 list, I'm not going to begin to get in to how much history we have to delve into. We're including OL? How do I compare Dan Dierdorf to Greg Skrepanek to Jake Long? Where does Rick Leach fit into this? And that's all after the Mad Magicians era.
Woodson was an example because, for basically everyone here, we have experience with at most two national titles... but in 1997 there is one top-level player, and on this team there is a handful and it's hard to pick. AND Aidan is hugely important. It's the contrast, and the challenge of elevating one 2023 guy over others.
Third round is really good for him. I'm hopeful that he'll get just a bit of that explosiveness back (he kinda already was late in the year, and I know for sure because I've seen him score that TD against Bama hundreds of times).
Pretty stacked list. One of the hardest parts of that kind of list is, how do you evaluate this team? It’s easy to ID the guy from 1997; it was Charles Woodson. We’ve had Heisman winners and candidates. Guys like Aidan, a dominant player who produced one of the singular performances ever against OSU and was the key player in the renaissance of the program after 2020.
But how do you choose between the guys on this team? JJ probably the best QB in program history. Blake, a Heisman candidate who got hurt, came back, and made the clutchest runs in program history. And we’ve got Will Johnson and Mason Graham still on the roster; Johnson was tasked with manning up against two guys that were just picked in the top ten last year. And Mason could be the most physically dominant defensive tackle in program history.
And then there’s Mike.
It’s an embarrassment of riches. I honestly don’t know how to choose between all of them. What a great team.
I remember well when word leaked out that he was changing positions.
I speculated that it was a good-faith effort to contribute to the team, but that he was obviously against his ceiling in receiver snaps and that he would probably transfer.
It’s not the wrongest I’ve been about Michigan football in recent years, but I was really wrong. And what a joy to see him prove what he is, over and over and over again, in the last two years. What a player. What a legend.
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.
Recent Comments
That back six, man.
It’s pretty remarkable that Michigan has three team captains in the NHL, nearly 10% of the League.
Portillo is a weird case. He had great stretches at Michigan but struggled a bit in his last season, mostly due to a struggle adjusting to where the puck was when it left his field of vision, particularly to the side or behind the net. This was visible for most of the season, distinct to me after the major sickness issue in the fall and never really resolving, and it was ruthlessly exploited by Quinnipiac in the Frozen Four loss.
But if that one particular issue is something that can be solved, he had the tools to be a terrific goaltender. He’s huge and has a disciplined butterfly style and his positioning was great when he had a good idea of where the puck was.
So if he can just develop techniques to deal with that particular issue, he has a high ceiling.
Maybe that’s what’s happening here.
Mocks all over the place have Johnson and Graham in the top ten (or, at worst, just outside of it for Graham--hilariously, the mock I read that placed him there dinged him for "lack of production," which is a nice way of saying that they haven't actually watched Michigan's defense play much without saying it directly) with Loveland and Grant both featuring prominently.
We're going to be talking about these guys for generations, and amazed that they were on the same team together. Graham might be the best DT to ever play at Michigan, and Johnson... isn't, but he's getting slated for the top five on the regular, and that's really impressive.
I've increasingly found this line of questioning tiring. I mean, I understand why people think about it, but things are more complicated than that.
For starters, a player usually doesn't learn their full height until well after they've started down the path toward being an elite player. There are stories of a few late bloomers, of course, but a guy like Simpson almost certainly had already begun building the tools and skills to be an excellent basketball player before he found out how tall he would get.
Second, as others above me say, the skills are different. There is more to being good at a sport than size and generic athleticism.
Third, while "nurture" can make one a good player in a lot of sports with enough time, the best of the best are generally a combination of hard work, lifelong quality development, and 99.99th percentile physical tools.
There are so many players that attempt to play sports and spend a lot of time at them that just don't make it that far. A tiny percentage is ever good enough. Yet a much larger number dedicate their lives to it; a rotation guy on the local D-2 team I watch, UMD, is a guy that spends hours a day in a gym, works out in the offseason, labors relentlessly to develop their skills and add new ones... and because of accidents of genetics and development, will never sniff a D-1 scholarship much less a professional contract. Guys like this are five inches too short, or have just the wrong level of peripheral awareness, or have a hand/arm structure that means they can never quite shoot consistently enough, or whatever.
Elite sports are so elite that they get the best combinations of physical giftedness and preparation. In the best cases you're looking at, not really exaggerating, 1-in-a-billion combinations of lifelong training, personal character, mental aptitude, and physical genetics. The guys who play at the highest levels are prepared for it and born to do it.
It was a common conversational trope that Lebron James would make a great football tight end. But he probably wouldn't, honestly. Maybe he'd be ok, but he'd also have a lot of weaknesses. And the reality is that he was born to play basketball. Barry Sanders was born to play football. Leo Messi was born to play soccer. Get those guys in a different sport and they're not elite; they're athletic and ok. Maybe minor league level, middling college, whatever. Michael Jordan was a minor league baseball player at best, but the best basketball player in the world.
Z is good at what he does. He's a basketball player.
I'm very mixed on this article.
On the one hand, I love Z/X. Great player for us, great player, and the way he has developed his hook and now this is just spectacular and fun. And, it's a great article in general, a deep dive into an emerging technique with good detail, quotes, and analysis.
On the other hand, the article says that Simpson is 27 years old.
I thought I felt old before I read that.
Fire Warde
or something
Yeah, the Unimog is my no-brainer response.
It's a Unimog and it's not close.
I haven't been to a huge number of parks, but I've been to a few and to be honest the high ranking you have for Dodger is a bit mystifying to me. Ah well, different strokes for different folks.
Haven't been to Skydome in decades. The renovations look modestly encouraging, but there's only so much you can do with that shell.
I mean, yeah. One of the three best college football defenses in this century. Two of the top ten picks were receivers that Michigan barely noticed because Will Johnson was covering them. They were so good that once Michigan got a lead at Penn State Sherrone Moore tossed the passing portion of the playbook in the trash. They were so good that Big Ten quarterbacks spent entire games scrambling in panic.
The players were/are great. The scheme was/hopefully is great. The defensive line is the stuff that dreams are made of.
This team has been so, so much fun.
Uh, can you back that up? I've watched his routes quite a bit and I've almost always seen them be terrific. He has better precision and a better repertoire than, for example, Roman Wilson, though Roman Wilson obviously has better speed.
CJ could have gotten much higher stats on a team less balanced and focused than Michigan. But he won a title here and I think he's going to stick in the NFL and do well, with better-than-I-thought speed, great routes, and a willingness to work hard and do well at literally everything he is asked to do.
Congrats and good luck, Jaylen.
Congrats, Ladarius. Go make the team and make a career.
Go get em, Mike.
Sorry, wasn't suggesting that nobody was good before 1997 (I'm a Des guy! AC! Harmon! Etc!) and I don't think I really implied it. The program has been around for a long time. You'll note I did reference "Heisman winners and candidates" which necessarily has to include guys before Woodson. And when you're compiling a top 5 list, I'm not going to begin to get in to how much history we have to delve into. We're including OL? How do I compare Dan Dierdorf to Greg Skrepanek to Jake Long? Where does Rick Leach fit into this? And that's all after the Mad Magicians era.
Woodson was an example because, for basically everyone here, we have experience with at most two national titles... but in 1997 there is one top-level player, and on this team there is a handful and it's hard to pick. AND Aidan is hugely important. It's the contrast, and the challenge of elevating one 2023 guy over others.
Let's go, Zak.
Go get em, Roman.
Third round is really good for him. I'm hopeful that he'll get just a bit of that explosiveness back (he kinda already was late in the year, and I know for sure because I've seen him score that TD against Bama hundreds of times).
What a wonderful player. Go be great, Blake.
Go Colson. Go Blue.
Awesome. Go be great.
Pretty stacked list. One of the hardest parts of that kind of list is, how do you evaluate this team? It’s easy to ID the guy from 1997; it was Charles Woodson. We’ve had Heisman winners and candidates. Guys like Aidan, a dominant player who produced one of the singular performances ever against OSU and was the key player in the renaissance of the program after 2020.
But how do you choose between the guys on this team? JJ probably the best QB in program history. Blake, a Heisman candidate who got hurt, came back, and made the clutchest runs in program history. And we’ve got Will Johnson and Mason Graham still on the roster; Johnson was tasked with manning up against two guys that were just picked in the top ten last year. And Mason could be the most physically dominant defensive tackle in program history.
And then there’s Mike.
It’s an embarrassment of riches. I honestly don’t know how to choose between all of them. What a great team.
I remember well when word leaked out that he was changing positions.
I speculated that it was a good-faith effort to contribute to the team, but that he was obviously against his ceiling in receiver snaps and that he would probably transfer.
It’s not the wrongest I’ve been about Michigan football in recent years, but I was really wrong. And what a joy to see him prove what he is, over and over and over again, in the last two years. What a player. What a legend.
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.