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Great stuff!

One final fun…

Great stuff!

One final fun fact is that this battle gave us the opening line of the Marines' Hymn: "From the Halls of Montezuma..."

/nods wistfully in USENET

/nods wistfully in USENET

Chuckled at "The Monitor…

Chuckled at "The Monitor Haters" but here's your obligatory reminder that the vessel that fought the USS Monitor was the CSS Virginia, which was constructed on the mostly burned hull of the former USS Merrimack.

/naval history nerdery

Thank you for the otherwise excellent preview, and Go Blue!

 

Harbaugh is known for…

Harbaugh is known for holding grudges until they die of old age, then sending them off to the taxidermist so that he can continue to cherish them in perpetuity. I would imagine that in a situation where he has the opportunity to participate in the public humiliation of a man who had publicly humiliated him by making him take a very public pay cut a few years ago, he did so with an enthusiasm unknown to mankind.

(And that's not a knock on Harbaugh -- I can't honestly say that I wouldn't embrace that opportunity myself.)

As a Michigan fan, I'm…

As a Michigan fan, I'm grateful for this beautiful writing and all the work that went into these previews. Thanks, Brian & Co.

As a Detroit City FC supporter, I appreciate the reminder that AFC Ann Arbor exists. (It's easy to forget things like that when you're busy selling out your industrial wasteland stadium and making the playoffs in your first season in the USL Championship and all.)

It's also "principals" when…

It's also "principals" when you're talking about people, not "principles."

Someday, Brian. we will turn…

Someday, Brian. we will turn you into a Detroit City FC supporter.

No one who gets the raw gutwrenching emotion that soccer can create like you do deserves to be stuck in the bland corporate grayness of AFC Ann Arbor fandom.

My son attends Grosse Pointe…

My son attends Grosse Pointe North, their football team is...not good. They were winless in 2019, getting outscored 407-60 in nine games. (The 2019 yearbook devoted two pages to their good sportsmanship while getting constantly blown out all season long.) No offense to the kids on the team, who work hard and give their best, but a D1 recruit posting highlights against them is like a B1G player showing off his moves against an early-season G5 bodybag opponent. 

I think the NIL change puts…

I think the NIL change puts athletes at the same level as other scholarship students, and is long overdue.

The school itself provides the student with an education (offer not valid in Chapel Hill, NC) and cost-of-attendance assistance in return for their participation in the public exhibition the school puts on. If the student wants to make some money with their talents outside that public exhibition and outside the control of the school, now they'd be welcome to do so.

This is similar to how a scholarship music major wouldn't get paid for performing in a university performance, but could make money in a bar band, offering private lessons, monetizing a Youtube channel where they perform their own music, etc. (Or, I guess, a scholarship dance major getting paid to work evenings in a more exotic locale.)

What I'd really like to see is the NCAA developing something like the systems in pro sports where a designated cut of the revenues from selling jerseys, etc. go into a fund that gets shared among all the players, so that when a QB's jersey gets sold every player on the team gets a small piece of it. Apart from just being fair, that's also a system that would work well for Michigan given our fanbase, brand, Nike relationship, etc.

I'm just here for the DCFC…

I'm just here for the DCFC references in the photo captions. UTFC.

"I got a lot of rage on the…

"I got a lot of rage on the sideline trying to control; now you’re going to put me in a clear box and try to keep that rage"

All I can think of is the scene from the first "Avengers" movie where they've got the clear jail in the helicarrier for the Hulk. Hopefully they're not making the offensive coordinator's box ejectable at Michigan Stadium.

But are champions of it,…

But are champions of it, regardless.

Appreciate the offer, but I…

Appreciate the offer, but I'll be outside Galway.

No cyan circle around DeBord…

No cyan circle around DeBord? I'm disappointed in you.

Higdon and Perry are…

Higdon and Perry are Harbaugh's 5th-year seniors. Gentry and Ulizio redshirted so they're juniors. There were other flips (Wheatley, Jones, Washington) who are no longer with the team. Everyone else from that 2015 class is a Hoke legacy I believe.

Details here: https://mgoblog.com/content/michigan-depth-chart-class-0

One memory of Braylonfest…

One memory of Braylonfest for me was how dark it got in the stadium by the end of the game. They had the "3:30 fall game" temporary lights up that they used to use, but the game went four and a half hours, sunset had been around 6:30 and it was full-on night game by the time OT rolled around.

Would be interested in…

Would be interested in MGoPistons night, especially if it's set up so that I could bring a 14-year-old son whose first basketball player stan was for GRIII.

I don't agree with Brian on…

I don't agree with Brian on much of anything politically and don't live in Ann Arbor. I was able to look at the headline for this post and realize that it was a topic that was Not Sports, not of specific relevance to me and probably contained opinions with which I'd disagree.

I made the decision to read it anyway, because I'm interested in the general topic of municipal planning and development (and frankly enjoy the schadenfreude of watching the progressive Left slap-fights over the inevitable results of giving petty apparatchiks too much power over private property in the name of social engineering.)

However, had I decided to pass this article by it wouldn't have affected my enjoyment of SPORTS CONTENT here in the slightest. There's no reason that couldn't be the same for you. That's my honest feedback in return.

A much larger problem is the…

A much larger problem is the screwed-up way we raise youth players here -- it doesn't help to get great athletes into the sport if we then don't develop them appropriately. Youth soccer has become a big, profit-making business and has gotten so expensive that the "sport of the streets" in the rest of the world has become a sport of the wealthy here in America. As a good New York Times article on the subject said, "Currently, American households with more than $100,000 in annual income provide 35 percent of soccer players, according to the Sports & Fitness Industry Association, compared with 11 percent from households earning $25,000 or less."

If that were true for basketball, the US Men's National Basketball Team would be losing to Trinidad & Tobago, too.

And at the risk of triggering Brian's AFCAA homerism, I'll note that this is one of the things I love about my club, Detroit City FC. They're trying to fight the youth soccer machine by not only running their own no/low-cost youth system in partnership with Detroit PAL but also by renovating Keyworth Stadium in Hamtramck so kids in the community there simply have a place to go play soccer.

I spoke once with a local soccer player and coach who grew up in Romania, was capped for onem of their national youth teams and played lower-league European pro soccer before coming to the U.S. He was passionate about the fact that neither he nor his parents had ever had to pay for him to play soccer, because there was always a free youth program in his local clubs. He told me that if he were named US Soccer King for a Day, he'd issue a decree that you couldn't call your team "FC" or "SC" anything unless it had a free youth program and developmental system -- in other words, unless it were an actual club.

The founding principle of our

The founding principle of our nation is that government derives its power from the consent of the governed. Without meaningful access to information about what our governments are doing, we can't provide informed consent.

As someone who's been both a journalist and a policy think tank staffer, I profoundly disagree with the way you look at FOIA. It shouldn't be an inconvenience for governments in a democracy to tell their citizens what they're doing; it should be a fundamental function. Sunshine disinfects.

Frankly, in the modern era, governments spend way too much time and effort making people go through the FOIA process rather than simply putting the information online. I recently got involved in trying to figure out why my small suburb's pension and retiree health care funds were so badly underfunded, and wanted to look at the city's union contracts to make sure I understood what the contractual limits were on potential solutions. The city administrator told me I needed to file a FOIA request, instead of simply sending me the contracts. What possible reason should there be not to simply put that information online where anybody who wants it -- including city employees covered by the contracts -- can see it?

FOIA allows governments to charge people for the staff time it'll take to collect requested information, so "understaffed" shouldn't be an issue. And when if comes to things like that five-year request you referenced, it's certainly common for government bodies to use that as a tool for not responding to that kind of fishing expedition. (The Platonic ideal of this is the famous $7 million FOIA fee the Michigan State Police tried to charge my friends and fomer colleagues at the Mackinac Center when they attempted to dig into reports of mismanagement of federal Homeland Security grants.)

Disappointing

Especially disappointing on Signing Day Eve.

As with others, I'd happily pay for access to a functional app frontend to MGoBlog that put money in your pocket.

Emphasis on functional.

Analogies

I too am puzzled why they would want to aspire to something other than the top level of soccer in North America.

How is it hard for anybody who's passionate about college sports to understand this? How is it hard for anyone who lived through Dave Brandon to understand this?

I'm a rabid DCFC supporter, in the midst of all of the flags and drums and smoke with my wife and son. We fell in love with the club in 2012 in its first season and never looked back.

We're Michigan football season ticket holders, but probably haven't been to a Lions game in five seasons even though Ford Field is a half-hour closer to where we live. We've got access to the football version of the "top level of soccer in North America" (which I'd heartily disagree with, the Mexican Liga MX is undeniably better than MLS), so why should we waste our time and money on lower-quality Michigan football?

It's because Michigan is ours. The NFL is not.

DCFC is to MLS as Michigan football is to what Dave Brandon thought it should be. Organic versus plastic, fan-centered versus money-centered, ours versus theirs. Our opposition to MLS isn't about whether we can say "fuck" a lot, it's about whether the thing we love stops being run for the people who love it and starts being run for the people who'd just want to profit from it.

DCFC's owners are five regular guys with day jobs who wanted to create a soccer club that they'd feel like supporting. They did, and thousands of others followed. DCFC's crowds are unheard of in amateur soccer in America, and that's a signal that something about the club's culture and what its supporters are doing is resonating in an important way. We think it's worth giving it a chance to grow and see what happens.

(And for the record, I'm a middle-aged gray-haired guy who wears a suit to work every day. I'm as far from a hipster as you can get without unironically listening to REO Speedwagon.)

I think Maryland had a better

I think Maryland had a better chance of this before they joined the B1G. Now, they're Purdue East. If you're good enough to be a quality Big Ten football player, why would you do it at Maryland?

Sure, there's the occasional guy who just wants to play for "his" school. But there's very few kids who grew up dreaming of putting on the red and yellow and black and white and...what is that, some kind of metallic grayish-orange? of Maryland Football. Rather, what that "rich talent pool" is going to get growing up is a half-dozen views a year of the Big House and Horseshoe and Happy Valley and Camp Randall where the Terps are getting steamrollered.

Sure, we could have stood

Sure, we could have stood pat. All of those other conference expansions were driven by ephemeral TV dollars as well and many won't end well. Kudos to the Big 12 (words I never thought I'd write) for ending the insanity and not adding UCF or Cincy or whomever else they were considering recently just to grow for growth's sake.

True, it's just one game against Rutgers and one game against Maryland. But that's two games in a 12-game season where we're remarkably unlikely to have a decent football game to watch. Add in a body bag game or two early in the season and one or two more down-year B1G teams and all of a sudden, half the games on the schedule are dreck.

That's because Rutgers is straight trash, and Maryland hasn't been consistently good since the 1950s. (Notably, they're 2-37-1 all time against Penn State.) Virtually every single B1G school -- including Purdue and Northwestern -- has been higher-quality and more consistent than either of those schools over the past few decades. Hell, even Illinois managed to win the B1G in 2001 and never forget that Ron Zook went to a Rose Bowl.

About a third of the most popular college football teams in the country are Big Ten schools. We were not threatened with being kicked out of the BCS or FBS or whatever if we hadn't grown even bigger, and if we needed to grow for on-field "we need a championship game!" reasons rather than TV dollars then there were other options that have been hashed out elsewhere ad nauseam.

I'm not celebrating, you make

I'm not celebrating, you make the same point I thought was implicit: Meltdown in cable revenues hurts the value of the B1G Network, B1G Network value is the only reason to have Maryland and Rutgers befouling our conference.

I like TV money for football because it means we can do non-revenue sports as well as keep the gameday atmosphere reasonably marketing-free (at least inside the bowl of the stadium), but I dislike the way the B1G decided to sell out everything the fans care about in favor of a revenue model that any reasonably-intelligent observer of media and technology trends could (and did) say was on its last legs.

It's a multi-day story once

It's a multi-day story once people like Kaepernick and Harbaugh get involved thanks to the importance we place on sports in our society, which was clearly Colin's intention.

The issues he's concerned about have lingered for years/decades/centuries. It's not the end of the world if we talk about them for more than one "news cycle" (I'm in media/marketing, hate that term) here and there.

Supply and demand

The corruption issues come because the NCAA's rules basically fix the price of a valuable product that has limited supply and high demand (the labor of high-quality college-eligible football players) at "scholarship, room and board." Markets being what they are, that rarely works.

Allowing schools to effectively compete on price through this kind of system will decrease the need for their boosters to do so behind the scenes. It'll create a more efficient market because everyone will be able to see roughly what their competitors are offering and players can openly share those offers in negotatiations with other schools.

Kids will get paid. Some will be worth it, some won't. But there's so damn much money sloshing around college football that it's good they'll see some of it.

Apropos

Edit: No HTML5 video tag, huh?

The scene in question, even if everybody else beat me to it while I was fighting drupal.
Not Constantinople?

Admittedly, that's nobody's business but the Turks.

Ordinary people didn't

Ordinary people didn't envision Rutgers in the Big Ten. And that was fine.

Disappointed

That he felt the need to lie in his first press conference, when he called Jim Delaney "...a true leader and one of the greatest minds in moving intercollegiate athletics forward in a positive direction."

/s

Oh the other hand, if this is

Oh the other hand, if this is the kind of recruiting that Harbaugh pulls off with just one season of relative success in the program then imagine what the 2018, 2019, etc. defenses will look like.

I fully expect that once we get through some of the lingering echoes of "RICH ROD Y YOU NO RECRUIT OL?" and "Fred Jackson, RB whisperer" and "My name is Inigo Borges, you are my quarterback, prepare to die" and the like, the amplitude of our boom and bust years will smooth out pretty significantly.

Academics

I know his Academic Gameplan was well-respected, any insight on whether some of that will stick around?

I wish Coach Baxter well -- USC is closer to Australia, he's just following his heart.

Yes

Andy Katzenmoyer is the obvious example. Apparently the secret is to find a recruit so dumb that he doesn't realize he's just a freshman.

(More seriously, Malik Jefferson was a very good starter at LB for Texas this season.)

General Studies major,

General Studies major, according to official bio.

Would assume it's Mattison

I would imagine that Gary isn't going to look at Jim Harbaugh and Greg Mattison and think, "Nope, the loss of DJ Durkin from that coaching staff leaves them with not enough coaching talent to help me reach my potential, I shall take my talents elsewhere."

I love Kalis on Harbaugh

"Other than his enthusiasm unknown to mankind?"

Compare and contrast the way these guys talk about their coaches to the way the Buckeyes are talking about their coaching staff.

This would be excellent.

This would be excellent. Rotate it each year between the Van Andel Center and The Palace (or the new Joe Louis Arena if that'll do hoops) so that nobody's got "home court" advantage.

I've always loved the GLI in hockey, this is that idea taken to the next level. Winner gets a block of fudge from Mackinac they get to lick once before putting away for the year and a Shinola watch embedded in a petoskey stone.

April 1993

And a posterboard sign: "YOU HAVE NO TIMEOUTS LEFT"

I seem to remember

That Baxter's a proponent of using your first-team/rotation players on special teams, since they can swing a game so wildly on something like this play or a blocked punt.

Chris Kluwe had a piece in SI recently talking about how one of the biggest determinants for whether or not a NFL special teams unit will suck is whether it's full of backup offensive players who don't know how to pursue and hit anybody.

I approve of it as well

And that's the official judgement of the guy who newgrouped alt.music.ska-core on Usenet, to add an additional layer of mid-90s nerdery.

Love the "no trash talking" Harbaugh rule

That'll save us (or earn us) a critical 15 yards somewhere down the road, probably against a team wearing green & white or scarlet & gray.

Cam Newton

Suggests you "trust, but verify" when it comes to Auburn being the cleanest of recruiters.

Or, for that matter

The "two-part question" that contained no actual questions.

If your RB's regularly

If your RB's regularly running into defenders while still in the backfield, the fault is rarely with them. It's more likely with the blockers and playcalling that allowed those defenders into the backfield in the first place.

Only guys like Denard or Barry Sanders could regularly be expected to make the first guy miss behind the line of scrimmage.

Love it

“Uh…what are you asking?”

I've been a reporter and host a podcast and I fully recognize how much harder it is than most people realize to ask intelligent interview questions, but way too many beat writers in Ann Arbor seem to be especially bad at it in these sorts of situations.

(That being said, I'd usually try to save my actual questions for 1-on-1s to keep other reporters from having the unique information that I wanted for the story I was planning on writing. But still.)

This is the nice thing

It's been "Ugh, if he's starting then we must not have anybody better" for too long, now we're starting to move to "Wow, if he's not starting then it must mean that we've got somebody even better."

I'll repost what I said over

I'll repost what I said over the gameday thread then try to add a bit:

Beyond the play on the field, the stadium experience was night and day.

There wasn't a single advertisement on the video boards that was trying to get us to have our weddings at the Big House or download an app or join the Victors Club or some such. We were asked to go to the field hockey and volleyball games, that's it.

The pregame hype video was spectacular, I need to find it online. Chills.

Sponsors were much harder to find. Pom poms were unbranded. There wasn't even an ABC Sports banner hanging on the wall that I could see.

The band now has a hype video. They played a heck of a lot more between snaps and series. Even the volume on the scoreboard speakers was down pretty significantly -- which was an issue because it was hard (at least where I sit under the press box) to hear the referee's penalty calls.

At halftime, the "This is no longer Dave Brandon's Michigan Experience" vibe lost all pretense at subtlety when the band started spelling out things like "TRADITION" and "YOST." It was the least monetized I've felt at a Michigan game in many years.

Then they started running the ball up the middle out of an I formation and holding the opponent to 1/11 on third downs. It was glorious.  

The big theme of the day was that this is the 150th anniversary of Michigan athletics, with the baseball team being the first sport. Lots of video of athletes in all sorts of sports training -- first time I've ever seen a women's track and field athlete throw a discus in a Big House video. Halftime show of the band was celebrating that, spelling out all sorts of words like COMPETITION and EXCELLENCE and TRADITION and YOST and ending with THOSE WHO STAY. (Plus a cool animated band stick figure thing with soccer and basketball players and the flag corps playing the ball.) Some voiceover bits from various Michigan people, from the drum major to Schlissel to football players and beyond reading Yost's "this Michigan of ours" piece.

Most of the video board interstitials were those short "Who's Got It Better Than Us?" videos they've been running in social media.

They welcomed the freshmen and other new students in the crowd to the Michigan family and had the rest of the crowd give them a round of applause.

Beilein won a NCAA sportsmanship award and got it in the endzone. Place got a bit loud for him, as well as for the WWII veteran who left UM in 1942 to fight in the Pacific they introduced. 

Even the flyover was slightly de-Brandonized -- yeah, there were a pair of jets that went over, T-38 trainers from some Air Force training unit on the East Coast. But the twist was that the two pilots were USAF lieutenant colonels who were both Michigan Engineering graduates. (There was apparently some parachute thing from SOCOM that got cancelled because of weather. I'm slightly concerned that our elite commandos can't parachute through relatively high clouds and hit a 100 yard x 55 yard target.)

In general, a very happy and engaged crowd. Louder than I'd heard it in a while.

The stadium experience

Beyond the play on the field, the stadium experience was night and day. There wasn't a single advertisement on the video boards that was trying to get us to have our weddings at the Big House or download an app or join the Victors Club or some such. We were asked to go to the field hockey and volleyball games, that's it. 

The pregame hype video was spectacular, I need to find it online. Chills.

Sponsors were much harder to find. Pom poms were unbranded. There wasn't even an ABC Sports banner hanging on the wall that I could see.

The band now has a hype video. They played a heck of a lot more between snaps and series. Even the volume on the scoreboard speakers was down pretty significantly -- which was an issue because it was hard (at least where I sit under the press box) to hear the referee's penalty calls.

At halftime, the "This is no longer Dave Brandon's Michigan Experience" vibe lost all pretense at subtlety when the band started spelling out things like "TRADITION" and "YOST."

It was the least monetized I've felt at a Michigan game in many years. Then they started running the ball up the middle out of an I formation and holding the opponent to 1/11 on third downs.

It was glorious.

That was my initial thought,

That was my initial thought, but then I started wondering what it's going to look like once we enter conference play and every P5 conference goes a cumulative .500 against P5 competititon every week...