Recent Comments

Yeah, this fall I think I might turn down the volume on Ole Miss games and play a recording of the 30-for-30 theme music just so I can feel like I'm watching it happen live.  Then I'll turn the volume back on but smoothly slip in a "What if I told you..." right before everything the announcers say.  "What if I told you... three yard gain up the middle?"  "What if I told you... first down Rebels?"  

The chicken of my chicken is my friend?

And Dumars' son played with Burke, right? 

I'm sure the Pistons have done their homework on him, and I wouldn't read much into the lack of an interview.

+1.  Thanks.  Will do.

If you can deliver tickets and a Michigan win, I'll kill him if you'd like.

Thanks, Magnus.



I feel like half the scouting reports I read (not just from you) say something along the lines of "the key question is whether he can preserve his speed/quickness when he bulks up." In general, do most of these slighter guys do that? It'd be nice to know whether I should assume he'll preserve his speed (unless something weird happens) or assume he'll lose some of it.

Hoke is right. The ONLY reason for ND to stop that game is to cut down on their expected losses. Compared to teams like Purdue and MSU, we provide a more appealing game for their fans, better TV ratings, a better recruiting atmosphere, better strength if schedule, and on and on. The problem? They probably see us as a 50-50 win for the coming future, while they probably see MSU and Purdue as 80-20 or 75-25. They've apparently decided that those extra 5-6 losses over the next 20 years are too high of a cost to justify.



Lame.

Uh, isn't our WR coach (Hecklinski) also our recruiting coordinator? 

The one site that is relatively low on Marshall, Rivals, has him at 205 lbs.  That probably means that he was a completely different dude when they rated and ranked him.  Assuming that he carries the extra weight well, I could see him moving up when Rivals revises its rankings.  (Then again, he could always move down on the other sites.)

I no longer care how the Fab Five story ends. I just want it to end. Fully embrace them, fully turn them away... I don't care anymore. It just feels strange that we keep punching ourselves in the face with this.

The problem is that Beilein is so good with talent development that after a year, the 20th-30th ranked prospects at Michigan will probably be as NBA ready as the 1st-10th ranked prospects at most other schools.

I am okay with this problem.

http://mgoblog.com/mgoboard/semi-ot-siap-great-article-about-jabrill-pep...

For the full explanation, read the beginning of that thread.

For a summary, just figure that MLaw06 behaves like a 9-year-old.

I think fans often mess up the "Did he have a ___ offer?" thing.

Take Shane Jones, for example.  If Jones had accepted his offer when it was initially made, he obviously would have had a place in the class.  The Michigan coaches therefore thought very highly of him, at least at one point.  When his spot was taken (by Gedeon?), Jones no longer had a spot, and he wasn't considered for one of the "best player available" spots.

So what does this mean with respect to shit-talking with MSU fans?

1. No, Jones didn't "choose MSU over Michigan."  When both schools were options, he hadn't made a chioce.  When he chose MSU, Michigan wasn't available to him.
2. Yes, the Michigan coaches believe that he's a Michigan-caliber prospect.

My sense with Marshall is that he's both a Michigan-caliber prospect and one who might choose MSU over Michigan while both are options.  If that happens, congrats to MSU for winning that battle.

Dude, he's a fucking high school junior.  Maybe "society" is unwilling to go online and anonymously call a 16-year-old kid an asshole when he hasn't done anything wrong.

I would imagine you're right, but it's a little odd that Rivals immediately bumped his interest in Miami to "Medium." They didn't do that when NC State offered and don't typically do that as far as I know.



Does anyone know if Rivals heard something?

I'd imagine Indiana fans aren't thrilled with this.  They're in a brutal division with no rival in sight, yearly games against Rutgers and Maryland, and a long way to travel to see most of their road games.  Also, between IU football's general lack of appeal and distance from the East Coast, their recruiting probably won't benefit much from the new Eastern feel.

The is a lesson in "it sucks to be irrelevant."

This is awesome.  One of my favorite diaries in recent memory.  I can't help but notice that the odds, when added together, are much longer than what you usually see.  Is that just a scaling issue (e.g., maybe Sullivan is actually 5:1, Krislov is actually 10:1, Cantor is actually 15:1, etc.), or do you think it's very likely that the eventual president isn't on this list?

Take care.  Have you had a SWAT team come through your house?

He's been highly rated by the recruiting services since the beginning (early four star). His offer list never matched the services' hype - including neither Mich nor MSU offering - but he committed to Wisconsin when Bielema offered. The post-Bielema Wisky staff apparently cut contact with him, which looks like their way of saying "please look elsewhere."

... and I really hope that you aren't a journalist.

I'd be careful about trusting that guy.  I don't know much, obviously, but people were accusing him of putting out false information before anything even happened tonight.  He could be completely legitimate, but information is messy with situations like this.

I get how your subject line fits with your last two sentences. I don't get how your first sentence fits with the rest of that stuff.

You're missing the point.  The thread title is bad and should be changed.  We just don't need 35 people making that point every time a thread title sucks.  It makes otherwise interesting threads unreadable (which I'm now contributing to in this one).  Ideal process when Guy A creates thread with bad title:

• Guy B suggests in a comment that Guy A changes title.
• Guy A changes title.
• Onward.

Where did you see this?  If you have a link, could you post it?

For what it's worth, I probably wouldn't take what anyone says too seriously when it comes in the heat of the moment like that.

I'm not sure where I am cloud-wise, but I'm sure as shit not productive at work right now.  I feel like all of us should have treated ourselves to yesterday off for emotional preparation and today off for emotional recovery.

Note: Michigan and OSU are football rivals. That rivalry is kind of important to some of us here.



OP - thanks for letting us know (not sarcastic).

SUBS! SO MANY THREADS! LOVE EVERY ONE OF THEM! FUCK!

Do we know anything about decision timelines for those guys?

I agree that it's a good get, but it's not too far outside of what's normal.  We have Colorado, Oregon State, BYU, and Hawaii coming to Ann Arbor in the next few years without having return visits planned.

Fuck

Individually, those are two scary things.  Together, they are two problems solved.

If that's true, then this decision can essentially be evaluated by whether or not they get Shaka Smart.  If they get him, great move.  If they don't, I'd be shocked if they get someone much better than Smith to come to Minnesota right now, especially knowing that Smith's performance at Minnesota could get you fired.

But a 50/50 chance that you'll be so, so damn happy.

Wow, I've been away from the internet today and nervous to check on this game.  Shit, that went about as well as it could have.  GO BLUE TOMORROW!

I was expecting this to be about Jake Ryan and was ready to be super pissed.  As it is, I just find this kind of cute.

This is a great update on Hand. Ace. Would if be possible to look for updates from other teams' sites after he makes those visits to other schools? It could be interesting to compare and see whether and how he mentions Michigan.

People crap on these kinds of posts - and fine, I get it - but I almost always learn something from them and get at least a laugh or two along the way. 

I don't like this logic.  Every fan base has jackasses who do this kind of thing.  That's obvious, but that doesn't mean that every fan base behaves similarly.  I'd be willing to bet that if you compared the typical reaction of Michigan fans to Dawson's decommitment to the typical reaction of MSU fans to Harris's decommitment, you'd see very different behavior.  For example, I just looked at the Dawson decommitment post on MGoBlog.  The overwhelming majority of posts were "good luck to the kid wherever he ends up" and/or "damn, this one hurts."  The few harsh posts were down-voted and criticized sharply.  The RCMB reaction to Harris was completely different.  Looking now, you can see a number of posts that were deleted (but preserved because people responded to them) that wished injury upon Harris.  The majority of posts called him entitled, wished him the worst, attacked his parents, or were otherwise very harsh.

The fact that we have some idiots doesn't mean that we rival their idiocy.

They're identical twin brothers.  Sorry.

That's not even to mention how fucking stupid Crean is for doing it in front of a television camera.

"I am not an Indiana fan"

This will be a fun year for filling out tournament brackets. I think we'll see a lot of Duke and Indiana in people's Final Four predictions, but beyond that there really should be a lot of variation. Even those two feel very beatable.

Come on.  Going forward, we'll play Rutgers more than Notre Dame.  That doesn't mean that Rutgers is a bigger rival than Notre Dame.

Ohio State is clearly our biggest rival.  Michigan State and Notre Dame are the clear #2 and #3.  Then there's a drop to a bunch of schools that hate us or see us as their rivals for some reason without us really reciprocating.

My biggest rooting interest in this year's spring game will be for Bellomy.  Partly, I'd like to know that we have a viable, non-redshirt-burning option if Gardner goes down.  Even more than that, though, I feel for the kid.  There's no way that he's as bad a QB as he was against Nebraska.  That was an awful situation for a freshman to step into, and I'd really like to see him show some things before he gets buried on the bench.

False.  You haven't been listening to MSU fans closely enough to really understand what's going on.  Here's basically what happens:

The recruit shows up in Ann Arbor to see Michigan.  As he's getting ready to leave, Hoke invites him into his office.  As soon as the recruit and his parents step in, Hoke locks the door and eats the key.  He then tells the recruit that he has to commit or else someone will take his spot.  When the commit says no, Hoke says, "MOTHERFUCKER, YOU WILL COMMIT."  Just as the kid starts crying (and bravely calling Coach Dantonio), Hoke grabs a knife and holds it to the mom's neck.  The brilliance here is that the kid's dad is secretly in on it, since the kid would never go to Michigan without his dad pressuring him.  Dad pleads with the recruit to spare his mom's life.  The recruit commits, Hoke opens the door, and on the way out Mattison maniacally yells, "You're gonna be the next Terrell Suggs!"

You aren't actually Rich Rodriguez, are you?

My pretending to be scientific guess: 25% chance with Hand x 15% chance with Peppers = 3.75% chance of both. 

Congrats!  And congrats to Brian & co. for making a very good choice.

This is probably a good time to ask "WTF is your avatar?"  So WTF is your avatar?  Warning: I'm old and out of touch.

Or a beaver that ran really fast into a tree and had its face smashed in.

GET IT DONE, BRANDON.

Didn't he also predict that Tommy Doles would commit this past weekend?



Just reading MGoBlog, it's not hard to make correct predictions a lot of the time.

If this is true, it's just the latest evidence that we (inadvertently) dodged a bullet when we missed out on that guy.

Okay, I just got to 16.87 trillion and I still think this is political.  What should I do now?

I would never listen to Tchaikovsky while having sex with rhinos.  That's disgusting.  I listen to Tchaikovsky when I'm upset about people judging me for having sex with rhinos.  Obviously I listen to Prokofiev during the actual act.

The only thing that really pisses me off is hearing people judge me for having sex with rhinos.

When that happens, I listen to Tchaikovsky.

Indiana has a football team?

15 TDs and 12 INTs.  Guh, Brady sucks.  That guy just doesn't have what it takes to be an elite QB.  Time to move onto the kid.  Henson's gonna be a superstar in the NFL.  We'd might as well cut our losses with this Brady bum and turn the keys over to our future franchise quarterback.

I can't wait to tell my grandkids about how I was there to see Drew Henson quarterback Michigan.  In person.

His improvement in these areas will definitely come as he's given a full offseason, spring, and fall with first team reps and film study.

Working with the first team is great, but how about the fact that he'll actually be practicing as a quarterback? 

I agree with your broader point.  I expect a major step forward.

Outstanding comprehension of the word "ceiling" here.

Sorry, but if anyone deserves an obnoxious, snarky response like this, it's you.

This is true if by "news" you mean a commitment, de-commitment, scheduled visit, etc.  If "news" is defined really broadly, like McDowell's visit reaction, that kind of thing often doesn't make it back here.  Whether it should is another question, since the pay sites typically work to get that information (and a lot of it is silly anyway), but as a point of fact, a lot of stuff like this doesn't actually show up on MGoBlog.

I think I read that Harris really liked hearing his name chanted at Breslin. Couldn't hurt to do it better at Crisler.

So, basically, you agree?

To me, the difference in the outcomes of those games was about timing more than anything else.  If we had played MSU when we played Indiana and Indiana when we played MSU, the Indiana game probably wouldn't have been pretty (and the MSU game would have gone much better).

In the three games immediately before MSU, Michigan played:

1. The most hyped game that had been played in college basketball this year (Indiana).
2. Arguably the best game that had been played in college basketball this year (OSU).
3. An overtime thriller at a brutal place to play (Wisconsin).

Aside from the physical exhaustion, it's really hard to get up for game after game like that.  Honestly, I expected the MSU game to be ugly.  That's as rough a stretch as I can remember and an insane path to a game against the local rival who hates us more than anything and resents that we're good this year.

I agree.  I kind of like the idea of adding UNC, and since the most important thing to me is adding good football programs, I've felt weird about liking that idea.

I think UNC has potential as a football program, and it's one of those programs that probably really would improve if it joined the Big Ten.  There's also a good amount of talent in that part of the country, so it'd be nice to open up those recruiting areas a bit.

This case is a little different from those.  I think those guys were in their 50s when they started college.

Interesting.  I'm curious about the timing if this is true.  I wonder if UNC just got that offer or if they've been sitting on it for awhile.

Agreed, but that coach probably wouldn't say this if Speight has a really weak arm.  Even if this is an exaggeration - and I have to believe it is - it can't be a bad sign.

Yes, but I think there are two types of reasons for this:

1)  ESPN knows that there are a lot of Michigan fans out there, so it won't hurt ratings to have a Michigan QB.

2)  Speight hadn't been scouted by the services much before his Michigan offer and commitment.  The Michigan offer suggests that the college staff that probably knows him best - and could have picked up many other elite QB recruits - thinks really highly of him, so he's probably pretty damn good.  I expect Speight to perform very well at these kinds of all-star games and camps, since his off-the-radar status is probably more due to Michigan finding him early than him not being a high-level prospect.  We are still a year away from signing day, after all.

I was about to say something similar.  I'm not sure that I've ever seen an MGoBlog thread so clearly distinguish the good posters on here (in my view) from the other ones.

Also, there seems to be a pretty strong positive correlation between grammatical skills and non-craziness/assholeness around here.

That sentence is still going, in fact. I can't wait to see how it ends.

I read somewhere that he's not planning to commit today. You never know, but it might be wise to scale back the expectations a bit.

Does anyone know if these guys are coming for a Michigan-only trip (as opposed to seeing a few of the Midwest schools or something)?  Cole is supposedly very high on Notre Dame.

"Ladies and gentlemen, here to announce our new $100 million partnership with Nike is a 16-year-old who plans to enroll in a couple of years. Please don't consult the NCAA rule book or your own common sense right now."

You're right on point.  The RPI is unbelievably simple and stupid.

It often leads to unusual rankings, and I've never seen a good argument for why this kind of ranking is reasonable.  There are a lot of good articles on this, and here's one of them:

http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2012/writers/luke_winn/09/27/schedule-s...

If Hood is a high school junior, he was probably born around 1996.  Elijah Wood probably got famous right around that time.  When that happened, do you think Elijah Hood's parents looked at each other and said, "You've got to be fucking kidding me"?

He said this after tonight's visit? 

Incorrect.  It was non-de-committable.  Marshall couldn't - and didn't - decommit.  Meyer dropped him.

They're tired.  Beilein implied after the OSU game in Ann Arbor that they fought through exhaustion having played two games a week for awhile, and they've had two brutal road games in the week since then.  Are these guys as good as they looked a few weeks ago?  No.  Are they as bad as they looked last night?  No way.

I'm having a little trouble figuring out what's going on without seeing your model or results, but there are some pretty serious potential sources of bias.  For example, programs that recruit the highest rated players probably tend to have better coaches, better facilities, better training staffs, more intimidating home stadium environments, more institutional emphasis on winning football games, etc.  Those things should produce more wins, which would lead to your model overstating the impact of getting good recruits.  Getting more talented recruits helps, of course, but it's hard to estimate that kind of thing too precisely with all of the potential confounding variables.

I don't think that's fair.  Mat has never been a glass half full guy around here, but his arguments are usually reasonable enough, it's healthy to have voices like his in the mix, and I see no reason to believe that he's not a Michigan fan.

This is cool.  Thank you. 

Even if you dig into the question that you aren't trying to answer - whether the Big Ten recruits poorly relative to the other conferences - the answer is a little more complicated than "the Big Ten sucks."  It's really just that "the SEC is crazy."  Below, I listed 247's composite team rankings.  The first number listed under each conference is the ranking of that conference's top ranked school (e.g., OSU at #2), the second number listed is the second-ranked school (e.g., Michigan at #5), and so on.  I tried to do this based on how the conferences will supposedly look in 2014, but I might have messed that up a bit.  Basically, Maryland (#34) and Rutgers (#48) are in the Big Ten, while Pitt, Syracuse, and Louisville are in the ACC.

I looked at whether the SEC's dominance could be attributed to signing larger classes that produce inflated class rankings.  Not really.  The numbers in parentheses reflect where the SEC classes are ranked with respect to average prospect rating.

Basically, either the SEC is getting talent that is much, much better than everyone else or there's some kind of bias where the recruiting sites think too highly of Southern recruits.

Do we know whether they're just visiting us or we're one stop on a bigger tour of schools?

Agreed.

The way I look at recruiting is that it reshapes the probability that a team wins any given game.  We're recruiting at an extremely high level and so is OSU.  In fact, they might be at a slightly higher level going forward.  Maybe that gives them, based on talent alone, a 50-55% chance of winning a neutral site head-to-head game with us.  That's fine.  The talent is similar enough that other factors will generally determine the winner (coaching, execution, talent development, injuries, luck, officiating, weather, etc.). 

These probabilities are getting a little out of hand, though, when you compare Michigan & OSU to the rest of the conference.

I'm interested to see what Kiffin's next job will be. There's no way he'll get an NFL head coaching job after the Oakland job and his subsequent college failures, and I don't think he has the mastermind reputation that would get him an NFL coordinator job. I can't imagine any big time college programs would touch him after this (as HC). That leaves options like coaching low profile college teams, which probably isn't his style, being a coordinator/assistant at a top college, which other coaches might not want to deal with, or being a position coach in the NFL, which he doesn't seem like a good candidate for.

I've lived and worked around a lot of Duke fans, and I find them most of them irritating, but this surprised me.  I expect this kind of thing at MSU, but this isn't really the Duke style of annoying.  Disappointing.

This is 1/2 of what makes this statement by Meyer seem so dick to me.

First, there's the "I'm looking out for you, coach whose recruits I'll gladly poach." 

Then there's the "Hey Minnesota, I think it's time that you start beating out Alabama, LSU, and Florida for some of these elite Southern recruits.  Why can't you get that done?"

When Meyer came, I was part of a small group here that believed he's an excellent coach and a really good guy.  I still believe he's an excellent coach, but I sure am changing my mind on that "really good guy" part.

He's very much on the three/four star border.  It's not like this class is loaded with two-star recruits who give you a lot of natural "sleeper" options.  If there's one guy who I expect to outperform his rankings (as the 25th-30th best safety, in Hill's case), he's my best bet.

Here’s my take on this:

First, I think the questions are fair.  We know that recruiting violations happen, and it seems neither healthy nor necessary to close our eyes whenever something looks fishy.  I also hate the “everyone does it” defense, since 1. we have no idea if that’s true and 2. even if it is true there are vast differences in the types of violations that programs could be committing and the degree to which they would provide illegitimate competitive advantages.

Still, I don’t see a smoking gun here yet.  Based on what you’ve written, Ole Miss now has four top 20 recruiting classes in the past five years.  While clearly the best of the group, this #7 class doesn’t strike me as a too-extreme-to-be-believed outlier.  (Now it’s possible that they’ve been cheating for most of those years.)  Beyond that, there are reasonable explanations for a couple of this year’s out-of-state 5-stars choosing Ole Miss.  Nkemdiche has his brother at Ole Miss and Treadwell has his friend, Anthony Standifer.  The Treadwell tweet was a little fishy, but it was just a few hundred dollars, so it’s obviously not crazy to think that he earned it legitimately.

Basically, I hope that people continue to look at this, and honestly I’d be surprised if Ole Miss is clean, but I need to see more evidence before I’m convinced.

Most people here are being reasonable, and the group that really thinks we've dropped the ball on this one is hilarious.  Based on what?  I like reading Magnus's stuff and everything, but some people here take him way too seriously.  He's a guy who's not trained in doing this, doesn't attend camps, doesn't have a staff of people working on this, hasn't seen any of these kids play live, didn't just go for a private workout with Speight, and might or might not have any idea what he's talking about.  He's a guy with a website who coaches low-level football.

It's a year before Signing Day.  Very few QBs are sitting on a lot of offers, since QB recruiting is just getting started.  Did Morris have any other power conference offers aside from MSU when he committed to us?  Maybe we shouldn't have accepted his commitment because of that?

One Turd's endorsement:

That's a very good interview.  Well worth reading.

Legends patch?

I'm counting about 10, but I agree with your broader point. 

Also interesting: the contributions we got from that class seem essentially uncorrelated with their recruiting hype.  A lot of that is probably the serious flame outs from many of the highest-rated guys.

Just make sure to label it "Derrick Green thread #473." That's all we talk about over there.

I'm not sure if anyone's noticing, but Alabama has recruited really well over the past few years. If they keep this up, they could turn into serious contenders for SEC and even national titles.

Just don't mess with the home football uniforms and the football helmet - and don't do anything outrageously stupid - and it doesn't bother me. I'd rather stick with one damn uniform, but I try to reserve my "HOW COULD YOU, DAVE BRANDON?" reactions for special occasions.

I'm all for the idea being floated as long as they keep MSU with us in the East. I don't want protected rivalries, and Michigan-MSU is probably the conference's second fiercest, second most entertaining rivalry. Maryland and Rutgers will take some getting used to, though.

I'm sure this won't happen, but if I were thinking about MAC recruits who might be worth a last second look - and if it wouldn't completely piss off Shane Morris - I'd take a look at Brogan Roback, the QB from Ohio who is committed to EMU. Our long-term QB depth still has me nervous, and it's be great to have one fewer egg in the Shane Morris basket. Roback doesn't seem like the kind of guy who's likely to win a starting spot from Morris, but it'd be comforting to fill the gap left by 2012 QB recruiting with another guy who'd be available/capable as an insurance policy. Getting some QB depth would probably be as valuable as anything else we could get from that last scholarship.

I'm ignoring any unwritten rules about not doing this kind of thing to the former Michigan guys at EMU. I'm also aware that the coaches, to my knowledge, haven't even hinted at getting another 2013 QB since Morris committed. Just thinking out loud.

It's Dr. Turd Ferguson, thank you very much.

Honest question for Brian and/or others.

Have we hit a point where realistically the KenPom rankings carry more weight with committee members than the RPI rankings?  They aren't required to use the RPI for any reason, are they?  KenPom has always seemed flawed to me but not nearly as flawed and gameable as the RPI.