Michigan's Jamie Phelan finished one tenth of a second behind Oregon's Maggie Schmaedick. If she could have passed her, Michigan would be national champs.
1) Michigan will finish 4th. UCLA will pass us after baseball and Texas A&M will get within 10 points, but no other school can pass Michigan.
2) Florida came close to knocking off Stanford. If their baseball team had finished second in their NCAA regional, that would have been enough.
3) Interesting that they changed the scoring structure so that you can now count indoor and outdoor track as completely separate sports (you used to only be able to apply the higher of the two scores). With new facilities and a new track coach on the way, hopefully Michigan can be more productive in future years.
The last minute loss in the bowl game cost about 30-50 points. The hockey team not making the NCAA tourney cost 25-100 points, depending on how far they would have gotten. So, not enough difference to claim the top spot. Improvements in golf, track and field, and lacrosse (men's and women's versions of each) would probably be the best opportunity to gain some points in future years. With new facilities on the way, perhaps that will happen.
Penn State actually had a pretty good year and should finish about 7th with roughly 984 points. Minnesota, Ohio State, Indiana, and even Michigan State are in line for top 25 finishes. For OSU, this year will be a big dropoff from last year's 4th place finish. Southern and far west schools without doubt outscore Big Ten schools by a wide margin in spring sports.
Illinois wins the tie breaker over Michigan based on a better record against teams finishing in the top 6. If Illinois and Michigan had tied for 6th with MSU 5th, then Michigan would have won the tie breaker since their 3-0 record against State would then have come into play.
Then again, the press release makes a conflicting statement regarding tie-breaking criteria, so either they got that wrong in the press release (no effect on outcome) or they changed the tie- breaker rules from those published last year.
The only way that a tiebreaker comes into play is if Michigan and Illinois match records over the next two games. And the only way a tiebreaker matters is if they are tied for sixth, meaning Sparty takes fifth. So the opponents of interest are Indiana, Ohio State, Minnesota, Nebraska, and MSU.
By my count, Michigan is 5-5 against these teams and Illinois 5-8, so ...
Sadly, Stanford will pass Michigan this weekend in the Director's Cup standings, with an already guaranteed 55 points in the women's water polo tournament.
I think the Capital One Cup formula was intended to overcome the Stanford diversity advantage and showcase the big time powerhouse schools with strong major sports teams. That's why Alabama is tied with juggernaut North Dakota State for fourth place.
I would agree that it would be extremely unlikely that Michigan can hold off the spring onslaught from Stanford. But let us not forget that a school can only count ten men's and ten women's sports towards their totals, so not all of those ranked Stanford teams are even going to register points. There are a few other schools (UCLA, Florida among them) likely to have a strong spring sport showing. So it is indeed a long shot for Michigan to hold onto its current first place standing, but not impossible.
Regardless, it has been a great year for Wolverine athletic teams and a top five finish in the Director's Cup seems all but assured.
Based on the prelims, it looks like a lock to me for the good guys. The most Cal can score is 133 points, assuming they finish at the top of every heat. The fewest points Michigan can score is 69, barring disqualifications. That would make the final Cal 434.5 - Mich 405, but that does not count the 1650 and is absolute worst case in every race. More likely, Michigan stretches its lead and wins by 50+.
Based on the prelims, Cal could make a small move today, although Michigan could slightly stretch its lead with a good showing in tonight's finals. Expect Arizona to shoot up to third and Auburn, Texas, and Florida to fade. If the finals mirror the prelims, standings after tonight would look something like this:
We shouldn't try to outcheat TAMU. Better to let their guy win and blast EA with tweets and e-mails that we refuse to purchase a sports game with a cover that personifies cheating.
Fabulous job by the swimmers. The results would be even more lopsided if not for the diving events (e.g. - Indiana had 8 divers scoring higher than the top Michigan diver in the 3m). This puzzles me. Michigan has a rich diving tradition, an accomplished diving coach - why can't they seem to recruit top divers? That could really help at nationals.
I can probably give him a pass on this one. It is just an old joke, although that is not obvious when the retelling omits the punchline (as heard in the video). With the punchline included, it becomes obvious that this is just a joke and not a true story. Only a moron would think it was supposed to be a true story ... oh, wait, what was the audience?
Barnes Arico seems to be off to an excellent start, I'm impressed.
Since this is the first day of the early signing period for most sports (incuding men's basketball) I am surprised to see so few announcements from Michigan's 20+ varsity teams that could be announcing signings today. Does anyone know if Derrick Walton, Mark Donnal, and Zak Irvin submitted their basketball LOIs today?
You are misinformed although it is true that we never had any direct contact and this may have led to some misunderstanding. Nobody asked me to do this. It was my own idea and I started a post on the board one day asking the community what they thought of it.
It was in response to that post that I was contacted by someone apparently associated with you (I will leave him out of this except to say that he has never been anything but completely supportive). He said that he had been thinking along much the same lines and suggested that he might be able to provide a host server, although my understanding was that it was on University-owned equipment. Anyway, that fell through and I had to go it completely on my own.
I most certainly am not lying about any of this and I trust that you too may have gotten some false impressions from lack of direct communications. In any event, I have stated that my reasons for stopping may have been precipitated by your comments, but that the decision stands on its own merits. I was not intending to start an ugly flame war. Still, I don't want to leave any false statements unchallenged.
P.S. I would suggest that if you feel anything more needs to be discussed, we take it offline.
My goodness ... I went away for a few hours and this thread kind of exploded.
Anyway, Thorin's claims are not correct. My original hope was for this to be part of MGoBlog, but that was not to be. I had some offers of support, but when it was time to launch, everyone bailed out on me and said "maybe next year". Rather than toss aside all of my work, I scrambled to set up my own web site to host the app.
Only after I launched to highly favorable reviews did Thorin offer to host. By that time I had already sweated out all the setup and wanted to closely monitor activity, so I declined. I had never agreed to make it part of MGoVideo.
If your point is that I shouldn't be posting these notifications on the board, well that was my original plan, to just assume that people would figure it out on their own.
However, it soon became obvious that this was not the case. Until the noficiations are posted on the mgoboard, the traffic at the viewer launch site is essentially zero. Once the notications are posted, hundreds of fans visit to use the enhanced viewer. Since I have to do work each week to synch the viewer to the posted UFRs, it is not always immediately available, so I am saving interested parties the trouble of visiting the site only to find that the viewer is not yet ready.
Thorin, you yourself post frequent notices when your videos are available on MGoVideo. Should MGoBlog users just figure that out for themselves by visiting your site?
I have put a significant effort into building and maintaining this utility as a service to the MGoBlue community. If there is a consensus that the posts are more annoying than useful, I will cease updating the utility and posting the notices.
Cbox probably is not sufficiently scaleable to handle the task. It claims to be able to handle "up to hundreds of concurrent visitors". I believe gameday chats tally users in the thousands.
There is something from Wordfaire that might be an alternative, but it is still a beta product and details are sketchy. Might be worth looking into.
I would think that if the Wordpress plugin is a viable option, setting up a subdomain and setting up the chat should be less than a day's work. I'm sure Brian could find some hapless volunteer to do the gruntwork if that is the best solution.
The designations 1-A and 1-AA were confusing as well. In most parallel universes, AA is higher than A. Dare I suggest, 1-A and 1-B? Oh, heaven forbid, Ivy league schools being labeled with a "B". Deal with it.
Three schools passed Michigan on the basis of their baseball team results. Hopefully, our new coach can get us back in the tournament in the future.
Special commendation to Craig Forys. His second place finish in the NCAA Steeplechase single-handedly vaulted UofM T&F from DNF to 33rd place, garnering 39 NACDA points and lifting us from a 13th place finish to the top 10.
Also, not to nitpick, but Sears no longer sponsers the Directors' Cup. It is now the Learfield Sports Directors' Cup.
They count the ten best men's results plus the ten best women's team results. Of course, just like oversigning, having bigger numbers to start with gives you more chances to come up with winners.
The 8 team points collected by Forys were the only points scored by Michigan, and managed to tie the team for 33rd place. The ladies, sadly, registered nary a point. With Craig graduating, I hope there are some Wolverine tracksters ready to take up the torch next year and make a bit more of a showing in the Big Ten and NCAAs.
It was indeed a terrific year and a marked improvement overall from last year.
However, let's not be too disappointed if Michigan actually winds up dropping down a few spots in the final Directors' Cup standings. They are unlikely to catch any of the four schools currently above them (except maybe Penn St.) and California, North Carolina, Virginia, UCLA, Duke, Texas A&M, and a few others all have very strong men's and women's spring sports programs and could possibly pass us in the end.
It was a long time ago, but I was on the field and don't remember it being particularly slippery, although it wasn't in top shape either. I couldn't find any game film, but the half time show is on YouTube:
I hate to step on your childhood memories, but the 1972 Rose Bowl was played on a hot, dry day. The field may have been sun-parched, but there was no mud anywhere.
Your memory of the final field goal being a total bummer is accurate, however.
This brings back fond memories of my days in Ann Arbor, while painfully reminding me that I am getting too damned old!
As a member of the MMB that year, I do have to correct that part of your historical perspective. William D. Revelli retired in the summer of 1971 and this was George Cavender's first football season as Director. Come Rose Bowl time, the band was oddly more in the news than the football team, in part because of controversy over the all-male composition and in part because of an injunction filed by the student council to keep the band off the field at the Rose Bowl. They were demanding that we perform an anti-war themed show of their design. They lost in court. Ah, the seventies.
I didn't mean to suggest that Michigan had recruited badly. It just goes to show that things happen and the best laid plans to have an elite 11 quarterback be a multiyear starter often times go astray.
The historical statistics are a sobering reminder of how difficult it is to project future success. Of the 95 "Elite 11" QBs between 1999 and 2006 (every year since 1999 has had 12 QBs - go figure), only 14 went on to be picked in the first 4 rounds in the NFL draft. More than half (52) never even got a sniff of the pros. 35 wound up transfering.
Of the three Michigan commits, two transfered (Gutierrez, Mallet) and one (Clayton Richard) never got significant playing time.
He seemed like a quality guy, was hyper-energetic, and had a good head for basketball.
The only knock might be an inability to land top recruits. This puzzles me in general with respect to B1G women's basketball. Why are there no Big Ten schools among the top 25 recruiting classes? I would think that with the current strength of men's basketball within the conference, there would be a few prominent programs on the ladies' side.
Yale is no threat to pass Michigan in all-time wins. They used to be number one (counting all divisions) until Michigan passed them in 2001. In the future, they are likely to keep dropping down the list, since they only play a 10 game schedule, do not participate in bowl games, and have averaged less than 6 wins per year over the past 15 years.
In addition to Taybor Pepper, Michigan also has Tyler Tokarsky walking on as a long snapper in 2012 (link). He is from Fenton. All your long snappers belong to us.
Just for the heck of it, I entered a bracket where I assigned a probability to each game based solely on historical records of seed posiitions, then generated a random number (flipped a lopsided virtual coin) to determine each winner. The outcome had Michigan, Ohio State, and Michigan State all in the final four. No way that happens, but weird it came out that way (I swear I didn't cheat).
Not only that, but if they get past Florida, they have to face (#1 undefeated) Baylor in the second round. Even if the game is in Ohio (Bowling Green), there is very little chance the lady Buckeyes will be throwing a sweet sixteen party this year.
Even a #14 seed (Arkansas-LR) gets to play at home against a number 3 seed. Looks like it pays off to host first round games. How about Ann Arbor for 2013?
On the night they won the national championship, I spoke briefly with Rumeal's mother after the game and congratulated her. I have seldom seen a mother beaming with more pride. Makes the whole thing that much more sickening to me.
So Taco Charlton and Khalid Hill did not crack the top 300 but were among the 500 rated players and were rated within their position groups.
Hill (#14 TE) was 2nd among the 11 rated TEs not in the top 300.
Charlton (#35 DE) was 13th among the 18 rated DEs not in the top 300.
For those of us into meaningless extrapolations, that would put Khalid Hill at approximately #336 overall and Taco Charlton at approximately #444 overall. Means nothing; just having fun with numbers.
They might not have gotten much ink on this blog, but Chris Cameron and Kylee Botterman won national all-around championships and Michigan Athlete of the Year awards. I would think that should at least get them on the ballot.
If you are only going back to 2005, then instead of having a larger inaugural class, why not just construct retroactive ballots for each year since then and conduct a separate vote for each year. With one vote per month, we would be caught up by fall.
I would suggest an 85% requirement with a limit of 5 inductees per year across all sports. Anyone who got over 85% but did not finish in the top 5 would be carried over to next year's ballot.
The renovation sounds terrific. It has been decades since I was on campus, but i hope to make it back for homecoming this fall and I look forward to seeing all of the new facilities.
I am curious about a comment made by Dave Bandon in a recent blog entry:
Now, the Michigan Athletics Department has a $122 million budget, 29 sports and some of the best facilities in college sports. And we also have some very uncompetitive and unacceptable facilities as well. We have a great deal more investing to do in several of our programs.
So, given the fabulous state of our athletic facilities, which are still considered unacceptable? Understandably, there are no permanent lacrosse facilities yet, but other than that, what other programs need facilities investment?
Recent Comments
is how much we lost the national championship by:
But also consider this ...
Michigan's Jamie Phelan finished one tenth of a second behind Oregon's Maggie Schmaedick. If she could have passed her, Michigan would be national champs.
1) Michigan will finish 4th. UCLA will pass us after baseball and Texas A&M will get within 10 points, but no other school can pass Michigan.
2) Florida came close to knocking off Stanford. If their baseball team had finished second in their NCAA regional, that would have been enough.
3) Interesting that they changed the scoring structure so that you can now count indoor and outdoor track as completely separate sports (you used to only be able to apply the higher of the two scores). With new facilities and a new track coach on the way, hopefully Michigan can be more productive in future years.
The last minute loss in the bowl game cost about 30-50 points. The hockey team not making the NCAA tourney cost 25-100 points, depending on how far they would have gotten. So, not enough difference to claim the top spot. Improvements in golf, track and field, and lacrosse (men's and women's versions of each) would probably be the best opportunity to gain some points in future years. With new facilities on the way, perhaps that will happen.
Penn State actually had a pretty good year and should finish about 7th with roughly 984 points. Minnesota, Ohio State, Indiana, and even Michigan State are in line for top 25 finishes. For OSU, this year will be a big dropoff from last year's 4th place finish. Southern and far west schools without doubt outscore Big Ten schools by a wide margin in spring sports.
Illinois wins the tie breaker over Michigan based on a better record against teams finishing in the top 6. If Illinois and Michigan had tied for 6th with MSU 5th, then Michigan would have won the tie breaker since their 3-0 record against State would then have come into play.
Then again, the press release makes a conflicting statement regarding tie-breaking criteria, so either they got that wrong in the press release (no effect on outcome) or they changed the tie- breaker rules from those published last year.
It is also worth noting that if Michigan splits the next two games with Nebraska and Illinois sweeps Minnesota, Michigan passes Minnesota!
So it would appear that one more win against Nebraska and they are in, regardless.
The only way that a tiebreaker comes into play is if Michigan and Illinois match records over the next two games. And the only way a tiebreaker matters is if they are tied for sixth, meaning Sparty takes fifth. So the opponents of interest are Indiana, Ohio State, Minnesota, Nebraska, and MSU.
By my count, Michigan is 5-5 against these teams and Illinois 5-8, so ...
tiebreaker -> Wolverines!
Sadly, Stanford will pass Michigan this weekend in the Director's Cup standings, with an already guaranteed 55 points in the women's water polo tournament.
I think the Capital One Cup formula was intended to overcome the Stanford diversity advantage and showcase the big time powerhouse schools with strong major sports teams. That's why Alabama is tied with juggernaut North Dakota State for fourth place.
The Gymnastics results are not yet reflected in the Capital One Cup standings. Add 20 points for the Michigan Men and they are tied for first!
I would agree that it would be extremely unlikely that Michigan can hold off the spring onslaught from Stanford. But let us not forget that a school can only count ten men's and ten women's sports towards their totals, so not all of those ranked Stanford teams are even going to register points. There are a few other schools (UCLA, Florida among them) likely to have a strong spring sport showing. So it is indeed a long shot for Michigan to hold onto its current first place standing, but not impossible.
Regardless, it has been a great year for Wolverine athletic teams and a top five finish in the Director's Cup seems all but assured.
Based on the prelims, it looks like a lock to me for the good guys. The most Cal can score is 133 points, assuming they finish at the top of every heat. The fewest points Michigan can score is 69, barring disqualifications. That would make the final Cal 434.5 - Mich 405, but that does not count the 1650 and is absolute worst case in every race. More likely, Michigan stretches its lead and wins by 50+.
If only I had seen this before doing the math myself. Oh, well.
Based on the prelims, Cal could make a small move today, although Michigan could slightly stretch its lead with a good showing in tonight's finals. Expect Arizona to shoot up to third and Auburn, Texas, and Florida to fade. If the finals mirror the prelims, standings after tonight would look something like this:
We shouldn't try to outcheat TAMU. Better to let their guy win and blast EA with tweets and e-mails that we refuse to purchase a sports game with a cover that personifies cheating.
Fabulous job by the swimmers. The results would be even more lopsided if not for the diving events (e.g. - Indiana had 8 divers scoring higher than the top Michigan diver in the 3m). This puzzles me. Michigan has a rich diving tradition, an accomplished diving coach - why can't they seem to recruit top divers? That could really help at nationals.
I can probably give him a pass on this one. It is just an old joke, although that is not obvious when the retelling omits the punchline (as heard in the video). With the punchline included, it becomes obvious that this is just a joke and not a true story. Only a moron would think it was supposed to be a true story ... oh, wait, what was the audience?
Barnes Arico seems to be off to an excellent start, I'm impressed.
Since this is the first day of the early signing period for most sports (incuding men's basketball) I am surprised to see so few announcements from Michigan's 20+ varsity teams that could be announcing signings today. Does anyone know if Derrick Walton, Mark Donnal, and Zak Irvin submitted their basketball LOIs today?
Send me an e-mail if you actually want answers to those or any other questions.
You are misinformed although it is true that we never had any direct contact and this may have led to some misunderstanding. Nobody asked me to do this. It was my own idea and I started a post on the board one day asking the community what they thought of it.
It was in response to that post that I was contacted by someone apparently associated with you (I will leave him out of this except to say that he has never been anything but completely supportive). He said that he had been thinking along much the same lines and suggested that he might be able to provide a host server, although my understanding was that it was on University-owned equipment. Anyway, that fell through and I had to go it completely on my own.
I most certainly am not lying about any of this and I trust that you too may have gotten some false impressions from lack of direct communications. In any event, I have stated that my reasons for stopping may have been precipitated by your comments, but that the decision stands on its own merits. I was not intending to start an ugly flame war. Still, I don't want to leave any false statements unchallenged.
P.S. I would suggest that if you feel anything more needs to be discussed, we take it offline.
My goodness ... I went away for a few hours and this thread kind of exploded.
Anyway, Thorin's claims are not correct. My original hope was for this to be part of MGoBlog, but that was not to be. I had some offers of support, but when it was time to launch, everyone bailed out on me and said "maybe next year". Rather than toss aside all of my work, I scrambled to set up my own web site to host the app.
Only after I launched to highly favorable reviews did Thorin offer to host. By that time I had already sweated out all the setup and wanted to closely monitor activity, so I declined. I had never agreed to make it part of MGoVideo.
If your point is that I shouldn't be posting these notifications on the board, well that was my original plan, to just assume that people would figure it out on their own.
However, it soon became obvious that this was not the case. Until the noficiations are posted on the mgoboard, the traffic at the viewer launch site is essentially zero. Once the notications are posted, hundreds of fans visit to use the enhanced viewer. Since I have to do work each week to synch the viewer to the posted UFRs, it is not always immediately available, so I am saving interested parties the trouble of visiting the site only to find that the viewer is not yet ready.
Thorin, you yourself post frequent notices when your videos are available on MGoVideo. Should MGoBlog users just figure that out for themselves by visiting your site?
I have put a significant effort into building and maintaining this utility as a service to the MGoBlue community. If there is a consensus that the posts are more annoying than useful, I will cease updating the utility and posting the notices.
Cbox probably is not sufficiently scaleable to handle the task. It claims to be able to handle "up to hundreds of concurrent visitors". I believe gameday chats tally users in the thousands.
There is something from Wordfaire that might be an alternative, but it is still a beta product and details are sketchy. Might be worth looking into.
I would think that if the Wordpress plugin is a viable option, setting up a subdomain and setting up the chat should be less than a day's work. I'm sure Brian could find some hapless volunteer to do the gruntwork if that is the best solution.
Anzalone on why he chose Notre Dame:
"Academics is what tipped the iceberg."
Apparently, he is planning on majoring in mixed metaphors. All kidding aside, he seems like a nice kid, good luck to him.
The designations 1-A and 1-AA were confusing as well. In most parallel universes, AA is higher than A. Dare I suggest, 1-A and 1-B? Oh, heaven forbid, Ivy league schools being labeled with a "B". Deal with it.
Three schools passed Michigan on the basis of their baseball team results. Hopefully, our new coach can get us back in the tournament in the future.
Special commendation to Craig Forys. His second place finish in the NCAA Steeplechase single-handedly vaulted UofM T&F from DNF to 33rd place, garnering 39 NACDA points and lifting us from a 13th place finish to the top 10.
Also, not to nitpick, but Sears no longer sponsers the Directors' Cup. It is now the Learfield Sports Directors' Cup.
UCLA has the most NCAA championships (108), but more than half of those are in tennis, volleyball, and water polo, so ... yeah, California.
Michigan comes closest to dominating in Ice Hockey, with more championships (9) than anyone else. A cold weather sport, as you may know.
They count the ten best men's results plus the ten best women's team results. Of course, just like oversigning, having bigger numbers to start with gives you more chances to come up with winners.
The answer to your question ...
Who is buried in Grant's Tomb?
A: Julia Dent
What, you say? This is true. Julia Dent was Grant's wife and is buried in his tomb. Win a bet or two with this answer.
Outstanding performance by Forys!
The 8 team points collected by Forys were the only points scored by Michigan, and managed to tie the team for 33rd place. The ladies, sadly, registered nary a point. With Craig graduating, I hope there are some Wolverine tracksters ready to take up the torch next year and make a bit more of a showing in the Big Ten and NCAAs.
It was indeed a terrific year and a marked improvement overall from last year.
However, let's not be too disappointed if Michigan actually winds up dropping down a few spots in the final Directors' Cup standings. They are unlikely to catch any of the four schools currently above them (except maybe Penn St.) and California, North Carolina, Virginia, UCLA, Duke, Texas A&M, and a few others all have very strong men's and women's spring sports programs and could possibly pass us in the end.
It was a long time ago, but I was on the field and don't remember it being particularly slippery, although it wasn't in top shape either. I couldn't find any game film, but the half time show is on YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=huv06-KwQzs
When will we ever learn?
I hate to step on your childhood memories, but the 1972 Rose Bowl was played on a hot, dry day. The field may have been sun-parched, but there was no mud anywhere.
Your memory of the final field goal being a total bummer is accurate, however.
This brings back fond memories of my days in Ann Arbor, while painfully reminding me that I am getting too damned old!
As a member of the MMB that year, I do have to correct that part of your historical perspective. William D. Revelli retired in the summer of 1971 and this was George Cavender's first football season as Director. Come Rose Bowl time, the band was oddly more in the news than the football team, in part because of controversy over the all-male composition and in part because of an injunction filed by the student council to keep the band off the field at the Rose Bowl. They were demanding that we perform an anti-war themed show of their design. They lost in court. Ah, the seventies.
I didn't mean to suggest that Michigan had recruited badly. It just goes to show that things happen and the best laid plans to have an elite 11 quarterback be a multiyear starter often times go astray.
The historical statistics are a sobering reminder of how difficult it is to project future success. Of the 95 "Elite 11" QBs between 1999 and 2006 (every year since 1999 has had 12 QBs - go figure), only 14 went on to be picked in the first 4 rounds in the NFL draft. More than half (52) never even got a sniff of the pros. 35 wound up transfering.
Of the three Michigan commits, two transfered (Gutierrez, Mallet) and one (Clayton Richard) never got significant playing time.
He seemed like a quality guy, was hyper-energetic, and had a good head for basketball.
The only knock might be an inability to land top recruits. This puzzles me in general with respect to B1G women's basketball. Why are there no Big Ten schools among the top 25 recruiting classes? I would think that with the current strength of men's basketball within the conference, there would be a few prominent programs on the ladies' side.
Yale is no threat to pass Michigan in all-time wins. They used to be number one (counting all divisions) until Michigan passed them in 2001. In the future, they are likely to keep dropping down the list, since they only play a 10 game schedule, do not participate in bowl games, and have averaged less than 6 wins per year over the past 15 years.
Hopefully Borseth gave them a rousing speech at halftime to put an end to some horrendously ill-advised pass attempts.
No local cable coverage for me, but it is available via ESPN/Xbox Live, for those with that option.
In addition to Taybor Pepper, Michigan also has Tyler Tokarsky walking on as a long snapper in 2012 (link). He is from Fenton. All your long snappers belong to us.
Just for the heck of it, I entered a bracket where I assigned a probability to each game based solely on historical records of seed posiitions, then generated a random number (flipped a lopsided virtual coin) to determine each winner. The outcome had Michigan, Ohio State, and Michigan State all in the final four. No way that happens, but weird it came out that way (I swear I didn't cheat).
Not only that, but if they get past Florida, they have to face (#1 undefeated) Baylor in the second round. Even if the game is in Ohio (Bowling Green), there is very little chance the lady Buckeyes will be throwing a sweet sixteen party this year.
Even a #14 seed (Arkansas-LR) gets to play at home against a number 3 seed. Looks like it pays off to host first round games. How about Ann Arbor for 2013?
On the night they won the national championship, I spoke briefly with Rumeal's mother after the game and congratulated her. I have seldom seen a mother beaming with more pride. Makes the whole thing that much more sickening to me.
So Taco Charlton and Khalid Hill did not crack the top 300 but were among the 500 rated players and were rated within their position groups.
Hill (#14 TE) was 2nd among the 11 rated TEs not in the top 300.
Charlton (#35 DE) was 13th among the 18 rated DEs not in the top 300.
For those of us into meaningless extrapolations, that would put Khalid Hill at approximately #336 overall and Taco Charlton at approximately #444 overall. Means nothing; just having fun with numbers.
There is a live video feed for anyone who wants to watch the action:
http://www.mhsaa.tv/events/31379
They might not have gotten much ink on this blog, but Chris Cameron and Kylee Botterman won national all-around championships and Michigan Athlete of the Year awards. I would think that should at least get them on the ballot.
If you are only going back to 2005, then instead of having a larger inaugural class, why not just construct retroactive ballots for each year since then and conduct a separate vote for each year. With one vote per month, we would be caught up by fall.
I would suggest an 85% requirement with a limit of 5 inductees per year across all sports. Anyone who got over 85% but did not finish in the top 5 would be carried over to next year's ballot.
The renovation sounds terrific. It has been decades since I was on campus, but i hope to make it back for homecoming this fall and I look forward to seeing all of the new facilities.
I am curious about a comment made by Dave Bandon in a recent blog entry:
So, given the fabulous state of our athletic facilities, which are still considered unacceptable? Understandably, there are no permanent lacrosse facilities yet, but other than that, what other programs need facilities investment?