charlie strong

He's all happy he's got his blackshirts back. [Patrick Barron]

With Michigan's non-conference schedule behind them I thought we'd look ahead to their next Big Ten opponent, and their interesting defensive system. Nebraska's new defensive coordinator Tony White runs a Rocky Long 3-3-5. We've come across this defense before—even installed a version of it 14 years ago. A different branch of it is the basis of the TCU and Ohio State defenses that felt frustrating to play against despite Michigan putting up loads of points in those games.

The Nebraska edition—the 3-3-5 stack—is about as pure of a 3-3-5 as you're going to find in today's modern, Everybody's Multiple age. And it's hard to argue with White's results with it thus far. Bill Connelly has them 28th in defensive SP+ this year, up from 61st in 2022. They're already up to 14 sacks after finishing with 21 and 20 the last two seasons, and are holding opponents to just 5.02 YPA (sacks included) passing and 3.32 YPC (sacks removed) on the ground. In their four games, the defense should have led to a victory at Minnesota, kept them in the Colorado game, and defeated a pair of G5 teams despite offensive struggles.

Where's this coming from? Everywhere.

[AFTER THE JUMP: Stack is back]

Michigan after Uche is not done with the Uche position [Bryan Fuller]

Michigan added a couple of defensive assistants last week to replace rising stars Chris Partridge and Anthony Campanile. Both losses grate for different reasons—Partridge was due to move up but chose easily the least respectable program in the Power 5, Campanile took a lateral move into the NFL after Michigan fought off other suitors, possibly botching their own chances to retain him in the process. On the recruiting front, neither is replaceable, especially Partridge, who was the first assistant at Michigan since Cam Cameron to have sustained success recruiting the Deep South.

Some of that ground will be made up for with Brian Jean-Mary, a scion of Apopka who's been recruiting the Confederacy since the first time I swiped my M-Card at the Union—for example I noted while doing his hello post that 9 of Louisville's top 10 recruits in 2013 were Floridians. I suspect, however, that there was another goal in mind with Harbaugh's recent hires. I can't say Harbaugh hired Bob Shoop and Brian Jean-Mary because those were the two most experienced former defensive coordinators on the market in the kind of defense Michigan was running a lot last year. But if the goal was to find guys who know more about zone blitzing than anybody not in a job, Shoop and Jean-Mary were #1 and #2. And given the types of players they've been recruiting, and the types of weaknesses on the depth chart, I think it's fair bet that Harbaugh and Don Brown are at least a little zone blitz curious.

As are we.

The Path of Shoop/The Don Brown Connection

Though best known as James Franklin's DC at Vanderbilt and Penn State, most of Shoop's coaching career has been either as a secondary coach or defensive coordinator in the same New England coaching circle as Don Brown. The 53-year-old Northeasterner played for Yale in the late 1980s, was the head coach of Columbia for three years, and spent a year coaching defensive backs under Don Brown at UMass in 2006.

From there Shoop moved on to the defensive coordinator job at William & Mary, where he won the FCS version of the Broyles Award, whence Franklin hired him as the new Vanderbilt DC and safeties coach. In 2016 Bob surprisingly left Penn State to join Butch Jones at Tennessee, which means yes, Shoop had Brady Hoke as his defensive line coach and was then Hoke's defensive coordinator for half a season after Jones was fired. Shoop was also key in recruiting Joe Moorhead to join Penn State's staff in 2016; Bob was most recently Moorhead's defensive coordinator at Mississippi State. I posted the path in full on the message board this week.

Shoop left Penn State after two seasons, and not on good terms—the university sued him for for just under $1 million for breach of contract for departing for Tennessee in January 2016. Shoop was countersuing under the claim that Franklin had already all but fired him at that point (their linebackers coach and current PSU DC Brent Pry had already been elevated to "co-coordinator"). The countersuit also claims Shoop was subjected to a "hostile, negative work environment" at Penn State. The suits were ultimately settled in February 2018.

Shoop was also the guy who got Gattis on James Franklin's staff. Bob's younger brother John met Gattis when the latter was finishing his pro career with the Bears, shortly before the former took the offensive coordinator job at North Carolina. John Shoop gave Gattis his introduction to coaching offense at UNC, then lobbied his brother to snag the up-and-coming assistant when Franklin had an opening for receivers coach at Vanderbilt.

[After THE JUMP: Examining the defenses Shoop and Jean-Mary came from]

IMPORTANT. McGary sings Beiber, endorses Teen Wolf:

IMPORTANT AS WELL. You kind of felt this was on the table when the Big Ten Network put up a survey that asked you whether you knew which division your team was in and you instinctively knew that even if you could figure it out by remembering that Michigan is not in the one mentioned by their fight song, you should put down "no." And then you thought about it and knew everyone else would do the same thing too. So yeah this happened at some conference that is apparently going on today:

Delany says names of Legends and Leaders TBD.

I mean who could question a decision to expand coming from the people who gave us Legends and Leaders? Speaking of:

So I went to a Maryland basketball game last night. They played a MEAC team Kenpom ranked 345th, and played like it. I have seen more people at a basketball game.

rhhsr[1]

I am pretty sure I have seen more people at a softball game.

The arena itself is cool, and amongst the few people around me were some old guys who had clearly been getting seats adjacent to each other since the dawn of time. At one point the cheerleaders held up big cardboard cutout credit cards and asked people to wave theirs around for some sort of prize that was probably FREEEE PIZZAAAA, and I marveled at… that.

I came away with an excellent picture of why Maryland's in such dire financial straights and with an unformed joke about how Northwestern should start calling themselves WASHINGTON'S BIG TEN TEAM™ because the position is most certainly open.

Meanwhile, Maryland forms a commission to consider re-adding some of the seven sports they recently dropped.

Mercenaries for… wait what? Yesterday's Bielema-related bombshell was the revelation that Arkansas offered him a whopping 600k extra to move to a school that has never won an SEC title and is probably never going to. Bielema was forced to say the usual things, added in some nonsense about how his first year he lost to Michigan 27-13 because of a bad call, and said this:

"When I began to have more and more success at Wisconsin, I stayed but a lot of my coaches left," he said. "I just wasn't able to compensate them in the way other coaches were. I know I'm hiring the right guys, because everybody keeps taking them from me."

Bielema lost six assistants last year, and he noted that three of them went from salaries around $225,000 per year to over $400,000 annually. He said that hours after the Badgers won the Big Ten title game last Saturday, three of his assistants told him they'd been contacted by other schools and were offered significant raises. He said he wouldn't have been able to match those offers.

"Wisconsin isn't wired to do that at this point," he said. "With what I wanted to accomplish, I needed to have that ability to do that. I've found that here at Arkansas."

If that's true—and I'm skeptical that people fleeing Wisconsin are not actually fleeing Bielema himself—that's another way in which the money is just not a factor. Wisconsin has that, and they are just choosing not to spend it because…? Because they need to build world-class facilities for non-revenue sports? Is that the answer?

That can't actually be the answer. But Wisconsin was the 8 team in revenue as of 2008 and I find it hard to believe they've dipped much what with the BTN. That year they brought in 30 million more than Arkansas. And yet…

Don't give me recruiting budget stuff either. Wisconsin spent 466k less than Arkansas in 2011, which is a big gap but it is also chump change. I don't know what the problem is, but adding more money to the huge and ever-growing money spigot isn't going to fix it. If it would, it already would have.

The problem is cultural: as Bielema said, we don't want to be like the SEC at all. Probably the best thing Brandon has done is pay the assistants the relative chump change that makes them happy.

The least the Big Ten can do for us as they set every tradition they can find on fire is actually spend the money on the stuff fans care about like "keeping that guy who has gone to three straight Rose Bowls."

BIG TENNNNN. Darrell Hazell is introduced as Purdue's next head coach and the world gets a terrifying glimpse into the reality of being a beat reporter in West Lafayette:

screen_shot_2012-12-06_at_9.48.46_am.0_standard_730.0[1] 

if I could summon the energy to do anything it would be obtain the sweet release of death

Darrell Hazell, by the way, is a wild-ass swing at another MAC coach of exceedingly short tenure (two years) who has shown little other than the ability to inherit a team that floats to the top of the MAC talent hierarchy for reasons unknown. And he'll just fly the coop if he works out anyway. Expanding the league does not fix this. Purdue is still Purdue.

But maybe they can be Purdue in another division! Here we go again:

"There are some advantages to 16 (teams) compared to 14," Michigan State athletic director Mark Hollis told ESPN on Wednesday. "Fourteen is clumsy. We're not out looking for two teams, but basically we will continue to survey the landscape."

At this point I endorse all Big Ten expansions in an effort to get to the Bargaining Phase post. With 16 we we can chuck the Indiana teams into the other football division and pretend none of this ever happened.

But it's about academics you guys! No, no it is not. It is not about academics in any way whatsoever.

Professors at the meeting alleged that the Athletic Department did not consult the ABIA on the addition of the Maryland and Rutgers to the Big Ten Conference.

“I happen to think that the implications of expanding the conference ... are significant academic matters, and I was personally very disappointed when I heard it on the radio,” Political Science Prof. Edie Goldenberg, an ABIA member, said.

If it was about academics, the academics would know about it.

Explaining to do, attempted. Michigan nixed a charity run at the Big House in two steps.

Champions for Charity is a for-profit limited liability company, though Highfield says all of the money a team raises prior to the race goes directly to a charity of the participant’s choice.

"It's just a little mom-and-pop organization," Highfield told AnnArbor.com.

Champions for Charity rented the stadium each previous year for roughly $7,000. Highfield was astonished when the school more than doubled the old rate, charging just under $16,000 for the next annual run.

The next step was just cancelling the thing entirely, because:

Really the decision in the end came down to our external focus," said Ablauf. The department announced last monththat it would begin partnering with the Special Olympics of Michigan for community service efforts. The first event of that partnership is the "Polar Plunge" at Michigan Stadium on Feb. 23, 2013.

That partnership, Ablauf said, has become the department's priority. Ablauf said the run had become "a very challenging event ... to fit into our stadium."

"We have our own private rental program, we're doing stuff with the Special Olympics and we have a lot of things we do now in the stadium," Ablauf offered.

I was waiting to sputter about this until the athletic department had its say, and… that's it? You can't spare the stadium for one day in April and one of the reasons you state for this is because you rent the thing out for profit (and annoy everyone at every football game by constantly repeating that fact)? I'm feeling a sputter comin' on you guys!

Actually, I don't have anything to say on this that I haven't already said a lot. I mean, this is a great thing to have people do from the ol' branding standpoint:

big-house-run-thumb-646x429-128915[1]

someone had a super idea once and people liked it

The thing had a lot of traction and if there was some problem with the organizational nature of the thing that was not organized as a non-profit it doesn't seem to be that hard to work through the issues. But I'm neither surprised or even disappointed that this happened. It's just how things work these days.

Antidote! Hey Charlie Strong seems like a good good dude.

Strong: I was 9-10, and (Jurich) hands me an extension...How do you walk away from someone who trusts and believes in you. …

Strong said his ego had him thinking abt what he coud do in the SEC. "It's not abt that. It's about people and how you affect their lives."

Yes Virginia, there are Bo-like people still around. One of them is Michigan's coach, and that's nice. 

Anti-antidote. Mario Cristobal is fired by FIU after one bad year when he turned down opportunities to move up in the world after he took the fledgling program from an 0-12 national joke to a couple bowl games.

STAUSKAS. As always, Canada bails us out of feeling bad. John Gasaway ranks his top 25 freshmen in college basketball and Stauskas comes in third($):

3. Nik Stauskas, G, Michigan Wolverines
Stauskas is merely Michigan's third option on offense, and you may think being rated the No. 3 freshman in the nation is self-evidently disproportionate for a role player. In the abstract I agree wholeheartedly, but exactly how much tribute do we give to a player who has helped his team's offense to the very limit allowed by the sport itself? Stauskas has an offensive rating (152.8) that's in another zip code entirely from what even the amazing likes of Bennett (127.5) and Adams (122.8) have posted. He is a normal carbon-based player in only one facet of the game: Stauskas inside the arc with the clock running is a mere mortal. But if he's at the line (89 percent) or, heaven help the opponent, outside the arc (64 percent), he's Stauskasesque.

His numbers will correct downward from this point forward, but the larger point is that for a second consecutive season John Beliein has a freshman who arrived in Ann Arbor as a lightly regarded recruit and then promptly began stomping on opponents like Mothra.

Stauskas was a little less lightly-regarded than Burke but yeah I mean seriously the hobbit at NC State was a burger guy. Oh right and that GRIII guy comes in ninth, which probably gives Michigan the best recruiting class in the country as of December what with adding in McGary and LeVert and Albrecht.

Etc.: Annual bowl swag update. Here is a tiny fraction of the money in gift cards because we can't give you cash. Tom Izzo goes full Holtz after MSU beats up on a SWAC team. Bielema fallout. More fallout. UMHoops podcast. David Merritt stops by to suggest his Merit fundraiser. Hockey coaches can now call CCHA reffing a joke in public. Gordon Gee is either lying now or lied to Urban Meyer.