eeee i'm a little girl for mike barwis

I listen to Colin Cowherd for you. Jim Harbaugh tried out his best Jim Tomsula impression on Colin Cowherd's show this morning:

I dunno man. I wonder if Harbaugh, a high-functioning lunatic, has points at which his function isn't so high. There is a general antipathy for press conference questions… a lot of the time. There is a general antipathy for lazy questions… some of the time. The questions Cowherd fired off were typical Cowherd: somewhat off-putting but nothing that an average person would get his dander up at, and Harbaugh is immediately in I Don't Know mode.

There are ways I think you can rescue it when he gets in that mode. Number one is talking about his players. Harbaugh loves talking about guys he has coached. But I don't think Cowherd really did anything. Harbaugh just wasn't in the mood from the drop. Steve Lorenz accurately describes it as "troll on troll crime."

Happy first-ish day of work at your new Harbaugh-wranglin' job, Zach Eisendrath! It's a very good idea to have a specific person whose only job is to wrangle Harbaugh, but I worry about the men who try to bridge the gap between beast and overman. I await the day the relentlessly upbeat Eisendrath turns his twitter feed into the SID equivalent of Nihlist Arby's.

I am surprised that I have not already been followed by thirty different "parody" accounts called Nihilist Harby's.

Colin should have read the operating manual though. When this Sacramento Bee story came out we all had a laugh about it and forgot. And then…

Your Harbaugh does not function like other head coaches. An innocuous query about the weather, for instance, could trigger a florid quote from Admiral William Halsey. And yet a routine question about a running back’s knee injury may cause your Harbaugh to wince, pause and grimace as if a malodorous scent has wafted into the room. Your Harbaugh’s default in this instance is: “We don’t really talk about that here” or “I can’t get inside his body” or “He’s working through something.” This is a design flaw our technicians in California have not yet worked out.

Also:

Your Harbaugh will be enormously affectionate one day and cold and distant the next. This is normal.

After Eisendrath starts wearing eyeliner and listening to My Chemical Romance 24 hours a day, Matt Barrows of the Sacramento Bee has a job waiting for him. A job he should not take. Yes, even if he works for a print newspaper.

Brock Mealer wants to help other people walk. You won't know that you've missed Mike Barwis's gravel truck of a voice until about ten seconds into this:

They are raising money at charity funding site Crowd Rise; you can also grab a shirt on Barwis's site.

Whyyyyyyyy. SBNation's Steven Godfrey has a piece on why there are so many neutral-site games and they continue to increase:

College football's neutral-site games are gaining in popularity because they make a lot of money for the companies and institutions involved.

But demand is even higher among schools suddenly looking to schedule tougher opponents. Consider it knee-jerk hysteria in the wake of Baylor's exclusion from the College Football Playoff, a move often explained as a product of weak non-conference scheduling.

"If you can break your $600,000 [deal for a game against] Akron to go cash $1.2 million from Allstate ... well, there's no catch any more," the agency rep said. "TCU not getting in [the Playoff despite being] at No. 3 the week before scared every athletic director shitless."

Now, you might be thinking to yourself "why would a neutral site game make more money than a home game?" There are three main reasons:

  • You can get away with more sponsor stuff at a neutral site. The Blank And Blank Classic, etc.
  • You can jack up ticket prices. When Michigan played Alabama at Jerryworld, the minimum price to get in the door was $125, with non-suite tickets ranging up to $245 face. It sold out because it was Michigan against Alabama. Neither school dropped their PSDs a cent.
  • The neutral site (sometimes) controls the TV revenue. Most conferences have stipulations that TV revenue  is shared, even nonconference TV revenue. This goes for "neutral site" games in the geographical footprint of the conference, but generally does not extend past that. That's why Washington State played Notre Dame in Texas several years back—ND wanted to control that revenue and could not do so in the Pac-12 footprint. That was not the case for Michigan-Alabama, however.

Now, even with all those advantages a neutral site game could only come up with 4.7 million for Michigan—less than they would have gotten for beating up on a cupcake. For a team like TCU, though, the financial equation is much different.

Michigan's got another one coming up because they had a terrible contract against Notre Dame and got left in the lurch; after 2017 against Florida they should never play a neutral site game again. In this, at least, Jim Delany is an aid:

In 2013, Big Ten commissioner Jim Delany issued a memo requiring any Big Ten school playing off-campus games to be designated the home team in at least half of the matchups, and that half of the games take place in the Big Ten's footprint. The two-game series between LSU and Wisconsin in Houston and Green Bay is the example.

Never say Jim Delany didn't do one thing right in his whole life.

Instead of having a neutral site game with those ticket advantages, you should ask your fans if it's okay to have big prices for a big game, and when they say YES YES YES then do it.

YOU WERE. There was a time in the 90s when Ohio State would roll in to The Game with a shiny record and national championship aspirations and a 7-4 Michigan team would destroy them. It wasn't exactly halcyon since, uh, 7-4, but there was a grim satisfaction in dragging those bastards into the pit with us. This happened so often that I can't remember which of these games featured this exchange between myself and an Ohio State fan deep into the third quarter:

"You guys are pathetic! You're 7-4! We are national championship contenders!"
"You WERE national championship contenders."
/merriment

Better that than the recent stuff, I guess. Anyway, ERASE THIS GAME—which still hasn't tackled #M00N—features the 1993 version of La Brea Tar Stadium, in which Tyrone Wheatley* did this:

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And Ohio State did this:

Ohio State:

- never crosses into the Michigan red zone
- goes two of twelve on third down
- averages two yards per carry compared to Michigan's five
- gets shut out by the Wolverines for the first time since 1976
- misses going to the Rose Bowl after Wisconsin beats Michigan State in Tokyo because the tiebreaker at the time eliminated the most recent Rose Bowl invitee
- seriously, that was a way the Big Ten decided who got to go to the Rose Bowl, and it's basically "aw heck you're due"

I would prefer that we keep this game, and possibly bronze it.

*[Whenever I watch Wheatley run these days I think that Brandon Minor was born 20 years too late to be a somewhat disappointing first round NFL draft pick.]

Etc.: Harbaugh throws out first pitch, talks to media personably afterwards. This is normal. An oral history of Barry Alvarez making Wisconsin into Wisconsin. You should probably read it. Harbaugh on the Tigers.

They said it couldn't be done. As first reported by mgouser Canadian, hockey tickets are actually declining(!) in price this year:

Just got an email informing me that this seasons prices have been reduced. Endzone seats see a 15% drop, sideline 12% and centre ice 10%.
Also I noticed at the bottom of the email that season ticket holders will receive a 20% concession discount before the start of the game (for every home game). This is great news for myself as that's the only time i visit the concession stands (grabbing a bite to eat as I have to rush over right after work).

Wags immediately assert not to click on any links as this email must be written by a Nigerian prince, but no seriously I got it too:

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I wonder when the last price drop in one of the big three sports happened. I certainly can't remember one, but you have to figure that basketball was walking back prices at some point during the dark period. Ticket demand for hockey must be very soft, what with two years out of the tournament and basketball going like gangbusters.

There's also an assortment of season ticket holder benefits. While none of them are particularly significant, it is a step in the right direction for a department that has basically laughed at the idea of loyalty since Brandon was installed.

Ty Wheatley tribute. Wolverine Historian releases a new version that's five minutes longer because why not:

A sizeable nerve hit. John U Bacon's article about Michigan's season ticket situation was so popular his server imploded under the pressure, and now Yahoo has asked him to consolidate and refine it for their site. I don't think the headline guy did him any favors by invoking "greed", but if you liked the original you'll find plenty to agree with in the sequel. It also gives me the opportunity to pull another money quote, so here goes:

Yes, advertising in the Big House does matter. Americans are bombarded by ads, about 5,000 a day. Michigan Stadium used to be a sanctuary from modern marketing, an urban version of a National Park. Now it's just another stop on the sales train.

Everything the ticket holders spend hundreds of dollars to wait for and pay for, they can get at home for next to nothing – including the ads -- plus better replays. They can only get the marching band at the Big House.

John might be attempting to set a record for "number of times single piece gets emailed to me," and I think he's just about caught that piece about Gibbons that every MSU/OSU troll in the world sent me.

Just when your life was running low on gravel trucks. Mike Barwis has a reality TV series coming up from the Funny or Die guys, who happen to be fanatical Michigan fans. Barwis is a natural for this, of course.

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Well done, Jim. Jim Delany took the stand as an NCAA witness. For the umpteenth time, an NCAA witness went over a bunch of stuff the judge said she wouldn't be considering like the impact on non-revenue sports. Delany also issued more College Is Good statements that make legal analysts rend their garments at their irrelevancy.

That was par for the course. Then Delany firebombed his side's cause:

Delany is tired of athletes being asked to spend all year on voluntary -- read: mandatory -- workouts. He'd like to see athletes get a chance to spend a semester abroad if they chose. He believes they are supposed to be students first. As he said all this, he admitted he remains very much in the minority among the policymakers in college sports on those issues. (Case in point: The schools have recently passed rules allowing football and basketball coaches to spend more time with their players in the offseason.)

That admission from Delany hacked several questions off his cross examination.

The plaintiffs have spent the entire trial trying to prove that in today's NCAA, players are athletes first and students second. The NCAA's attorneys and most of its witnesses have insisted that isn't the case. They say the athletes are students who just happen to play sports. They say allowing football and men's basketball players to sell their name, image and likeness rights would drive a wedge between the athletes and the student body. The plaintiffs contend the wedge was driven long ago and extra money in the pockets of the athletes won't change that. Delany helped them make that case Friday by explaining the reforms he'd like to see that actually would make the players feel more like regular students and then by explaining that they'd get steamrolled if they came up for a vote.

People are just in charge of things, etc.

I only have one problem with Andy Staples's article:

Outside of the Big Ten, Delany is massively unpopular. He continually stood in the way of a college football playoff. He essentially claimed an SEC team beat a Big Ten team for a football national title because the SEC team was faster and dumber. He created a cash cow of a cable network while still banging the drum for amateurism.

He is massively unpopular to Big Ten fans as well after adding Rutgers and Maryland.

Meanwhile, in Emmertland. Staples covers Emmert's testimony:

Emmert discussed the "commercial pressures" to use athletes in a variety of ways. "One has to make sure, in an amateur context, that it doesn't go to a place where the student-athletes are in fact being used as nothing more than shills for a product," Emmert said.

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Staples got a little snarky. I understand. It's hard not to be. As I've noted before, taking the NCAA's model and trying to justify it in a courtroom leads to progressively increasing levels of cognitive dissonance that end with you going ACK and snarking.

Oh no, what would that be like. Upside to the NCAA enforcement department ceasing to exist, from the NCAA's perspective:

Dinosaur hit by Google meteor. It must have been grand to be a sportswriter in the days when the collective memory of your readers was about six months long, tops, an you could just recycle your bits ad nauseum in between three-martini lunches. Unfortunately, these days you can just plug "out of touch sportswriter name" and "topic" and verily, thou art exposed.

So when Dan Shaughnessy wrote a "but I don't want to like soccer" piece that seemed 25 years old, it was quickly discovered that the reason it seemed 25 years old is that it actually was. Deadspin:

Hands are what separate man from beast

June 22, 2014

Soccer takes away our hands. This makes the game incredibly skillful and exhausting, but also robs fans of much of the beauty of sport. Hands and opposable thumbs separate us from creatures of the wild.

June 17, 1994

And what's with the hands? How good can any game be when you can't use your hands? Hands are what separate us from the animal kingdom.

July 5, 1990

Finally, there is the hands problem. Hands and thumbs, that's what separates us from the beasts of the jungle.

I'm terrified that I repeat myself too much when I go on about how punting is evil or the NCAA should keel over and die posthaste, because I came of age shaking my head at dudes like Shaugnessy and Rick Reilly who phoned in the same four columns for 20 years.

I used to be really mad at these guys because they were wasting the greatest job in the world. Nowadays it's more contempt than anger. Y'all are still doing this in 2014?

Hockey scouting. Over The Boards collects a bunch of scouting on college-hockey bound gentlemen, touching on a number of Michigan recruits. Zach Werenski, who may be on campus this fall:

He’s deliberate and doesn’t put himself in situations to fail. He doesn’t pick his battles, he just battles smart. His natural abilities, what he’s worked on, continuing to improve, I think the debate is what part of what he does is going to persist to the pro level, but his being well-rounded I don’t think makes him undefined like some toolsy kids that can’t figure out where they put their skills in the toolbox and when to pull them out, you know? He knows what he can do and plays to it: situational awareness.

2016 D Griffin Luce:

“Luce is arguably the best ’98 defenseman in the country. He has great size at 6’3, 200 and plays with an edge, throwing his body around in the corners and in-front of the net in his own end and is a presence on the offensive blueline. Luce moves very well for his size and age and handles the puck effortlessly with hard, crisp, tape to tape passes up ice. He can run the powerplay and with his reach and hockey IQ is an ideal penalty killer as his head is always on swivel and getting his stick out to take away passing lanes."

Luce is projected as a potential first-rounder. 2015 F Kyle Connor gets a brief mention as a kid who has really come on this year. That is understating it a bit. Connor was second in the USHL in scoring this year, highly unusual for a kid his age, and is one of three 2015-ish recruits at the WJC evaluation camp this year. I know Yost Built has been fretting about whether he'll follow through on his commitment, so hopefully this reassures somewhat:

“Growing up, that was my dream school,” said Connor. “I’m a Michigan football fan and Michigan everything, even my parents are big Michigan fans. When I heard they offered me the scholarship it was a no brainer.”

Saginaw drafted him in the 14th round, and they're not known for swooping in on college commits.

I will also take this opportunity to note that UNO has a kid named "Luc Snuggerud" coming in this year. That has to go high up on the list of most hockey names.

Etc.: EMU to install a gray field, start calling Rynearson "the Factory." "Why isn't EMU I-AA?" you ask, because that's what you always ask about EMU.

USC announces that all revenue sport scholarships will be guaranteed for four years. A collection of early Big Ten odds. Texas's AD is so Brandon, still.

On my signal, unleash charity. EDSBS's annual fundraiser for Refugee Resettlement and Immigration Services of Atlanta is up. Michigan has won this thing back-to-back, crushing all comers, and I'm pretty sure if we win a third straight year we get the right of first refusal on any 7'3" Spiderman shot-blocking centers they might accidentally produce.

Orson suggests commemorating a past football game with your donation. I'm going SUMMER OF TATE!

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I blame the Big Ten Network for this. And wheel routes, of course. The donation page can be reached directly here. Michigan State is currently leading.

Hagerup gets the Stonum treatment. Michigan has announced that Will Hagerup is reinstated and will be suspended for the entire 2013 season. He'll have one more year of eligibility in 2014 if he can survive the double secret probation period, which of course Stonum could not.

Q: would Michigan announce anything if their own players didn't spill the beans on social media? The timing of all these reports seems to be: "wait for someone on a message board to notice, announce once it starts getting wider attention."

If Hagerup is still on scholarship that would take Michigan's next recruiting class down one.

Kovacs doing his Kovacs thing. The NFL equivalent of a walk-on is the undrafted free agent, and Kovacs is doing his Kovacs things with the Dolphins. But first, awesome lead!

Jordan Kovacs is the rarest kind of three-time all-Big Ten player. The kind that is nearly $100,000 in debt.

That might be a first, actually. Kovacs came in for a profile on the Dolphins' site with this quote in it:

"Those within the Dolphins organization tell me that Kovacs has a legitimate shot," MiamiDolphins.com's Andy Cohen wrote, "that you aren’t as productive as he was at Michigan without having a chance at the next level."

Practice observers are united in stating he is small but impressive nonetheless. One:

Michigan safety Jordan Kovacs was the main guy who caught my attention. At first I noticed he's the runt of the litter, standing all of 5-foot-10, 205 pounds. Most NFL safeties are three inches taller, and maybe 10 pounds heavier.

"Then I noticed Kovacs has a knack for being around the ball," Kelly continued, "and plays with a feisty spirit. He pulled down one of the Friday session's two interceptions and was consistently around the ball. What does that mean? No clue at this point, but flashing is a good thing."

And two:

Former Michigan safety Jordan Kovacs, an undrafted rookie free agent signee, knows how to make an impression. He was a walk-on at Michigan and rose to prominence and had something of a cult following in Ann Arbor. He knows the way to draw attention and that's hit. He did plenty of that, taking some liberties at times in the defensive backfield. He also had an interception. So he's got my attention, at least.

Spiece means all of the scouting reports. There was an immense AAU tournament in Fort Wayne over the weekend that has resulted in an unusually large scouting dump even for the internet. Trevon Bluiett had a great weekend on both ends, filling it up and giving five-star Kevon Looney the business on defense:

Dylan on Bluiett:

We’ve been keeping tabs on Bluiett for a long time now so his offensive exploits don’t come as a big surprise. Bluiett can score the ball against just about anyone. He has a great jumpshot, can use his 6-foot-6 frame to get to the rim and even has a nice mid-range game. But it’s always encouraging when a guy that you’ve been following for a long time shows off something new. We already touched on Bluiett’s defensive exploits against Kevon Looney but his performance was very impressive – mostly because we haven’t seen that out of him. Five threes on the other end didn’t hurt, although this still wasn’t Bluiett’s best offensive game of the tournament, that would have been his 28 point outburst against Team Thad.

He told Rivals($) that Michigan and Butler are recruiting him "most vigorously" at the moment. Everyone who's ventured an opinion thinks Butler has a tentative lead, and time is running down. Bluiett wants to decide before his senior year begins.

UMHoops also put together a scouting reel on Looney. Which… wow. He doesn't have the quickness to drive on guys a lot shorter than him, but he's a 6'9" kid who blocks everything, runs the floor, has three point range, and is aggressive. I say, he might be a good player.

Scout also has extensive, uh, scouting($). Vince Edwards had a little bit of a rough outing as his teammate and OSU commit Jae'Sean Tate went to the basket over and over; everyone's now filing Looney as an "elite face-up power forward."

Oh. ESPN's Paul Biancardi puts Zak Irvin on his class of 2013 "dream team," describing him as an "alpha dog($)":

Every team needs some alpha dogs, and Irvin fits that category. He provides the luxury of having a big-time scorer who can stroke it from deep with excellent size or beat his defender off the bounce, pull up and nail it from the midrange. That scoring versatility is priceless. He also has high-level athleticism, and his frame is strong enough that he can take a hit and finish at the rim. Irvin is a competitor who can play the game up tempo or in the half court. Bottom line, he is a bucket getter who can put up big numbers.

Hardaway++?

Sports in which you attempt to throw a ball past a person with a stick. Softball clinched their sixth straight Big Ten title over the weekend with a narrow 2-1 win over Northwestern, then celebrated by clubbing the Wildcats into a fine paste 16-1 in a game I attended. I was just talking up how Sierra Romero was pretty good when she put one over the fence; later in the game they walked her with a base full. The next day, Northwestern walked her at every opportunity, plunking her the first time. Also she's the shortstop. She might be good.

Softball is the top seed for the Big Ten tourney, which is in… Nebraska. Does that make more or less sense than having the hockey tournament at neutral sites? Advanced math necessary to tell. In any case, it's a big tourney for Michigan, which currently sits on the edge of the top-eight spot that would not only guarantee them a regional but also a home super-regional should they advance.

The softball tourney is a twelve-team single elimination thing; Michigan's Friday opener won't be televised but their hypothetical semi would be at 3 Saturday and the final is 1 Sunday, both on BTN.

Meanwhile, the baseball team is fighting for the last spot in the six-team Big Ten tournament, taking two of three from Iowa over the weekend. They've got six conference games left, a home series against Purdue and a trip to Lincoln. Purdue is about as good as Iowa—not good—and Nebraska is just okay; Michigan has to keep ahead of Illinois for the last spot. They've got a game on the Illini.

Dollar dollar bill y'all. The Big Ten's distribution to its schools pops up over a million dollars to $25.7 million. The BTN is now putting out $7.6 million a year. Makes you wonder how they used to manage with just 15 million a year. Probably ate roof tiles, sat in a hot tub filled with dirt, used old batteries to decorate.

The irony of this bullet. The only good thing about the new flood of articles (YES IT'S A TWO-ARTICLE FLOOD GAWD) about Chris Webber is they're the ones spurred by the dissociation period imposed on him by the NCAA ending. So they should be the last, by God. Has anyone else ever been a subjection of this much discussion 20 years after he left his college team?

Canadian Football. Your names. I don't know what to do. There's a new Ottawa CFL team that just drafted a backup Iowa lineman in the first round because the CFL draft is only for Canadians. In any case, I bring this to your attention mostly because that team is considering the following names:

Wiki says they're choosing between the RedBlacks, the Nationals, the Raftsmen, the Voyageurs, or the Rush. Of course a Canadian team would consider "Rush" an appropriate nickname. Whatever they end up going with, they're always going to be The Fightin' Tom Sawyers to me. But I digress.

Canada. I think "RedBlacks" is actually the goofiest what with its connotations of a distant rollerball future where all things are named according to the colors that comprise them because the gubberment has confiscated nouns.

Knobwatch. When Bret Bielema isn't fighting with Wisconsin fans on twitter—seriously—he's dialing up the doublespeak to its maximum:

Coincidentally, "Transition is a process" is also what the noun-confiscating dystopian gubberment says when it takes your nouns.

One of those guys is a postgrad quarterback everyone will want Michigan to look at who will instead go somewhere he can play.

Barwis talking about Mealer. Via the latest TEDx event at M:

Etc.: Is the body of this article titled "Why B1G has no November night games" just "IT'S COLD"? It should be. Ringer departure official if you missed it yesterday. FWIW, I heard he'd had microfracture surgery a la Greg Oden. Where the O'Bannon case stands and is going in the near future. Ben McLemore stuff just makes me want agents to be cool wit the NCAA. Burke's got a shot at going #1.