Hand : Elephant in the room

Correct answer is its over. I mean, honestly Kid chose Alabama. They win a lot. Its not a rash decision, Hand took a very long look at his options and made the best choice for him. Give em hell kid. We have our own team to worry about, and we have kids who want to play for us. 

You cant win em all, and we still have Jabrill Peppers.

Over. 

Couple of issues.  North Campus is in a different time zone from the athletic campus.  Doesn't matter if you drive a V8 rocket either, there's minimal parking.

Also, thinking back, all the tutors in the world will Not help you when you have to write equations for laminar flow (fluid mechanics).  I once went to a 1 hour test.  All the problems involved manipulating variables (no actual numbers).  The prof "generously" allowed 2 hours total time so nobody would feel pressure, and then not a single person finished before the two hour time window.  The prof had to call "time....turn in your work now".

When the test involves manipulating a 6 x 6 matrix on an exam an infinite number of tutors will Not help.  If you beat your head against the wall and learned by trial and error about the "tools" and "patterns" you can do the job.

I met a couple of guys in my first year who wanted to get together and spread out homework problems, each doing a share of them, to save time and effort.  After all homework is merely a check mark for effort and amounts to about 5% of the semester grade.  I resisted this and preferred to work alone in the basement of my rented house on them

The untold secret is if one busts their ass (head??) on those HW problems, and truly understands the methods behind the answers, then you will do well on the exams.  A complex way of saying its about effort.

I also recall a guy who I worked at the same company with over the summer.  He got overwhelmed the next fall because he spent too much time on the solar car project and let school slide a bit, like for a few weeks.   His grades fell off.  Next year the same company  wouldn't even offer him an engineering job, he supervised a production line...which is in some ways valuable but he didn't seem happy.

So there's this dilemma here.  Do well in engineering...spend lots of time on it.  Do well in football...spend lots of time on it.  There aren't enough hours in the day to do both.  Hoke knows.  Saban knows.  Recall that Bama lets the players weed themselves out (iow competition for the next year of scholarship, depth chart, etc) and so if one lets football slide...you see the outcome. 

It seems like Hand chose Engineering.  What I am saying is Hand chose Football...and to paraphrase another post of mine...higher concentration of hotter girls.

Both schools wanted the kid, both schools made their best pitch, both schools tried to be as honest as they could and do what they think is mutually beneficial.  Alabama won.  You can't really fault Hoke for suggesting not doing engineering, if in fact that happened.  I highly doubt he wouldn't let him do it that's what Hand really wanted.  But, you also can't expect Hoke to tell the kid he should do it, knowing full well he probably won't have the time it takes to complete the degree he wants and play football at UM at the same time.  Hoke did what he thought was best for him, made his pitch, etc.  Saban did the same thing and won.  What are you gonna do?  

In reality it would be a surprise to beat Bama at this point for any non-regional recruit.  It only hurts because we assumed all along that he would go to UM.  With a visit to Bama we probably never should have allowed ourselves to become so secure in his committment in the first place.

I graduated Michigan with 2 degrees and am a huge fan. If Hand were my son and could play D with Saban (and potentially get paid) I'd urge him to go to Bama over Michigan. Michigan is a sh*tshow right now, and it's more likely that Hoke isn't coaching 4 years from now than Saban.

Hand did not pick Alabama because of academics, not when we were leading for so long during his recruitment.

I have a little experience with engineering students and expectations. IMO engineering schools are much less likely to let students 'slide' with shallow knowledge, and for obvious reasons: an engineer makes a mistake and the bridge falls down, machine blows up, or something bad like that happens. So while it may be possible to water down expectations for other majors, it's not happening in engineering.

And the truth is, at the highest levels Michigan academics are hard. It's hard because all of your classmates are really smart and competitive, and that's doubly true for engineering. It's possible Hand might not have been able to hack it in engineering at UM, even with his B average in high school. 

I think people often fail to understand that there's a big difference from being able to get into a university and being able to survive there. Especially with athletes, where we have this one-size-fits-all NCAA clearinghouse criterion. Just because a guy has the minimum requirements to attend college according to the NCAA doesn't mean he can or should do it at Michigan. I'm not being elitist, I'm being a realist. Because if you're a student at Michigan that means you have to actually take classes in Michigan, full of other students who are really smart. And because they're smart, the classes will be taught at a high level and the competition for grades will be fierce. Not every student--let alone athlete--can handle this.

are going to be level with the kid and steer him away from making his stay at UM a total nightmare. Sooo those who say it's cause of UM's slide the past couple of games have obviously never went to UM, the engineering school, or they are Sparty trolls who just don't get the fact that the UM degree is as much of the reason UM has been beating them regular until RR. Its not the team or the helmets, its the degree, that, my friends makes perfect sense.