Dear Diary Ate Brees's Lunch That One Time
Available from jonvalk, with or without redemption.
Diaries: That and the Tour de France in three parts. Mich1993 did a table of comparison of 4*+ upperclassmen at various positions. In 2013 there were nine; this year projects to 14 and 2015 projects to 30 as the Hokesters grow.
THE GREATEST NOTHING GAME EVER
South Bend Wolverine asked the assembled masses to pick a non-rivalry, non-major game from Michigan's past that you just remembered very fondly. Weirdly he then says the Air Force game—you weren't terrified of losing to Air Force after getting wrung out by Alabama? Other folk picked moderately big games, like the 1999 Citrus Bowl. And State games. C'mon, this isn't nam. Here's rules:
Disqualified: lots of MSU and Notre Dame games. Penn State games when PSU was ranked in the top 10 at some point. Bowl games Citrus or higher. Last-second wins (AC's catch vs. Indiana, etc.) Things remembered for personal reasons.
My favorites were all games when things went totally better than expected. Like the first Nebraska Big Ten game, when Martin forced a pitch and at the end we were chanting "Beat Ohio!" Another guy mentioned 1999 Purdue, to which: YES THAT'S WHAT I'M TALKING ABOUT.
Tiller had been tearing up the league with the spread-n-Brees (47 pts vs UCF, 28 in a win over ND, 58 vs CMU, 31 vs NWern), and with all due respect to the legion of defensive backs from that team who are friends of this site, our secondary was a weak point. But not that day. That day Carr came out in a 3-3-5 and Todd and Whitley and Patmon and Tommy and B-Will decided to punish every receiver who dared come near them. The guy who remembered it being a nice day is wrong; it was rainy.
If we're extending to other sports, the Molly McGannon game. Whoever's idea it was to raise funds to name the student section the Molly McGannon Memorial Student Section, get on that already.
BRIAN GETS WINDY
Time to bust out the On the Road.gif
How's that for a geographic headline? Double-entendre baby. I should get paid for this. Like Brian got paid for taking his powerpoint presentation to a meeting of the grand association of Chicagoan alumni of Michigan. They also had Chris Balas; tell me you wouldn't pay to see Brian and Balas together, fielding questions about unspeakable things known only to the Fort.
Tentatively scheduled Monday the 18th in New York and Tuesday the 19th in Philadelphia, and currently talking to Cleveland. We plan on having a Marlin event at MGoPatio again this year, and something like that again at Notre Dame with Jared and the Sports Power Weekends trip, and Chicago again for Northwestern.
PREACH BO!
Pelini, not our Bo. Apparently he lost a recruit to Ole Miss the way people always lose croots to Ole Miss, and he decided to say/not-say. Then he blamed the parents. Don't you just love Pelini? I mean, he's kinda right: big-time recruits might be content with a scholarship and the benefits of playing in 100k stadiums, etc., but their parents who sank tens of thousands of dollars into training these athletes don't get diddly, and yet have a very large influence. Whatever happened with Cam Newton, nobody's disputing at least that his dad called asking for a ridiculous sum, correct?
Blame: the system, of course, but honestly if the players could get paid upfront, the bag men would still drop bags with the parents. As a solution, I'd just legalize that too: boosters can give money to whomever they please, so long as they report it, and maybe a portion goes to fund an NCAA branch that can police this stuff.
MICHIGAN SOUTH UPDATE
At 2:09 of this video Chad Henne throws a pass to Denard Robinson. Also in favor of your interests, they do a flash of Bortles and then a long segment on clearly-the-starter Henne, where Chad mentions they're using a lot more audibles (complexity favors the elders).
MICHIGAN OF THE ________
This design could be copied for any politically boundaried entity, really.
ETC. Brandon Watson shirtless. White socks are back in the road kits.
Your Moment of Zen
P.S.
They weigh 12 oz. and they'll be in Ann Arbor on Monday.
August 1st, 2014 at 11:35 AM ^
Are any of you wearing clothes?
August 1st, 2014 at 10:19 PM ^
August 1st, 2014 at 11:40 AM ^
As a solution, I'd just legalize that too: boosters can give money to whomever they please, so long as they report it, and maybe a portion goes to fund an NCAA branch that can police this stuff.
I've come to the opinion that any amount of reporting requirements or limitations on money no matter how seemingly insignificant will be flaunted. This is why I'm just about dead serious when I say, throw the whole system wide open, and get rid of scholarships. Let the players pay tuition, require their accounts with the school to be paid in full before they can play, and let the boosters do the paying.
This wouldn't be all that different from real-life anyway. To my knowledge there's no foundation at Michigan like UVA's VAF or Clemson's IPTAY, but those foundations just funnel donor money to the athletic department to pay for scholarships anyway. This would just redirect the money and cut out the middleman and some accounting tricks. And then players could go out and have all the Nevin Shapiro parties they wanted and the enforcement money could be redirected elsewhere.
August 1st, 2014 at 11:54 AM ^
Except players would have to cosy up to sponsors to get anywhere. There are sports that work mostly on a sponsorship basis, and in those sports players are herded out of high schools into prep schools so they can get noticed. The goal is to empower the players, not create an oligarchy.
The whole point of college football is to be the pinko heaven of sports. You can watch the best 1500 athletes play for relatively equally talented teams and be bombarded with ads and massive ticket prices; that's the NFL. College football is the public space: you sit on a bench on publicly granted land on the campus of a publicly owned institution with 111,000 other people sitting on benches, and you watch exhuberant young adults who picked their own schools, and the 92% of those who aren't going to be amont the 1500 best athletes still get to be one of a shrinking group of people with college degrees and good connections and no debt.
My problem is they've privatized the things that make money for administrators and price it like a capital good while trying to maintain the same communist standards for everyone else. So now we've got the prices and iniquity of a free market combined with the corrupt bureaucracy and dehumanizing unfairness of a state-controlled market. Basically they've made it the worst of both worlds.
I admit there's something of an aspect of "you want money, fine, you got it" to that proposal. But it's not like players don't already cozy up to sponsors. Shoe agents infest every AAU tournament between the shining seas. And it's not like SEC recruiting isn't already a competition between boosters rather than coaches. So why not flip the script? Take what's now a capitalistic market and pinkoize it, and take what's now state-controlled and capitalize it. (The obvious answer is that it'll be, to put it mildly, difficult to convince the schools to submit to a huge heap of new rules about things like how much they can pay their coaches and where they get their gear from and such. But still.)
August 1st, 2014 at 11:57 AM ^
August 1st, 2014 at 12:03 PM ^
I remember being soaked to the bone in the student section, and I was sitting pretty high up (one of our group failed to mention he had freshman status so we were in the 90s) with the wind on us. During halftime a bunch of us huddled under a poncho and smoked cigarettes which in retrospect was probably really dumb.
August 1st, 2014 at 12:16 PM ^
I remember the weather being awful.
Also of note, Purdue was a top 10 team and would go to the Rose Bowl the next year. Michigan was #4. I felt like that was a really big-time game when I watched it. I'm not sure it qualifies based on your criteria. That said, it was really fun.
I definitely had a double take, but where is Panda land?
I had no idea, and had to look-up "Panda Land" via google images to find this.
I thought it was an old map of the Great Lakes.
August 1st, 2014 at 12:38 PM ^
Ah.,..that Air Force game.
What I remember most about that game is the emotion I felt when the Eagle (caps deserved) flew in circles from the top of the stadium onto the arm of its handler down on the field during the Star Spangled Banner, followed by the B-2 flyover.
It wsan't the B-2, it was the eagle that made that flyover special.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fiiiLSjiMUo
August 1st, 2014 at 12:50 PM ^
A conveniently placed scale calibrated in ounces. Interesting.
August 2nd, 2014 at 12:10 AM ^
I thought it was a digital alarm arrival countdown clock.
And then I saw the Pitney Bowes. (I don't work in a mail room, but I visit it now and then.)
That scale... someone must still be smoking every now and then...
It's two tumor-ridden kidneys, a severely-inflamed pancreas, and an appendix that's about to burst.
Most memorable games:
Nov 9, 1991 the #4 Michigan Wolverines dismantled Northwestern in my first college football game. I was only 11 years old and had really only been into sports for a few years. I remember Desmond, the 1989 basketball team,etc but this was the first event I attended live. I remember parking on someone's lawn (which seemed odd as a kid) and walking into a formidable sized stadium. I had been to Tigers Stadium and some others, and from the outside Michigan Stadium looked consistent with what I had prepared myself for. But as we walked through the tunnel and the stadium opened up before us my jaw must have dropped. It was HUGE.
We sat in a low row next to the players tunnel. It was cold but I had a blast. I don't think Northwestern even crossed midfield until some time in the 4th quarter. Just utter Michigan dominance and high scoring. All a kid could ask for. I remember towards the end of the game a young kid name Tyrone Wheatley got a few touches (might have been special teams, I don't remember). But I remember my dad telling me to remember that name because he was good. Wheatley ended up becoming my childhood favorite.
Honorable mention:
The season opener vs. UVA. TD Mercury Hayes in the corner as the clock ran out.
2003 comeback vs. Minnesota in the dome. John Navarre rumbling down the sideline. Biggest comeback in UofM history at the time.
Moment of Zen was very memorable. Drew Brees already with a ton of hype from the year before (when he didn't have to play us or OSU). Rainy homecoming. Lloyd Carr wondering why we were playing a Brees led Purdue team when the homecoming game is SUPPOSED to be an easy opponent.
Half of Purdue's points were thanks to 2 fumbles by A-Train deep in our own territory that they turned into field goals. Brees played OK. Boiler receivers dropped a ton of passes.
Lloyd was still doing the quarterback survey thing. Brady starts the 1st quarter, Henson starts the 2nd quarter and then coaches meet at halftime to decide who plays the rest of the game.
game at Michigan that's one of my favorite non-rivalry games---the 1980 Michigan win over Purdue. The Boilers came into Ann Arbor undefeated in the Big Ten (and--- I think--- ranked in the top 10 nationally) and Mark Herrmann was being hyped as a Heisman Trophy candidate.
End result? A 26-0 Michigan victory. I had a hand in pulling down the goalpost in the south end zone after that one and helping drag one of the uprights nearly to the top of the southeast corner of the bleachers before stadium security stepped in and ruined our fun. Great times!
Purdue, as I recall, was a pretty damn good team during the Mark Herrmann days. Didn't they beat Michigan in West Lafayette in 1979? They also played Michigan in '78 with a chance at winning the Big Ten Title (Michigan won that game something like 22-6 and then beat OSU to win the conference with Purdue finishing 2nd).
Do you have the video of any of those 3 games in your collection?
August 1st, 2014 at 11:09 PM ^
when UM played possibly the best game from start to finish I had ever been in AA to watch. There weren't a large number of stars on either side but it was definitely a statement game, more so I think for the fans who had been accussed of being so quiet. Helped that kickoff began at 3:30. The fans stood and screamed for the entire game. We had Marlin Jackson and the AA safety from Detroit who left UM after his senior year, not for the NFL, but judging by how little had been written about him - Ah, Earnest Shazor was his name - you'd guess it was the Witness Protection Program. Our defense was on fire, bringing heat from all over the field. Possibly Purdue's best player was from Saginaw Heritage, Stu Schweigert whose Uncles sat directly in front of me and left by midway 1st quarter. I am not certain if Purdue crossed the 50 in the first half except possibly for the last play of that half, a pass, intercepted by Stu and brought back about 40 yds or so. Throwing on the last play of the half on our side of the field? We were going for the jugular that day. I remember looking at the scoreboard at halftime and the Boiler's total yardage was either 6 or -6, really can't recall, but it was one of the most dominant games of the LC era, one in which the defense, not setting back and waiting were in that qb's - yes another pretty good one- face the entire afternoon. Also it was a game in which I was able to break my buddy's cherry in terms of First game watched in the Big House and he loved it. Good Times!!!!!!!
August 2nd, 2014 at 10:23 AM ^
appreciated!
YES. Definitely the Molly McGannon game. I was in HS at the time, but I was there and it was fantastic. I remember it being so loud my ears hurt -- seriously. As far as football goes, I remember my first game in person, 1996 vs. Indiana. It was homecoming and we played very poorly and I remember sitting next to old, insufferable people talking about how boring the game was. I also remember the Illinois game from 1999 and how much that game pissed me the hell off. Lloyd for some reason liked to start putting his backups in while the other team was still in the game to some extent and it ended up biting us in the ass. We only lost 2 games that season too. I think most of the random memories I have of games that weren't great Michigan wins are losses that especially stung, such as the one I just mentioned. Oddly I remember Indiana in 2006 -- Herbstreit had called Stevie Breaston "worthless" earlier in the week and he ended up returning two kicks for TDs. Also, Michigan fans at the game (it was away) started chanting "Ball St.'s better!" as the Cardinals had just played us rather tightly the week prior.
It's a painful memory I have of watching us get ruined by Ferentz's best team, but it makes me think of how much better that team was than Tressel's close-your-eyes-and-throw-it-up-to-beat-Purdue team.
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