Unverified Voracity Pivots To Hamster
let's talk about all three of these dudes [Bryan Fuller]
Chris Evans: already good? I'm a wee bit skeptical about these numbers because I seem to remember Chris Evans breaking some tackles and running for a gorillion yards when it was 49-0 against Rutgers, but, uh:
Chris Evans returns after a sensational freshman season in the Maize and Blue as the Big 10's most elusive returning RB. pic.twitter.com/NQb7w1EO01
— PFF College Football (@PFF_College) July 3, 2017
No Saquon Barkley is a surprise. (He's not even 4th, which goes to Maryland's Ty Johnson.) Enough of a surprise that I look at this stat with a bit of a jaundiced eye. It looks like it heavily favors guys who end up in certain situations but not others. Wadley and Evans were insulated from short yardage situations by LeShun Daniels and De'Veon Smith, respectively. And the whole Maryland offense was geared towards getting little quick guys in space one on one. The context is important.
This one might be better?
In 2016, these were the most effective freshman running backs on a per carry basis after contact with a defender. pic.twitter.com/0zyNCDrGJA
— Aaron Resnick (@aaronmresnick) June 28, 2017
I still think that's about Evans breaking the occasional tackle and getting a huge play than anything De'Veon Smith-esque. Huge plays are good, don't get me wrong—I am just worried about sample size. Better to have Evans on these lists than not; maybe not super predictive about the season.
Less skeptical about this one. Michigan's DL is going to be just fine this fall.
Michigan and Ohio State are the only schools returning multiple 4-3 ends who finished in the top 20 nationally for pass rush productivity. pic.twitter.com/XNuV7KRBgL
— Aaron Resnick (@aaronmresnick) June 26, 2017
Bosa and Winovich are in fact #2 and 3 nationally, behind only Harold Landry—another Don Brown acolyte. Meanwhile the new DEs were actually more productive against the run than the departures:
The Michigan defense should be solid against the run this season, despite the loss of Charlton and Wormley. pic.twitter.com/krPa1z6Cnl
— PFF College Football (@PFF_College) July 2, 2017
That one may be a garbage time artifact. Even if you haul those numbers back down to Wormley/Taco level that's pretty dang okay, and we haven't even talked about Mo Hurst.
BRILLIANT
Exit Fox Sports Dave Brandon. A spectacular final act for carnival-barker Jamie Horowitz at Fox Sports. Step one is gutting the profitable(!) Fox Sports digital team in order to consolidate his hold on power, with a side of implementing his post-apocalyptic vision:
What really does work is when you take things are good like ’11 Coaches Oregon Might Hire’, that might be something someone is interested in the day Helfrich gets fired, and we change to ‘Colin Cowherd’s 11 Coaches.’ We’ve seen this be very successful. You look at Fox News right now, O’Reilly and his take. That’s all it is. And there are many different ways.
Step two is getting fired literally the next week.
Jamie Horowitz’s dismissal Monday came about a week after Fox began investigating allegations of sexual harassment in the workplace in its sports division. The company interviewed several women at L.A.-based Fox Sports about Horowitz’s behavior, according to a person familiar with the investigation who was not authorized to publicly discuss it.
The women included prominent on-air personalities and show producers, according to two people who requested anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the investigation.
Lawsuits will follow as Horowitz tries to collect on a contract and Fox Sports tries to separate itself from an alleged sexual harasser. Unfortunately for Fox and their writers, there appears to be no way to re-spool the thread.
A bloody few weeks in online #content have caused a round of introspective articles about "pivoting to video," and why that's exec-speak for "I give up, eat at Arby's." Bryan Curtis:
Why this is happening is simple: The web has a surplus of copy versus advertising. Companies have decided that sticking an ad at the front of a video makes it less ignorable than putting a similar ad next to an article. It doesn’t matter what the video is. I often get a paragraph or two into a Sports Illustrated story only to find Madelyn Burke in the lower right-hand corner of the screen, giving me a summary of the sentences I’m already reading.
The new round of layoffs ignited a lousy ritual. “Hire these people!” we tweeted at … whom, exactly? A word-friendly publication that would promise to never, ever pivot to anything else? The contact information for Vocativ’s “free agents” was sent around on a spreadsheet.
Other writers tried to play media visionary and stepped in it. “I’ve been in digital media for 12 years,” Sports Illustrated’s Andy Gray tweeted last week. “One thing I’ve learned is that nobody wants to read anything over 1,000 words. MTV is more proof.” Never mind that Gray’s employer uses the motto “longform since 1954.”
On Twitter, Gray got the noogie he deserved. I enjoyed reading his replies. They proved that no occasion, not even an existential threat to the industry, will prevent a journalist from citing his old articles — and, in this case, also providing the word count. Why, my recent longform piece was actually quite popular!
There are two kinds of online video. One has video content. Like this:
Delightful.
The other kind of online video does not have video content, whether it's a talking head repeating what someone else said or a poorly lit podcast-on-youtube-for-some-reason with horrible audio. These are stuck next to the actual written content you want, set to autoplay, and nowadays they even follow you around when you scroll down. They exist only to scam advertisers willing to play high CPMs for ads on video content. The problem, of course, is that these videos only have written content repurposed badly. No hamsters anywhere. They are never watched. At best they run in the background of someone's work computer, on mute.
Scout's bankruptcy and firesale was easily predicted by their own pivot to video. I can't tell you how many times I've clicked on a Scout article hoping for information on a recruit only to be presented with a video. Once in a while this seems useful enough for me to transcribe, and I do so. Half the time I decide to do this I can barely hear the #content because they taped it outside on a phone in high winds.
I dunno what the solution to online content is but I do know that scamming people is not it. Making your product worse by turning it into a tedious video instead a searchable, skimmable article is also not it. Until someone trains a hamster to recite your text, video is strictly worse for most content.
Penn State skepticism. Various folks on this here blog have been trying to elucidate why we're not as high on Penn State as most folks. Mostly it comes down to "their all-bomb offense was pretty lucky," and here's a stat to back that up:
Good stat from Phil Steele that matches the eye test:
— Chris Vannini (@ChrisVannini) June 28, 2017
Penn State came down with ~75% of 50-50 balls last year. McSorley bailed out a lot.
That conversion rate on jump balls is almost certainly unsustainable and PSU will have to make up for it elsewhere. They've got a shot at doing so because they bring back a lot from last year's team.
Drake yes? Drake no? Per Sam Webb, Drake Johnson did get approved for a sixth year in various sports:
Drake Johnson has finally been approved for 6th yr in fball, indoor & outdoor track. Now discussion on whether he'll play all 3 can commence
— Sam Webb (@SamWebb77) June 28, 2017
Whether he'll actually come back for football is an open question. Webb reported that he's 1) down to 180 and 2) very fast, so there's a role for him in both football and track. With a wonky hamstring that might not like stop-start, you could hardly blame him for packing it in and just running track.
Michigan has the room, FWIW.
Etc.: Buccigross survives, gets new five year deal. The Elite 11 is basically garbage for predicting QBs. That Bamba cash thing isn't going anywhere. The fullback is dead in the NFL. Assistant coach names. Talking with Mel Pearson. A reason to huddle?
I'm glad that McSorley stat bore out what I saw this year. PSU will be fine this year, but flip a couple long bombs against Wisconsin and USC and I think people see them as a top-15 team, not a top-5 team.
Fox Sports never had a plan to compete with ESPN, because ESPN doesn't really even have a plan anymore. People will pay for good content - Patreon does solid business on that front. But it takes effort, and for a lot of older media outlets they've coasted on filler for so long that it's hard to find that extra gear required to do so. The fact he was fired for sexual harassment instead of incompetence is the noteworthy flavor to the story, because my guess is he would have been gone in 6 months or a year once analytics on ad sales vs. bandwidth costs came in.
The proprietors of our beloved MGoBlog lecturing large media companies on their myopic tone-deaf online content tactics, while simultaneously and stubbornly maintaining one of the poorest laid out and least robust websites (given the level of traffic) on the interwebs... and losing $1,000s in revenue because of it. Pot, meet kettle. But wait, let's hear from our "guy in his basement" mortgage broker sponsor!
The inclusion of hamsters in the imbedded video is doubly ironic.
Mgoblog has an inherent difference than most websites and that is a sense of community. I don't say that off hand - I mean literally despite the layout from 2003 and lack of functionality at times, and load times, and all that people come because of content AND "Cheers" factor. A lot of people know your name, and you have the schticks (WD!) etc that is not found elsewhere. I think it is an underestimated part of the website attraction. There are comment bars found on MANY of the most popular websites but its by "strangers" or people who will comment on 1 story and then never be seen again. Here almost every story is commented by the same critical mass and then some portion of others as well. So you have the community sports bar feel where you can strike up conversation and you know quite a few of the regulars. Someone could create content just as good (or better) than MGo and wouldn't attract people due to that missing factor.
p.s. I don't think I've EVER set through an entire video on sports "content" ever. If a story has video and exact same content in written word below I just read for whatever reason.
I don't think I've EVER set through an entire video on sports "content" ever.
Generally agree, but an exception are those "In the Trenches" videos where they break down the Michigan games. Those are outstanding.
Re: MGoBlog's community ... true ... and extremely challenging to re-create, particularly at this stage in the Internet's development. MGoBlog caught lightning in a bottle ... to all our benefit.
One of the poorest laid out and least robust websites on the interwebs is still profitable thanks to content that keeps people coming back despite the infrastructure issues. Maybe it's worth listening to his opinion on online content tactics.
1. Curious if you have numbers to back up the revenue assertion. I mean, they might be--when the blog was crashed for most of signing day that can't have been good--but on a day-to-day basis the readership is the readership.
2. Complaining about the current interface is fine, but the obnoxious and mean tone of your post suggests that you missed the bulletins discussing the site update later this summer. If so, well, news: The website is going to be overhauled.
I would give you more credibility here if you weren't dissing a sponsor as a guy in a basement. Mgoblog actually makes money, I'm told, which means that Brian can do something that a whole lot of people are finding difficult at this moment: Write for a living.
Over at Touch-The-Banner Magnus/Thunder shines a light on his site's numbers:
http://touch-the-banner.com/traffic-income-report-may-2017/
MGoBlog has far more hits and a different cost structure.
But as a wet-finger-in-the-air type of guide, that link provides a sense for potential revenue.
Were you talking about the ones this spring, or the ones last fall, or last spring or two summers ago? I wasn't sure which ones to pay attention to.
For one, we have no idea how much revenue MGoBlog makes/loses at a time; they seem to be doing fine regardless. And sure, the site has some slowdowns and can fail on major traffic days; those are being fixed as we speak. But this site is in the top 5000 in America for traffic per Alexa; that's better than basically all other college team-specific sites out there (11 Warriors, for example, is about 2,000 spots lower).
Also, cute shot at a guy who is running his own mortgage business and seems to be doing well enough that he can sponsor a popular site and support a family.
Sure, the site needs a redesign refresh, but the content is solid and brings people back. Fox Sports has been a downward trend for about a year now, and they are already appealing to the lowest common denominator.
As a businessman, I am sure you recognize the difference in business models (and the blunt instrument of per-emplyee revenue estimates) in your business vs an internet blog? And we both know if Brian did choose to charge a dime or more for online content what would happen to this blog.
All I am saying is that someone who is so intensely and publically critical of others' business practices seems very hypocritical when you look at how he runs his own house. I am sure Brian makes money; and good for him - it's a tough racket, for sure... but at the same time, a site upgrade would increase traffic and therefore ad revenues - there is literally zero disputing that fact.
Even if the big guys in sports media are cutting people to remain profitable due to bad decisions on content type and what the public and advertisers will pay for, it isn't like they are going away any time soon.
"operating a business is not cheap no matter what you are doing" says the guy who in this very thread defends a paid subscriber podcast business at $8.50 a month because "the overhead is minimal and it only takes a few dozen subscribers to break even." So which one is it?
That level of logical gymnastics is quite impressive... You must be quite the businessman!
Yes. If you are adding a subscription service to a business that is already operating. Who's doing the mental gymnastics?
Let me say the eye test has me way more excited about Evans than Derrick Green but I remember the Green defenders early on pointing to his average ypc etc .... which were seriously inflated by some flea bag opponents.
To that end Evans had 614 yds on 88 carries - with a gaudy near 7.0 ypc. Take out Hawaii and Rutgers and it drops to 348 yards on 69 carries - still a very Mike Hart career like average of 5.0. Elite college RBs come in at around 5.8+.
http://mgoblog.com/diaries/elite-ncaa-rbs-and-ums-lack-them-decades
So to extrapolate what is in reality "3 good games" - three 100-110 yards games for a feature back, is a bit difficult in you just look at #s as it took him 11 games (ex Hawaii Rutgers) to get the #s a feature back would get over a course of a season.
To that end he never carried more than 9x outside of Rutgers in 1 game. So a very situational runner.
Again - eye test looked good, he has the burst, wiggle, and escapability Green never showed. Hopefully he has the vision Smith lacked. If he didn't lose speed while able to gain 12-15 lbs he should be a heck of a back. But the #s yes were indeed gaudified by those 2 opponents.
McSorley had a 1995 Scott Mitchell season: heave it up and have Herman Moore grab it. Not to say McSorley's gonna be on The Biggest Loser in 20 years but it's hard to count on the heave it up principle over the course of a season.
Mitchell the Lion's 4th best QB of all time behind Stafford, Layne and Landry. Ahead of Munson and Danielson. surprisingly Ware was not on the list.
better steroids than the bulloughs used?
It helped McSorely's jump balls that 6'6'' Gesicki often had someone seemingly 6 inches shorter on him.
I couldn't believe how careless McSorely was with heaving up jump balls at the end of the Rose Bowl.
It bit him in the ass in the 4th quarter.
...to answer the question ("good?") - yes, he is.
i would love to see him to get a consistent 15-20 carries a game. i'm not even talking about the home run threat, i'm talking about the 2-yarders he turns into 6-yarders with a tiny move in traffic. seems like he did that on a lot of his carries last year...i think more carries will make him a star.
Love the Drake but we are loaded at RB and he's skinny at 180. Also don't want him taking touches from my guys Evans and Higdon. Think that pairing could be special.
One of my only hesitations about Harbaugh is his love towards power backs with little speed. Think Frank Gore, Deveon, Brandon Jacobs(/s), Stepfan Taylor, etc.
Yippie!
Charts on paper say we are awesome.
In the Hoke years I would say B.S.
However, I know Jim H gets the most out of his players so this bodes well.
Let's hope all the angry (insert injury here) hating god stays far away.
I wish life had that soundtrack
and text to video and audio to text, but yeah, couldn't agree more with how annoying it was to click for an article and get a horseshit video.
1.) PSU is an interesting regression team because they played a handful of close games last year and they were so reliant on the jump ball with Godwin. I question whether last year was legitimate. If they lose the B1G to wisconsin, or if we don't lose to Iowa, no one remembers they were a thing. Instead, two close games, one of which they weren't even in, makes them memorable.
2.) The DLine is going to be better than last year. Better at stopping the run and rushing the passer. I think LB's will be pretty similar, secondary worse, but that line is going to be great
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