Unverified Voracity Punches A Police Horse, Probably Comment Count

Brian

Sponsor note. Hey, if you happen to be in Philadelphia and punched a police horse last night, you need a lawyer. Please don't call Richard Hoeg, who does not handle that kind of law at all.

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But if you had the idea for a company that sells football helmets for police horses, then you would call Richard Hoeg, who does do that kind of law: contracts, LLCs, S corps, and the like, for entrepreneurial sorts who can survey the urban chaos our Super Bowl inflicts on local communities and finds a way to make it slightly better. For horses. Or people, I guess. If you have a company that helps people, Hoeg Law will also help you. I've never heard Richard say "we only handle horse companies." And that's the sort of thing that I think you'd bring up. Right?

Brandon Graham Michigan

The Gang Wins The Super Bowl,  thanks to Brandon Graham. Obligatory Philly chaos:

Congratulations to Brandon Graham, who was one of the few bright spots on the whole dang team when he was an upperclassman. I remember doing the UFRs for his senior year and pleading with anyone to listen to me that dude was an All-American. Nobody did except maybe Matt Hinton(?). Graham worked his ass off despite the very Rich Rod carnage all around him and was deservedly drafted in the first round; took him a minute to find his footing but that'll do. Everyone who's met him also thinks he's the best dude ever.

In other Super Bowl takes, this article from SBN was extremely prescient after watching that Big 12-ass game:

Last September, Sonny Dykes sat to watch the NFL’s season-opening game between the Chiefs and Patriots. Dykes, recently the head coach at Cal and then an offensive analyst at TCU, has coached college football since he was a graduate assistant at Kentucky in 1997. He noticed something about the pro game he was watching.

“Watching that game, I remember thinking, ‘This looks like a college football game,’” Dykes tells SB Nation. “They were both playing kind of college offenses, were really diverse in what they were doing, were using a lot of misdirection, were using some quarterback run, both teams. I thought, ‘Wow, this is kind of fun to watch.’”

The Chiefs used a series of misdirection and option plays that have long been common in the college game. They conned New England’s defense all night and scored 42 points in a surprising win. The Chiefs were near the tip of a spear that now includes pretty much the whole league, including the team they beat that night and the Eagles team the Patriots will play in Super Bowl 52.

“Ten years ago or maybe eight years ago, even, everybody in the NFL ran the same offense,” Dykes, now SMU’s head coach, says. “It was all kind of an I-formation, under center, you know; everybody ran the same stuff. All of a sudden, you started seeing a little bit of the college game proliferate a little bit in the NFL.”

New England didn't punt, gained 600 yards, and lost. Oh and there were multiple missed extra points. Big 12? Big 12.

The other thing that jumped out at me as I watched the second of two NFL games I consume annually: holy hell that catch rule. Philly's winning touchdown saw the WR catch the ball, get two feet down, and then take a full step to the endzone before he hit the ground. Both Al Michaels and Cris Collinsworth were absolutely convinced it was not a catch.

Which is nuts, because... uh, that's nuts. I will repeat my previous assertion: once you get foot #3 down by taking a step you're a runner and have caught the ball. That's a catch, and the Pittsburgh play earlier isn't.

Also, in the fourth quarter of a tight, all offense Super Bowl, Cris Collinsworth marveled that the football game he was watching could possibly live up to the halftime show. This was after several hundred plain old play action passes were dubbed "RPOs," like—just hypothetically—a two year old who had just discovered the word "wine" at Thanksgiving and may have repeated it at maximum volume for the sheer delight several hundred times.

I just dunno man.

Sample size! I have maybe been googling David DeJulius's free throw stats, for no reason, really. This is what I have found.

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Hooray! Also, here's this from that Orr game when he blew up:

DeJulius continued his strong play in the second half and was extremely efficient, finishing with 49 points on 13-of-19, including 9-of-11 from deep range in the 92-82 victory. He also converted 14-of-15 free throws and had seven assists and three turnovers.

I get nervous when they show him shooting just one free throw in the highlight videos but apparently that's just because free throws are boring. May they again be boring.

Also in high school stat news, Colin Castleton might be able to continue Michigan's stretch five offense...

Miller said he runs a motion offense and moves Castleton around the court to try and make it harder for teams to focus on him. "We let him back screen, we get him on the perimeter and let him flare and curl to the basket," Miller said. "We're perfectly fine with him shooting 3s." In fact, Castleton is his team's best 3-point shooter at 38 percent.

...after a year of eating nothing but meatballs.

Also also:

No word on his free throws though.

Boiled up. Purdue AD Mitch Daniels writes an op-ed for the Washington Post about the one-and-done rule being bad and dumb, and while he's necessarily compromised by being the head of an organization that doesn't actually pay its most important labor, he still brings more heat at the NCAA than I've seen from someone inside the sausage factory:

When the FBI revealed its findings about the corrupt connections among shoe companies, agents, a few big-time college programs and coaches, and the Amateur Athletic Union or AAU (the first “A” increasingly looks like a misnomer), no one near the sport was shocked. The existence of this part of the cesspool has been in plain view for years. Those in a position to stop the scandals spawned by the “one-and-done” era — in which many top-tier players were required to enroll in college for one year before bolting for the NBA — have been either powerless to do so or actively interested in perpetuating the status quo.

When it was discovered that, at what we’ve always considered an academically admirable school, championships had been won by teams loaded with players who took completely phony classes, most of us were sincerely shocked. We were stunned again when, after years of cogitation, the NCAA delivered a penalty of . . . nothing. It was a final confession of futility, confirming the necessity of this special commission, if any meaningful change is going to happen from the collegiate end.

Unfortunately none of his policy solutions—removing freshman eligibility, leaving early entry scholarships filled for four years, or adopting the college baseball zero-or-three model—are, like, good. Or even implementable, in the baseball case. I still fail to see how one-and-done stands up legally since the collective bargaining of the NBAPA is taking away rights from people who aren't members; IANAL but I'm surprised one-and-done hasn't been sued into oblivion by some Lavar Ball sort.

Etc.: ESPN's Paula Lavigne on the OTL investigation of MSU. PSDs no longer tax deductible. Cooper Marody executes some jock jams.

Comments

ijohnb

February 5th, 2018 at 1:15 PM ^

really does suck about "the catch" nonsense is that it, and other controversies like it, zap the drama out of the moment.  People don't even know whether to cheer in real time anymore because all plays of any significance go through a de novo review to see if the play was actually a play.  The "call on the field" is completely insignificant now.  It doesn't exist.

 

In reply to by ijohnb

Lou MacAdoo

February 5th, 2018 at 1:55 PM ^

You could see it when they panned to the fans in philly. About half were scared to cheer because they didn’t know if the fumble was legit or not. Everyone is just waiting for the replay. Ruins the moment

Pepto Bismol

February 5th, 2018 at 2:11 PM ^

While I 100% agree the Ertz catch was correctly a TD when he broke the plane, I don't think the Clement TD in the back of the endzone was a catch.  He bobbled.  Every other time in my NFL viewing life, that means possession isn't established until he re-grips, at which point he only got one foot in.  That's the way it's been every other time I've watched NFL football.  When something like that stands, I just throw my hands up and stop trying to figure it out.

CRISPed in the DIAG

February 5th, 2018 at 3:39 PM ^

I went into the game assuming there would be no "Catch?/No Catch?" calls going in Pats' favor. In that respect, I wasn't disappointed. The 4th and 1 pass to Foles was off an illegal formation that occasionally gets called. Whatever. If the Pats had won with the Pats getting those calls, the League would have imploded.

In reply to by ijohnb

Kevin13

February 5th, 2018 at 2:49 PM ^

it's getting to a point, with me, where I wish they would do away with all replay. It just slows a game down and seems unnecessary most of the time.

I honestly can't even believe they reviewed that play. He caught the ball cleanly, took three steps and then dove across the goal line. It never crossed my mind it might be a catch until they started talking about it on TV.

Needs

February 5th, 2018 at 3:30 PM ^

I seem to remember that when the NFL started to have replay, they put a clock on it and if the decision wasn't clear after 60 or 90 seconds of viewing, the call stood. Soccer seems to be doing something similar for its early iterations of replay. If a variety of sports adopted that idea of a fixed time limit to review and focused on egregious errors rather than the kinds of minute "was the ball moving in his hand/did he scrape the ball with his fingernail," it'd avoid the kind of frame by frame atrocity we saw in the end of the Purdue game.

Indy Pete - Go Blue

February 5th, 2018 at 1:18 PM ^

Nice tribute,and hats off to you Brian for seeing his potential so early.  I loved his post game interview. You could tell how much this means to him.  He is a true world champion, and how neat that he was the man who 'single-handedly' dethroned one Tom Brady.

Also, thank you for pointing out Collinsworth's worthless comment about the game living up to the halftime show.  That was bad, man.

Shop Smart Sho…

February 5th, 2018 at 1:27 PM ^

Mitch Daniels is Purdue's president.



A job he stole by stacking the deck at Purdue with his friends while he was governor, so they could hand him a job he has no qualifications for. I'm assuming to fulfill some strange libertarian fever dream of letting the market handle education. He's off to a strong start with the purchase of a for-profit college that is being ingested whole by Purdue.

Space Coyote

February 5th, 2018 at 2:07 PM ^

Purdue continues to be one of the most affordable B1G schools (both in-state and out-of-state) and hasn't increased tuition significantly (less that $200) since 2012.

I think his selection was shady and a conflict of interest. I think overall he's been pretty successful in seperating himself from his former politics, and been able to focus strictly on being the best president he can be for the university. He's taken some risks and done some innovative things since he's started, but most of them have seemed like smart moves (I think the purchase of Kaplan fits in very well with their growing on-line education system, Purdue Polytechnic High School is a good idea, etc.

And like his politics or not, his Purdue is going to operate in that political environment for the forseeable future. So it makes at least a little since to get someone that actually understands it to work within it. The policies may not be the best (you can debate either way, I don't want to get into that), but what is best for the University right now is understanding how to operate under those policies.

Bando Calrissian

February 5th, 2018 at 1:55 PM ^

Are you familiar with Mitch Daniels' general reign of terror, er, tenure as governor of Indiana? I mean, the person you want at the helm of an institute of public education is not someone who basically doesn't believe in the concept of public education. But that's all I have to say about that without crossing the line any further.

Robbie Moore

February 5th, 2018 at 2:23 PM ^

because I really don't like a bunch of politics in this blog but I can't help myself. America spends more per student than any nation on earth. And we rank, what?...25th in academic performance? WE ARE NOT GETTING RESULTS. But, like so much else in this country, we can't try new ideas because some tribal interest is threatened. This is not a left-right thing. This is, in most cases, self interest masquerading as ideology. I appreciate leaders like Daniels who try new things. And succeed with some and fail with others. That's called innovation.

And since Purdue has managed to keep tuition basically level for 5 years maybe they know something we can implement elsewhere. The millions of students about to go into debt up to their ears to finance an education will appreciate anything we can do.

Kevin13

February 5th, 2018 at 2:54 PM ^

Americans do not spend that much money on education. We are failing our public education in this country and most people who have a problem with some of his ideas, have been in education for a long time and believe it or not have a very good understanding about what works and does not work. We fail because too much money gets siphoned off for hairbrain ideas, because every Tom, Dick and Harry think they know more about education, even though they never worked in a school or tried to educate a child.

tpilews

February 5th, 2018 at 3:14 PM ^

Actually, we spend a lot of money on education. We just happen to spend it on things that don't actually make education better. Look no further than how far teaching has fallen as a profession the past 30-40 years. 

tpilews

February 6th, 2018 at 12:40 PM ^

There are studies that conclude that having a master's or phd doesn't equate to a higher quality teacher. Higher ed aside, the biggest problem is that we don't reward highly effective teachers. There is zero competition for their skillset. Teacher quality has the largest impact on student's education, moreso than any other factor. If we want to fix education, we should focus on measures to increase teacher quality. 

Kevin13

February 6th, 2018 at 9:29 AM ^

Guess what since 1970 inflation has caused spending to increase significantly so nothing new there.  Do you spend money on things like up keep of your home and utilities? Take a look at how much that has gone up since 1970? What was the cost of gas in 1970?  People put together charts but it doesn't tell the whole picture and then again someone is going to make a claim about that statitstic and how they can do better when they have no idea what they are talking about.

J.

February 6th, 2018 at 10:01 AM ^

Did you read the chart?  It's adjusted for inflation.  That doesn't mean that the chart tells the whole picture -- it doesn't.  Inflation-adjusted spending is essentially uncapped; the test scores may not be.  (Inflation-adjusted spending tripled, test scores stayed flat -- but could they have tripled?  If they were perfect scores in the first place, flat would be the best possible outcome).

In reply to by J.

Kevin13

February 6th, 2018 at 10:10 AM ^

would be I could put together a chart of Michigan football showing how much spending has increased since 1970 and then show their wins and championships in that time, which would be a pretty flat line.  Then I could say look how much more we spend on football why are we not winning a championship every year.  

Graph doesn't tell the whole story in either case. There are so many other factors and just becasue results don't always match spending it doesn't mean it's failing.

J.

February 6th, 2018 at 12:20 PM ^

I wish it would be a flat line. :(

Your analysis would almost certainly show that there was an extreme negative correlation between money spent and championships won, and therefore demand that we cut salaries and staff by 95%. :)

I wasn't claiming that the chart was accurate -- I said that explicitly.  I was just saying that your particular criticism of it was wrong.  There are plenty of other, legitimate criticisms.

CalifExile

February 6th, 2018 at 1:21 PM ^

The chart you're suggesting would be meaningless. You don't suggest any comparison to expenditures by other teams and the number of victories available is a set number. You have also set an arbitrary start point since you picked the start of Bo's tenure instead of say 1960. (Note to the DBs, I know Bo's first year was 1969).

Kevin13

February 6th, 2018 at 9:25 AM ^

but my answer was more we don't spend so much more then other industrialized nations. I have worked in education for 30 years and get upset when every layman out there thinks they know what's better for education and have no clue on studies and research and never been in a classroom to work with a student or on the administration side to know everything we deal with.

It would basically be like me telling a brain surgeon how to do their job and we could do an operation cheaper if we took a different approach.

jmblue

February 5th, 2018 at 3:27 PM ^

And we rank, what?...25th in academic performance? WE ARE NOT GETTING RESULTS.

These rankings need to be taken with a grain of salt. In contrast to many other Western countries, we don't make kids take a do-or-die examination at age 14 to decide whether or not they can go to a college prep high school.

jmblue

February 6th, 2018 at 11:39 AM ^

Not necessarily.  We need more data at our disposal.    

Public schools in Michigan are not swimming in cash, if that's what you're implying.  Many districts have spent a good portion of this century freezing salaries, requiring teachers to purchase many of their own supplies, making class sizes larger, and and making students pay to participate in extracurricular activities.  

zlionsfan

February 5th, 2018 at 2:12 PM ^

The last non-interim Purdue president before Daniels is an astrophysicist who's now director of the NSF. The acting president after her was a professor at Cal-Berkeley and Purdue before moving up to Provost.

The one good thing Daniels has done is (mostly) leaving the athletic department to them what knows it. It wasn't great when Burke was there, since Burke was aware of Purdue's deficiencies but unwilling to mount any serious effort to overcome them (but was still head and shoulders above his predecessors in trying to build a C-level athletic department). Bobinski seems to understand how to build something better than that, and actually has taken steps to do so (see: hiring Brohm, not having lost Brohm yet).

As mentioned in this space during the Dark Age, despite what the NCAA would like, college sports doesn't work entirely like a business. You can't #brand and #promote it at the expense of the experience of going to games, because it doesn't work that way. Daniels' background is as close to #brand as you can get without a marketing degree, and Purdue is sending out quite a bit of non-sports material exactly along those lines. From where I sit, criticism of his background is entirely on point.

Section 1.8

February 5th, 2018 at 2:22 PM ^

In just the spirit of informing people -- like telling them when there's been a "reign of terror" -- here's another take.  You know, just so's people can get all the information, right?  Kate Bachelder of the Wall Street Journal and formerly of Hillsdale College:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-to-save-american-colleges-1429913861

For my own part, I'm going to go ahead and suggest -- respectfully of course -- that it is grossly misinforming people that Mitch Daniels "basically doesn't believe in the concept of public education."

There might just be no major university president anywhere in the United States who has done more to hold down costs for his students, reducing their tuitions and their student debt, than Mitch Daniels.

And by all means feel free to disagree.  Make up your own mind.  Because "that's all I have to say about that without crossing the line any further ." 

 

 

outsidethebox

February 5th, 2018 at 10:20 PM ^

My daughter is a Purdue grad. I would say that maybe the low cost correlates most closely with a poor education. My daughter was fortunate to have a good HS education but she said she felt like she was mostly a tutor for her fellow classmates...otherwise was not challenged appropriately. 

Otherwise, we were Indiana residents when dear Mitch was governor. Mitch Daniels is a simply your average, jackass politician...maybe worse, definately not better.

outsidethebox

February 5th, 2018 at 10:20 PM ^

My daughter is a Purdue grad. I would say that maybe the low cost correlates most closely with a poor education. My daughter was fortunate to have a good HS education but she said she felt like she was mostly a tutor for her fellow classmates...otherwise was not challenged appropriately. 

Otherwise, we were Indiana residents when dear Mitch was governor. Mitch Daniels is a simply your average, jackass politician...maybe worse, definately not better.

Section 1.8

February 6th, 2018 at 12:38 PM ^

About Title IX: In a nutshell, my main gripe with Title IX has been that in practice, it has been both a ridiculous overreach (See, Drew Sterrett v. Regents of the University of Michigan) and a woefullly weak response to true cases of sexual assault.  (See, People v. Larry Nassar; U.S. v. Larry Nassar).  And I think that with each passing month and year, events just keep proving me right on both counts.

 

About "defend[ing] the campus culture that has swept rape under the rug...":  I have already stated before; given that I have never once written a single thing that lends credence to that allegation, any time somebody wants to accuse me of somehow being "pro-rape" or "pro-rapist," the conversation is over.

 

trueblueintexas

February 5th, 2018 at 5:13 PM ^

This is only one persons's take, however, I value this persons insight because: 1) is a close family member 2) worked their way up to be a very successful college president during their career 3) has lived in Indiana the past 20+ years 4) was chairman of the board of the library which was managed under the state budget so they have insight into the state political operations with regards to education 5) has interacted with and knows Mitch Daniels.

That one person's take is that Mitch did only get that job because of his contacts through politics and it should not have happened. They like the purchase of Kaplan because it is a new way to broaden the footprint of a school which needs help attracting a broader and more diverse student body. Despite their support for this individual action, they still are very skeptical of Daniel's long term positive impact on a good academic school because he is not committed to education. 

That's one persons take.

Um1994

February 5th, 2018 at 5:46 PM ^

I, for one, am also skeptical of many “professional educators and administrators.”  It’s difficult to argue that they all have the academic interests of the institution in mind when making decisions.  Academic rankings have fallen at many universities headed by such professionals.  Furthermore, it’s likely that a large portion of university administrators are appointed because of who they know, so that’s probably not the disqualifier that some think it is or should be.  It seems that a lot of criticism by some commenters is related to politics rather than performance.