It's a bye week and Atomic Dog happened, so this week's question is naturally inspired by Dennis Norfleet:

I think we can all admit our collective love for Dennis Norfleet extends well beyond what he's accomplished thus far as a Michigan football player. (What he could hypothetically accomplish is a topic for another week.) Looking back onto Michigan teams of the past—hoops and hockey included—which player or players stick out in your mind as somebody you enjoyed cheering on largely for reasons outside of their ability to perform between the lines?

Additionally, please include the song you'd choose for Special K to play when a hypothetical kick returnin' you prepares to receive a kickoff.

Seth: Oh man. Well, Dakich, but I have a feeling Ace had Andrew in mind when he asked, so I leave that to the basketball beat. There must also be an entire category for one-off videos: Coner's rap, Louie Caporusso: Love Expert, 2011 hockey's savage mock rock skit, etc.

There's a bittersweet one worth discussing: Big Will. As a player, in a time when Michigan needed a hero out of their 5-star DT, we instead got Thor. Soup did little to justify his hype until Brady swapped him back to defense and set the army of DL coaches on him. That fact unfortunately overshadowed a blue chip off-the-field career.

Even before he arrived, Will gave us two commitment celebrations: one a year before the rest of his class, the second a literal hat dance...

...after trolling recruitniks by declaring Michigan out and LSU his leader two days prior.

Will was a regular at various with-the-kids charity functions the players did, and these inevitably led to endearing photos of flat-topped Soup among the Lilliputians. I never found video of it, but in the same vein, I remember after we beat Michigan State in 2012 that the scoreboard zoomed in on the students as various smurf-sized players jumped up to sit among them, and then Will started to follow and you could clearly make out some girl in the drop zone mouthing "Oh shit!"

Finally, there was the misdemeanor so hilarious we begged EDSBS to bring back the Fulmer Cup: denting the hood of a car while trying to Dukes of Hazzard. This destroyed my previous all-time favorite crime by a Wolverine: Jerald Robinson's heroic destruction of a parking gate. Campbell may not have been as productive as Martin, nor as eloquent as RVB, but in times that called for levity as much as interior line depth, Big Will was at the very least hilarious.

Seth again: Crap, I forgot music. Kool & the Gang, Jungle Boogie: "Get down, get [your pad level] down!"

Also: this.

[Hit THE JUMP for Denard, Air Georgia, the owner of the world's most interesting pet, the unicyclist and the philosopher, and more.]

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Adam: You're probably going to roll your eyes when you read this, but my answer is Denard. Of course the performance caveat applies, but the reasons I cheered for Denard extend far beyond what he did on the field. Sure, there was the Notre Dame run and the time he defied the laws of physics against Ohio State, leaving us collectively squealing, "wut?" More than anything, though, I cheered Denard on because he cared.

I had a friend who was a student equipment manager for the football team when we were undergrads. Denard lingered in the locker room after a game his freshman year in which he barely played. The student managers were gathering up equipment to load the truck when Denard started helping them. They told him that he could leave, but he told them he couldn't; he said he had to do something that day to earn his scholarship. 

Denard was the equivalent of a virtuoso performer who played unlike any I've ever heard. In 2011 a new coaching staff arrived and asked him to keep doing what he was doing but throw in a little Seven Nation Army, thank you very much. Denard was no Jack White, but he didn't transfer. There were places he could have gone that would have offered better on-field opportunities. Those places, however, weren't Michigan. Denard loved Michigan, and I'll always root for him because of that.

As Seth mentioned, the late Rich Rod era was one that needed levity. Denard may not have danced much, but his ubiquitous dilithium-powered smile made things seem a little better than they really were. 

If I'm returning kickoffs my music is Notorious B.I.G.'s "Hypnotize."

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Ace: I've got two, one each from basketball and football, and while Dakich is certainly working his way into the discussion he's featured plenty in this space—instead, I've gotta show some love to two Michigan internet stars of yore.

A friend from high school who'd walked on at Michigan for a couple years ended up on our IM flag football team after he'd left the varsity squad, along with another former walk-on buddy of his; as you'd probably imagine, we were quite good. Before a game late in the season, the walk-on came to our game with a good friend in tow: Marques, who was very intent on actually playing in the game. He warmed up with us and asked to play quarterback. None of us would say 'no', of course, and Slocum started tossing lefty, flat-footed, 60-yard frozen ropes with so much force most of us couldn't (or chose not to) hang on. It was remarkable.

Before the game started, the other team recognized the 320-pound man on our team was very much not allowed to play in an IM game, so Marques was relegated to cheerleader duty. It was a cold night. He had a car. He could've easily left. Instead, he spent the entire game on our sideline, mostly heckling his former teammates, but also dishing out plenty to any player on the field and the refs—all in good fun, and to the point that everyone on that field had involuntarily busted out laughing at an inopportune time before the final whistle. Our flag football team fell just short of the title that year, but I'm pretty sure we had the most fun of anybody.

Finally, kickoff music. For its great buildup, thumping drums, general hypeness, built-in call-and-response section, and overall excellence, give me Rage Against The Machine's cover of "Renegades of Funk", which narrowly beats out about half the songs off Outkast's Stankonia, easily the most reliable get-hype album in my library.

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Brian: We must not forget that we had this combination on the bench just last year: 

For football, I liked all the Pahokee kids more than might be rational. They were small, tough as nails, and never had a whisper of trouble. They got caught up in all that Rodriguez stuff and I kind of felt that a certain cranky kind of Michigan fan regarded them as not Michigan material... for whatever reason. Tell that to last season's running back pickups. Also, fingerguns.

Also Ryan Van Bergen, for telling it like it is. And David Molk, for transparently hating the media in a hilarious way. 

My kickoff return music is probably some emo crap but I'll pretend it's "Bombs Over Baghdad."

Ace: Of course Brian would be the last person on Earth who still spells out the entire name of that song. (Unassailable choice, though.)