When the university president needs to step in to help close a contract, it's a good sign that the AD isn't up to the task.
And one glance in the general direction of the basketball program should be enough to convince anyone who wasn't already convinced by the friction between Harbaugh and Warde.
Two years ago I moved back to the midwest, from the west coast. My son is a high school junior now and has already mentioned that he'd like to go to Wisconsin, since we'd be paying in-state tuition and they have programs that match his interests.
On Monday night as the clock wound down to zero in Houston and we stayed in our seats waaay up in Section 641 for the trophy presentation and then filtered out of the stadium with the happiest crowd I've been in since the '98 Rose Bowl, he was shouting "IT'S GREAT! TO BE! A MICHIGAN WOLVERINE!" just as loudly as I was.
I'm gonna remember that for the rest of my life, no matter where he ends up for college.
"The buck stops with me, and I've got to get our football team to understand and recognize that you've got to play this game for four quarters with a mentality. [...] We just did not, for some reason. We thought we were somebody else. We thought we were the two-time national champion Georgia Bulldogs or something. I don't know what we thought, but we were mistaken. [...] it's how you respond to them. They have a chance to respond to this very disappointing performance in the second half. So the choices they will have to make will be ones that start tomorrow."
Dude went from "It's me" to "we" to "it's them and they suck" in the space of a few sentences.
I remember that game. A couple of folks on the other side of the arena waited until about sixty seconds into the game, stood up, and shouted "WHY HAVEN'T WE SCORED YET??".
100% of the credit for getting us moving on the "new" site (which was originally internally called the "Temporary Orders Site", believe it or not) belongs to u/dustinruns on Reddit (...I'd tag him here but I'm not sure what his MGo username is). He saw us struggling to get the OG orders site up and running -- we never did find someone who's an AWS console jockey to help us out -- and said "Hey, I've got this little proof-of-concept I made for an orders site in order to teach myself Flask..."
Quick question: I understand the Discord hurdle being a bit too high for some. Do you use the orders site? Or do you rogue? Both are valid choices, but as one of the folks who spent a fair amount of time (re)building the orders site I'm curious whether it's also considered too hard to use.
Discord's great to be able to engage with the rest of the Wolverines while you make your move.
The orders site is great for quick "I want to do my part but I don't want to make it my entire life" folks.
There are pros and cons to both, and the orders that are assigned to each are more or less distinct. If you want to be social, join the Discord and come have fun with the rest of us over there! If you're just looking to lend your support but don't have a lot of time, use the site!
There is a good chance that we're going to be asking folks on Discord to start using the site in the near future, since we're relatively happy with how it's been performing the last few nights. But please don't take that as an indication that you shouldn't join our Discord!
Answering this assuming it's an honest question, but feel free to laugh about whooshing me if that's the case.
RNG is "random number generator". In this context, they're referring to the rolls every night that determine whether a team wins or loses a territory -- the roll is a matter of figuring out how many effective stars each contesting team has committed to the territory, and then basically picking a random number between one and the total-effective-star-count.
Assuming you're playing the game, you can look at eg the territory of Cariboo (currently occupied by Wisconsin in Western Canada), and then on the left side click on "3/17 -> Michigan". It'll open a window where you can scroll to the bottom and see a pie chart
Michigan had 145.5 stars allocated, Wisconsin 81, and Nebraska 29. We had a 57% chance to defend the territory, and lost it on a slightly unlucky roll.
That's what they're talking about when they mention RNG
There's a dropdown at the top of the map that says "Latest" when you load it. If you turn on bridges and then change the date you're looking at, you'll see where Chaos has been linked. It's been changing as expected.
Every CFB Risk game has involved an element of Chaos. In this iteration, folks could opt to join Chaos as their team -- and four people have chosen to do so -- but mostly Chaos gets recruits from teams that are eliminated early in the game (...at which point the eliminated team's players can choose to align with any other faction).
Chaos can't be directly attacked at their home base, Bermuda, and that region's bridges to other North America territories change randomly on a daily basis. Anywhere that Chaos can get a foothold on the mainland, they can continue to spread from there.
Yeah, Notre Dame has one territory (Blacksburg) and is surrounded by four different rivals including the second-biggest team. They'll be gone in the next few turns.
Each region you wholly own appears to give every player an additional .5x power. That is, if/when we get the Candian Shield, literally everything we do is worth 1.5x as much. If we take a second region, it'd be 2x.
The Buckeyes already have this bonus since they've taken control of Ohio, which is the "Rust Belt" region. We shouldn't have too much to worry about from them for a little while longer since we're in the alliance, but it'd be worth it to make sure we continue to own as many regions as they do so that we can keep our battlefield superiority when it eventually becomes necessary to confront them.
Well, as EastCoast mentioned, we've got three or four Georgia-owned territories that we need to pick up -- three of them are necessary to get a region bonus for the next turn -- and at that point we'll have a few bridges to distant parts of the map that we can play with (Yukon over in western Canada, currently owned by UVa; and Greenville and Statesboro down the Atlantic Coast).
I'm sure our diplomats have a combined strategy to take out the Southern schools and I strongly suspect getting those bridges under control is a key part of it.
That said, even though we have an alliance with the rest of the B1G, every team has rogues and we're still going to need to defend our territories -- especially within the Canadian Shield region, since we want to retain that bonus once (if/when) we get it.
Yes, all eight teams that were still alive at the end of the last game had to hold off for the first three days and could only defend their home territory. That was us, Wisconsin, tOSU, Nebraska, Texas, Texas A&M, Alabama, and Georgia Tech.
Now that there aren't any restrictions, seven of the eight are holding at least six territories (with Bama only having four after last night's roll). There are 42 teams left who haven't been eliminated, including Team Chaos; at this point Michigan is doing great but we can't get complacent.
The first round went more or less until everyone kinda ran out of steam and just decided to end it. Round 2 (and subsequent rounds) have been capped at 50 days because by that point the map tends to reach a kind of equilibrium.
I can't tell whether I'm more annoyed that Sparty has laid claim to Windsor or that it will take Michigan at least two days to fix that error since "Ann Arbor" (territory) isn't considered to be bordering on "Toronto".
Unhomed teams. They're allowed to attack anywhere on the board, including Ann Arbor; the ideas is that they'll likely (if they coordinate at all) pick up some of the currently-owned-by-NCAA territory.
I've only seen the headlines so far, but I can answer this at least partially: It's always a bad look for a boss to have a relationship with a subordinate. It gets worse the higher up the food chain you go.
Yeah, this is the correct answer. The only thing about Ted Lasso that was based on Harbaugh was his clothing choices. The report during the game left out this (fairly significant) piece of context.
I didn't go to JCU (spent my undergrad in Ann Arbor), but I was a ball-boy for the basketball team for five or six years in the eighties, attended just about every home football game between '77 and '95 (with one year off somewhere in there -- and to be fair, the first several years weren't by choice), attended the summer sports camp around the same years I was helping out the basketball team, worked for the Alumni Association for my first paying software gig in high school, and generally lived on the campus until I started college. Can I be a Blue Streak too? ;-)
Regarding this news: Tom Arth was an acquaintance of my brother's -- both Ignatius football players -- and he seems like a good guy and a great coach. The UT-Chattanooga people are pretty annoyed they got a D3 coach from what I've heard, but they'll love him soon enough. I really hope Finotti does well at Carroll; that program's been blowing up under Arth.
I want to share this with my Firefly-loving friends and family, but just realized that they all either a) already saw this or b) have no idea what UFR is.
Yay for being the smallest intersection on the Venn diagram.
If the band is more important than the opponent then how come I can get CMU or Appy State tickets so much cheaper and easier than OSU or ND tickets? Same band is at all those games.
He said "more important." He didn't say "the only thing important at all."
I live in the Bay Area, and my older sister went to Boston College for undergrad and Stanford for medical school. I've never heard her mention Stanford sports a single time.
Oddly enough, the biggest Stanford fan I know is a Michigan alum (and fan) who went to Stanford for his post-grad. Perhaps he learned his fandom in the midwest and just carried it over.
Was it the spring of '96 or the spring of '98 when, after the hockey team won the NCAA championship in overtime, a "riot" occurred that consisted of a mob of a couple hundred people walking down South U towards the Union, stopping a couple of places (including the Law Library) to sing the Victors?
While it's one of my favorite memories of my time at Michigan, I can't remember what year it was. Must be getting old.
A third were people who got sloppy (VCU's take would be "they were playing faster than they were comfortable", but they were self-inflicted mistakes regardless of the spin); another third or so looked like blatant uncalled fouls. I foresee a lot of complaining about the refs in my near future.
It's almost certainly just a "money grab" -- there's no other reasonable explanation -- but that explanation itself is unreasonable as well.
In January of 1998, I remember Rose Bowl uniforms for sale in the bookstores. They were the exact same uniforms worn during the year, except that they had the Rose Bowl patch on 'em. They seemed to sell just fine, to the same people that already had a bunch of uniforms in their closet.
That trick play was atrocious, but there's so many things that went wrong in this game (almost any one of which could have led to a different result) that it's hard to put this on any one person's shoulders.
Only positive coming out of the game that I saw: The D-line didn't cave nearly as badly as I had expected.
So, I'm a slacker and didn't contribute to the Kickstarter. Also, I suck. But it just so happens that I'm going to be in A^2 on Saturday, and would love to stop by and pick up a copy. Will that be possible? The phrasing ("We'll have copies and t-shirts available there for pickup if you bought on the Kickstarter") is sufficiently ambiguous -- I'm aware I missed my once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for the photobomb T-shirt, but are the "copies" only for Kickstarters as well?
What's the chant at this point? When I graduated in 1999, it was "chump, dick, wuss, douuuuuchebag, asshole, prick, CHEATER!"
I always liked that it ended with a elementary-school-level taunt. I was disappointed when I heard that it had grown, a few years later (and thus diminished the power of CHEATER!)... what is it now?
I was about to post the exact same point. Was it indisputably not a catch? Apparently the refs thought so after review, and I'm really glad they did, but... not so sure. Although the last animated gif makes a very strong argument that the refs got it right.
Of course, I think that it was about as good a catch as the called-back INT that VT had in the third quarter(?), and if that one wasn't good enough, then this one wasn't good enough either, so at least they were consistent.
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So the question we all need to be asking is: What does Jim Stapleton think of the hire?
(...kidding, but unfortunately maybe not kidding?)
When the university president needs to step in to help close a contract, it's a good sign that the AD isn't up to the task.
And one glance in the general direction of the basketball program should be enough to convince anyone who wasn't already convinced by the friction between Harbaugh and Warde.
Two years ago I moved back to the midwest, from the west coast. My son is a high school junior now and has already mentioned that he'd like to go to Wisconsin, since we'd be paying in-state tuition and they have programs that match his interests.
On Monday night as the clock wound down to zero in Houston and we stayed in our seats waaay up in Section 641 for the trophy presentation and then filtered out of the stadium with the happiest crowd I've been in since the '98 Rose Bowl, he was shouting "IT'S GREAT! TO BE! A MICHIGAN WOLVERINE!" just as loudly as I was.
I'm gonna remember that for the rest of my life, no matter where he ends up for college.
The only reason Matt's videos are funnier is because he crams four times as many jokes in.
And because he's a better writer.
And he seems to have a better grasp of each team's fanbase.
And since he's not sponsored he likely has more freedom to poke fun at sacred cows.
But if it weren't for those things... SEC Shorts would be just as funny!
(...and I'm not gonna mention anything about how Michigan was in the toddler room last year in a late-season SEC Roll Call video)
"The buck stops with me, and I've got to get our football team to understand and recognize that you've got to play this game for four quarters with a mentality. [...] We just did not, for some reason. We thought we were somebody else. We thought we were the two-time national champion Georgia Bulldogs or something. I don't know what we thought, but we were mistaken. [...] it's how you respond to them. They have a chance to respond to this very disappointing performance in the second half. So the choices they will have to make will be ones that start tomorrow."
Dude went from "It's me" to "we" to "it's them and they suck" in the space of a few sentences.
I remember that game. A couple of folks on the other side of the arena waited until about sixty seconds into the game, stood up, and shouted "WHY HAVEN'T WE SCORED YET??".
Less than ten seconds later, Michigan scored.
It was glorious.
100% of the credit for getting us moving on the "new" site (which was originally internally called the "Temporary Orders Site", believe it or not) belongs to u/dustinruns on Reddit (...I'd tag him here but I'm not sure what his MGo username is). He saw us struggling to get the OG orders site up and running -- we never did find someone who's an AWS console jockey to help us out -- and said "Hey, I've got this little proof-of-concept I made for an orders site in order to teach myself Flask..."
And the rest is history.
Thanks, dustin!
Huh. Given your recent posting history, you care more about the game than most people on the blog. Thanks for your continued support!
We'll let you know in about twelve hours.
Quick question: I understand the Discord hurdle being a bit too high for some. Do you use the orders site? Or do you rogue? Both are valid choices, but as one of the folks who spent a fair amount of time (re)building the orders site I'm curious whether it's also considered too hard to use.
Nah, OSU's Turn 25 (and then Turn 26 after the anti-bot stuff was turned on) are perrrrrfectly legitimate.
Discord's great to be able to engage with the rest of the Wolverines while you make your move.
The orders site is great for quick "I want to do my part but I don't want to make it my entire life" folks.
There are pros and cons to both, and the orders that are assigned to each are more or less distinct. If you want to be social, join the Discord and come have fun with the rest of us over there! If you're just looking to lend your support but don't have a lot of time, use the site!
There is a good chance that we're going to be asking folks on Discord to start using the site in the near future, since we're relatively happy with how it's been performing the last few nights. But please don't take that as an indication that you shouldn't join our Discord!
Answering this assuming it's an honest question, but feel free to laugh about whooshing me if that's the case.
RNG is "random number generator". In this context, they're referring to the rolls every night that determine whether a team wins or loses a territory -- the roll is a matter of figuring out how many effective stars each contesting team has committed to the territory, and then basically picking a random number between one and the total-effective-star-count.
Assuming you're playing the game, you can look at eg the territory of Cariboo (currently occupied by Wisconsin in Western Canada), and then on the left side click on "3/17 -> Michigan". It'll open a window where you can scroll to the bottom and see a pie chart
Michigan had 145.5 stars allocated, Wisconsin 81, and Nebraska 29. We had a 57% chance to defend the territory, and lost it on a slightly unlucky roll.
That's what they're talking about when they mention RNG
There's a dropdown at the top of the map that says "Latest" when you load it. If you turn on bridges and then change the date you're looking at, you'll see where Chaos has been linked. It's been changing as expected.
Every CFB Risk game has involved an element of Chaos. In this iteration, folks could opt to join Chaos as their team -- and four people have chosen to do so -- but mostly Chaos gets recruits from teams that are eliminated early in the game (...at which point the eliminated team's players can choose to align with any other faction).
Chaos can't be directly attacked at their home base, Bermuda, and that region's bridges to other North America territories change randomly on a daily basis. Anywhere that Chaos can get a foothold on the mainland, they can continue to spread from there.
Yeah, Notre Dame has one territory (Blacksburg) and is surrounded by four different rivals including the second-biggest team. They'll be gone in the next few turns.
Each region you wholly own appears to give every player an additional .5x power. That is, if/when we get the Candian Shield, literally everything we do is worth 1.5x as much. If we take a second region, it'd be 2x.
The Buckeyes already have this bonus since they've taken control of Ohio, which is the "Rust Belt" region. We shouldn't have too much to worry about from them for a little while longer since we're in the alliance, but it'd be worth it to make sure we continue to own as many regions as they do so that we can keep our battlefield superiority when it eventually becomes necessary to confront them.
Well, as EastCoast mentioned, we've got three or four Georgia-owned territories that we need to pick up -- three of them are necessary to get a region bonus for the next turn -- and at that point we'll have a few bridges to distant parts of the map that we can play with (Yukon over in western Canada, currently owned by UVa; and Greenville and Statesboro down the Atlantic Coast).
I'm sure our diplomats have a combined strategy to take out the Southern schools and I strongly suspect getting those bridges under control is a key part of it.
That said, even though we have an alliance with the rest of the B1G, every team has rogues and we're still going to need to defend our territories -- especially within the Canadian Shield region, since we want to retain that bonus once (if/when) we get it.
Yes, all eight teams that were still alive at the end of the last game had to hold off for the first three days and could only defend their home territory. That was us, Wisconsin, tOSU, Nebraska, Texas, Texas A&M, Alabama, and Georgia Tech.
Now that there aren't any restrictions, seven of the eight are holding at least six territories (with Bama only having four after last night's roll). There are 42 teams left who haven't been eliminated, including Team Chaos; at this point Michigan is doing great but we can't get complacent.
The first round went more or less until everyone kinda ran out of steam and just decided to end it. Round 2 (and subsequent rounds) have been capped at 50 days because by that point the map tends to reach a kind of equilibrium.
Take THAT, Ohio governor Robert Lucas (1832–1836)!
I can't tell whether I'm more annoyed that Sparty has laid claim to Windsor or that it will take Michigan at least two days to fix that error since "Ann Arbor" (territory) isn't considered to be bordering on "Toronto".
It's being worked on. Could use some help, actually -- join the Discord if you're interested in helping to get the orders site back up.
(We've got the code, but there are some knowledge gaps)
Unhomed teams. They're allowed to attack anywhere on the board, including Ann Arbor; the ideas is that they'll likely (if they coordinate at all) pick up some of the currently-owned-by-NCAA territory.
Of course they called it SD ball on the floor. At least the refs are consistent.
I've only seen the headlines so far, but I can answer this at least partially: It's always a bad look for a boss to have a relationship with a subordinate. It gets worse the higher up the food chain you go.
Yeah, this is the correct answer. The only thing about Ted Lasso that was based on Harbaugh was his clothing choices. The report during the game left out this (fairly significant) piece of context.
I didn't go to JCU (spent my undergrad in Ann Arbor), but I was a ball-boy for the basketball team for five or six years in the eighties, attended just about every home football game between '77 and '95 (with one year off somewhere in there -- and to be fair, the first several years weren't by choice), attended the summer sports camp around the same years I was helping out the basketball team, worked for the Alumni Association for my first paying software gig in high school, and generally lived on the campus until I started college. Can I be a Blue Streak too? ;-)
Regarding this news: Tom Arth was an acquaintance of my brother's -- both Ignatius football players -- and he seems like a good guy and a great coach. The UT-Chattanooga people are pretty annoyed they got a D3 coach from what I've heard, but they'll love him soon enough. I really hope Finotti does well at Carroll; that program's been blowing up under Arth.
I had originally included "... unless it happens to be Homecoming", but figured the snark would be too over-the-top at that point.
Since "The Art, The Art, The Art" hasn't updated since the preseason wallpaper, Darboh's catch has been my phone lock screen since Saturday afternoon.
But man, that run is fun to watch over and over and over. SBNation's teleporter take on it is my favorite.
I'm ready to run through a wall RIGHT NOW.
Yeah, they were St. Joe's alums. The confusion is warranted, though, since Grbac is currently the QB Coach at St. Ignatius.
(Or at least he was recently -- I'm an Ignatius alum, but I haven't been following their football program as closely in recent years)
Judging from his Twitter feed, it's true.
I missed the announcement too, and guess I can stop reading the presser transcripts now. Bummer.
I want to share this with my Firefly-loving friends and family, but just realized that they all either a) already saw this or b) have no idea what UFR is.
Yay for being the smallest intersection on the Venn diagram.
He said "more important." He didn't say "the only thing important at all."
I live in the Bay Area, and my older sister went to Boston College for undergrad and Stanford for medical school. I've never heard her mention Stanford sports a single time.
Oddly enough, the biggest Stanford fan I know is a Michigan alum (and fan) who went to Stanford for his post-grad. Perhaps he learned his fandom in the midwest and just carried it over.
Was it the spring of '96 or the spring of '98 when, after the hockey team won the NCAA championship in overtime, a "riot" occurred that consisted of a mob of a couple hundred people walking down South U towards the Union, stopping a couple of places (including the Law Library) to sing the Victors?
While it's one of my favorite memories of my time at Michigan, I can't remember what year it was. Must be getting old.
I modded you (+1, Underrated) because I couldn't find the (+1, Awesome).
If all else fails, the Muppets have already shown us a way forward...
I think you might be overestimating Burke a bit.
It might be easier to list the awards that Burke won't win.
Um...
...Hobey Baker?
Joe Posnanski has you covered here.
A third were people who got sloppy (VCU's take would be "they were playing faster than they were comfortable", but they were self-inflicted mistakes regardless of the spin); another third or so looked like blatant uncalled fouls. I foresee a lot of complaining about the refs in my near future.
It's almost certainly just a "money grab" -- there's no other reasonable explanation -- but that explanation itself is unreasonable as well.
In January of 1998, I remember Rose Bowl uniforms for sale in the bookstores. They were the exact same uniforms worn during the year, except that they had the Rose Bowl patch on 'em. They seemed to sell just fine, to the same people that already had a bunch of uniforms in their closet.
That trick play was atrocious, but there's so many things that went wrong in this game (almost any one of which could have led to a different result) that it's hard to put this on any one person's shoulders.
Only positive coming out of the game that I saw: The D-line didn't cave nearly as badly as I had expected.
Two weeks to learn from this and move on.
...but you don't need to bother with a 'bot. Just set up a hashtag and go from there.
Anyone "watching" the conversation can just search for the tag. Anyone can block anyone they don't want to hear from. Win/win.
So, I'm a slacker and didn't contribute to the Kickstarter. Also, I suck. But it just so happens that I'm going to be in A^2 on Saturday, and would love to stop by and pick up a copy. Will that be possible? The phrasing ("We'll have copies and t-shirts available there for pickup if you bought on the Kickstarter") is sufficiently ambiguous -- I'm aware I missed my once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for the photobomb T-shirt, but are the "copies" only for Kickstarters as well?
If so, drat.
But I'll still stop by. See you Saturday!
What's the chant at this point? When I graduated in 1999, it was "chump, dick, wuss, douuuuuchebag, asshole, prick, CHEATER!"
I always liked that it ended with a elementary-school-level taunt. I was disappointed when I heard that it had grown, a few years later (and thus diminished the power of CHEATER!)... what is it now?
I was about to post the exact same point. Was it indisputably not a catch? Apparently the refs thought so after review, and I'm really glad they did, but... not so sure. Although the last animated gif makes a very strong argument that the refs got it right.
Of course, I think that it was about as good a catch as the called-back INT that VT had in the third quarter(?), and if that one wasn't good enough, then this one wasn't good enough either, so at least they were consistent.
A game photo... in a jersey thread... with a picture of Oregon... where they weren't the offenders.
I see what you did there. Well played, Moleskyn.