This is true, but independent contractors are not employees.  There's also tertiary considerations like "can Michigan put Tom Brady on the team just for the tournament, even though he's not a student?" that would have to be addressed.

It is not an easy equation, and I don't pretend to have a magic answer.

That said, it seems like the fundamental issue is whether we are willing to warp our education institutions around sports.  Specifically, are we willing to let football dictate what the educational institution can and cannot do for its students? or do we want the colleges to dictate what football can and cannot do?

I absolutely want the University of Michigan to provide a top-quality educational experience to all its students as its highest priority.  It would be nice if it can also field a championship football team in the new world, but I would rather see the football team fall back to its nadir than have football players paid princely sums while the AD cuts other men's programs or fails to support women's programs to any equal degree.

Given that, I have two proposals.
1.  Incremental Change.
   i.  Take the TV money and create a health care trust fund that provides all student-athlete-alumni with subsidized health care.  It could even be free-at-UM-facilities/subsidized elsewhere.  This has three primary benefits:  it dodges all the Title IX/NIL issues because it's only for alumni; it helps cushion the athletes against the damage their sport inflicts (I'm primarily thinking concussion/late-life TBI, but Trente Jones could use something like this); and it is a benefit that sets Michigan apart - world-class healthcare is not something everyone else can offer.
  ii.  Restructure the athletic department from the top down to account for the fact that in the new world, Michigan will be soliciting donations for itself and for the NIL collectives which are paying the athletes.

2.  Radical Change.
  i.  Drive the formation of a super-conference between the B1G and SEC, ending up with ~32 teams.  That super-conference would contract with a newly formed entity - call it the NCFC - which would be a for-marginal-profit company.
  ii.  Use the marketing muscle of the new super conference to make it clear that there are now two groups:  big-time college football, awash in money and the issues that brings; and universities which offer their students athletic opportunities.  The idea is to isolate the schools which really do make money on football (and use it to fund their other sports) from the schools which struggle to stay in shouting distance.  Some of those schools will end up dropping football.  Some of them will drop back a division and no longer play games on national TV.  Something will be lost there, but what is gained is that schools won't have to bankrupt themselves or warp their mission around football when they really can't have it all.  
  iii.  The NCFC would create a 16-team post-season tournament and sell the TV rights.  The tourny would be the two-rounds-of-home-sites and then two semifinal games at traditional bowl sites, with the final being at the Rose Bowl.  The gate/proceeds etc. would be primarily split between the teams, with a rake-off for the NCFC.
  iv.  The participating teams are paid directly by the NCFC (no NIL/Title IX there), and the bulk of the money goes to the players.
-----

The first proposal doesn't really change anything, although it allows Michigan to take the revenues flowing in and redistribute them to the players in an equitable way, and addresses a looming long-term problem.

The second proposal is as far along the road to professional college mercenaries as I can see going without losing the sense of student-athletes.

It's actually far easier to say what I don't want to happen.  I do not want the bowls, NCAA, ADs or coaches to suck off the cream of the revenue stream built on the backs of the players.  I do not want female student-athletes to get cut out of opportunities because ADs are hyper-focused on making money with football.  I do not want the football tail to wag the college dog.

Those are professional leagues, which are not government funded, and market forces are unchecked by civil rights laws.

The opposite is true for universities - they do get government funds, and civil right laws explicitly trump market forces.  Directly paying players (as opposed to the NIL collectives, or the proposed super-conference run by a non-educational entity) in an educational setting runs afoul of not just Title IX, but the Equal Pay Act and Title IX of the Civil Rights Act, because our society believes that in that educational setting, equality trumps economics.

That doesn't even consider Michigan state law, which explicitly prohibits direct payments:
"Sec. 3.

A postsecondary educational institution, athletic association, conference, or other group or organization with authority over intercollegiate athletics shall not do either of the following:

• Provide a prospective college athlete who will attend a postsecondary educational institution with compensation in relation to the athlete’s name, image, or likeness rights."

Other states have similar laws.

Short version: it's a big mess, but Title IX and other civil rights laws explicitly supersede economic realities.  That is the biggest reason why there's persistent discussion of super-conferences run by something-that-is-not-connected-to-education.

Past court decisions have interpreted most cash payments from the university to be related to opportunity, not outcomes.  This is consistent with the purpose of Title IX, which is not to reward economically valuable athletes, but to broadly match higher education athletic opportunities with the student population.

"[This article] concludes that college athletic departments would have a legal obligation under Title IX to provide commensurate compensation for female athletes. Though such an outcome conflicts with principles of capitalism, which would otherwise operate to limit compensation to those athletes whose labor has value on the open market, it is nevertheless the right result. That is because an institution’s obligation to pay female athletes arises from application of a civil rights law, which in the context of Title IX and other such laws, reflects democratic consensus of the priority equality over the freedom of private entities to make unconstrained market choices in such fundamental contexts as education."

Put simply, it does not matter if your college sport is profitable, it matters that it's your college sport.  Title IX doesn't care that football and men's basketball earn money and other sports don't. 

That one, at least, was the subject moving toward something they wanted, even if it's not what we wanted.

I agree that Harbaugh identified two focus points for his recruiting: underserved-by-scouting regions, and high-character recruits for whom Michigan had unique advantages.

The first will change as other teams beef up their scouting and exercise their own staff connections (as an aside, it's amusing to me to see the "it's who you know" factor featured prominently here after the discussion on college admissions the other day), and it will be harder to pull players from those areas.  The second, though, should be applicable going forward, and as a fan I'm glad.  It's a lot easier to root for a team with players like Blake Corum, and matching the recruiting process to the recruits in this way makes it more likely they'll be happy with the decisions they make.

I do disagree with the characterization of Nick Saban though.  If this change had happened when he was 20 years younger, I think he'd have beefed up his scouting department, built an unofficial network of trainer/coach connections and started offering the bag to those under-or-un-scouted players as well.  Saban is many things, but even if "Unwilling to take on a multi-year project when well past retirement age" is one of those things, "afraid of hard work" is not.

On the one hand, it's a ton of money.  On the other hand, he's the current-last starting QB to sign an extension, so he's going to get current-elite-QB money.

I don't think he's a top-10 NFL QB, but the reality of the NFL is that if your top-20 starting QB contract is up, you re-sign him for top-5 QB money.  You then wait out all the complaints about "geez, that much?!" until the next QB signs ...

If they think he's going to replicate his average Lions season for the next four years, this is what they needed to pay, because that's their window.

This is a lot like the Tigers going all in on Miguel Cabrera, knowing they'd eat the end of his contract, judging it worth the price to chase the World Series ring.  Hopefully the Lions have better luck.

How much of this can they continue?  They don't have Ben Herbert, but they have his top assistant.  They have a scouting approach with a staff with a lot of connections, including many NFL connections.  They still have Michigan as a selling point to the kinds of players they want to recruit, which will help when the other powers try to replicate their approach.

The two things they may not be able to replicate?  The Harbaugh touch with TEs, and his personal weird-character-connection to recruits.

Moore will have to find his own way to connect with recruits, sell them on what he, his staff and Michigan can do for them.  I look forward to their future progress with considerable interest!

You mean, like building airplanes?

If you're really in the mood for the darkest of dark humor, ask yourself who killed more people - the CEO of Boeing, or the 9/11 terrorists?

Your degree school matters a great deal in the tech world.  Recruiters/hiring managers will reach out to alumni associations, work with the schools directly, schedule hiring fairs, and so on for the perceived top schools.  Those students enter the hiring process with a large head start and concurrent advantage over their competitors.

And yes, this is a seemingly-good idea with subtle-but-awful consequences.  It greatly reduces minority participation, and promotes the "not-invented-here" and groupthink that lead to bad decisions.  But people still do it because it's how it's always been done, and it must have worked before ...

Hoke did recruit well for the DL (and coached 'em up), but the OL recruiting/development was hit or miss.

Part of that is Wilson Speight's injury, though.  It seems clear in hindsight that he never fully recovered from his 2016 injuries, at which point our QB position was reduced to thoughts and prayers.  It's not clear to me what the coaches could have done - recruit better before Harbaugh got there, or not have Peters broken?

It does put emphasis on one thing, though:  have great lines, win many games.  Football is won and lost in the trenches.

Why should Michigan tell donors to give money to NIL funds instead of to Michigan?

The University and the NIL collectives are competitors for donor dollars, and it's not an infinitely-deep slush fund.

I agree with the theme of your post, but I do disagree with the "future determined by where you go" line.  There are many, many places where a degree from the same/similar school as the people in charge will get you in the door, and without one you'll get shown the door.

Is that fair, or even effective?  Not at all.  But it hasn't changed much.  I have such a degree, and it's opened a lot of doors for me that I saw closed for others.

The math problems are not generally arithmetic - they are word problems, and hence suffer from the same context issues as other standardized test questions.

All the standardized tests are compromises between creating an "objective" measure for educational standards, and making the test "accessible" to students of wildly varying backgrounds.  As with many compromises, they tend to be derided by both sides but are used nonetheless because we don't have anything better and currently available.

Article I, Section 9, Clause 3:
No Bill of Attainder or ex post facto Law shall be passed.

It is irrelevant - damages are awarded for past actions all the time, and settlement of civil suit != bill-of-attainder or new-law.

At least the word salad pointed somewhere interesting.

I wonder if football's transfer portal will go the same way, or if it will continue to increase as people take the bag as freshman and then bug out for greener pastures?

In no particular order, Fenway, Chavez Ravine, PetCo and PacBell Park (not even sure what the current name is; just how I always think of it) are my favorites.  Old favorites include Tiger Stadium (just for nostalgia, it was not great objectively), Candlestick (extra-inning night games were an adventure!), and Three Rivers.

My three best ballpark experiences were:
3. An early April game at PacBell the year it opened.  Perfect, warm spring day; seats behind home plate way up high, with the Bay spread out in front and the water shining in the light.  Bonds hit a splash bomb and the crowd exploded.
2.  Watching the Tigers win a playoff game against the A's in Oakland.  Pudge hit a homer into the seats not that far from us and Brandon Inge doubled in the eventual winning runs.
1.  A summer game at the Staten Island Yankees(!).  They were the Yankees short-season A affliliate, and they played in a tiny park on Staten Island.  They were very well financed, so the park was a gem - right in the middle of the harbor, every seat had a fantastic view, and the teams were filled with future major leaguers.  It was a scorcher on the mainland, but in the park it was cool and gorgeous.

I think XJ was overshadowed by the truly stunning number of cromulent WR in this draft.  There were names as late as the 5th round that I wondered "why so late?", then I went back and looked at the previous WR taken ... "Oh."

Washington threw the ball a lot with an elite college QB, so their WR look quite good by comparison to a team which largely threw the ball as an afterthought.  (And I know we like to rag on Penix, but he absolutely defenestrated a pretty good Texas D the week before Michigan's best-in-show D crushed his soul, which helps to showcase his WR.)

That's all 7 of the Wolverines Alex was certain would be picked, with Zinter going a little earlier than might have been expected.  A good sign towards breaking the record would be if Barner/Keegan/Johnson went off the board early tomorrow, but it will depend on a big run in the 6th-7th rounds (for Harrell/McGregor/Nugent/Jones/Henderson/Barrett/Barnhart/Wallace).

Corum, Wilson, Zinter B2B2B!

I'm excited for Corum and Wilson and happy for MGrowOld that the Browns got a bargain provided his leg heals fully.  Wish the Steelers didn't have to deal with #65 for the next few years, though :<)

Good luck to him.  Hopefully he can rediscover his joy in coaching/teaching.

True, just one pick up with minimal cost, rather than the big move to #5 that was forecast.

And they did it without a [big] trade, so they'll have more resources available.  I'm surprised the Giants didn't move on from their QB-superfund-site, but clearly they didn't have JJ in the same group as the top three QBs.

I guess the Lions need to draft Chop Robinson and a DB so they don't keep hearing "McCarthy to Jefferson - touchdown!" :</

TBF, there's only a few all-time Michigan greats that could have hung with Griffin that year.  This is the same guy who played 13 years in the NBA (just retired last week, in fact), was injured for half of them, and still put up an all-time rookie season, a handful of All-Star/all-NBA seasons, and warehouses full of highlight reels.

To be contrarian for a minute ...
- It doesn't matter how many other programs have a QB-first run game.  It only matters whether M has the talent/coaching for it, and whether that's the best use of the resources at hand.
- The "RichRod QB game" is not really a special scheme at this point - the best parts have been picked up, refined and incorporated into a zillion other schemes/plays.
- If Kirk Campbell isn't comfortable teaching/running QB-run plays, they won't be running them, but I'm confident Moore/Campbell had that talk already when they were laying out the plan for the year.
- Who did Meyer have backing up Barrett?
- Orji is not Denard, but he might be their JT Barrett.
- Why not both?

The short answer here is likely a variation on what dragonchild posted above.  If they need a QB with an elite skill - any elite skill! - to meet our goals, then Orji is the only choice, they'll make it and live with the results.  If they don't think they need that to beat OSU, then Tuttle/Warren would get the nod.

Everybody says that (QB-read offenses are risky because there's only 1 QB who can run it), but that doesn't stop people when circumstances warrant.  It's not like Meyer at OSU had a running QB backing up Barrett, etc.

I don't think we're really arguing about the facts, only our projections of how those facts will play out.  Orji is the only QB with an elite skill ... and it's not related to throwing the ball.  So work backwards:
- Can M win another championship without an elite-skill QB?
- Can they be playoff-eligible without one?
- Can they beat OSU without one?

If the "practical/reasonable" goal(1) is one of the above, and the answer is no, then Orji will start and they'll live with the results.  If the answer is yes, then we might see Tuttle/Warren start.  The outcome of the QB race might tell us more about Michigan's goals than about the QBs.

1.  Yes, I know every program/team/player's goal is to win a title and anything else is unacceptable blah blah blah whatever.  Wishing does not make it so.

Michigan state law prohibits schools from paying NIL:
Sec. 3.

A postsecondary educational institution, athletic association, conference, or other group or organization with authority over intercollegiate athletics shall not do either of the following:

• Provide a prospective college athlete who will attend a postsecondary educational institution with compensation in relation to the athlete’s name, image, or likeness rights."
   

Well researched.

I am all for post-educational health care for student athletes - it's a benefit that can be given equally across genders and sports, and would potentially mitigate any long-term damage suffered by the athletes (e.g. concussion syndromes).

It would be expensive, but would Michigan rather spend its money on health care/insurance for Denard, or more AD employee benefits?

My son and I are enjoying these shirts.  In general, the Underground Printing shirts are soft and hold up reasonably well, but the true test will come this year, as I cycle through all my M shirts to celebrate The National Champion Michigan Wolverines.

TL,DR: Yes, there was a large talent imbalance, but it's smoothed out somewhat, and even before that imbalance the women could play.

I disagree with this, to a degree.

For a long time, the women's game was more skill dependent than the boys, because they did not have the jump-out-of-the-gym, above-the-rim athletes.  They had to play as a team, and you saw a lot more games that looked like the Princeton constant-motion offense than the NBA-style "I will drive to the hoop and you cannot stop me" variation.

With the advent of Title IX and greater overall acceptance (and money!) for women's sports, there was an influx of talent, distributed unevenly.  Well-coached teams like Tennessee could now get dominant players who could explode for buckets whenever they wanted, and the rich got richer.

Then the tide started lifting more boats, and teams other than UConn and Tennessee started getting more talent.  The last tournament's TV ratings were largely driven by Clarke, and they'll fall back some, but some of the fans who tuned in to watch Clarke will stay to watch Watkins and the next generation.
 

I think Blake Corum will be successful at whatever he does and wherever he goes.  He's a Michigan Legend and Favorite Son.  But!

Given how RBs are used in the NFL, and how short their careers are, I think I would rather see my favorite team take Zinter/Keegan/Henderson in the 3rd round over Corum.

I too would pick "Take Us Home, Blake" or "6-5", or "2023 National Champions", but I have enough to revel in due to the National Champion Michigan Wolverines, that I don't feel like I need to revel in OSU schadenfreude.

"some allowance needed to be made for profitable programs" is an example of a systemic bias.  It basically says that money is more important than opportunities. 

Title IX, on the other hand, explicitly makes opportunities the most important factor, and mandates that access to those opportunities be provided no matter the cost.

The top football schools don't have a problem here - they can fund football and all the other sports they want.  It's the schools that are breaking even on football at best that should consider radical changes (drop down a level in competition, halve your football scholarships, and so forth).

Then those schools should move football down a level and (literally) stop playing with the big boys.  It's not like those schools are using football to fund other sports; those are the schools that lose money trying to keep up.

For all that LSU is ferociously cleaning the glass and blocking shots, they're either forcing shots or missing layups at the other end.

Clarke with the dagger to push the lead to 11 with a little over 5 minutes to go.

Will there be a way to send books to multiple addresses?  Not a big issue, but it comes up every time I get these things for me and my brother-in-law.

No more surprise onside kicks or squibs (the ball has to land in the red zone).  I predict a lot more of the high hang time kickoffs to try to nerf the return.

This seems relatively fair.  Blaming Warde because Harbaugh dreamt of winning a Super Bowl and not of building Michigan into Alabama-Redux+Georgia-Part-Deux seems pointless.  I also share your opinion that trying to make Michigan baseball happen is not the best use of resources at a school where three other men's sports (and arguably the women's softball team) come first.

The Pearson farrago, however, is all on him.  Whether he was trying to wait it out, or was vigorously defending Pearson behind the scenes but failing, the situation left Michigan hockey twisting in the wind, and kept the story in the news if on the back burner.

You don't win without talent.  Michigan did not acquire much of the obvious-to-everyone talent available, but they still had tons of elite players - Graham, Grant, etc.  Zinter and Mikey were All-Americans but not 5-stars, Blake Corum made a team, and so on.

So either Michigan out-scouted the recruiting services to find five-stars-in-the-rough, or coached up 3/4 stars to play like 5 stars.  (Or both.)

The key going forward is for the new coaching staff to continue that trend.  One way or another - portal, scouting, coaching them up - you gotta have Jimmies and Joes.

No, it isn't.  Brian, Seth and Ace all got to that point before the OSU game-that-wasn't, and the louder elements of the board were howling well before that.

Check out the When Can We Fire This Guy blog tag for further reading.

When I was in college, it was quite literally "Get a bag of Fritos, and a cup of chili.  Pour the chili into the Frito bag.  Stir and serve."

Surprisingly tasty and you could eat it while walking.

Thanks for this.  The main caution I would bring is that we're using "JJ McCarthy" as a proxy for "JJ McCarthy, with Corum/Edwards/Mullings as backs, Loveland/Barner/Brederson as TE, Wilson/Johnson/Morgan as WR and an OL fit for the Zombie Apocalypse".  One way to visualize that is to recall Cade McNamara in 2021 against OSU:  his non-end-of-half drives went TD/INT/punt/punt/TD and then TD/TD/TD/TD.

The higher he gets drafted, the less likely he is to have that kind of high-level support.  Ideal for him would be to go lower but to a team with a decent-to-good-OL that needs a QB to take the next step.

This is not meant to denigrate JJ in any way.  It's merely a reminder of how difficult it is in football analysis to untangle all the synergies and dependencies, and how much it's a team game.

Without a great QB on a long-term deal, all NFL team success windows are "tight".  It's a consequence of the salary cap and the escalating salaries of your players.  The Lions will have major decisions coming up on Brown, Goff, Sewell, etc.

We like to rag on Cousins for rivalry reasons, and it is an overpay, but not as much as you'd think given the salary cap and the limited number of even average NFL QBs.

That said, Cousins is a perfectly cromulent NFL QB, especially if he has a good OL.

Yes, Denver will pay $38M for next year, and will take an $85M(!) hit against the cap.

The ideal/likely spot would have been Pittsburgh, but they signed Wilson.

I'm not averse to the idea of landing in Detroit(!), as I still have lingering Goff-will-turn-into-a-pumpkin vibes.

In general, his needs are the same as any non-all-time-great-QB looking to start right away - a coach who will support him and change their system to suit him best, good-to-great lines on both sides of the ball, and a few playmakers for synergy.  Detroit, Seattle, Minnesota and maybe LA are the spots for that, I think.

If he's willing to be a backup at first (and risk the Chad Henne career path, which while rewarding, is not exactly covered in glory), then you want to go to one of the league's top franchises - SF, KC, etc.

If Warde Manuel is doing the job his bosses want him to do, he will not be fired.  We're not his constituency; the President and Regents are the people he has to please.  So what do they want?

They want a zero-scandal, profitable AD that supports all the sports, perhaps especially the non-revenue sports, has full compliance with Title IX and all relevant laws/regulations, and generally keeps on kicking a bunch of money into the general fund without their having to get involved so they can focus on the University's greater mission.

Look at his tenure through that lens, and the "appeasement/repairs" becomes more understandable.

The Howard situation is a bit more complex.  There is a cost to firing Howard - he's a legendary alum, with a serious medical issue that's impacting his performance, and there are any number of (white) coaches who got equal or longer leashes.  A negotiated settlement would likely be best, but both sides have to want that. 

While it doesn't look like you need a top 5 squad on both sides, it does look like you need one best-in-class squad.  Every champion on your list ranked #1/#2 in SP+ on offense or defense except 2018 Clemson ... which was #3 on offense *and* #1 in PPD on defense.

Those 2021-2022 Georgia teams were utterly loaded and these rankings (and their performance on the field) reflect that.