dan orlovsky

Indiana Links: Preview, The Podcast, FFFF Offense (chart), FFFF Defense (chart).

Something's been missing from Michigan gamedays since the free programs ceased being economically viable: scientific gameday predictions that are not at all preordained by the strictures of a column in which one writer takes a positive tack and the other a negative one… something like Punt-Counterpunt.

PUNT

By Bryan MacKenzie
@Bry_Mac

Like most born-and-raised Michiganders, I grew up a Detroit Lions fan. Back there and back then, it was kind of like the idea of having a smoking section in a restaurant or putting CFCs in breakfast cereal. Maybe not GREAT for you, but certainly nothing that would cause serious long-term problems. I was nine in 1991 when the Lions made the NFC Championship Game, part of a stretch where the Lions made the playoffs six times in a nine year stretch. It seemed harmless.

Eventually the true physical and emotional toll of Lions fandom became clear, but by then I was hooked. But at some point in the late ‘aughts, when Michigan was adrift under either RichRod and Brady Hoke⁠—those years blend into a morass of ‘oh right that happened’⁠—I decided that enough was enough. I couldn’t put mental energy into Michigan on a Saturday AND the Lions on a Sunday. It wasn’t healthy, and I didn’t enjoy it. And I made an active decision to emotionally divest from the Lions.

Tell me about your childhood…

It was, and remains, a freeing feeling. Once the final whistle blows in the Michigan game, my emotional football load is lifted. But now, because I don’t have the kind of burning, seething, all-encompassing focus on what every snap of every game means for my favorite team, I’ve become the kind of casual generic fan that I can barely comprehend when I think of college football. In fact, I’ve become the worst kind of fan:

The Fantasy Football Fan.

[After THE JUMP: Snowmaglobin.]

SPONSOR NOTE: Trivia time! Leaderboard is here. Adam W maintains his #1 ranking with NeelV, mdmelvin, and jmer120 one point back. Round 4 is here and there are only 53 fans who've competed in all of them so don't be scared off if you haven't played yet. Complete by 5 PM Friday.

The State of our NIL. Deeply ironic that Michael Rosenberg is the one to write a story on Michigan's NIL program after the whole Freep investigation thing—which portrayed a series of minor envelope-pushes from Rodriguez as a program that was violating NCAA regulations on countable hours by a factor of three—but since he did and it has some insight into the murkiest thing in college football, link grudgingly deployed. Sounds like whatever deficiencies led Hunter Dickinson to Kansas don't apply to football:

[Corum] bought two rental properties in his home state of Virginia and invested in an apartment complex in Michigan to “make sure I have that cash flow coming in on a regular basis.” As he points out: “A lot of kids leave college, and they don’t have any money. They just have debt.”

Corum did not give out an exact number but asserted he is "in the 1%." And since NIL cannot be used as a recruiting inducement you get a lot of up front promises that are not backed by binding contracts. The result:

“I have a lot of friends from different schools and different programs where they’re getting promised money up front, whether it’s the [transfer] portal or in recruiting, and when they get to the program, they’re just not getting what they were told,” Keegan says. “That’s causing a lot of problems in other locker rooms.”

Corum says he has friends at other schools who tell similar stories: “They’d never signed anything, so therefore, they didn’t get it.”

Keegan says he made 50-70k between the Big Ten championship game and TCU and expects to bring in low to mid six figures this year. As a guard! Who is the second best guard on the team!

Also in the Blake Corum, perfect human files:

[Edwards and Corum] have done joint autograph signings and have talked about building low-income housing together someday.

Blake Corum may have opinions about downtown FAR premiums.

[After THE JUMP: Mel Tucker items.]