matt beniers

Name and image is here. The floodgates have opened and now Jordan Bohannon can help sell fireworks. Lo, it is a new era. A couple of Michigan players have signed on with a company that will pair you with athletes so you can play games with them, and Adrien Nunez—who has 1.6 million TikTok followers—launched some merch. Social media!

…as Nuñez received cupping therapy in a training room, he pulled out his phone and filmed his legs. “People on TikTok go viral for literally the dumbest reasons possible,” a voice says in the published clip, which has since been played 116,000 times.

There was a brief Michigan-related kerfuffle when human-type object Darren Rovell tweeted out that Michigan's policy is that athletes have to file their deals with the AD a week before they're actually signed, causing 1) a bunch of people saying that's bad and dumb and 2) an even larger number of people pointing out that Michigan is aligning their policy with state law:

Hi Darren,
That provision exists because of what's currently in the state's NIL statue. That bill doesn't go into effect until 2022 and, in the interim, we recognize this is a fluid landscape & will work collaboratively w/ our students & to their benefit #GoBlue #NIL

— Kurt Svoboda (@ksvoboda) July 1, 2021

It's possible the state will revisit the NIL bill they passed if that actually turns out to be a problem.

Note that the version of NIL that passed is the most permissive, and opens virtually all the doors:

the Council rejected another proposal that — while largely similar — also included the proviso that schools’ NIL policies not allow payments from “any booster, or any person or entity acting on behalf” of the school.

This indicates that the Council was concerned that virtually any restriction in a temporary policy would draw a legal challenge based on the Supreme Court’s ruling last week in the Alston antitrust case.

So the doors are all the way open. Guy Who Sells Cars can give people loaners above-board now. Handshakes are probably going to continue but their relative importance will plummet. 

[After THE JUMP: 420 games!]

Something I forgot to put in the soccer post. LOOK AT THIS MAN JUMP INTO INFINITY

Did not even phase Dempsey one bit https://t.co/wNkOWfQE6n

— Brian Floyd (@BrianMFloyd) June 7, 2021

Just city council things. How's city council going, nobody asked?

This Ann Arbor Council Administration Committee is off to a fiery start after council member Ali Ramlawi invoked the due process Nazi Germany was given after the holocaust in defense of what is happening to Jeff Hayner. #A2council

— Samuel J. Robinson (@samueljrob) June 2, 2021

Two months ago Jeff Hayner dropped an anti-gay slur on Facebook and the fallout has not yet stopped because no one can say "sorry" and take their lumps. (As this goes on, the majority faction is quietly busy doing good things for the city.)

[After THE JUMP: an ordering of things displeases me!]

Fairly unusual. Any interest in an inside-the-park grand slam? Sure:

Gotta love it, @lexieeblairr! Her 5th HR this season. #GoBlue pic.twitter.com/mComZj1lC4

— Michigan Softball (@umichsoftball) April 24, 2021

That's probably up there in terms of least driven home runs, anywhere.

This is not a bucket list thing but it should be. As anyone who follows @internetraj on twitter (or reads Punt/Counterpunt) knows, the idea of a "bucket list" was invented by the 2007 Jack Nicholson/Morgan Freeman vehicle The Bucket List. This is distressing to many people who experience a sudden onset of the Mandela effect when told this, because they thought bucket lists were a thing well before the release of a 2007 buddy comedy.

Anyway, opening the floodgates has nothing to do with Curt Flood but it should. Fifty years ago today Flood retired from baseball, a relatively peripheral figure on the field but a seismic event for the business of sports:

Curtis Flood, once one of the game’s best defensive outfielders and a founding father of modern free agency, quietly fled Washington and the Senators on April 27, 1971. He had tried to change Major League Baseball forever and emerged too scarred to believe he could ever find a home there again.

“It devoured him,” his widow, Judy Pace Flood, a decorated actor for decades whom Flood first saw when she appeared with Willie Mays on “The Dating Game,” said in a phone interview last week. She remembered one of Flood’s teammates with the Senators told her later that “Curt was the saddest person he had ever met or seen. It was awful.”

The last time Pace Flood saw him that year, she was dropping him off at spring training. He was out of shape after missing a year while he refused to report to Philadelphia, and his new Senators manager, Ted Williams, reportedly bemoaned the fact that the team signed him in the first place. He was radioactive, a man who had sued a baseball establishment so powerful that many of his teammates and close friends, Gibson included, were too worried about the consequences to stand alongside him or attend his court hearings.

Tremors of Flood's departure are still being felt today—the NCAA is just now removing the sit-out year from revenue sport transfers. He paid a tremendous price just because he asked for basic fairness. RIP.

[After THE JUMP: Tschetter is hard to make a pun out of?]