stupid minds

Scheduling note. I sat down to start UFRing last night and found that I'd actually re-converted the UMass game and hadn't downloaded ND at all. My subconscious is protecting me as best it can, but I now have the thing. UFR will be a day late, which it traditionally is during a bye week anyway.

Denard's night went better than at least one person's. Mmmm Northern Indiana style:

The man on the ground had severe facial and upper body wounds. According to police, both men said they were hit by a car, but police have not confirmed that. Investigators say it's possible that is a story to cover-up a fight.

While police were talking to the men, a woman approached officers and said she'd been hit in the face with a case of Natural Light Beer. The woman had very visible wounds, most profound, her entire bottom row of teeth were missing.

This was at 9 PM, so I assume all of this arose from an argument about whether Borges or Denard was the worst.

The pants! They are motion pants. That's not a Sufjan Stevens song title yet, but I bet it's on his next album. No, it's a reference to some digging done by UMHoops that unearths a piece of basketball's uniforms for next year:

THEY'RE TUBES FOR YOUR LEGS!

The way this works is you put one leg in one tube and the other leg in the other tube and then pull up until you feel resistance. Once you feel resistance, STOP. You will now be wearing your legtubes. You will kind of look like a 12-year-old from 1993. If you did not stop when you felt resistance you will also be in severe pain, but that's your problem. That's what you get for not following instructions.

Nobody at commenting at UMHoops likes these, but they do like Glenn Robinson III.

Uniforms are supposed to be, you know, what's that word… the same. Adidas is still not executing this task, apparently:

Piping: it's just all over the place man. Also, Washington's missing his block M. If you sent this to me, thanks, but I forget who did.

Bye week activity. WTKA is replaying Ufer's call of the 1979 Michigan State game at noon on Saturday. 1050 on your dial, or on the internets. Here's Keith Jackson doing the same:

Band noise solution? They amplified the band a couple years back to mixed reviews. If you couldn't hear them before it's great. If you could, it sounds horrible as the slightly delayed noise coming out of the speakers conflicts with the band itself. I'm in an area where it sounds horrible.

I thought about this on Saturday at some point in the third quarter when I noticed I could hear the ND band loud and clear despite being about as far away from them as possible, but couldn't hear the Michigan band that was just below our section. I was going to mention this in the game column as depressing commentary on how quiet the MMB, but MVictors pointed out the speaker setup they had on the sideline:

Audio people: does this make a difference, having the speakers in the same place the band is? Or am I grasping at straws?

Idiots in charge of stuff. Replacement refs screw up Monday Night Football and the NFL burns its credibility all for a pathetically tiny slice of their enormous revenue pool. In the NHL, Edmonton's ownership laughably threatens to move the Oilers to Seattle; the NHL is bunkered down for another strike less than a decade after an entire season failed to happen.

At some point, it has to be about something other than the pursuit of as much money as you can get right damn now, doesn't it? Maybe, maybe not. They'll have to start to see some erosion before they act, just like college football teams are starting to now that the terrible scheduling practices of the last 20 years are finally resulting in empty seats.

In other news, someone is paying bowtied twit Gordon Gee an exorbitant amount of money and allowing the guy to spend 7.7 million in expenses(!), including $64,000 on bowties(!!!). How's that going?

At the University of Michigan, President Mary Sue Coleman’s travel and entertainment expenses from 2007 through 2010 totaled $410,235. Upkeep and utilities at the university-owned house runs an additional $100,000 a year and if Coleman takes someone to lunch or dinner, she pays the tab out of her own pocket, according to University of Michigan spokesman Rick Fitzgerald.

Coleman’s compensation package is $860,782 a year and includes housing and a car. Her employment contract does not call for first class airline tickets or private jets, as Gee’s does. In Michigan’s last endowment campaign she helped raise $3.2 billion — the most ever by a public university at that time.

There are signs that OSU isn’t keeping pace nationally on the size of its endowment. OSU slipped from 27th in the four years preceding Gee’s return to Columbus to 31st in 2010-11, according to the National Association of College and University Business Officers and the Commonfund Institute. The Big 10 universities Northwestern, Minnesota, and Michigan all ranked above Ohio State for the size of their endowment.

Jim Tressel, fire this man.

Come on Tim. Baumgardner on Tim Hardaway entering his junior year:

"I've watched and probably had more interaction with Tim this summer (than ever before)," Beilein said recently. "With him just coming in, sitting in my office, hanging out and feeling very comfortable as a Michigan man.

"Him being more comfortable with everything has allowed him to have a lot of confidence in the intangible area (off the court). And there's a strong correlation between that and how he'll perform on the court."

I hope that's true. Hardaway's three point shooting should bounce back just because 27% is incredibly low, but if Michigan is going to live up to some extremely hefty preseason expectations he'll have to either be more effective creating his own shots or go from terrible to elite from behind the line.

wat. Mac Bennett on the twitter:

The @BeatsPointZero "Deblois is a Bag of Milk" EP will be out later today. Excited about it

I don't know. I've notified Jon Bois about this, though.

A fast one. The Michigan-ND series opened up in South Bend, and if it's ending semi-permanently in 2014, it'll end in South Bend. Not a smooth move to not build an even number of home/away games into the contract, Michigan. This is probably Bill Martin's fault, FWIW.

Chalk. Via Jamie, Michigan's… performance type thing against Notre Dame has finally provided a leader in Big Ten betting whatnot:

MSU now "clear" betting chalk to win Big 10: MSU +220, Braska +250, Wisco +300, UM +400, PU +700. Odds lot less muddled than a week ago

Purdue's down from 20-1 recently. I TOLD YOU JAMIE /ignores Wisconsin

Also, Michigan lines are frightening. Michigan's favored by less than a field goal at Purdue and about a touchdown at Nebraska and Ohio State. This is all an overreaction to something that won't happen again, right guys? Right?

I'm a little surprised things are shaking out like this after last weekend. I mean, MSU-EMU couldn't have moved the needle in favor of the Spartans, could it?

Here's your statistical nutshell. Michigan State snapped the ball 72 times on Saturday with the intention of advancing the ball.

On 46 of those plays, the ball ended up, or was targeted to end up, in the hands of Le'Veon Bell or Dion Sims. The average gain on those plays was 7.8 yards.

On the remaining the 26 plays, the ball was intended to end up in someone else's hands. The average gain on those plays was 2.8 yards.

Yipes.

Etc.: Hockey starts off ranked third. Seems high. Bois fake mailbag about those refs with mini-Packers TWIS. This is not Ace holding his head, but both Ace and I had to check. Kirk Ferentz is unfireable. Which person is Borges and which is me in this XKCD?

... not that it ever was.

Someone was getting screwed yesterday. If Michigan went, Florida was getting screwed. Every other year the BCS claims another fanbase as its virgin sacrifice on the altar of "#1" versus "#2," and you're damn skippy those are airquotes delivered with maximum sarcasm. It just so happens that this year it's us.

I had planned on slapping up a column today boldly titled "FLORIDA GOT SCREWED." This would have been preferable to the above title for many reasons, the foremost among them being that since it isn't it's Michigan fans who are quietly swearing oaths of revenge against poll voters. But it would also have removed the waft of sour grapes from this post and allowed me to be really frickin' righteous. Alas.

I spent a good portion of the day jumping from from Tradesports to the coaches poll to the computer rankings, pounding refresh. When the coaches poll came out I slapped some stuff up, updated it a few times with more detail, and then clicked over to Tradesports. Naturally, Michigan had collapsed and Florida had surged. What stood out, though, was Ohio State's price, which shot up in concert with Florida's.


The market was telling Ohio State to breathe easier because the coaches had decided that the number three team in the nation was number two. Over the course of yesterday, OSU shot up from a 64% chance to win against either Michigan or Florida to a 73% chance against just Florida. If you think a win premium was built into Michigan shares, the market was 50-50 on who would get picked, so a reasonable assumption is that the market felt Ohio State was around 55% to beat Michigan.

That's what draws my ire. It seemed clear to everyone from sea to shining sea that there was a choice between the best team and the matchup that least highlighted the staggering absurdity of the BCS. The vast majority went with the latter. Some people are at least forthright enough to admit it:

George Lapides, a Memphis sports radio talk host, said he believed Florida would lose to Michigan if the teams were to play. But he jumped the Gators from No. 4 to No. 2, past the Wolverines, after Florida beat Arkansas.

"I liked the idea of a conference champion playing a conference champion," he said. "I think that's more appealing than a rematch. I think you try to pick something as appealing as possible."

God... this is what it's come down to? We're having sports talk radio hosts choose who plays in the national championship game? Sports radio is a medium built around saying and doing dumb things for attention. If there's a profession less suited for the careful consideration I would like to think is the main attribute of a good poll voter, I can't think of one.

Uh, nevermind. I forgot about football coaches. Here's Jim Walden. He's the guy who voted Florida number one, and his reasons for doing so are subtle and reasonable:

"If you look at the Big Ten conference, it is a joke," Walden said in a telephone interview late last night. He added: "I voted my heart and I voted my strength of what I believe in. In my opinion, Florida is the No. 1 team in the nation."

If I stumbled across that sentiment on a Rivals message board, I would dismiss that guy as one of the board idiots. This guy has a vote that determines who goes to the national championship game. (Wikipedia temporarily has this nugget of joy on Walden: He still hosts a Sunday evening radio show in Iowa on WHO called "Two Guys Named Jim," or what some may call "One Guy Named Jim and One Guy Named Urban Meyer's Bitch!"Wooo open source encyclopedia. Also note that Walden was 0-17 against the Big Ten in his coaching career.)

Then there's former MSU coach George Perles:

"They lost one game to the best team in the country," Perles said in a telephone interview from his home in East Lansing, Mich. "And No. 2, because they're from the state of Michigan, and I just so happen to live here."

I did not realize that geographical proximity was supposed to be a factor.

It's Pat Hill, the D-I coach voted Most Likely To Be Mistaken For A Janitor, who comes off the best:

"It was hard," Hill said in a telephone interview. "I think Michigan had their shot at Ohio State. They didn't get it done."

...for a given value of "best," anyway.

Bowl advocates constantly tell us that the entire regular season is a playoff. If that's so, it's the world's dumbest, one where teams either can lose or can't, either must schedule tough teams or don't have to, either have a history of good teams or don't. It's a "playoff" where over half the time some team with as much or more of a claim is cast aside, leaving their fans and coaches to gnash their teeth and, if they're from the charmingly insecure and paranoid south, bring it up for years whenever their team hits 6-0.

There's no conspiracy here save that of stupidity. The BCS is a Lovecraftian monster with parts swiped from any system that was handy. A playoff beak here; bowl tentacles there. It is a playoff, a two team playoff, which is no playoff at all. It has ruined college football's most hallowed traditions, kicked a half-dozen teams directly in the nuts, and given us mostly grief. The people who run the BCS are, bluntly, idiots. The Harris poll has talk radio hosts in it and guys who vote Boise #2. Richard Billingsley's formula is a disjointed mess. The rest of the computers are crippled by an inability to consider the same factors humans do. The coaches -- glorified gym teachers all -- are hopelessly biased. Only Jim Tressel, who abstained after looking at the absurdity of picking one of two teams and seeing it spun as an insult to his opponent either way, seems sane to me.

And somehow people who oppose a playoff will tell me that watching a bunch of idiots decide that my 11-1 team doesn't deserve to go to the national championship game because there's a much worse 12-1 team that had the good fortune to play in a conference without Ohio State is a beautiful thing that adds to the unique charm of college fooball. To them, I only say that I wish you would die in a hideous and painful fashion because a bunch of gym teachers held a vote.

Sometime last week a dude got booted from the AP poll. His offense: dropping Oklahoma because he thought they lost. Naturally, as the operator of a similar enterprise a few people asked me my opinion. It's similar to everyone else's -- boy, is that guy dumb! We'd like to introduce him to this interwebs thing! -- with one bonus thought: it's the structure of the poll and these people's lives that's at fault for the regular stupidities.

This case is made for me by the Good Witch in an extensive article on the snafu (from Oklahoma, natch):

As a voter in the Associated Press Top 25 college football poll, John Hoover takes his job seriously. This past week, Hoover, the OU beat writer for the Tulsa World, filled out his ballot at 2 a.m. after getting home from the OU game.

"I watched a couple of games on TiVo. I looked on the Internet for about an hour. I read a couple of school reports; game reports and watched a highlight show. I then spent another hour just moving teams around on my ballot," Hoover said.

An hour? Filling out a ballot? Hoover's either helplessly OCD or a filthy liar, but at least he manages to pay enough attention to college football to keep Louisville in front of West Virginia. Later in the article Hoover makes some displeased noises about the carelessness of this other guy's ballot, but if you accept WVU-UL as an acid test the AP poll as a whole fails by placing West Virginia behind the Cardinals. That's inane. It can't be explained by anything in either team's schedule or play and requires you to ignore a 10-point UL victory like three weeks ago. It is the product of carelessness. That carelessness is caused by the unholy demands on beat writers' time and newspaper's foolish devotion to having everything as quickly as possible because it's NEWS, dammit.

(Rutgers? Well, Louisville can be placed ahead of them now because they've played a tougher schedule, won by greater margins, and lost narrowly to a good team instead of getting hammered by a meh one. Head to head is important but not so much that it outweighs a team's resume. But when you're ranking teams and you judge that two teams that played each other are basically equal, you'd better rank the head-to-head winner first unless you've got a good reason. Pat White meowing doesn't count.)

I, of course, love this story. I love it for many reasons, but foremost among them is the newspaper man (as archetype) and his state of mind. There's a software saying: "Fast. Cheap. Good. Pick two." Newspapers -- in comparison to the internet -- only get to pick one, since "cheap" is right out the window. They went with fast. The AP poll comes out on Sunday. Game stories hit the wire minutes after the game ends. Columnists rip off 600 words on a game and move on. And the deeply ironic thing is that all this is in service to a flagging print beast that shows up in the morning, hours after anyone who actually cares about speed has already seen the box score, six minutes of highlights, and immediate reaction from internet folks. Nobody picks up the paper to find out the score of the game last night. But along the dilapidated beast rolls, its momentum making it impossible to stop or even divert.

If I ran a poll I would probably back the voting deadline off a couple days so the participants could, you know, find out what happened. Even then, certain people would freak out and rush ballots in at the last moment every week, but by in large everyone would have some time to digest, discuss, and evaluate what happened. Then they would keep Louisville in front of West Virginia.

Newspapers have slowly morphed from the fastest communication medium available to the slowest. They have not adjusted their coverage. They have gone from monopolies on information dissemination to a sea of competition. They have not shed their belief that attention is their birthright. They are beset on all sides by people who have not come out the other end of a sports journalism meat-grinder bitter, twisted, and devoid of all human feeling. The Free Press still employs Drew Sharp.

Circulation dropping, you say? That's strictly dog bites man stuff.