Unverified Voracity Bites The Bullet
I listen to Colin Cowherd for you. Jim Harbaugh tried out his best Jim Tomsula impression on Colin Cowherd's show this morning:
I dunno man. I wonder if Harbaugh, a high-functioning lunatic, has points at which his function isn't so high. There is a general antipathy for press conference questions… a lot of the time. There is a general antipathy for lazy questions… some of the time. The questions Cowherd fired off were typical Cowherd: somewhat off-putting but nothing that an average person would get his dander up at, and Harbaugh is immediately in I Don't Know mode.
There are ways I think you can rescue it when he gets in that mode. Number one is talking about his players. Harbaugh loves talking about guys he has coached. But I don't think Cowherd really did anything. Harbaugh just wasn't in the mood from the drop. Steve Lorenz accurately describes it as "troll on troll crime."
Happy first-ish day of work at your new Harbaugh-wranglin' job, Zach Eisendrath! It's a very good idea to have a specific person whose only job is to wrangle Harbaugh, but I worry about the men who try to bridge the gap between beast and overman. I await the day the relentlessly upbeat Eisendrath turns his twitter feed into the SID equivalent of Nihlist Arby's.
Draw the blinds. shut out the sun. Cry. The pile of meat has been on the table for weeks. Just eat it & go back to bed. Arbys: edible.
— Nihilist Arby's (@nihilist_arbys) July 1, 2015
I am surprised that I have not already been followed by thirty different "parody" accounts called Nihilist Harby's.
Colin should have read the operating manual though. When this Sacramento Bee story came out we all had a laugh about it and forgot. And then…
Your Harbaugh does not function like other head coaches. An innocuous query about the weather, for instance, could trigger a florid quote from Admiral William Halsey. And yet a routine question about a running back’s knee injury may cause your Harbaugh to wince, pause and grimace as if a malodorous scent has wafted into the room. Your Harbaugh’s default in this instance is: “We don’t really talk about that here” or “I can’t get inside his body” or “He’s working through something.” This is a design flaw our technicians in California have not yet worked out.
Also:
Your Harbaugh will be enormously affectionate one day and cold and distant the next. This is normal.
After Eisendrath starts wearing eyeliner and listening to My Chemical Romance 24 hours a day, Matt Barrows of the Sacramento Bee has a job waiting for him. A job he should not take. Yes, even if he works for a print newspaper.
Brock Mealer wants to help other people walk. You won't know that you've missed Mike Barwis's gravel truck of a voice until about ten seconds into this:
They are raising money at charity funding site Crowd Rise; you can also grab a shirt on Barwis's site.
Whyyyyyyyy. SBNation's Steven Godfrey has a piece on why there are so many neutral-site games and they continue to increase:
College football's neutral-site games are gaining in popularity because they make a lot of money for the companies and institutions involved.
But demand is even higher among schools suddenly looking to schedule tougher opponents. Consider it knee-jerk hysteria in the wake of Baylor's exclusion from the College Football Playoff, a move often explained as a product of weak non-conference scheduling.
"If you can break your $600,000 [deal for a game against] Akron to go cash $1.2 million from Allstate ... well, there's no catch any more," the agency rep said. "TCU not getting in [the Playoff despite being] at No. 3 the week before scared every athletic director shitless."
Now, you might be thinking to yourself "why would a neutral site game make more money than a home game?" There are three main reasons:
- You can get away with more sponsor stuff at a neutral site. The Blank And Blank Classic, etc.
- You can jack up ticket prices. When Michigan played Alabama at Jerryworld, the minimum price to get in the door was $125, with non-suite tickets ranging up to $245 face. It sold out because it was Michigan against Alabama. Neither school dropped their PSDs a cent.
- The neutral site (sometimes) controls the TV revenue. Most conferences have stipulations that TV revenue is shared, even nonconference TV revenue. This goes for "neutral site" games in the geographical footprint of the conference, but generally does not extend past that. That's why Washington State played Notre Dame in Texas several years back—ND wanted to control that revenue and could not do so in the Pac-12 footprint. That was not the case for Michigan-Alabama, however.
Now, even with all those advantages a neutral site game could only come up with 4.7 million for Michigan—less than they would have gotten for beating up on a cupcake. For a team like TCU, though, the financial equation is much different.
Michigan's got another one coming up because they had a terrible contract against Notre Dame and got left in the lurch; after 2017 against Florida they should never play a neutral site game again. In this, at least, Jim Delany is an aid:
In 2013, Big Ten commissioner Jim Delany issued a memo requiring any Big Ten school playing off-campus games to be designated the home team in at least half of the matchups, and that half of the games take place in the Big Ten's footprint. The two-game series between LSU and Wisconsin in Houston and Green Bay is the example.
Never say Jim Delany didn't do one thing right in his whole life.
Instead of having a neutral site game with those ticket advantages, you should ask your fans if it's okay to have big prices for a big game, and when they say YES YES YES then do it.
YOU WERE. There was a time in the 90s when Ohio State would roll in to The Game with a shiny record and national championship aspirations and a 7-4 Michigan team would destroy them. It wasn't exactly halcyon since, uh, 7-4, but there was a grim satisfaction in dragging those bastards into the pit with us. This happened so often that I can't remember which of these games featured this exchange between myself and an Ohio State fan deep into the third quarter:
"You guys are pathetic! You're 7-4! We are national championship contenders!"
"You WERE national championship contenders."
/merriment
Better that than the recent stuff, I guess. Anyway, ERASE THIS GAME—which still hasn't tackled #M00N—features the 1993 version of La Brea Tar Stadium, in which Tyrone Wheatley* did this:
And Ohio State did this:
Ohio State:
- never crosses into the Michigan red zone
- goes two of twelve on third down
- averages two yards per carry compared to Michigan's five
- gets shut out by the Wolverines for the first time since 1976
- misses going to the Rose Bowl after Wisconsin beats Michigan State in Tokyo because the tiebreaker at the time eliminated the most recent Rose Bowl invitee
- seriously, that was a way the Big Ten decided who got to go to the Rose Bowl, and it's basically "aw heck you're due"
I would prefer that we keep this game, and possibly bronze it.
*[Whenever I watch Wheatley run these days I think that Brandon Minor was born 20 years too late to be a somewhat disappointing first round NFL draft pick.]
Etc.: Harbaugh throws out first pitch, talks to media personably afterwards. This is normal. An oral history of Barry Alvarez making Wisconsin into Wisconsin. You should probably read it. Harbaugh on the Tigers.
Fuck Colin Cowherd.
You know, after listening again, it wasn't that bad until the end. The questions weren't great, and that question about 'the big ten a buy' kind of pissed harbaugh off, he seemed annoyed. Then instead of a slow pitch, Colin went abstract with the "sales pitch" for a 4.3 receiver. He should have gone with something really easy, about Bo, or something that was a slow pitch to get things back on tract.
The worst question in an interview is 'tell me about yourself?" I think Colin blew it than upped the ante and cut off the interview. I think he smelled blood in the water and shut it down.
Apparently he wanted a conversation and for whatever reason Harbaugh didn't. At that point Cowherd should have been prepared to ask questions requiring more specificity with follow up questions. That he wasn't able to adjust speaks to his own lackadasical approach to interviewing.
The bottom line is that show is Cowherd's job, so it's much more on him for the interview to go well than it is on Harbaugh. Cowherd has one of the lowest talent-to-success ratios in all of sports broadcasting and that showed here. He didn't give a shit, because he hasn't gotten to where he is by being good, he's gotten there by being polarizing and having people talk about him. He's not Bob Costas or Dan Patrick. In fact that interview going poorly probably benefitted him because it's stiff like that that gets people talking about Cowherd, not because of a great interview he did.
Also agree that it wasn't bad or painful until the end.
Cowherd sensed a wee little bit of awkwardness and rather than react like a pro, panicked and shut it down like a chump. Just another lame chapter in Cowherd's lame show.
Yeah, he's an asshat.
That said, in the beginning he was trying to go through the usual softball questions, and I think him and Harbaugh just didn't click. But then he got on his high horse and started engaging with Harbaugh as if he was a first-year coach who just wanted to "talk shop" with empty platitudes, and Harbaugh just shut down and that was it. Cowherd then continued the usual line that Harbaugh was difficult to deal with at SF, because as we've seen that is a well-run ship that certainly suffered under his leadership.
It was just a bad interview, but for Cowherd to act offended that Harbaugh wasn't going to prattle on like Meyer is dumb.
Seems like Cowherd is faux-outraged for publicity's sake.
The "Troll on Troll" crime comment is spot-on. Not since Kenneth Star deposed William J. Clinton have I seen a more awkward exchange. Not getting political here - it's just that it seemed like a middling lawyer deposing a very hostile witness.
I don't think it did Michigan any good, but also - in the grand scheme of things - not a lot of harm. Happy to have our guy coaching Michigan, even if he'll troll a troll now and again.
Also when coward was calling the big ten a buy I thought he was saying "bye" to be a fucking dick and get a rise out of Harbaugh. P
I thought, "why and how is the B10 like a BYE, like most of the teams are beatable? OK."
The much better was to phrase the question would be something like: "you know, if the B1G were stock, I'd rate it was a BUY. Would you agree?"
Harbaugh still would have answered something like, "well I never would have sold...", but at least there's no confusion.
Sounds like a job interview for a used car dealership. Sell me your car. Pretend I'm a customer. Etc.
What I suspect is that however we do this year and the years to come with JH at the helm, Cowherd won't be getting any more interviews with JH or any other Michigan coaches.
However poorly it was going, cutting JH off the end reduced that bridge to a crater.
Harbaugh's just a throwback to Bo, and back to the days when putting on a dog and pony show for the media every day wasn't part of the Michigan coach job description.
Harbaugh simply doesn't care to entertain Cowherd and his audience. He just cares about making Michigan better, and offering young recruits an exceptional study/sports environment and doing that, and hyping the program the way he wants to, not the way the audience starved media attempst to dictate.
It's a sad day if kids base their future on how much a coach entertains Colind Cowherd.
Cowherd's questions were fit for a Miss Teen USA pageant contestant. "When are you a cupcake?" Harbaugh obviously wanted no part of this.
Some sample questions:
"When are you a cupcake?"
"When are you a real pushover?"
"I want the man?! I have coaches on here all the time like Urban and Sark. I want the man!!"
"How do you feel about the B1G being a bye (buy)?"
I dont know about you, but those questions arent going to get you very great answers.
My wife would want to poke out the eyes of anyone stupid enough to ask her that.
The "buy"/"bye" question was absolutely terrible. It was without context, practically out of the blue, and with no real follow-up that could have given it more meaning until Harbaugh basically asked him what he wanted. Just a dumb interview.
I realize part of any coaches job is to talk with the media, no matter how insufferable the questions are. Harbaugh is human. Maybe he was tired from a late night at the Tigers game. Blame them. As long as he can effectively coach football, every Michigan fan should be okay with this seven minutes of mildly awkward, amusing sound bites from our coach. Harbaugh.
CNNSI had a column about college football and branding (the dreaded "b" word) that I think most people would find instructive. You can read it here: http://www.si.com/college-football/2015/06/26/college-football-branding…
Here's the excerpt from a companion CNNSI article (http://www.si.com/college-football/2015/07/01/college-football-teams-br…) that discusses what each CFB team's brand should be. Colin Cowherd would have done himself a favor if he'd read it prior to the Harbaugh interview. Perhaps then he would have realized that JH has a history of giving terse answer to questions with topics that have no brand-building value.
******
Michigan
The brand: To be determined, but judging by his Twitter feed, Jim Harbaugh is actively molding it.
What it should be: Winning with character and cruelty worked for Harbaugh at Stanford, and there is no reason he can’t do the same thing at Michigan. Harbaugh is keenly aware of the importance of creating an identity, and he works very hard at staying on message. He didn’t tweet at all as the 49ers coach, but he was active on social media as the Cardinal coach and came roaring back when he took the Michigan job. Why? He didn't have to recruit to the 49ers. He does have to recruit in college. In interviews, Harbaugh gives expansive answers to questions about topics that advance the brand and terse responses to questions about topics that have no brand-building value. The most important part of a team’s identity is the on-field product, though. Harbaugh’s Stanford teams had clear offensive and defensive identities, and he'll have all the tools to create similar schemes at Michigan. It may take some recruiting, but the Wolverines could develop dominant run blockers and versatile tight ends to build a devastating run and play-action passing game, just as Harbaugh’s Stanford teams did. It could all come together faster if Harbaugh can find his next Andrew Luck, though.
******
In a quasi-related item, John Beilein refers to Michigan using the dreaded "b" word in this article: http://www.mlive.com/wolverines/index.ssf/2015/07/john_beilein_tips_cap…
Jim Hackett did the same thing when talking about the negotiations over the new apparel contract as well. Hopefully, Brian will give them a pass and not start a FOIA request for their emails . . . .
Harbaugh gives expansive answers to questions about topics that advance the brand and terse responses to questions about topics that have no brand-building value.
I didn't see that. Cowherd lobbed up a few softballs that were open opportunities for Harbaugh to talk about Ann Arbor, what makes Michigan special, what make his players special, what the program's vision is, etc. Harbaugh was having none of it, apparently because Harbaugh was having none of Cowherd.
Cowherd could have done no amount of prep sufficient to make him not Cowherd.
is they need to try and do a better job of screening which interviews Coach H takes and which ones he doesn't. It's very obvious that he didn't want to do this interview AT ALL. Whether that was because he was very tired, was given little notice, or was just in a bad mood, or just doesn't like Cowherd in the least. My guess is the last one. If that's the case, then they come up with an excuse like he's busy with recruiting, camps, or whatever right now - maybe in the future. Doing bad interviews does no favors for U-M or the football program. It doesn't matter who's fault it is.
Cowherd's like a hyper chihuahua jumping up and down overdosing on caffeine. If he would have just allowed a few seconds of dead air, Jim might have been able to give him a good answer to one of those lousy questions. Jim takes time to develop his answers. Cowherd is normally in the booth by himself talking non-stop. A few seconds of quiet is the enemy to Cowherd. You can hear that Jim felt that way when he asked Cowherd if this was going to be one of those 50 question interviews. Jim wanted time to answer the questions. Were the pauses awkward? Maybe a little, but Cowherd as a professional should be better prepared to deal with them, instead of rapid firing ridiculous questions at Jim hoping that one would get him to respond quickly.
Dan Patrick would have been a much better choice. He's had a couple rough interviews over the years, but I'm usually impressed by how he's able to get the interviewee to open up.
to me that he didn't like Cowherd from the moment that CC didn't say hello, and the idiotic first question made it worse, and then the apparently insulting (to the Big 10) "bye/buy" question sealed the deal. After that, Harbaugh was just messing with him.
Rob
Arby's believes in nozhing.
I dunno, maybe Harbaugh doesn't like Colin. Or, I dunno...
Just listened to the Cowherd interview. There certainly was some shortness from Harbs but I think too that part of the deal was there were times where they were both trying to be funny/sarcastic and it just wasn't landing well.
I honestly didn't think Cowherd was as bad there as some people were making out on Twitter and in other threads. He may hate Harbaugh, I don't know, but I didn't get that sense from the questions he was firing to him.
I will agree though, that was brutal.
P.S. That Alvarez Oral history looks like a doozy.
seemed a little out there.
JH is just a guy who doesn't care about doing interviews. IMHO he looks like a guy who views doing interviews as taking out the garbage. It's just something he has to do and doesn't relish it. And it shows when there is no edit button like the Real Sports interview
The difference with Cowherd is that Cowherd was acting like he was trying to do Harbaugh a favor to help him "sell" the program to an 18 year old kid.
Harbaugh could care less. He's results oriented. He doesn't need some blowhard on ESPNU to help him with recruiting. . .
the same thing Harbaugh heard on the buy/bye thing.
Rob
The buy / sell segment proved to me Cowherd didn't really have much intention of having a good interview. Evidence, as soon as Harbaugh said he understood the question, Cowherd asked another unrelated question. At that point Cowherd had a great opportunity to turn the growing lemon into lemonade and he just let it pass.
I cannot stand neutral site games, especially when they are played in NFL stadiums. Part of what separates NCAA and NFL football is the atmosphere in which the games are played. College crowds (of the bigger schools) are normally far better/rowdy than those of NFL teams and they can make watching a college game in an NFL stadium better, but it will never be as good as watching the games in the schools' stadiums.
At the end of the day, it keeps Michigan in the news.
Probably should shift back to good news for tomorrow.
Am I the only one that is imagining what's going through the new "publicity" guy's mind? Something along the lines of "what... the **** have I gotten myself into"?
That was one of the most poorly constructed interviews I've heard in a longgggg time. Cowturd didn't welcome his guest, asked about the stupidest question ever to open it with that really just made no sense. Then ends it by being blatantly disrespectful and unprofessional. Smh
Yeah, that horrible interview was all on Cowherd.
I didn't hear anything unusual in terms of Harb's replies. He is who he is. Cowherd was uncomfortable, got shitty, and pulled the plug on the interview. The interview going bad was100% on his sorry ass.
I didn't even think it was that bad except for the two poorly planned areas by Cowherd. The bye vs buy thing and then the stupid thing about trying to get him to give a recruiting pitch. Then he got all butthurt because Harbaugh had more important things to do besides playing "make believe." Cowherd should have kept his head and finished the interview properly. I heard he badmouthed him after the interview for a long time too. Don't get mad at other people because your questions sucked then go on to bury the coach and act like the terrible interview he gave was some crime against humanity.
I agree. Based on all the focus on this interview at this site, I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop...the moment when Harbaugh just seemed like dick. It never happened. He did not seem that into it, but he basically behaved the way he normally does with the media...guarded. This is much ado about nothing. It will have absolutely zero impact on recruiting, nor should it. Recruits are going to remember their facetime with Jim an his absolute enthusiasm for all things Michigan, not how he responded to some terrible questions by Cowherd. And ending the interview the way Cowherd did was totally unprofessional. He's just pissed that Harbaugh wasn't entertaining and didn't fawn over him like they are buds or something. Cowherd's reaction is in no way fitting given how the interview went. And, really, Jim doesn't need Cowherd or ESPN's help to sell Michigan. His recent recruiting record seems to show he's doing that fine on his own. What a tool.
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