Unverified Voracity Hoards Nerf Guns
Quarantine #content. Need me some nerf guns:
Omg he wasn’t ready pic.twitter.com/Bn6LT0nfVD
— Benjamin Dixon (@BenjaminPDixon) April 20, 2020
DRC says he's bored outside and this seems like a good way to make him less bored. Trauma!
Why all the sports got canceled. A (likely) demonstration of what going forward with the Big Ten Tournament would have led to:
It was the hottest ticket in the state for high school basketball. Four great teams. An electric atmosphere was guaranteed for the night of March 6 at Lawrence Central, where 2,800 fans would pack the gym for the sectional semifinals.
But early on that Friday afternoon, the calls started coming in to Lawrence Central.
It was revealed by state officials at 11 a.m. that the first person in Indiana had tested positive for coronavirus at Community Health North, four miles from the school.
“We started getting calls,” Lawrence Central athletic director Ryan Banas said, “wondering if we were still going to play.”
The games were played that night — and the following night — just like they were in 63 other venues around the state. Fans at Lawrence Central that week for Sectional 10 were treated to a basketball bonanza of incredible games and individual performances.
But on that night of March 6, there were five people in the gym who later died after testing positive for coronavirus. There’s no way to know if they contracted it at Lawrence Central. But families are left to mourn.
Might be the last things to come back, too.
[After THE JUMP: They can still have an NFL draft, though.]
Life as a pass rusher. Josh Uche isn't going to have to wait too long to hear his name called during the NFL draft, so it's interesting that PFF put together a reel of Uche going up against Tristan Wirfs that's totally devoid of whiz bang plays:
All of Tristan Wirfs' meaningful pass-blocking snaps against Michigan's Josh Uche (2019)
— Austin Gayle (@PFF_AustinGayle) April 20, 2020
Wirfs wins the matchup, but some of Uche's reps are really impressive — I think Uche would be getting more first-round hype if he tested at the Combine.pic.twitter.com/r4RRBwyoR2
Wirfs is a bad dude who will be one of the first tackles off the board, but this is a tape that 1) mostly shows Uche getting handled and 2) is being used as pro-Uche evidence. Pass rush is a thing where you lose most of the time and nobody notices until you put a guy under the draft microscope like this.
FWIW, my Uche take from the Iowa game:
I think the problem is that Wirfs is truly elite. I forgot to clip a thing he did where it looked like Uche had beat him to the inside and then he just shoved him back to the LOS. It was a WTF moment. I mean, obviously, how many times have I mentioned an individual opponent pass block in the history of this column? Probably once.
I think that block is at 20 seconds in that reel, but there are a few like it.
Can they maintain? Michigan had a massive amount of interior OL experience and for the first time in a long time looks set to send every graduating OL to the NFL. So you got things like this:
I love watching Michigan’s OL on tape. This is how you handle 5 on 3 pic.twitter.com/Hl1PY6D1qd
— Jon Ledyard (@LedyardNFLDraft) April 16, 2020
This was an incredible turnaround that happened when Ed Warinner showed up… and when Cesar Ruiz became the starting C. Ruiz is getting talked up as the smartest OL in the draft. Whether Michigan can maintain their superior interior communication next year is an open question.
It's not going back to the last days of Drevno, but a step back is inevitable. Its size is going to be a major swing factor in the season, assuming it occurs.
(Also, yes, before everyone in the comments says it: FFS, Patterson. The replies to this tweet are literally all that except for one guy despondent that Michigan has four draftable OL and finished 77th in rushing.)
Michael Jordan: good. The most baffling thing about late Jordan is that he hit half of his incredibly difficult midrange twos.
That is inhuman. Also he had a 1-3 playoff series record against the Pistons.
Hat tip to Bring Your Champions, They're Our Meat for pointing out that there's an "All Cheap Shots, Altercations, and Techs" compilation video from the 1989 series, amongst others. It's six minutes long!
I sort of miss the Bill Laimbeer's Combat Basketball era.
The aristocrats! No details on Isaiah Todd's contract with the G-League but it looks like it's going to be an entirely different deal than previous ones if Jalen Green's is any indication:
Green’s deal is expected to be for $500,000 and will reach well over $1 million with endorsements, appearances and educational fees, sources have told The Athletic. Todd didn’t divulge how much he is expected to earn.
The NBA is going to siphon off guys like this from now on. The NCAA can reduce the number by allowing name and image rights to revert to players.
I'm pretty salty that it's come to this: instead of acknowledging reality the NCAA chooses to damage its product by refusing to work with the NBA. One of the few human persons left at the cybernetic sports factory that used to be SI is Jeremy Woo:
What continues to be clear is that power has shifted away from the hands of college programs when it comes to recruitment. The availability of feasible financial alternatives that bypass the NCAA’s academic charade and the independent branding power granted by social media have worked in concert to devalue the traditional college hoops experience for some. Green’s presence will bring the G League more eyeballs than ever before, and in turn, he’ll be heavily marketed on NBA platforms, with potential for added exposure and brand awareness, and also immediate opportunities for sneaker and marketing money. These alternative routes will remain a strange middle ground for top prospects as long as the NBA decides to maintain its current age minimum, and, for a small group of prospects, it’s more than feasible.
I seriously doubt Green is going to get anywhere near the Branding Power he would have gotten as the NCAA tournament's most-hyped star, but when the choice is between getting no money for that and getting a lot of money for less exposure it's not a hard choice.
It absolutely sucks that the NCAA's ruling cabal is damaging the golden goose for some short term gains realized entirely by the cabal, but that's the story with everything these days so it's not a huge surprise.
Weird hockey decision delayed. I'm not sure if this was common knowledge yet:
Just finished up a Zoom chat with @IlliniAD, who said @IlliniAthletics was set to formally announce #Illini hockey as early as next month. COVID-19 has put that on hold for now. Regardless, the 3-year project is nearing the finish line
— Bret Beherns (@WCIA3Bret) April 20, 2020
Illinois has been wandering towards a hockey program for a few years now, first partnering with the NHL for a study that was always going to have one conclusion and then issuing reports about how hockey could be break-even, or close to it. I'm skeptical that things are going to work out as well for Illinois as they did for Penn State, which has a massive fan culture and a historically awful basketball program. Illinois is a basketball school first and foremost and even if their program has fallen off since their salad days it still casts a much longer shadow.
Illinois would be the eighth Big Ten team. This would remove the awkward bye weeks currently baked into a conference with an odd number of teams. It would also severely limit the nonconference schedule (just six slots in a 34 game regular season) or force the Big Ten to change its conference format.
Well, yeah. Jace Howard is back on scholarship. Announcing he'd walk on shows how badly the program got blindsided.
Etc.: Knock-on effects of the economy slowing are weird. "RENDERING OF THE ASS CREAM TRUCK COURTESY OF CHRIS SALITURE." Bordeleau profiled by Dave Hogg at NHL.com. Adrian Martinez has some holes in his game. Uche and Ruiz goin in Dane Brugler's first round. Chase Pietila profiled by his hometown paper. What now?
That Pistons-Bulls montage is great. Best part is at 5:15 in the video where the ref physically drags Scottie off the court and then continues to get into a stance and shuffle accross the baseline to get in position to make a call.
Personally, I enjoyed the freeze frame of Salley staring straight into the camera with a guy in a choke hold.
What's weird is that as they much as they let 'em play, they seemed to call a lot of random technical fouls back then.
The last clip where Jordan runs into Rodman when he had his back turned and knocks him down, and then the ref somehow calls fouls on BOTH players is some classic Jordan Rules basketball right there.
Uh, yeah, he was shoved into Rodman. Foul actually should have been on the guy that shoved Jordan into Rodman. If looking for video of Jordan getting preferential/superstar treatment from the refs, you can find much better than that clip. If anything, it highlights Rodman getting screwed by the refs.
Correct me if wrong, but I think the Pistons were the last bully ball team to win a championship. Pat Riley tried to replicate the model with the mid 90's Knicks but came up just short against Jordan's Bulls and Olajuwan's Rockets. The Knicks just didn't have enough skill players/scorers like the Pistons did, with Thomas, Dumars, Aguirre and Johnson.
In today's game and the way it's officiated, it obviously won't be happening.
Weird to see a normal Rodman.
April 21st, 2020 at 11:50 AM ^
Chuck Daly was the one coach who had a real connection with Rodman and kept him from going off the deep end. Rodman loved him like a father. After Daly left he was never the same.
Daly may not have won as many titles as Phil Jackson or Pat Riley but for my money he was every bit the coach they were, he just didn't have quite as much talent to work with. Note that he got picked over them to coach the 1992 Dream Team.
Am I wrong or are like 1/3 of those Uche/Wirfs snaps missed holding calls?
Some of them looked really close, but Wirfs always seemed let go just before Uche slipped down... Just before Uche could be fairly viewed as having gotten by.
Sure, you could probably call a couple of them. But mostly, to me, it shows just how good Wirfs is at footballing. He looked twice Uche's size, and matched him speed wise (for the most part). He's legit good.
Completely agree that he's really good. Some of those just looked borderline
Yeah, I arched an eyebrow at Uche's reps against Wirfs resulted in him being "handled". I initially read it as being "owned", but perhaps he meant that Wirfs successfully rerouted Uche the majority of the time.
My memory of how Wirfs did against us wasn't as dominating as that series of clips showed. Maybe I'm thinking of how Winovich did the year before. This was pretty cominant. I don't think Uche got irresponsible and in a few clips you saw other members of the D get sacks so in that sense it worked.
FFS, Patterson...
I could not stop watching the pocket abandonment. I mean, both the NG and left DE were ON THE GROUND, and still Patterson bailed right - which freed up an otherwise doubled DE.
JFC.
Could not stop shaking my head in disbelief. Had to close the window and start over.
FFS....he scrambled to the right and threw his WR open for a TD on this play.
Yep I went back to find the play and was shocked we scored a touchdown on it! On a great throw and catch nonetheless!
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=d-FQCjcz_1E&t=9m20s
Of course, Shea missed Haskins open over the middle if he had just stepped up. Which is the frustration with Shea in a nutshell. Very physically talented in terms of mobility and accuracy but just mentally both anxious and a step slow.
Yeah, it happened to work out on this play. But if he had stepped up he had RB wide open up the middle for an easy TD. He made it a lot harder than it needed to be.
Clips like these give me hope (?) that even if McCaffrey isn't a great QB that he can still improve the overall efficiency of the offense. It was great that Shea turned this play into a TD, but it highlights the challenge from drive-to-drive and game-to-game we had on offense. It should also be evidence against the "Harbaugh sucks" crowd because that play worked really well, only for Shea to turn it into a high-risk, high-difficulty play instead of easy conversion. How many of these DIDN'T work the last two years?
I also think this is a reason why the read-option game was so hard to figure out too. The number of times Shea didn't keep when he should have....were those his bad decisions? Were those true reads? Did the coaches take away some of his reads because he lacked field awareness?
Shea was a good QB with some skill who lacked the refinement to ever reach his full potential and thus the full potential of our offense.
I can't even imagine what watching film this past season must have been like for the offensive coaches. I consider it a miracle Shea is still alive and Harbaugh isn't in jail for Murder 1.
If I go all-in with pocket twos and win the hand anyways that doesn't make me a good poker player.
He made a good throw on that play, but I think people complaining also have a point. That was a perfect pocket and he decided to scramble
It's not about the end result but more of the process. This is a recurring issue with Shea. He has a tendency to leave the pocket when he shouldn't. A better QB would make the offense a lot more efficient and consistent instead of wild swings of good and bad plays.
Bad process that happen to go in Michigan's way but he shouldn't have made it harder for the offense and he basically ran into pressure
I'd say it's also about the end result, which was his receiver getting lit the fuck up. Which you really want your senior QB to be able to avoid by hitting the blindingly open RB instead.
If we can reasonably assume that Tate Forcier would have been able to do something that the current QB screws up, that says a lot about that QB.
Brady was forced to get a feel for the pocket because he was way to slow to move out of it. I remember Henson as a freshman being the athletic QB and constantly abandoning the pocket and running when his first read (Usually Terrel) was not open. Henson fixed that by his Junior year and put on some amazing offensive performances. Still can't believe he didn't make it in the pros.
Shea was a good quarterback. that could use his athletisism to make plays and win games against bad and good teams. He didn't have the smarts and feel for the pocket to take down the elite teams. Really hope Dylan is an upgrade. I am still surprised he never passed Shea on the depth chart, but I don't know how much that hit took out of him.
"Also, yes, before everyone in the comments says it: FFS, Patterson."
Sorry Brian, bears repeating ad nauseum
FFS, Patterson!!!!!!!
I really hope that if nothing else, McCaffery (yes it will be him) is an upgrade in terms of reading the defense and getting the ball out to the correct place at the correct time. Gotta think that will really help the offense a LOT
Hell yes, Ben Dixon making an appearance.
Truly impressive that nearly every one of the clips in that video involve Laimbeer, Rodman, or both. I think there's like one Mahorn in there and all the rest are those two.
John Salley gets a good one in it.
I don't remember the scrub on the Bulls that seems to be mixing it up a lot.
Charles Davis.
Also, he didn't get in this compilation but Bill Cartwright could throw a mean elbow or two. I remember him elbowing Isiah in the head and then Isiah broke his hand punching him.
I'm curious what others think about the #77 in rushing offense stat. While that clip of Shea shows a big part of our problem last year....I am curious about the rushing stats. Part of that is system/style related and part of it is having to play a lot of very good defenses. But what other thoughts does the board have? (I'm hoping this isn't just an excuse for people to yell about Harbaugh.)
This is really hard to look at, I believe that the stat that they are talking about is yard per attempt which Michigan ranked 77. That number is so skewed by sacks in college football that it could be way off. I think about times, like when Patterson threw the ball left handed out of bounds for a 7 yard loss against ND. Or ran 15 yards backwards against MSU and inexplicably tripped. Granted that could also be the case for a lot of other teams, but it is just one way why tracking rushing is difficult.
The OL was also adjusting to a new offense, and there were two running backs, getting their first look at running in college. It could be any number of things. To me, all you have to know about the OL last year was when Michigan ran down ND's throat in a driving rain when everyone knew they would be running.
I wonder what our rushing stats would look like if the Army game was excised. That whole game was such a, “what the fuck am I watching,” experience.
But their pass protection was great. If anything I'd guess lack of sacks was keeping it from falling farther. The run game just wasn't that good. A good deal of that is because of the terrible read game.
Yea that clip is Patterson in a nutshell.
FFS Patterson is right. I don't care that it turned into a TD because that's still the kind of play that'll get you yelled at by a coach because it's the wrong decision almost all the time.
2 guys on the ground and only 1 guy vaguely pressuring and he still bugs out. If he had fumbled the ball bugging out of that pocket it would've been the quintessential Shea play
"Why all the sports got cancelled"
My brother-in-law is a multi-sport official at the HS and college level (HS basketball and volleyball, college softball). He has five officiating friends who all came down with COVID-19 from a single high school basketball game right before the lockdown was announced, in the obvious hot spot of (checks notes) Concord, MI. Last I heard, at least one of the five was not expected to recover. Jackson County Health Department announced that anybody who was at that game and showed any symptoms were advised to immediately seek medical attention. If a one-legitimate-traffic-signal town of scarcely a thousand people can be the source of that kind of outbreak, it's a small miracle that everything got cancelled when it did.
The IndyStar article is well written and very interesting. You see less of that journalism these days. It takes a little extra time and requires some homework.
This. If schools had not been closed when they did, things could easily be 5x worse right now in Michigan (especially Jackson where there are quite a few inmates & staff from the various facilities infected.)
Let's see, a dozen people tested positive, eventually and 5 people died (all approximately 60 and above) ostensibly from a game environment on the very day that the first case in that state was identified, and somehow that implicates the game environment? Color me skeptical. What it sounds like to me is proof that the virous was and has been much more prevalent than advertised. Also, the dearth of student age victims indicates that the schools are not the issue. Indeed, I have heard the point made that the worse thing that could have been done is to close the colleges sending large groups of non-susceptible persons home to their parents and grandparents who were much more at risk. When the post-mortem is done on this crises, I think we will see that most of the choices were sub-optimal
The reason schools are closed is not because the students themselves are at great risk, but because schools can be major vectors of infection, given the close proximity of lots of kids with so-so hygiene habits. You can't ask a class of 30 students to all stay six feet apart, and you certainly can't ask that in the lunchroom, or on the bus.
And then the kids come home and infect their parents.
April 20th, 2020 at 11:25 PM ^
In a situation like a pandemic, every decision will have sub-optimal outcomes. Every decision is about reducing the amount of life lost and mitigating the negative impacts on the majority of the population.
There will be lessons learned and improvements to process. It won’t be because politicians made decisions to protect a larger percentage of the population.
Under Martinez holes tweet is a classic Spurrier tweet.
Obviously its his blog and he can post what he wants, but if Unverified Verocity is gonna continue to have Brian's opinions about Covid, maybe just get rid of it for a while. I'm sure Brian is a smart guy, but the last thing I want to read on here is Brian's Covid content. Just one reader's opinion for whatever it's worth. Also, sports brings in billions of dollars to the economy, and not that money is more important than health, but we all now what drives decision making, which means it won't be the last to come back, unless he's talking about full stadium games.
What did he say about covid that was so bad?
Just sick of reading about it 24/7. Come here to escape the non stop Covid talk, not read more about it.
April 20th, 2020 at 11:28 PM ^
I never realized reading news was a forced activity.
LOL found "stick to sports" -guy
April 21st, 2020 at 12:21 PM ^
You don't think he should mention Covid's massive affect on sports on his sports blog?
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