I don't have an Athletic subscription so I can't read the linked article, but Penn State doesn't have any common opponents with either Michigan or OSU so far this season, so I don't know how these anonymous opposing coaches can be making meaningful comparisons.

Meek's writing process.

Step 1: need to write about a rivalry game.

Step 2: lots of agitation.

Step 3: include all the juicy stuff.

Step 4: notice all the juicy stuff is on one side.

Step 5: scramble to seem balanced.

Yes, thank you. This is the correct summary of the Austin Meek article and the "toxicity" of the rivalry.

Also, did Manchin "say the quiet part out loud"? I guess for some people. But this is what I am always left with when I hear arguments against NIL and revenue sharing. "I don't like change" is more important than not exploiting people.

I wonder if Manchin found it hard to root for his daughter who as CEO of Mylan drove the price of EpiPen up 500%? 

Spoiler alert - he did not. Mylan gave over $200k to his campaigns. I guess he only roots for certain types of Capitalists.

Inside Washington and Oregon's move to the Big Ten.

I must have been really out of touch with the PNW, because I didn't know until recently that they were such hated rivals. I always thought that their primary rival was their respective in-state version of Sparty.

Sorry to go political, but does Joe Mansion serve any purpose but to protect the right of coal barons to pollute streams?

Finally someone else who doesn't think this MSU game is going to be a big deal. Half the players on MSUs squad are new. The coaches who tried to leverage the rivalry to hate are mostly gone. They aren't good. My assumption is Michigan will forget its even a rivalry near the end of the 3rd and up by 4 scores. The ultimate insult is to play them like they don't even matter.

“It’s a fairly radical notion, but if we could find a way to reach binding agreements with our student-athletes, most of this goes away,” the Notre Dame athletic director said, referring to what industry leaders say is a chaotic compensation system around name, image and likeness (NIL).

I keep hearing this argument, but I don't understand it.  We now have star football and basketball players making six (if not seven) figures in NIL.  There is no way any sort of collective bargaining agreement would pay athletes that much directly from the schools.  Moreover, they wouldn't give up their right to NIL just because they agreed to a CBA with the schools.  Pro athletes don't give up their right to endorse products because they're paid by their teams.  Any NCAA-mandated salary would just go on top of NIL money, not replace it.

The NIL genie is out of the bottle, for better or worse.  

I think PSU might be able to eked out a win against OSU. ND  is ok but I'm not impressed by OSU's win over them.

Great column.  Pretty surprised to read the surveyed Coaches give PSU a slight edge this week.  

My favorite write up quote of the year so far:

“Michigan is above both of them,” said a staffer who faced Penn State. “Ohio State and Penn State are 2-a and 2-b in some order, but Michigan is well above both of them.”

Sounds so good I want to believe and believe I do.  Beat Sparty !  Win the game.

That Harbaugh quote perfectly captures how weird and cool he is.

If it were at all possible to limit NIL to "getting rights literally everyone else in the country has," in Brian's words, I honestly don't think anyone would care, much. But of course it's not. Schools remain incentivized to pay the players — a "right" very few people have — and many's the pundit, in Ann Arbor as elsewhere, that demands a school pay whatever it takes to get a highly-prized recruit to commit to the local school.

I'm all for NIL, and at the same time I'm absolutely appalled by the suggestion that schools should pay players, which 100% makes them "professionals." If we want schools to have affiliated and paid football teams, fine, but ... why do those players have to go to class? Why do we worry what their GPA is? Let's just admit that we don't care if they're students or not, and have school-affiliated-professional teams!

In any event, I don't believe every politician who is trying to find a solution that works is necessarily trying to screw the players out of a "right," but may be trying to find a system that allows players to get paid without bankrupting every single non-revenue sport there is. 

The insistence on the application and use of the adjective "toxic" 24/7 and onto every damn thing and situation in common English parlance grates and has officially jumped the shark everybody.

There has to be a better way.

Surely there are alternatives.

Brian's link to the Oregon-Washington story is a good read. Would recommend.

It's amazing how chaotic and random decisions were that will have such long-term implications.

idk I’m taking Fitchburg and the points 

Walk ons and students from the stands will be playing by the 2nd quarter 

I had Athletic for a couple years. Austin Meek barely even tries. Doesn't do analysis or have an ounce of access to Michigan football recruiting writ large. I wonder how these guys land such cushy gigs.

Two D2 schools above 2 FBS schools and two D3 schools above 50 FCS schools.  Had a friend in college who always wore a Fitchburg State sweatshirt…Bring it on.

It seems to me, and maybe I'm wrong here, that the "toxicity" of the U-M/MSU rivalry took on a nastier edge when Mark Dantonio became the head coach. He assiduously fostered and encouraged a culture of resentment, moreso than I've seen any other MSU head coach do in my lifetime. Everything U-M ever did was somehow evidence of "disrespect" or worse. I think that this culture carried over after his departure from the team, and it had something to do with MSU's terrible behavior in the tunnel last season.

Does “Harbaugh remembers” mean we’ll keep our starters in til the end of the game?

I expect this will look like the rest of our games this year: paving an inferior opponent for a 30+ point MOV. Where I’d like to see it different is not pulling our starters; keep the pedal to the metal.

There’s a practical benefit too: while it’s great getting backups reps (and they’ve had many), the starters need to get the feel of playing a full game going into the next portion of the season. The downside would be risk of injury, especially against this malevolent, trained-to-hate-and-injure team. But an 80 point MOV, Fielding Yost style, would be glorious.