I think perception is reality. I'm sure every non-M coach tells every WR on the recruiting trail that if they go to Michigan they'll just be asked to block and occasionally run end-arounds because Michigan never throws the ball. Maybe show them tape of last year's PSU game, and the second half of 2021 OSU.
Facts never get in the way of a recruiting visit, but this is a very easy case to fabricate.
It's a long time from April to September, so the QB missing some throws is nothing to panic about.
BUT the reasons should be timing and chemistry with the WRs. WR is supposed to be here, but the ball went here instead. That sort of thing. If the issue is footwork. . . for a junior?? That's not getting fixed in five months.
Now I'm a little upset about the "let's throw him under the bus" thread the other day. Someone who did this much for the program doesn't deserve that treatment, just because it's politically expedient.
Obvious ones are obvious, so I'll just toss another into the hat: 2023 MSU.
That one was about more than sports. The last meeting ended with violent crimes the media bent over backwards to "both sides" and. . . FFS was Tucker ever suspended at all for it? I was sickened by the corruption. Since the NCAA was going to do nothing about MSU, and the B1G was going to do nothing about MSU, and the media was coddling them with everything they could muster, and the legal system negotiated punishment down to almost nothing, it was up to Michigan to teach them a lesson the only way they could. I didn't want just a win; I wanted humiliations galore. If they care about beating Michigan so much that they'll resort to becoming a mob, make them eat the fucking football.
So they did. Michigan went to East Lansing and started scoring. And scoring. And scoring. 21-0, 28-0, 35-0. And they put in Ja'Den McBurrows and German Green, and the last play was Green with a TFL. By the end of the game, MSU had put up more Hitlers than points. Michigan 49, Fuck-around-and-find-outs zero. And then Sainristil wouldn't let the camera cut away and pulled McBurrows in front of it.
And they were still both-sidesing, but it didn't matter anymore. MSU had been reduced to a brittle, trampled, shattered husk.
It's tempting to dismiss them but there are serious psychological problems in anyone who takes sports so seriously that they resort to delusion as a coping mechanism.
I mean, I can get pretty worked up about sports, but I make distinctions between when Michigan punches itself in the face, gets beat by a clearly superior team, or gets robbed. I get upset when they lose, but in the end, I move on.
But when someone feels unhinged, mouth-frothing rage over some 20-year-olds they've never met wearing shirts of one color beating 20-year-olds they've never met wearing shirts of a different color in a competition. . . that's frighteningly poor impulse control, and that's not a nice thing to be around in many situations. Like, what if one of these wackos (of which there are thousands) is coaching your kid's team? Or any kids' team?
"Lambert-Smith is gonna be like a 2nd or 3rd round pick; he's legit." "So why didn't he leave?" "He did leave!" "No no no, why didn't he leave for the draft?" "I don't know. But Michigan should go get that guy." "Oh, I mean, totally! When did he leave?" "After spring practice." "So, very recently." "Uhhh, hello! What year is he?" "He's a senior." "OK, so, he hypothetically could get in?" "Uhhhh. . ."
For a long time, the women's game was more skill dependent than the boys, because they did not have the jump-out-of-the-gym, above-the-rim athletes. They had to play as a team, and you saw a lot more games that looked like the Princeton constant-motion offense than the NBA-style "I will drive to the hoop and you cannot stop me" variation.
What era are you talking about? Because I heard this a lot maybe ten years ago, and it was applicable then, but UConn's dominance goes back a good twenty years, and women's b-ball in the early aughts was horrid. Like, to hell with "team basketball" -- some scholarship players, on tournament teams, playing meaningful minutes, looked like they barely exercised.
Forget "above the rim" freaks; the game at one point was so atrocious that it questioned the notion of women being athletes. Teams that looked barely coached at all were making the tournament as if the prevailing attitude of WBB coaches was, "I'm here to undermine Title IX." UConn was one of a few programs that affirmed their players were indeed serious athletes.
But the obvious result of that disparity in approach was unwatchable. Today's game is real, and I daresay UConn's blowout wins played a role in that. They weren't doing anything special; they were largely showing what women could do if you took their game seriously, because back then that wasn't the norm. They made it the norm.
One other thought, I have to quibble with Brian's take on women's basketball.
I remember seeing some of those old UConn games and yeah they were boring, but the lack of hate wasn't the problem. The problem is that UConn games were a team of well-coached athletes destroying disorganized piles of stiff, unconditioned, clumsy intramural casuals. And that would be like the NCAA quarterfinals.
These days. . . OK, the back half of bubble rosters still look rather stiff, but I mean even an 8-9 match will have some real ballin'. There are still more programs than talent to go around, but it's gotten legitimately watchable -- and as a result, people are watching.
It's not like it suddenly got good because people now care. It's that it finally got good enough to give a damn about.
I'm being nice. Bryce Underwood is apparently getting offered well more than I've made in my entire life.
He may be a hard worker, but considering his age vs. the sleep debt I built up just from my years as an engineer, I don't think he's outworked my entire adult career.
I'm OK with athletes making money, but there's something audacious about asking fans to directly foot this bill on top of everything else.
I'm inclined to agree, but I think the "it's legal now!" cry a few years ago created the expectation that every program has an untapped pile of boosters-that-weren't-until-now, because they follow the rules, or something, which is a laughably delusional idea based on everything I've witnessed about high-revenue sports.
Anyone inclined to funnel personal funds into a damn collegiate sports program had been doing so all along. So yeah, it's the same people with the same money, but everyone thought NIL was going to magically create another huge pile of money out of thin air, and that it's not is causing serious problems.
Am I the only person to think NIL was unsustainable to begin with?
Brian finally got the model right. Sure, it was a way to finally pay the players "over the table", but it was a way to pay the players in a way that didn't threaten the billions going into the NCAA's insatiable maw. So, yeah, we're still paying for (increasingly expensive) tickets and subscriptions and parking and merch and $20 watery beers and then everyone's supposed to fork over NIL money on top of all that? And many of these young men are demanding more than I make in a year.
So NIL was always going to mostly come from bored rich people with nothing better to do with their money than throw it at athletes for literally no reason but fandom, but there are only so many of those.
Folks here keep pounding the table to "fix Michigan's NIL" but Michigan's fundamental problem is that -- from the donors' perspective -- NIL is a terribly stupid way to spend money, and Michigan alumni are generally on the smarter side with their finances. Like, even if I had millions to spend, the NIL pitch is basically, "We're a billion-dollar franchise but we need you to give us your millions so one high-schooler will wear a blue shirt instead of a purple shirt." My reaction is, what the fuck.
Maybe? I don't know what's going on with Phelia or even the program in general, but IF this is about NIL, they're being naive.
Women's basketball outdrew the men's finals. They know they're being watched. That bell can't be un-rung, and bully for them. But NIL isn't TV money*. It comes from business owners and other wealthy benefactors, who for the most part are white, male, sexist, and generally not fans of women's basketball. There are exceptions, but those exceptions literally define where NIL money is concentrated. From 30,000 feet, the inclination to pay female athletes is still a full generation -- if not two -- behind the revenue they're generating. (I mean if men want to complain about not getting paid. . . WBB going "LOL that's adorable")
So Michigan likely can't pay her, but most other places can't either, because (as pointed out by Brian on the latest Roundtable) NIL and TV revenue are two completely separate buckets, by design. She could land at a place with significant NIL for WBB, but if this is really about money, she's as likely to be looking for a pot of gold with her name on it that just doesn't exist.
*Again, unless you're a Caitlin Clark, which no one on M's squad is
Also, Clark is a horrible example. She is one of only a few cases of WBB NIL being used in a straightforward way -- businesses are sponsoring her, actually paying for her Name, Image and Likeness, not funneling money into Iowa WBB, per se.
99% of NIL is glorified money laundering, and WBB is growing in popularity, but sports fandom overall is still deeply sexist and happily exploiting the outdated notion that women's sports are "non-revenue" (ratings be damned, no really, the condescension is that brazen) to tell them they're [financially] worth nothing. Oh, I'm sure there's some money out there, but it's so miniscule compared to football that you can't imagine them working the same way. Phelia'd be welcomed at a number of programs and she can try to make NIL an issue, but those are basically two different conversations. She's good, but she's not Caitlin Clark.
Point being, the vast majority of women probably aren't getting paid, anywhere. I can't imagine the offers at any one program are significantly more lucrative than any other. And in the case of superstardom like Clark's, the money's following the individual, not coming from the program.
I recall Ross' comment as a "I think he could". In any case, AFAIK no one's seen him do it. I think Goldin moves much better than people give him credit for, but he's definitely not switchable.
Small is a true junior who transferred from ECU last year; Michigan admissions is going to obliterate many of his credits unless he somehow manages to get a degree in three years after a transfer.
Obligatory clarification that Admissions doesn't determine credits but we're all well aware of that. We're just using that as a shorthand because "admissions" is one word and we really don't care about splitting this hair.
Rule #1 about reads is, there is no such thing as a simple read. DCs will reverse-engineer the read and then position a defender to either force a bad decision or make the read "fuzzy" to induce confusion.
What you can do is make a simple progression so if a read looks iffy, it doesn't result in certain death. A lot of flawed offenses we've seen through here, especially zone reads, were one-read or even zero-read plays wherein the defense reliably herded the ball into a free hitter by exploiting the QB's programming.
What you can do with Orji is add option C, "just make a damn play". If A isn't there, check B. If B isn't there, it's now "broken play" time and you take what you can get. That's a viable progression with an athletic QB, but Harbaugh never did it because A) he's terrified of turnovers and B) he's trying to keep the QB healthy. Which, to be fair, were absolutely legitimate problems early in his tenure at M. But the conservatism also killed a ton of drives.
That said, I'm curious about the post-Harbaugh era. I think Harbaugh is good at developing NFL QBs, as in, QBs that can drink from the firehose. JJ might be an early first-rounder, and while Rudock didn't get much NFL interest, he's now in med school. (Then a bunch of QBs got hurt due to pass pro issues, so jury remained out.) Lesser QBs tended to struggle or get even worse. He can't make the game simple for them.
JJ's gone, but so is Harbaugh, so this doesn't mean we regress all the way back to O'Korn. It's Moore's team now, and it'll be interesting to see if he can put together an offense that mortals can run.
Not so crazy for us. We’ve played Chris Wormley and Rashan Gary at SDE; both were close to that size. Yeah it’s basically like having three DTs on the field but that’s not inherently a bad idea.
I wasn't a fly in the room but the incoming class is kinda getting a "Fab Five" hype of its own.
I can empathize with the thought of, "I'm busting my butt and improving but I'm gonna get passed by someone younger than me?" Some people don't just want "increased roles"; they don't want to spend their upperclassmen years as a 6th/7th banana.
It's impossible to know, but there may have been too much "rebuilding year" talk.
I think it's really about the G-League. Diabate and Jett are basically G-League players.
So it's about choosing where to develop, and getting paid while doing so. But two things in G-League's favor are that you can play against other professionals there, and you can sign two-way contracts that get you onto NBA rosters. NIL can't merely match G-League offers dollar for dollar and compel players with NBA interest to stick around.
They probably all did. I've been in similar situations. You can love someone doing something crazy and suggest nicely, then ask, then plead, then scream in desperation, but some people think they know it all and just won't listen to advice, all the way to the grave. Even consulted a lawyer at one point to get a family member help but was told, "The law doesn't protect people from making bad decisions."
As for Warde, I hate the guy but I do have to acknowledge he did reach out to an expert in Beilein, and as a result we landed May. That's a rare level of introspection these days.
Doctors set his recovery time at 6-12 weeks. He spent 15 days in the hospital post-op.
Howard told assistant coach Howard Eisley, a lifelong friend, that he would return in two weeks.
I realize this is common as dirt, but this shit grinds my gears. Half of this is elite athletes being hard-wired to think everything is a challenge, I get that, but half of this is typical American anti-intellectualism normalizing the casual dismissal of subject matter experts.
Juwan, this is more problematic than you going "oops" and paying the price. You're a longtime pro in a basketball arena, but you're the know-nothing here. The idiot. The dumbest person in the room. Now, there's nothing wrong with that if you know your place. But you don't know shit about cardiology, so you have to listen. I can't imagine he'd take it well if I -- an old, out-of-shape desk potato -- loudly said "WTF do you know about basketball" to his face with all the confidence of a Dunning-Kruger case study, but that's basically what he did here. He completely disregarded an expert in their own area of expertise, but he expects his kids to listen? The Sanderson incident suddenly makes a lot more sense.
I know, it's easy to pick on Juwan when like half the country does it, and everyone's now going, "Yo, DC, what's the big deal? Everyone does that," but that's a hypocritical thought if you've ever felt frustration over not being listened to at work. It's a dangerously broken form of normal, but it's just so common these days that we don't react to it anymore.
I think it’s an overreaction to media trying to make something of its own bullshit, which I’m saddened to remind folks of considering Connor Stalions was just last year.
Anyway we kind of have a first world problem because our D-line just might be one for the ages. When the best pass pro in the country couldn’t block these guys, it’s hard to tell what shape your O-line is in by watching practice.
Michigan also plays host to Iowa the week after (with games against pushover MSU/CMU in between), an offensively challenged team with very good pitching
Role, probably. At 6'3", he was an upperclassman reserve. . . at FAU. Not clear why May would recruit a transfer he wasn't even starting over shorter players at a basketball desert.
I think we can assume that FAU's four guard lineup was out of necessity, not desire.
I considered that a foregone conclusion. At a place like FAU, your only choices (beyond a throwback center in Goldin) are big guys with bricks for hands or oompa-loopmas who can ball, because anyone who's big and talented will be too highly ranked. May opted for the latter.
Grad transfers are others' guys (not so much FAU of course, but in general). They're either immediately useful or hopefully round into shape by March, and those are the only two optimistic outcomes. And the reality is, we'll need transfers just to field a team.
May said he's going to try to put together a winning roster immediately, because why not, but his stated preference is to develop. I'm mostly fine with it; I think there are other benefits to surrounding freshmen with upperclassmen, even if the latter developed elsewhere.
People who fancy themselves evil masterminds are baffled by Jim's authenticity. They don't think anyone can say & do the things he does and still be real. And those that realize he is the real deal, absolutely hate him for it. He reminds them of what they've become.
Recent Comments
-Vlad Goldin, probably
I think perception is reality. I'm sure every non-M coach tells every WR on the recruiting trail that if they go to Michigan they'll just be asked to block and occasionally run end-arounds because Michigan never throws the ball. Maybe show them tape of last year's PSU game, and the second half of 2021 OSU.
Facts never get in the way of a recruiting visit, but this is a very easy case to fabricate.
It's a long time from April to September, so the QB missing some throws is nothing to panic about.
BUT the reasons should be timing and chemistry with the WRs. WR is supposed to be here, but the ball went here instead. That sort of thing. If the issue is footwork. . . for a junior?? That's not getting fixed in five months.
Harbaugh got us a lot of good wins.
Now I'm a little upset about the "let's throw him under the bus" thread the other day. Someone who did this much for the program doesn't deserve that treatment, just because it's politically expedient.
Obvious ones are obvious, so I'll just toss another into the hat: 2023 MSU.
That one was about more than sports. The last meeting ended with violent crimes the media bent over backwards to "both sides" and. . . FFS was Tucker ever suspended at all for it? I was sickened by the corruption. Since the NCAA was going to do nothing about MSU, and the B1G was going to do nothing about MSU, and the media was coddling them with everything they could muster, and the legal system negotiated punishment down to almost nothing, it was up to Michigan to teach them a lesson the only way they could. I didn't want just a win; I wanted humiliations galore. If they care about beating Michigan so much that they'll resort to becoming a mob, make them eat the fucking football.
So they did. Michigan went to East Lansing and started scoring. And scoring. And scoring. 21-0, 28-0, 35-0. And they put in Ja'Den McBurrows and German Green, and the last play was Green with a TFL. By the end of the game, MSU had put up more Hitlers than points. Michigan 49, Fuck-around-and-find-outs zero. And then Sainristil wouldn't let the camera cut away and pulled McBurrows in front of it.
And they were still both-sidesing, but it didn't matter anymore. MSU had been reduced to a brittle, trampled, shattered husk.
It's tempting to dismiss them but there are serious psychological problems in anyone who takes sports so seriously that they resort to delusion as a coping mechanism.
I mean, I can get pretty worked up about sports, but I make distinctions between when Michigan punches itself in the face, gets beat by a clearly superior team, or gets robbed. I get upset when they lose, but in the end, I move on.
But when someone feels unhinged, mouth-frothing rage over some 20-year-olds they've never met wearing shirts of one color beating 20-year-olds they've never met wearing shirts of a different color in a competition. . . that's frighteningly poor impulse control, and that's not a nice thing to be around in many situations. Like, what if one of these wackos (of which there are thousands) is coaching your kid's team? Or any kids' team?
To be fair, Hutchinson DID pad his stats against scrub teams. I mean, three of his sacks were against OSU.
None. Pippen tagged along and not even Elrond could dissuade him.
/ what?
What era are you talking about? Because I heard this a lot maybe ten years ago, and it was applicable then, but UConn's dominance goes back a good twenty years, and women's b-ball in the early aughts was horrid. Like, to hell with "team basketball" -- some scholarship players, on tournament teams, playing meaningful minutes, looked like they barely exercised.
Forget "above the rim" freaks; the game at one point was so atrocious that it questioned the notion of women being athletes. Teams that looked barely coached at all were making the tournament as if the prevailing attitude of WBB coaches was, "I'm here to undermine Title IX." UConn was one of a few programs that affirmed their players were indeed serious athletes.
But the obvious result of that disparity in approach was unwatchable. Today's game is real, and I daresay UConn's blowout wins played a role in that. They weren't doing anything special; they were largely showing what women could do if you took their game seriously, because back then that wasn't the norm. They made it the norm.
One other thought, I have to quibble with Brian's take on women's basketball.
I remember seeing some of those old UConn games and yeah they were boring, but the lack of hate wasn't the problem. The problem is that UConn games were a team of well-coached athletes destroying disorganized piles of stiff, unconditioned, clumsy intramural casuals. And that would be like the NCAA quarterfinals.
These days. . . OK, the back half of bubble rosters still look rather stiff, but I mean even an 8-9 match will have some real ballin'. There are still more programs than talent to go around, but it's gotten legitimately watchable -- and as a result, people are watching.
It's not like it suddenly got good because people now care. It's that it finally got good enough to give a damn about.
I'm being nice. Bryce Underwood is apparently getting offered well more than I've made in my entire life.
He may be a hard worker, but considering his age vs. the sleep debt I built up just from my years as an engineer, I don't think he's outworked my entire adult career.
I'm OK with athletes making money, but there's something audacious about asking fans to directly foot this bill on top of everything else.
I'm inclined to agree, but I think the "it's legal now!" cry a few years ago created the expectation that every program has an untapped pile of boosters-that-weren't-until-now, because they follow the rules, or something, which is a laughably delusional idea based on everything I've witnessed about high-revenue sports.
Anyone inclined to funnel personal funds into a damn collegiate sports program had been doing so all along. So yeah, it's the same people with the same money, but everyone thought NIL was going to magically create another huge pile of money out of thin air, and that it's not is causing serious problems.
Am I the only person to think NIL was unsustainable to begin with?
Brian finally got the model right. Sure, it was a way to finally pay the players "over the table", but it was a way to pay the players in a way that didn't threaten the billions going into the NCAA's insatiable maw. So, yeah, we're still paying for (increasingly expensive) tickets and subscriptions and parking and merch and $20 watery beers and then everyone's supposed to fork over NIL money on top of all that? And many of these young men are demanding more than I make in a year.
So NIL was always going to mostly come from bored rich people with nothing better to do with their money than throw it at athletes for literally no reason but fandom, but there are only so many of those.
Folks here keep pounding the table to "fix Michigan's NIL" but Michigan's fundamental problem is that -- from the donors' perspective -- NIL is a terribly stupid way to spend money, and Michigan alumni are generally on the smarter side with their finances. Like, even if I had millions to spend, the NIL pitch is basically, "We're a billion-dollar franchise but we need you to give us your millions so one high-schooler will wear a blue shirt instead of a purple shirt." My reaction is, what the fuck.
Maybe? I don't know what's going on with Phelia or even the program in general, but IF this is about NIL, they're being naive.
Women's basketball outdrew the men's finals. They know they're being watched. That bell can't be un-rung, and bully for them. But NIL isn't TV money*. It comes from business owners and other wealthy benefactors, who for the most part are white, male, sexist, and generally not fans of women's basketball. There are exceptions, but those exceptions literally define where NIL money is concentrated. From 30,000 feet, the inclination to pay female athletes is still a full generation -- if not two -- behind the revenue they're generating. (I mean if men want to complain about not getting paid. . . WBB going "LOL that's adorable")
So Michigan likely can't pay her, but most other places can't either, because (as pointed out by Brian on the latest Roundtable) NIL and TV revenue are two completely separate buckets, by design. She could land at a place with significant NIL for WBB, but if this is really about money, she's as likely to be looking for a pot of gold with her name on it that just doesn't exist.
*Again, unless you're a Caitlin Clark, which no one on M's squad is
Also, Clark is a horrible example. She is one of only a few cases of WBB NIL being used in a straightforward way -- businesses are sponsoring her, actually paying for her Name, Image and Likeness, not funneling money into Iowa WBB, per se.
99% of NIL is glorified money laundering, and WBB is growing in popularity, but sports fandom overall is still deeply sexist and happily exploiting the outdated notion that women's sports are "non-revenue" (ratings be damned, no really, the condescension is that brazen) to tell them they're [financially] worth nothing. Oh, I'm sure there's some money out there, but it's so miniscule compared to football that you can't imagine them working the same way. Phelia'd be welcomed at a number of programs and she can try to make NIL an issue, but those are basically two different conversations. She's good, but she's not Caitlin Clark.
Point being, the vast majority of women probably aren't getting paid, anywhere. I can't imagine the offers at any one program are significantly more lucrative than any other. And in the case of superstardom like Clark's, the money's following the individual, not coming from the program.
Uh-huh-huh.
I take it a lot of Brian’s uncertainty is baked into those numbers.
So 60% doesn’t mean 40% chance of rain, per se. It can mean something like, “I have 75% confidence in my information that it’s 80% happening.”
No, they moved him from de-bate to de-fense.
No it isn’t
Only because Pettiti had such regard for safety that he suspended Harbaugh another three games.
Stop the bleeding!
What the hell. I'm now starting to worry that our women's program might not be able to field a team next season.
I recall Ross' comment as a "I think he could". In any case, AFAIK no one's seen him do it. I think Goldin moves much better than people give him credit for, but he's definitely not switchable.
Obligatory clarification that Admissions doesn't determine credits but we're all well aware of that. We're just using that as a shorthand because "admissions" is one word and we really don't care about splitting this hair.
Rule #1 about reads is, there is no such thing as a simple read. DCs will reverse-engineer the read and then position a defender to either force a bad decision or make the read "fuzzy" to induce confusion.
What you can do is make a simple progression so if a read looks iffy, it doesn't result in certain death. A lot of flawed offenses we've seen through here, especially zone reads, were one-read or even zero-read plays wherein the defense reliably herded the ball into a free hitter by exploiting the QB's programming.
What you can do with Orji is add option C, "just make a damn play". If A isn't there, check B. If B isn't there, it's now "broken play" time and you take what you can get. That's a viable progression with an athletic QB, but Harbaugh never did it because A) he's terrified of turnovers and B) he's trying to keep the QB healthy. Which, to be fair, were absolutely legitimate problems early in his tenure at M. But the conservatism also killed a ton of drives.
It's kind of an important position.
That said, I'm curious about the post-Harbaugh era. I think Harbaugh is good at developing NFL QBs, as in, QBs that can drink from the firehose. JJ might be an early first-rounder, and while Rudock didn't get much NFL interest, he's now in med school. (Then a bunch of QBs got hurt due to pass pro issues, so jury remained out.) Lesser QBs tended to struggle or get even worse. He can't make the game simple for them.
JJ's gone, but so is Harbaugh, so this doesn't mean we regress all the way back to O'Korn. It's Moore's team now, and it'll be interesting to see if he can put together an offense that mortals can run.
Tuttle is injured.
I remember Brian giving Hall an early shout-out in UFR.
I'm amazed his arms still work. Dude's taken more hits than Ali.
Does “letting them play” mean no Kyle, or just a dog whistle for “let them cheat”?
Not so crazy for us. We’ve played Chris Wormley and Rashan Gary at SDE; both were close to that size. Yeah it’s basically like having three DTs on the field but that’s not inherently a bad idea.
Which is probably why we aren’t refs.
Everyone whines about officiating but if I ever called a game I would take no shit from either team and the result would be riots in the streets.
I wasn't a fly in the room but the incoming class is kinda getting a "Fab Five" hype of its own.
I can empathize with the thought of, "I'm busting my butt and improving but I'm gonna get passed by someone younger than me?" Some people don't just want "increased roles"; they don't want to spend their upperclassmen years as a 6th/7th banana.
It's impossible to know, but there may have been too much "rebuilding year" talk.
I think it's really about the G-League. Diabate and Jett are basically G-League players.
So it's about choosing where to develop, and getting paid while doing so. But two things in G-League's favor are that you can play against other professionals there, and you can sign two-way contracts that get you onto NBA rosters. NIL can't merely match G-League offers dollar for dollar and compel players with NBA interest to stick around.
They probably all did. I've been in similar situations. You can love someone doing something crazy and suggest nicely, then ask, then plead, then scream in desperation, but some people think they know it all and just won't listen to advice, all the way to the grave. Even consulted a lawyer at one point to get a family member help but was told, "The law doesn't protect people from making bad decisions."
As for Warde, I hate the guy but I do have to acknowledge he did reach out to an expert in Beilein, and as a result we landed May. That's a rare level of introspection these days.
I realize this is common as dirt, but this shit grinds my gears. Half of this is elite athletes being hard-wired to think everything is a challenge, I get that, but half of this is typical American anti-intellectualism normalizing the casual dismissal of subject matter experts.
Juwan, this is more problematic than you going "oops" and paying the price. You're a longtime pro in a basketball arena, but you're the know-nothing here. The idiot. The dumbest person in the room. Now, there's nothing wrong with that if you know your place. But you don't know shit about cardiology, so you have to listen. I can't imagine he'd take it well if I -- an old, out-of-shape desk potato -- loudly said "WTF do you know about basketball" to his face with all the confidence of a Dunning-Kruger case study, but that's basically what he did here. He completely disregarded an expert in their own area of expertise, but he expects his kids to listen? The Sanderson incident suddenly makes a lot more sense.
I know, it's easy to pick on Juwan when like half the country does it, and everyone's now going, "Yo, DC, what's the big deal? Everyone does that," but that's a hypocritical thought if you've ever felt frustration over not being listened to at work. It's a dangerously broken form of normal, but it's just so common these days that we don't react to it anymore.
The O-line backups played extensively last season, meaning, this season’s starters are experienced and we know they’re at least not bad.
How not bad? I have no idea. Our D-line made every O-line it faced look bad.
I think it’s an overreaction to media trying to make something of its own bullshit, which I’m saddened to remind folks of considering Connor Stalions was just last year.
Anyway we kind of have a first world problem because our D-line just might be one for the ages. When the best pass pro in the country couldn’t block these guys, it’s hard to tell what shape your O-line is in by watching practice.
WR2 is probably Loveland.
What does a kid ninja know about collegiate-level hockey anyway.
You don't say.
FWIW he’s always been like this.
Well, they’re both Michigan recruits.
I think this says something.
Role, probably. At 6'3", he was an upperclassman reserve. . . at FAU. Not clear why May would recruit a transfer he wasn't even starting over shorter players at a basketball desert.
I considered that a foregone conclusion. At a place like FAU, your only choices (beyond a throwback center in Goldin) are big guys with bricks for hands or oompa-loopmas who can ball, because anyone who's big and talented will be too highly ranked. May opted for the latter.
Grad transfers are others' guys (not so much FAU of course, but in general). They're either immediately useful or hopefully round into shape by March, and those are the only two optimistic outcomes. And the reality is, we'll need transfers just to field a team.
May said he's going to try to put together a winning roster immediately, because why not, but his stated preference is to develop. I'm mostly fine with it; I think there are other benefits to surrounding freshmen with upperclassmen, even if the latter developed elsewhere.
. . . is thirteen!
People who fancy themselves evil masterminds are baffled by Jim's authenticity. They don't think anyone can say & do the things he does and still be real. And those that realize he is the real deal, absolutely hate him for it. He reminds them of what they've become.