Sure -- I acknowledge the situations are different. And in particular, there's an argument that Harbaugh deserved a longer time because of there were decades of evidence of him being a outstanding coach while there is nothing comparable with Howard.
Though to be honest, I'm not 100% sure where I come down on this. You could also make an argument that rookie coaches are bound to make mistakes as they find their feet as head coaches and ought to be given extra leeway because of this. Not for the sake of fairness, but because you don't want to fire someone who's has a lot of potential because he's making mistakes that he learns from and won't repeat.
But I don't think I'm tap dancing around the anger issue. What I'm saying is that with Harbaugh people thought that they were arguing that he had to go because he was an ultra competitive weirdo (and thus building a bad culture). But in retrospect, it turns out we're all fine with him being an ultra competitive weirdo and so are the players.
For the first few years, the blog was full of stories about how the players absolutely loved Howard, and full of pictures of him doing things like grabbing towels and drying sweat stains from the court like he was a volunteer ball boy, and not an ultrarich highly paid coach. Right now we think we're upset about anger problems but in a couple of years of winning we might all love his spontaneity, unfiltered personality, and fiery temper. We just shouldn't trust our gut reactions.
(Don't get me wrong -- obviously if Howard physically hits someone, he has to be fired on the spot. But there's no accusation of that.)
Sarcasm aside, before I'm negged into Bolivia, let just say what I think the lessons are. It's not that Howard might be as good a coach as Harbaugh. Harbaugh is one of the all time greats. It's just statistically unlikely that you get a coach like that, no matter how good your search process is, or how much money you have that you are able to commit to a program.
The lessons as I see it are:
(1) Fans are almost always too impatient to get rid of a coach who has a couple of bad seasons. It always seems reasonable at the time, and there always seem to be good reasons beyond "It's a bad season", but this is an instance where one should not trust one's instincts.
(2) Judging the football program by the Covid year where normal practice rhythms didn't apply was a particularly bad idea, and judging the basketball program by a year where the coach misses a huge initial chunk of the season due to heart surgery might turn out to be a similarly bad idea for similar reasons.
Frustrating as it is, I think it's probably a bad idea to fire Howard before the end of next season.
So we hired a super-popular former player to be our head coach. At first the program did extremely well, but then there were a couple of disappointing seasons, rumors of a poor culture, and worries that the coach's personality was a detriment to the program.
I have some vague memory of something similar happening in the football program. Didn't we also hire a super-popular former player who had a lot of initial success. But the seasons always had disappointing endings and there were rumors that his ultra-competitive and kind of weird personality was driving off players. And then there was a really bad season and half of this board was extremely angry at the athletic director for not firing him and replacing him with Matt Campbell.
How did that end up? I wonder if there are perhaps some lessons to be learned from that experience?
only school who has had a #1 ranking in both MBB and FB in the past decade
That struck me as a really cool fact, and one that we should probably mention more often. And I tried to check if it was true. And then after an embarrassingly long time googling random schools, I remembered that last year's AP #1 going into March Madness (Alabama) might have something to say about this.
But "Michigan and Alabama are the only two schools with a #1 ranking in both MBB and FB in the past decade" is still a pretty cool statement. (Though, of course, I didn't really check this.)
Wait -- I agree that Juwan Howard should be good at teaching bigs to play defensive, and the bigs aren't playing great defense.
But it's also a fact that Juwan Howard has been hospitalized and unable to coach (until quite recently).
So if you kind of expect that someone's a good defensive coach, and then when he suddenly isn't there to coach, the defense gets really unexpectedly bad, that's actually evidence that he might be even better than you thought.
I mean, I have a lot of criticisms of Howard, but the team's recent defensive failures are an argument in his favor, not against him.
I really, really hate to be the one to defend Ryan Day, but you seem to be counting 2020. And that year they beat Clemson. I don't know what Clemson's final SP+ ranking was, but I'd guess they were #2 or #3. They had to be top 5 at any rate.
So Ryan's record against top 5 opponents should be 1-7, not 0-6. Still not great!
But I think that might be true of everyone. In general, even very good teams with good coaches lose to top 5 teams. Especially when you look at the end of year rankings, because those end of year rankings are top 5 because they won their big games. For example, we were definitely top 5 when we played OSU in 2016 but ended up 6th after losing. So that wouldn't count as a top 5 victory for Urban.
I took a quick look at Urban Meyer at Ohio State, using AP rankings at the time of the match-up In his first two years, he played no top 5 teams but lost to a couple of top 10 teams.
In his 3rd year, he got his first top 10 victory and followed it up by beating two top 5 teams in the playoffs. I'd guess those teams probably finished in the top 5 SP+.
In 2015, he played no top 5 teams, beat 2 top 10 teams and lost to one top 10 team.
In 2016, he beat a top 5 team and lost to one. (And beat two top 10 teams.) But the top 5 team, as mentioned above, was us, and we didn't end the year top 5 in SP+.
In 2017, he lost to a top 5 team (and was hilariously crushed by unranked Iowa, when noted offensive masterminds Kirk and Brian Ferentz hung 55 points on OSU).
In 2018, he beat a top 5 team (us, but again, not top 5 at the end of the year) and was crushed by unranked Purdue, when actual offensive masterminds Jeff and Brian Brohm hung 49 points on OSU.
So as far as top 5 SP+ victories go, I'd guess that Urban Meyer had 2 to Ryan Day's 1
That's not so much better than Ryan Day, and Urban Meyer would also randomly lose games to Iowa, Purdue, Penn State, and Michigan State in a way that Ryan Day hasn't.
As a quick question for those lawyers who have looked at this -- I'm worried about interim actions as detailed in 32.2.1A.
It seems to me that these can come before an investigation as they are intended "protect the integrity of the involved sport . . . pending final determination with respect to whether a violation has occurred." (Perhaps they even must come before an investigation ends, by 32.2.1B.)
Also interim actions require knowledge only of a "possible violation" rather than a knowledge of a violation. And the allegation of a possible violation is explicitly allowed to come "from any source" (32.2.1), which seems incredibly broad!
The examples of possible interim actions include suspending any coach (32.2.1A.2) and canceling any game played in a Big 10 stadium (32.2.1A.4) and these actions can extend until the investigation ends and a penalty is given (32.2.1B).
And since interim actions are not formally penalties (although of course they would be experienced by us as such) I think the appeals process outlined in 32.10.1 does not apply.
All that being said, I'm not a lawyer, and I'd very, very much like someone to explain that I'm wrong!
I think people mean different things by “control your own destiny”. It’s pretty much impossible for all of Texas, Florida State, USC, and Georgia to all go undefeated. I’m definitely not saying that we should in any way worry that an undefeated Michigan will be left out.
But at the moment, making the playoffs requires things out of Michigan’s control. In a couple of hours, that might not be true anymore.
I was there there to watch Kipchoge. I almost didn't go -- it was very early in the morning, I thought the kids might be bored, etc. Wow! I'm glad I did. That video doesn't come close to capturing what it was like. I sympathize with the guy doing the commentary in the video, trying to put the inexpressible into words.
One thing that struck me was how, well, "effortless" is definitely wrong word for one of the most grueling physical feats in the history of man. Smooth? How smooth it was. You could tell that the real grind, the real struggle had been in the years leading up to the moment. We saw the (not quite) two hours of perfection that was the culmination of that struggle.
"However, a human with a computer can beat a computer without a human. "
Are you sure this is still true? It's a little hard to find data, so please correct me if I'm wrong, but I think that since 2017 computers playing alone beat human-computer collaborations. (See the wikipedia article on advanced chess, for example.) And computers have made enormous advances since 2017.
“Your multiplication of probabilities incorrectly assumes each game is independent of the others”
Just fyi, to get the probability of two independent events both happening you multiply the probability, and this works only if the events are independent.
But to get the expected number of wins, you add the probabilities. And this works regardless of whether or not the events are independent.
And since that win, Wisconsin has managed to sign the quarterback ranked 493rd and the quarterback ranked 760th. And they've signed wide receivers ranked 376, 736, 826, 968, and one not good enough to be ranked.
Oh, and their passing game got their head coach fired.
So what the Wisconsin fans actually said after that win and what they might wish they'd said with the benefit of hindsight are two different things.
But I'd guess that there are a lot of mid to low 4 stars that would be willing to earn a bunch of money, take some free classes, and compete for a spot on Alabama or Ohio State.
Then if they end up too far down the depth chart, they can transfer after a couple of years and start somewhere else.
It makes sense for the athlete, but it also makes sense for the school. Lots of 3 and 4 stars end up blowing up into fantastic college and even NFL players. Not at the same rate as 5 stars, of course, but I'd bet it's better to roll the dice on five low 4 stars than one 5 star.
Schools like Michigan can do this too. Even if we don't have the same level of team as Alabama or OSU, we're really close (to OSU at least) and have a better education to offer. Maybe we won't get a bunch of 4 stars, but we could get twenty to thirty 3 stars. Twenty extra 3 stars might mean one extra Hassan Haskins plus one extra Ronnie Bell. Sounds like a good deal to me!
you'll see that Bryce Young "deserves" 3.4 million and Blake Corum "deserves" about $800,000.
A website that tries to track how much each athlete is actually getting is nilauthority.com. Obviously they don't find every NIL deal, but you can still compare players to see the relative effectiveness of different institutions' NIL programs.
For example, follow the links below to compare Bryce Young's and Blake Corum's relative NIL deals.
I was curious how many Tier 4 teams there really were, where Tier 4 would mean sometimes qualifying for a new year's six bowl, but with a floor of 8-4. So I took a quick look.
I didn't look up who's made it to a New Year's Six bowl, but here's a list of teams that have maintained at least an 8-4 record over 5 seasons, not counting the covid shortened year (i.e. 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2021)
In the ACC: only Clemson,
In the PAC-12: no one,
In the SEC: only Alabama, (although Georgia was a 16-17 loss to Georgia Tech away from joining Tier 4)
In the Big 12: only Oklahoma,
In the Big 10: only Ohio State and Michigan (and we just barely squeaked in with an overtime victory over Indiana).
Moral: Consistently 8-4 or better is an unrealistic expectation, and we, as fans, are unrealistic people.
(I didn't spend super long on this, so it's possible I missed a team, but I don't think so.)
If the choice is "be OC at Bama or be head coach at Nebraska", sure, maybe you turn down Nebraska.
But is Alabama really going to stick with O'Brien? I think right now Bill O'Brien might be looking at "be fired from Bama or be head coach at Nebraska" and that seems like an easier choice.
"Auburn is a better job recruiting wise than Nebraska, but that place is crazy."
Sure Auburn is crazy, but Nebraska fires coaches that go 9 and 4, just fired Scott Frost when waiting 3 weeks would save 7.5 million, and has fans that expect to compete in the Big 10 despite a negligible recruiting base and no draw like a city, night-life, beaches, or even particularly good academics. So if they fail to be as crazy as Auburn, at least they're giving it a good shot.
Are you kidding?! Just imagine Iowa with Scott Frost as it's OC!
Frost cannot for the life of him teach football fundamentals, hire competent special teams coaches, or pick a good defensive coordinator out of a crowd of kindergarteners.
But he wouldn't have to do any of those things at Iowa. He'd just come up with consistently innovative offensive schemes, have game strategies that take advantage of his opponents weaknesses, and recruit. One season and Iowa would be the strongest team in the Big 10 West. Luckily this will never happen.
I'd go farther: Nebraska fans are talking about hiring Bill O'Brien as head coach. If they manage to pull that off and Saban replaces O'Brien with Frost, that's also a win for Alabama.
Haven't read all the comments, so maybe others have pointed this out, but even under normal circumstances, planting drugs is a fairly common practice by Russian police.
That's just a few of the examples on the first page of google results.
So did she fuck up? It's hard to say. Unless of course deciding to work in a country where it's well known that police frequently plant drugs on innocent people itself counts as fucking up. (Probably does.)
Sam said on the Mgoblog roundtable that there's a big gap between what the players feel Michigan should be doing regarding NIL and what Michigan feels it should be doing.
And I've read in several places that Terrence Shannon wanted to come to Michigan but Texas Tech refused to pay for his summer classes that were necessary for him to graduate. You would think the obvious response on Michigan's part would be "Of course we'll pay for the classes!" But instead Shannon is at Illinois.
If we're dealing with an athletic program that won't even scrape together the money for summer tuition, what are the chances they're offering Frankie Collins anywhere near what he should be getting?
And it's not like Collins jumped right into the portal. It was literally the last day.
Sure -- maybe Collins is in the portal because he irrationally thinks he won't get the playing time he wants.
But isn't it way more likely that he (completely rationally) thinks he's not getting nearly the money he deserves, that he waited as long as he possibly could for Michigan to get its act together, and that only when it didn't, he entered the portal.
That's 19% at the U19 World Cup (and 25/103 over his last three seasons of AAU and FIBA play).
Expecting him to come in and immediately shoot 38% while adjusting to the college game at the same time might be a bit too optimistic.
Of course, the fact Howard has him in the starting line-up is a very good sign that he's worked through his shooting slump, and maybe I'm worrying over nothing.
I hate to sound like Scott Frost, but if Michigan's season ended each year with a game against USC and Notre Dame's ended with a game against Ohio State, I bet they wouldn't have had those three NY6 bowl games (and our Ohio recruiting would be better).
I don't mean to take anything away from Notre Dame, but if by "that level of success" you mean having a team of Notre Dame's quality, that's pretty much what we have.
To get double digit wins every year, regularly go to a NY6 bowl game, and occasionally go to playoffs while being a member of the Big Ten East just requires a much better team than Notre Dame has been able to field recently.
Thanks! Yeah, that's exactly what I thought looking at his tape.
I worry a bit that if Michigan gets a really big name recruiting victory, and then that guy doesn't become a star at Michigan, it's going to make it harder to get the next one-and-done kind of player to commit. And I could definitely see that happening with Holmgren.
There are currently flights to and from the UK -- it's the EU which is a bit more problematic. Nor is there (to my knowledge) a ban on UK citizens traveling to the US. But perhaps Ojabo holds only a Nigerian citizenship? Trump banned Nigerians from getting visas. See here: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/02/world/africa/trump-travel-ban.html
It's hard to remember now, but that was a pre-coronavirus controversy. The justification given was terrorism, not pandemic.
Matt, I wonder what you think of Chet Holmgren on defense. In his one year of college, will he have the size to match up with Big Ten centers? Or even power forwards?
But why do you need swamps and forests to play Devin Bush? Michigan decks should be blue (islands in Great Lakes) and maize (plains planted with corn).
Harbaugh's decks are full of typical blue cards: Instants like "Tap one running back. Counter opponent's blitz" and enchantments like "There is no limit to the number of offensive linemen you may have on the field at one time. "
On the other hand, Ohio State always plays some version of Red Deck Wins. Their decks are full of 2-drop 4-3 slot receivers with haste, and other cards that should have been banned from standard ages ago.
(OK, now you can send me to Bolivia for too much Magic the Gathering on a sports blog.)
Ace (or someone with access to Synergy), can you post last year's stats for Michigan's post defense together with the Big Ten's post offense last year?
Is this a weakness that was already there, and opposing teams are starting to take advantage of it? Is it new (either because of a regression on Teske's part or a lack of help defense from Charles Matthews)? Or some combination?
JPC notes above that only 98 more negs will make it impossible for me to start new threads, and now it's only 80. I'd rather that didn't happen, so this will be my last post on the subject, much to the relief of everyone.
First, if it's only for athletes who play 4 years and graduate, then those who go pro early wouldn't get it.
Is it unsustainable? Yes, $500,000 sounds like a huge amount of money. But I think people underestimate the amount of money that Michigan fans are willing to spend. 90,000 people are willing to pay for football season tickets. If a comparable amount of people are willing to donate a $100, then you're most of the way there. And in return we'd get to watch the occasional victory over Ohio State. I'd pay $100 for that.
And some people are willing to donate much more. Witness the football team's overseas trips, the Champions Fund, not to mention the Ross Athletic Campus.
To be honest, even if it were $200k or $100k it would still be effective for recruiting. 100k for, say, 20-25 graduating athletes -- that's clearly a sustainable amount of money for the Michigan fanbase.
It could become a Michigan tradition that fans raise $500,000 for every football and basketball player who plays 4 years, finishes the season, and leaves with a degree. That's what, about 10-15 million dollars a year? That's well within the range of what fans donate to the athletic department, but now it goes towards new buildings or what not.
Would Oliver Martin have transferred to Iowa if doing so meant turning down half a million dollars? Would Karan Higdon have played in the bowl game? Would Aubrey Solomon have transferred to Tennessee? Maybe Charles Matthews doesn't even enter the draft. Obviously some of these things will happen anyway. But some of them won't.
And I don't think its the case that every school could match the amount of money Michigan fans could donate.
Well, I understand that it is not our responsibility.
But how many things that fans can do are
(1) morally good
(2) an aid to Michigan recruiting
and (3) not an ncaa violation?
Well, I sense I’m not going convince a lot of people. :-)
I thought the general consensus would be “this is obviously against the rules” rather than “this may be a clever way to legally pay the players and thus negate other schools main advantage in recruiting against us, but who cares, it’s not our responsibility”.
I admit it seems like kind of a dumb question -- I almost didn't post it. But I really don't know the answer.
It seems like the answer has to be "no", otherwise it could lead to paying the players. (After all, if it became a Michigan tradition to do this, not just for Charles, but, say, for every football and basketball athlete that plays 4 years and leaves with a degree, that would be a huge recruiting and retention advantage.)
But it doesn't seem to violate any rule I know of. (Not that I know the rules, really.)
I was also a grad student at Berkeley. I don't think I saw anyone in a Piston's jersey -- we must have been at different bars.
It was great -- I knew the Pistons matched up well against the Lakers, a fact everyone (in Berkeley at least) was completely blind to. It was so satisfying to see the series play out exactly as I expected, while watching the Lakers fans go from ridiculous overconfidence to stunned disbelief to despair.
First of all, I agree. But before we all get too depressed, this also has an upside. If you're not currently thought of as a top OC candidate, you can still get to take part in play calling at Michigan.
Wasn't that the case with Warinner? He was respected as an O-line coach, but it was felt at OSU that he wasn't any good as an OC. And subsequently he mostly got O-line coaching offers. But at Michigan he gets to call plays. I'd guess that makes the job much more attractive.
So if Warinner stays rather than heads to Bama, we should all keep this in mind when we feel like sinking into a pit of depression over our play calling process.
(If Warinner leaves for Alabama, I think we should all feel free to sink into a pit of depression.)
I share the apathy of a lot of us. But there's another way to look at it.
If we win this game, we'll have an 11 win season ending on a winning note. Here's a complete list of the times that has happened in the last 100 years: 1997, 2011.
(Of course, teams used to play less than 13 games. So you should probably look at "no more than 2 losses and ending with a win", which gives you also 1980, 1985 and a few other years I'm too lazy to look up. But the point is: we are being way too negative about what could still be a great season by the standards of Michigan football -- the sort you should only expect two or three times a generation.)
Sure, a chance to relax with family. That would sound good to me!
But to a Harbaugh? I bet he's looking at the state where he was born, the state where he went to college, a state in which he has experience coaching at the college level and recruiting, and seeing that its premier program has a coach that seems on the brink of retiring. He's seeing that while their program is usually spread oriented they currently have a quarterback suited to his type of offense, not to mention more talent than any team outside Alabama.
He's thinking back to beating his brother in the Super Bowl and thinking "I could do that every year."
But did you see the way quarterback ran to the tight end, arms outstretched to hug him, and the tight end just runs right past him? Then the quarterback just shrugs, takes his helmet off, and hugs someone else. Even better than watching a tackle score a touchdown!
I agree with MGoChippewa. In fact, I kind of think you should edit his name out of your post. (These posts are searchable by google, while the podcasts aren't).
Recent Comments
Sure -- I acknowledge the situations are different. And in particular, there's an argument that Harbaugh deserved a longer time because of there were decades of evidence of him being a outstanding coach while there is nothing comparable with Howard.
Though to be honest, I'm not 100% sure where I come down on this. You could also make an argument that rookie coaches are bound to make mistakes as they find their feet as head coaches and ought to be given extra leeway because of this. Not for the sake of fairness, but because you don't want to fire someone who's has a lot of potential because he's making mistakes that he learns from and won't repeat.
But I don't think I'm tap dancing around the anger issue. What I'm saying is that with Harbaugh people thought that they were arguing that he had to go because he was an ultra competitive weirdo (and thus building a bad culture). But in retrospect, it turns out we're all fine with him being an ultra competitive weirdo and so are the players.
For the first few years, the blog was full of stories about how the players absolutely loved Howard, and full of pictures of him doing things like grabbing towels and drying sweat stains from the court like he was a volunteer ball boy, and not an ultrarich highly paid coach. Right now we think we're upset about anger problems but in a couple of years of winning we might all love his spontaneity, unfiltered personality, and fiery temper. We just shouldn't trust our gut reactions.
(Don't get me wrong -- obviously if Howard physically hits someone, he has to be fired on the spot. But there's no accusation of that.)
Sarcasm aside, before I'm negged into Bolivia, let just say what I think the lessons are. It's not that Howard might be as good a coach as Harbaugh. Harbaugh is one of the all time greats. It's just statistically unlikely that you get a coach like that, no matter how good your search process is, or how much money you have that you are able to commit to a program.
The lessons as I see it are:
(1) Fans are almost always too impatient to get rid of a coach who has a couple of bad seasons. It always seems reasonable at the time, and there always seem to be good reasons beyond "It's a bad season", but this is an instance where one should not trust one's instincts.
(2) Judging the football program by the Covid year where normal practice rhythms didn't apply was a particularly bad idea, and judging the basketball program by a year where the coach misses a huge initial chunk of the season due to heart surgery might turn out to be a similarly bad idea for similar reasons.
Frustrating as it is, I think it's probably a bad idea to fire Howard before the end of next season.
So we hired a super-popular former player to be our head coach. At first the program did extremely well, but then there were a couple of disappointing seasons, rumors of a poor culture, and worries that the coach's personality was a detriment to the program.
I have some vague memory of something similar happening in the football program. Didn't we also hire a super-popular former player who had a lot of initial success. But the seasons always had disappointing endings and there were rumors that his ultra-competitive and kind of weird personality was driving off players. And then there was a really bad season and half of this board was extremely angry at the athletic director for not firing him and replacing him with Matt Campbell.
How did that end up? I wonder if there are perhaps some lessons to be learned from that experience?
That struck me as a really cool fact, and one that we should probably mention more often. And I tried to check if it was true. And then after an embarrassingly long time googling random schools, I remembered that last year's AP #1 going into March Madness (Alabama) might have something to say about this.
But "Michigan and Alabama are the only two schools with a #1 ranking in both MBB and FB in the past decade" is still a pretty cool statement. (Though, of course, I didn't really check this.)
Wait -- I agree that Juwan Howard should be good at teaching bigs to play defensive, and the bigs aren't playing great defense.
But it's also a fact that Juwan Howard has been hospitalized and unable to coach (until quite recently).
So if you kind of expect that someone's a good defensive coach, and then when he suddenly isn't there to coach, the defense gets really unexpectedly bad, that's actually evidence that he might be even better than you thought.
I mean, I have a lot of criticisms of Howard, but the team's recent defensive failures are an argument in his favor, not against him.
double post
I really, really hate to be the one to defend Ryan Day, but you seem to be counting 2020. And that year they beat Clemson. I don't know what Clemson's final SP+ ranking was, but I'd guess they were #2 or #3. They had to be top 5 at any rate.
So Ryan's record against top 5 opponents should be 1-7, not 0-6. Still not great!
But I think that might be true of everyone. In general, even very good teams with good coaches lose to top 5 teams. Especially when you look at the end of year rankings, because those end of year rankings are top 5 because they won their big games. For example, we were definitely top 5 when we played OSU in 2016 but ended up 6th after losing. So that wouldn't count as a top 5 victory for Urban.
I took a quick look at Urban Meyer at Ohio State, using AP rankings at the time of the match-up In his first two years, he played no top 5 teams but lost to a couple of top 10 teams.
In his 3rd year, he got his first top 10 victory and followed it up by beating two top 5 teams in the playoffs. I'd guess those teams probably finished in the top 5 SP+.
In 2015, he played no top 5 teams, beat 2 top 10 teams and lost to one top 10 team.
In 2016, he beat a top 5 team and lost to one. (And beat two top 10 teams.) But the top 5 team, as mentioned above, was us, and we didn't end the year top 5 in SP+.
In 2017, he lost to a top 5 team (and was hilariously crushed by unranked Iowa, when noted offensive masterminds Kirk and Brian Ferentz hung 55 points on OSU).
In 2018, he beat a top 5 team (us, but again, not top 5 at the end of the year) and was crushed by unranked Purdue, when actual offensive masterminds Jeff and Brian Brohm hung 49 points on OSU.
So as far as top 5 SP+ victories go, I'd guess that Urban Meyer had 2 to Ryan Day's 1
That's not so much better than Ryan Day, and Urban Meyer would also randomly lose games to Iowa, Purdue, Penn State, and Michigan State in a way that Ryan Day hasn't.
Thanks! The fact that it has to be forward looking is something that I had overlooked, and that makes me much better!
As a quick question for those lawyers who have looked at this -- I'm worried about interim actions as detailed in 32.2.1A.
It seems to me that these can come before an investigation as they are intended "protect the integrity of the involved sport . . . pending final determination with respect to whether a violation has occurred." (Perhaps they even must come before an investigation ends, by 32.2.1B.)
Also interim actions require knowledge only of a "possible violation" rather than a knowledge of a violation. And the allegation of a possible violation is explicitly allowed to come "from any source" (32.2.1), which seems incredibly broad!
The examples of possible interim actions include suspending any coach (32.2.1A.2) and canceling any game played in a Big 10 stadium (32.2.1A.4) and these actions can extend until the investigation ends and a penalty is given (32.2.1B).
And since interim actions are not formally penalties (although of course they would be experienced by us as such) I think the appeals process outlined in 32.10.1 does not apply.
All that being said, I'm not a lawyer, and I'd very, very much like someone to explain that I'm wrong!
Fixed *hat for you
I think people…
Oh never!
I think people mean different things by “control your own destiny”. It’s pretty much impossible for all of Texas, Florida State, USC, and Georgia to all go undefeated. I’m definitely not saying that we should in any way worry that an undefeated Michigan will be left out.
But at the moment, making the playoffs requires things out of Michigan’s control. In a couple of hours, that might not be true anymore.
I was there there to watch Kipchoge. I almost didn't go -- it was very early in the morning, I thought the kids might be bored, etc. Wow! I'm glad I did. That video doesn't come close to capturing what it was like. I sympathize with the guy doing the commentary in the video, trying to put the inexpressible into words.
One thing that struck me was how, well, "effortless" is definitely wrong word for one of the most grueling physical feats in the history of man. Smooth? How smooth it was. You could tell that the real grind, the real struggle had been in the years leading up to the moment. We saw the (not quite) two hours of perfection that was the culmination of that struggle.
Let's hope that our season is anything like that!
15-0! Go Blue!
Personally, I'd prefer a DB room with no gaping weak spots, but maybe that adds a bit of excitement.
Nitpicking about typos aside, thanks, Alex, for an excellent series!
"However, a human with a computer can beat a computer without a human. "
Are you sure this is still true? It's a little hard to find data, so please correct me if I'm wrong, but I think that since 2017 computers playing alone beat human-computer collaborations. (See the wikipedia article on advanced chess, for example.) And computers have made enormous advances since 2017.
Just fyi, to get the probability of two independent events both happening you multiply the probability, and this works only if the events are independent.
But to get the expected number of wins, you add the probabilities. And this works regardless of whether or not the events are independent.
And since that win, Wisconsin has managed to sign the quarterback ranked 493rd and the quarterback ranked 760th. And they've signed wide receivers ranked 376, 736, 826, 968, and one not good enough to be ranked.
Oh, and their passing game got their head coach fired.
So what the Wisconsin fans actually said after that win and what they might wish they'd said with the benefit of hindsight are two different things.
But I'd guess that there are a lot of mid to low 4 stars that would be willing to earn a bunch of money, take some free classes, and compete for a spot on Alabama or Ohio State.
Then if they end up too far down the depth chart, they can transfer after a couple of years and start somewhere else.
It makes sense for the athlete, but it also makes sense for the school. Lots of 3 and 4 stars end up blowing up into fantastic college and even NFL players. Not at the same rate as 5 stars, of course, but I'd bet it's better to roll the dice on five low 4 stars than one 5 star.
Schools like Michigan can do this too. Even if we don't have the same level of team as Alabama or OSU, we're really close (to OSU at least) and have a better education to offer. Maybe we won't get a bunch of 4 stars, but we could get twenty to thirty 3 stars. Twenty extra 3 stars might mean one extra Hassan Haskins plus one extra Ronnie Bell. Sounds like a good deal to me!
I'm not sure exactly what you saw, but sadly, I think it was likely based on ON3's NIL rankings.
But these attempt to quantify how much each athlete deserves, based on their social media following and on field results. So, if you go here:
https://www.on3.com/nil/rankings/player/college/football/
you'll see that Bryce Young "deserves" 3.4 million and Blake Corum "deserves" about $800,000.
A website that tries to track how much each athlete is actually getting is nilauthority.com. Obviously they don't find every NIL deal, but you can still compare players to see the relative effectiveness of different institutions' NIL programs.
For example, follow the links below to compare Bryce Young's and Blake Corum's relative NIL deals.
Or rather don't. It won't make you happy.
https://nilauthority.com/athletes/view/blake-corum
https://nilauthority.com/athletes/view/bryce-young
Thanks for putting this together!
I think that in the table of Michigan opponents, Nebraska's talent rank should be 24 not 59 (and the rank difference 10).
I was curious how many Tier 4 teams there really were, where Tier 4 would mean sometimes qualifying for a new year's six bowl, but with a floor of 8-4. So I took a quick look.
I didn't look up who's made it to a New Year's Six bowl, but here's a list of teams that have maintained at least an 8-4 record over 5 seasons, not counting the covid shortened year (i.e. 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2021)
In the ACC: only Clemson,
In the PAC-12: no one,
In the SEC: only Alabama, (although Georgia was a 16-17 loss to Georgia Tech away from joining Tier 4)
In the Big 12: only Oklahoma,
In the Big 10: only Ohio State and Michigan (and we just barely squeaked in with an overtime victory over Indiana).
Moral: Consistently 8-4 or better is an unrealistic expectation, and we, as fans, are unrealistic people.
(I didn't spend super long on this, so it's possible I missed a team, but I don't think so.)
If the choice is "be OC at Bama or be head coach at Nebraska", sure, maybe you turn down Nebraska.
But is Alabama really going to stick with O'Brien? I think right now Bill O'Brien might be looking at "be fired from Bama or be head coach at Nebraska" and that seems like an easier choice.
"Auburn is a better job recruiting wise than Nebraska, but that place is crazy."
Sure Auburn is crazy, but Nebraska fires coaches that go 9 and 4, just fired Scott Frost when waiting 3 weeks would save 7.5 million, and has fans that expect to compete in the Big 10 despite a negligible recruiting base and no draw like a city, night-life, beaches, or even particularly good academics. So if they fail to be as crazy as Auburn, at least they're giving it a good shot.
Are you kidding?! Just imagine Iowa with Scott Frost as it's OC!
Frost cannot for the life of him teach football fundamentals, hire competent special teams coaches, or pick a good defensive coordinator out of a crowd of kindergarteners.
But he wouldn't have to do any of those things at Iowa. He'd just come up with consistently innovative offensive schemes, have game strategies that take advantage of his opponents weaknesses, and recruit. One season and Iowa would be the strongest team in the Big 10 West. Luckily this will never happen.
I'd go farther: Nebraska fans are talking about hiring Bill O'Brien as head coach. If they manage to pull that off and Saban replaces O'Brien with Frost, that's also a win for Alabama.
Well, Marshall is on the road while OSU was at home. I'm pretty sure this is an ironclad proof that Marshall > OSU
Haven't read all the comments, so maybe others have pointed this out, but even under normal circumstances, planting drugs is a fairly common practice by Russian police.
See for example, here:
https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-news-from-elsewhere-51390001
Or here, in the "frequent practice" section:
https://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/russia-officers-convicted-planting-drugs-reporter-77961460
That's just a few of the examples on the first page of google results.
So did she fuck up? It's hard to say. Unless of course deciding to work in a country where it's well known that police frequently plant drugs on innocent people itself counts as fucking up. (Probably does.)
Is it really so surprising?
Sam said on the Mgoblog roundtable that there's a big gap between what the players feel Michigan should be doing regarding NIL and what Michigan feels it should be doing.
And I've read in several places that Terrence Shannon wanted to come to Michigan but Texas Tech refused to pay for his summer classes that were necessary for him to graduate. You would think the obvious response on Michigan's part would be "Of course we'll pay for the classes!" But instead Shannon is at Illinois.
If we're dealing with an athletic program that won't even scrape together the money for summer tuition, what are the chances they're offering Frankie Collins anywhere near what he should be getting?
And it's not like Collins jumped right into the portal. It was literally the last day.
Sure -- maybe Collins is in the portal because he irrationally thinks he won't get the playing time he wants.
But isn't it way more likely that he (completely rationally) thinks he's not getting nearly the money he deserves, that he waited as long as he possibly could for Michigan to get its act together, and that only when it didn't, he entered the portal.
Hey -- save that for Georgia!
\s
(not \s)
I'm a fan of Caleb Houstan and I'm excited to see him play for Michigan. That said, we may have to pump the brakes on our expectations.
He hasn't been shooting the three well lately: https://basketball.realgm.com/player/Caleb-Houstan/Summary/117539
That's 19% at the U19 World Cup (and 25/103 over his last three seasons of AAU and FIBA play).
Expecting him to come in and immediately shoot 38% while adjusting to the college game at the same time might be a bit too optimistic.
Of course, the fact Howard has him in the starting line-up is a very good sign that he's worked through his shooting slump, and maybe I'm worrying over nothing.
Also who's Notre Dame's big rival? USC?
I hate to sound like Scott Frost, but if Michigan's season ended each year with a game against USC and Notre Dame's ended with a game against Ohio State, I bet they wouldn't have had those three NY6 bowl games (and our Ohio recruiting would be better).
I don't mean to take anything away from Notre Dame, but if by "that level of success" you mean having a team of Notre Dame's quality, that's pretty much what we have.
To get double digit wins every year, regularly go to a NY6 bowl game, and occasionally go to playoffs while being a member of the Big Ten East just requires a much better team than Notre Dame has been able to field recently.
Thanks! Yeah, that's exactly what I thought looking at his tape.
I worry a bit that if Michigan gets a really big name recruiting victory, and then that guy doesn't become a star at Michigan, it's going to make it harder to get the next one-and-done kind of player to commit. And I could definitely see that happening with Holmgren.
There are currently flights to and from the UK -- it's the EU which is a bit more problematic. Nor is there (to my knowledge) a ban on UK citizens traveling to the US. But perhaps Ojabo holds only a Nigerian citizenship? Trump banned Nigerians from getting visas. See here: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/02/world/africa/trump-travel-ban.html
It's hard to remember now, but that was a pre-coronavirus controversy. The justification given was terrorism, not pandemic.
Matt, I wonder what you think of Chet Holmgren on defense. In his one year of college, will he have the size to match up with Big Ten centers? Or even power forwards?
But why do you need…
Yes!
But why do you need swamps and forests to play Devin Bush? Michigan decks should be blue (islands in Great Lakes) and maize (plains planted with corn).
Harbaugh's decks are full of typical blue cards: Instants like "Tap one running back. Counter opponent's blitz" and enchantments like "There is no limit to the number of offensive linemen you may have on the field at one time. "
On the other hand, Ohio State always plays some version of Red Deck Wins. Their decks are full of 2-drop 4-3 slot receivers with haste, and other cards that should have been banned from standard ages ago.
(OK, now you can send me to Bolivia for too much Magic the Gathering on a sports blog.)
Ace (or someone with access to Synergy), can you post last year's stats for Michigan's post defense together with the Big Ten's post offense last year?
Is this a weakness that was already there, and opposing teams are starting to take advantage of it? Is it new (either because of a regression on Teske's part or a lack of help defense from Charles Matthews)? Or some combination?
JPC notes above that only 98 more negs will make it impossible for me to start new threads, and now it's only 80. I'd rather that didn't happen, so this will be my last post on the subject, much to the relief of everyone.
First, if it's only for athletes who play 4 years and graduate, then those who go pro early wouldn't get it.
Is it unsustainable? Yes, $500,000 sounds like a huge amount of money. But I think people underestimate the amount of money that Michigan fans are willing to spend. 90,000 people are willing to pay for football season tickets. If a comparable amount of people are willing to donate a $100, then you're most of the way there. And in return we'd get to watch the occasional victory over Ohio State. I'd pay $100 for that.
And some people are willing to donate much more. Witness the football team's overseas trips, the Champions Fund, not to mention the Ross Athletic Campus.
To be honest, even if it were $200k or $100k it would still be effective for recruiting. 100k for, say, 20-25 graduating athletes -- that's clearly a sustainable amount of money for the Michigan fanbase.
It could become a Michigan tradition that fans raise $500,000 for every football and basketball player who plays 4 years, finishes the season, and leaves with a degree. That's what, about 10-15 million dollars a year? That's well within the range of what fans donate to the athletic department, but now it goes towards new buildings or what not.
Would Oliver Martin have transferred to Iowa if doing so meant turning down half a million dollars? Would Karan Higdon have played in the bowl game? Would Aubrey Solomon have transferred to Tennessee? Maybe Charles Matthews doesn't even enter the draft. Obviously some of these things will happen anyway. But some of them won't.
And I don't think its the case that every school could match the amount of money Michigan fans could donate.
Well, I understand that it is not our responsibility.
But how many things that fans can do are
(1) morally good
(2) an aid to Michigan recruiting
and (3) not an ncaa violation?
Well, I sense I’m not going convince a lot of people. :-)
I thought the general consensus would be “this is obviously against the rules” rather than “this may be a clever way to legally pay the players and thus negate other schools main advantage in recruiting against us, but who cares, it’s not our responsibility”.
I…
Well, yes, it is.
I admit it seems like kind of a dumb question -- I almost didn't post it. But I really don't know the answer.
It seems like the answer has to be "no", otherwise it could lead to paying the players. (After all, if it became a Michigan tradition to do this, not just for Charles, but, say, for every football and basketball athlete that plays 4 years and leaves with a degree, that would be a huge recruiting and retention advantage.)
But it doesn't seem to violate any rule I know of. (Not that I know the rules, really.)
I was also a grad student at Berkeley. I don't think I saw anyone in a Piston's jersey -- we must have been at different bars.
It was great -- I knew the Pistons matched up well against the Lakers, a fact everyone (in Berkeley at least) was completely blind to. It was so satisfying to see the series play out exactly as I expected, while watching the Lakers fans go from ridiculous overconfidence to stunned disbelief to despair.
I guess this might be an intentional bit of poking fun at Hoke, but you have his victory over Ohio State as a victory over Ohio.
But this was fantastic! Thanks for putting it together.
Yeah, WTF?! What does one have to do to get a lifetime ban?
First of all, I agree. But before we all get too depressed, this also has an upside. If you're not currently thought of as a top OC candidate, you can still get to take part in play calling at Michigan.
Wasn't that the case with Warinner? He was respected as an O-line coach, but it was felt at OSU that he wasn't any good as an OC. And subsequently he mostly got O-line coaching offers. But at Michigan he gets to call plays. I'd guess that makes the job much more attractive.
So if Warinner stays rather than heads to Bama, we should all keep this in mind when we feel like sinking into a pit of depression over our play calling process.
(If Warinner leaves for Alabama, I think we should all feel free to sink into a pit of depression.)
^^This times a quadrillion^^
I laughed; but then I thought "empty backfield, 5 TEs, running QB -- sounds kind of fun to watch!"
My question: should I be worried about what this says about my mental health?
I share the apathy of a lot of us. But there's another way to look at it.
If we win this game, we'll have an 11 win season ending on a winning note. Here's a complete list of the times that has happened in the last 100 years: 1997, 2011.
(Of course, teams used to play less than 13 games. So you should probably look at "no more than 2 losses and ending with a win", which gives you also 1980, 1985 and a few other years I'm too lazy to look up. But the point is: we are being way too negative about what could still be a great season by the standards of Michigan football -- the sort you should only expect two or three times a generation.)
Sure, a chance to relax with family. That would sound good to me!
But to a Harbaugh? I bet he's looking at the state where he was born, the state where he went to college, a state in which he has experience coaching at the college level and recruiting, and seeing that its premier program has a coach that seems on the brink of retiring. He's seeing that while their program is usually spread oriented they currently have a quarterback suited to his type of offense, not to mention more talent than any team outside Alabama.
He's thinking back to beating his brother in the Super Bowl and thinking "I could do that every year."
I also clicked on the video to see that.
But did you see the way quarterback ran to the tight end, arms outstretched to hug him, and the tight end just runs right past him? Then the quarterback just shrugs, takes his helmet off, and hugs someone else. Even better than watching a tackle score a touchdown!
I agree with MGoChippewa. In fact, I kind of think you should edit his name out of your post. (These posts are searchable by google, while the podcasts aren't).
He does listen to us whine a lot, so there's that
This is good