My boss (an Illinois fan) mentioned this to me yesterday, which was the first I had heard of it. But Davis has been in school for four years, and still hasn't graduated. I honestly don't see any way he could transfer here and be eligible, unless he graduated first.
Having been in school for four years, he'd have to be at least 80% of the way toward his degree in order to be eligible to play. But at most he could get 60 transfer credits to count toward his degree here, and needing 120 to graduate, he'd only be 50% (and that's if he was even able to get 60 to transfer, which I doubt coming from a school like FAU). So that's automatic ineligibility. I don't think the COVID year changed the academic progress requirements, so it'd be 80%. What I don't know is when that goes into effect, i.e. could a kid take classes all summer to get up to the threshold by the fall? That might make it feasible for a guy that's been in school three years (60%), but trying to go from 50% to 80% (36 credits) in a summer here just doesn't seem feasible...
I feel like people had bad things to say about Barrow, but I'd take this guy as a depth piece. I know DT depth is a bit of a concern, and I'd love to have more depth to burn against overmatched opponents so Graham/Grant are fresher for the big games...
Does anyone know how casino parking will work? The casino garages (e.g. Greektown) are usually open for people with player's cards, but I'm not sure if there will be an exception given just how many people are expected to attend...
I hear you. I guess I should have been clearer, I'm more asking for myself than anything. I had been leaning towards going, but after what some of those posters wrote a few weeks back, the more I've thought about it, I'm now leaning toward not bothering, though I'm hoping to elicit some thoughts either way...
Is it even worth going? I registered and am thinking about it, but in an earlier post people mentioned that you're so packed in, and so far away from the stage, that there's not much reason to go...
That makes sense. I get differences between Hanukkah and Christmas (especially since Christmas is a fixed date), but given that originally Easter was the Sunday after Passover, and that it always seemed to line up that way (at least when I was paying attention), I assumed the Church used the same method to calculate the date for Easter that the Jewish calendar uses for Passover...
Interesting, I thought Passover and Easter typically tracked each other pretty closely. The one Seder I went to while I was a student was during Holy Week, and the next year I didn't end up going because it was on Good Friday (so not much point since I couldn't eat meat). Don't think I realized they could be this far apart...
I think most people understand that rankings are meaningless at this point. The much bigger worry is that it took Sherrone months to land his first recruit, but hopefully the floodgates start to open now...
Idk. While I would like to think that may be the case, my gut tells me the only motivation that would push the needle (at least for Harbaugh) would be familiarity, i.e. he knows the player, his work ethic, etc., and a known quantity in many ways has more value than an unknown quality. But deep down I probably do believe the comments that said that now he's with the Chargers, he only cares about the Chargers (and thus couldn't care less about setting a draft record; if he thinks another player is even marginally better for the Chargers, that's who he's going with). I mean the guy didn't even wear M gear to the ring ceremony on Saturday; it's an event celebrating the biggest achievement of his career and he's wearing a Chargers shirt...
Additionally, given how passing oriented the NFL is I would think most teams would prefer players whose skillsets lean more to pass rush than run stuffing if they only have one, but what do I know?
That may be true, but it misses the point. The point wasn't that Orji is more likely to get injured in a QB-run system. His point was that it's incredibly risky to switch to a QB-run system (e.g. read option) when Orji is the only QB we have that can effectively run it. If Orji gets hurt, we either have to scrap that offense and all the time spent on it (when practice time is limited to begin with), or try to continue running it with non-running QBs. Remember Threet and Sheridan trying to run the read option in 2008? I'd prefer not to have a repeat of that...
Did anyone else catch that Harbaugh was wearing a Chargers shirt at the ring ceremony? I guess I'm not surprised, but it's still a little disappointing (unless he sold all his M gear at his garage sale)...
If we beat one of Texas, Oregon or Washington (toughest non Ohio road game) and dont drop anything else before the game, I'll feel good.
I get West Coast road trips are always tough for us (don't think we've won a regular season road game out west since Colorado in 1996, and haven't won a true West Coast road game since UCLA in 1989), and Fisch is a great coach, but if we lose to a Washington team that is in complete rebuild mode (they lost pretty much all their star players from this past season, plus the coaches), I don't think that portends good things for our season...
I mean I know what you're saying, we ran the entire second half and held onto our lead, but do we get that lead in the first place if we never passed in the first half either?
I do have to look at the fact that Warren couldn't complete a pass last year against East Carolina, UNLV or Nebraska.
Yeah, he certainly didn't look good last year after looking promising in 2022. No idea what happened. Maybe it was the Harbaugh QB regression curse (JJ was the first Harbaugh starting QB since Luck at Stanford to finish his career at M (S in Luck's case) instead of transferring or switching positions)?
Either way it doesn't matter. NCAA says that you need to be 80% of the way to your degree after your 4th year, but M won't give more than 60 transfer credits (and that's assuming he has 60 credits that would transfer--no small issue with M's credit policy), meaning that he'd be at only 50% here and thus ineligible for athletics. Even if the COVID year didn't count for the academic progress requirements (40% after 2nd year, 60% after 3rd year, 80% after 4th year), i.e. he had been in school four years but only needed to be at 60%, he'd still be ineligible, as he couldn't be any higher than 50% when he comes here (unless I guess he busts his ass all summer to make it to 60% by the fall?).
There's nothing wrong with a policy that says you have to get at least 50% of your credits from M to graduate with an M degree. If someone gets 99% of their credits at a different school, transfers to M and takes that last course, should they be able to get an M degree? NO! They can get the degree from their old school. I actually know someone who did that in reverse. She finished four years at M two credits short of graduation, and got the final credits from a (already transfer-approved) BYU online course. She graduated from M, not BYU.
So this, a cap on 50% credit transfer, in combination with the NCAA progress requirement (40% after soph year, 60% after junior year, 80% after senior year), is why we can't get non-grad-transfers older than sophomores...
No, it was Warren; it was more of a feels thing than a numbers thing. I distinctly remember the Hawaii game, where the QB progression went JJ => Cade => Warren. JJ was lights out (6 TDs, 1 punt). Cade came in, looked super shaky, and the offense ground to a halt (punt, punt, punt, INT). But when Warren came in, the offense picked back up again (TD, TD, EOG) and he looked pretty smooth, a huge step up from Cade. Plenty of people wondered afterward if Warren should be ahead of Cade on the depth chart, but then Cade got hurt the next week and was out for the rest of the season.
I mean, just look at the stats from the Hawaii game:
Yes, Warren was only 2/4, but his QBR was only 2.6 points below JJ (who had a near-perfect game), and 3.4 points from the max QBR (100). Maybe the incompletions were drops? And Cade was 1.8, when the minimum is 0. So I don't think the completion percentage tells the whole story...
Yeah. Honestly it feels like kind of a stretch to even label Orji as a Guy instead of Iffy like the other QBs. They clearly had ZERO trust in his ability to throw last year. They called one pass the entire season (which he didn't even throw--he ran it OOB instead), and didn't let him pass at all in garbage time, which would have the perfect time to try and get him some reps, since if he throws a pick, who cares, the game's already over. It's really no different than the PepCat, which if I remember correctly also called exactly one extremely obvious pass that Peppers didn't end up attempting. Would anyone have been excited if Peppers was then the likely starter at QB in 2017? No, we would all have been terrified.
And we should be terrified. It doesn't matter how good of a runner he is (because let's face it, we won't be running an option or wishbone offense) if he's not a decent or better passer, games against any good defenses will be slogfests as they stack the box and dare us to throw. I get shades of the 2012 Bama, ND and Nebraska games.
It's not that he can't turn the corner, but the talk hasn't been instilling much confidence that he's markedly improved from where he was last year...
The flipside view/question is: does it impact recruiting? We've been to three straight playoffs, winning this past year, and yet we haven't had much of any kind of recruiting bump (I get that NIL has had a huge impact).
The one big what-if possibility for me is if we beat OSU in 2016, maybe Harbaugh doesn't lose his fire and have that weird zombie period from 2017-2020. But given how things played out, I can't help shake the feeling like we were still going to need a wholesale overhaul of the coaching staff in order to reach the mountain top...
Which makes sense. There's no sense burdening current coaches with unnecessary penalties to fight for the honor of coaches that aren't here anymore.
But the frustrating thing is the thought that this repeated failure to stand up to the NCAA's (and B1G's) bullshit is in part what pushed those coaches out the door in the first place...
It does matter where guys are taken. As has been discussed, the team they go to is extremely important. Good luck succeeding on a team with a shitty supporting cast, especially at OL (as an aside, probably the best argument for why Brady is the GOAT isn't the seven rings, but rather that he did what he did with the offensive "weapons" he was stuck with; other than a few years (mostly 2007-2010), the offensive skill players around him were just guys...).
But draft slot is also important. Counterintuitively, a given QB will actually have a higher chance of success the lower they're drafted. The QB is the same either way, but taking them lower rather than higher allows for accumulation of other talent. For example, Brady's chances for early success were boosted by the fact that he was taken in the sixth round instead of the first (like Peyton), since the Pats got Brady and a first rounder instead of Brady and a sixth rounder...
This is a great point, but it's complicated by the further question of fit. JaMarcus Russell (for example) was probably always going to be a massive bust, but would some of these other guys have looked different on a different team (with a different coach, GM, supporting cast, etc.)? My guess is at least some of them would.
It's tough because as a fan, we're conflicted. Not surprisingly a big part of us wants our guys to go as high as possible, but on the flipside, we also want them to go to teams where they'll be likely to succeed...
Kind of a bummer for M fans that were thinking of attending (at least the first round). With Jenkins projected as a likely 2nd day pick, JJ was really the only hope for an in-person, round 1 pick...
I think he does better, but still flames out. Maybe more like Hoke's tenure. At the end of the day, he was the vanguard of an innovative system, but while he could add some wrinkles here and there (think some of the great first halves we had--a PSU game with Minor comes to mind--where we fizzled once they figured it out), he couldn't continue innovating once his read-option system was figured out.
Good point on the OL. Once you look closely, you see that really the only OL Hoke had that were good were ones that were initially developed under RRod and Frey. The OL brought in under Funk floundered, except for a few leftovers that Drevno got some improvement from early in Harbaugh's tenure.
Mason Cole really encapsulates the Funk thing for me. I honestly think his best year was his true Fr. year. It's as if the coaching he got in HS was better than what he got from Funk, because he (and other OL) seemed to get worse, not better, as they went along under Funk. Dude was easily one of the few worst coaches we've had here in our lifetimes...
Given that I'm firmly in the camp that what CS did was gray area at best,* this question is irrelevant to me.
*The only thing in my mind that may have actually violated the letter of the law would be the CMU thing, but to me, the Occam's Razor/most plausible scenario is that he was there to help CMU. It just doesn't make sense to go to all that trouble (and if that was him, he was clearly trying to disguise himself, i.e. he knew it was problematic to be identified) for a much inferior vantage point than just sitting incognito in the stands (not to mention that on top of it, he either wasn't recording (way inferior for intelligence purposes), or trying to record with camera glasses which, again, are much inferior to using a phone camera from the stands).
This is a very good take. While it's easy to play the "what-if" game, and I'm certain that lack of motivation after falling just short of the BCS title game played a role in our poor performance against USC, we had some major flaws that got exposed against OSU and USC that Florida very likely would have exposed as well.
While we had arguably the best DL in the country, our back seven generally lacked speed and we had a major liability at CB2. We got torched by OSU's spread (can easily see Florida doing the same thing) and USC's receivers. On the offensive side, we had an incredibly talented offense, but a reluctance to open it up until it was too late (had we come out with 2008 Capital One Bowl offense against OSU from the start, we may have won that one in a shootout...).
You're right, ND was a mirage of sorts. We feasted on their poor OL (Brady Quinn was under siege all game, and they had no running game whatsoever--it was a nearly a double rushing Rutger (47 points to 24 yards) even with sacks excluded; include the sacks and ND had 4 yards rushing), and lit up their horrendous defense (they gave up 47, 44 and 41 points in their three blowout losses, plus 37 in a win over MSU). But even despite the DL's domination ND was still able to put up three passing TDs (a harbinger of things to come).
Honestly, and especially with Harbaugh gone, I think we're the only ones that actively remember this question is sitting out there unanswered, and since it's fallen off the radar, CMU is perfectly fine letting it slide into the ether...
I had never heard of him (my first thought when I read the name was OJ's brother), so I looked him up. Among other things I found was a nice summary of the Jason-was-the-killer theory on Reddit, and while I can't speak for the accuracy of the purported facts, I'm not going to lie, it made a compelling argument...
BC is playing like we should have played in 2022, but instead we played tight as shit. Unfortunately this is trending like last year, where we just plain got outclassed. Guh...
Did some comments get deleted out of the OJ thread, or a user get banned (and thus his comments deleted)? I ask because I was part of a sub-conversation re the website design/HUEL that's not there anymore (the original top-level comment is still there, but a series of sub-comments are gone). Not that I really care one way or the other, but the thought of comments being deleted because they were critical of HUEL and the website redesign strikes me as something that Ace would do, but the current writers/mods not so much...
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Would have been interesting to have seen Funchess on Beilein's teams...
My boss (an Illinois fan) mentioned this to me yesterday, which was the first I had heard of it. But Davis has been in school for four years, and still hasn't graduated. I honestly don't see any way he could transfer here and be eligible, unless he graduated first.
Having been in school for four years, he'd have to be at least 80% of the way toward his degree in order to be eligible to play. But at most he could get 60 transfer credits to count toward his degree here, and needing 120 to graduate, he'd only be 50% (and that's if he was even able to get 60 to transfer, which I doubt coming from a school like FAU). So that's automatic ineligibility. I don't think the COVID year changed the academic progress requirements, so it'd be 80%. What I don't know is when that goes into effect, i.e. could a kid take classes all summer to get up to the threshold by the fall? That might make it feasible for a guy that's been in school three years (60%), but trying to go from 50% to 80% (36 credits) in a summer here just doesn't seem feasible...
I feel like people had bad things to say about Barrow, but I'd take this guy as a depth piece. I know DT depth is a bit of a concern, and I'd love to have more depth to burn against overmatched opponents so Graham/Grant are fresher for the big games...
That's unfortunate, I get it's all hindsight but we could use it a lot more this year than we did in 2022 when we missed the tournament anyway...
Does anyone know how casino parking will work? The casino garages (e.g. Greektown) are usually open for people with player's cards, but I'm not sure if there will be an exception given just how many people are expected to attend...
Unfortunately no, so I don't have anything to go off of...
I hear you. I guess I should have been clearer, I'm more asking for myself than anything. I had been leaning towards going, but after what some of those posters wrote a few weeks back, the more I've thought about it, I'm now leaning toward not bothering, though I'm hoping to elicit some thoughts either way...
I'm pretty sure he meant RichRod ("from small town southern WV")...
Is it even worth going? I registered and am thinking about it, but in an earlier post people mentioned that you're so packed in, and so far away from the stage, that there's not much reason to go...
That makes sense. I get differences between Hanukkah and Christmas (especially since Christmas is a fixed date), but given that originally Easter was the Sunday after Passover, and that it always seemed to line up that way (at least when I was paying attention), I assumed the Church used the same method to calculate the date for Easter that the Jewish calendar uses for Passover...
Interesting, I thought Passover and Easter typically tracked each other pretty closely. The one Seder I went to while I was a student was during Holy Week, and the next year I didn't end up going because it was on Good Friday (so not much point since I couldn't eat meat). Don't think I realized they could be this far apart...
Is this the guy that was in the 100th percentile on 3s or something like that?
I think most people understand that rankings are meaningless at this point. The much bigger worry is that it took Sherrone months to land his first recruit, but hopefully the floodgates start to open now...
Idk. While I would like to think that may be the case, my gut tells me the only motivation that would push the needle (at least for Harbaugh) would be familiarity, i.e. he knows the player, his work ethic, etc., and a known quantity in many ways has more value than an unknown quality. But deep down I probably do believe the comments that said that now he's with the Chargers, he only cares about the Chargers (and thus couldn't care less about setting a draft record; if he thinks another player is even marginally better for the Chargers, that's who he's going with). I mean the guy didn't even wear M gear to the ring ceremony on Saturday; it's an event celebrating the biggest achievement of his career and he's wearing a Chargers shirt...
Additionally, given how passing oriented the NFL is I would think most teams would prefer players whose skillsets lean more to pass rush than run stuffing if they only have one, but what do I know?
Isn't this the first commit since Harbaugh left? Hopefully this breaks the seal...
That may be true, but it misses the point. The point wasn't that Orji is more likely to get injured in a QB-run system. His point was that it's incredibly risky to switch to a QB-run system (e.g. read option) when Orji is the only QB we have that can effectively run it. If Orji gets hurt, we either have to scrap that offense and all the time spent on it (when practice time is limited to begin with), or try to continue running it with non-running QBs. Remember Threet and Sheridan trying to run the read option in 2008? I'd prefer not to have a repeat of that...
Did anyone else catch that Harbaugh was wearing a Chargers shirt at the ring ceremony? I guess I'm not surprised, but it's still a little disappointing (unless he sold all his M gear at his garage sale)...
I get West Coast road trips are always tough for us (don't think we've won a regular season road game out west since Colorado in 1996, and haven't won a true West Coast road game since UCLA in 1989), and Fisch is a great coach, but if we lose to a Washington team that is in complete rebuild mode (they lost pretty much all their star players from this past season, plus the coaches), I don't think that portends good things for our season...
You hate to see it...
I mean I know what you're saying, we ran the entire second half and held onto our lead, but do we get that lead in the first place if we never passed in the first half either?
Yeah, he certainly didn't look good last year after looking promising in 2022. No idea what happened. Maybe it was the Harbaugh QB regression curse (JJ was the first Harbaugh starting QB since Luck at Stanford to finish his career at M (S in Luck's case) instead of transferring or switching positions)?
Either way it doesn't matter. NCAA says that you need to be 80% of the way to your degree after your 4th year, but M won't give more than 60 transfer credits (and that's assuming he has 60 credits that would transfer--no small issue with M's credit policy), meaning that he'd be at only 50% here and thus ineligible for athletics. Even if the COVID year didn't count for the academic progress requirements (40% after 2nd year, 60% after 3rd year, 80% after 4th year), i.e. he had been in school four years but only needed to be at 60%, he'd still be ineligible, as he couldn't be any higher than 50% when he comes here (unless I guess he busts his ass all summer to make it to 60% by the fall?).
There's nothing wrong with a policy that says you have to get at least 50% of your credits from M to graduate with an M degree. If someone gets 99% of their credits at a different school, transfers to M and takes that last course, should they be able to get an M degree? NO! They can get the degree from their old school. I actually know someone who did that in reverse. She finished four years at M two credits short of graduation, and got the final credits from a (already transfer-approved) BYU online course. She graduated from M, not BYU.
So this, a cap on 50% credit transfer, in combination with the NCAA progress requirement (40% after soph year, 60% after junior year, 80% after senior year), is why we can't get non-grad-transfers older than sophomores...
Even more so, I'd say that playing less than half the position (the coaches didn't let him pass) is not a "rotation role"...
No, it was Warren; it was more of a feels thing than a numbers thing. I distinctly remember the Hawaii game, where the QB progression went JJ => Cade => Warren. JJ was lights out (6 TDs, 1 punt). Cade came in, looked super shaky, and the offense ground to a halt (punt, punt, punt, INT). But when Warren came in, the offense picked back up again (TD, TD, EOG) and he looked pretty smooth, a huge step up from Cade. Plenty of people wondered afterward if Warren should be ahead of Cade on the depth chart, but then Cade got hurt the next week and was out for the rest of the season.
I mean, just look at the stats from the Hawaii game:
C/ATT YDS AVG TD INT QBR
J.J. McCarthy 11/12 229 19.1 3 0 99.2
Davis Warren 2/4 65 16.3 0 0 96.6
Cade McNamara 4/6 26 4.3 0 1 1.8
Yes, Warren was only 2/4, but his QBR was only 2.6 points below JJ (who had a near-perfect game), and 3.4 points from the max QBR (100). Maybe the incompletions were drops? And Cade was 1.8, when the minimum is 0. So I don't think the completion percentage tells the whole story...
Yeah. Honestly it feels like kind of a stretch to even label Orji as a Guy instead of Iffy like the other QBs. They clearly had ZERO trust in his ability to throw last year. They called one pass the entire season (which he didn't even throw--he ran it OOB instead), and didn't let him pass at all in garbage time, which would have the perfect time to try and get him some reps, since if he throws a pick, who cares, the game's already over. It's really no different than the PepCat, which if I remember correctly also called exactly one extremely obvious pass that Peppers didn't end up attempting. Would anyone have been excited if Peppers was then the likely starter at QB in 2017? No, we would all have been terrified.
And we should be terrified. It doesn't matter how good of a runner he is (because let's face it, we won't be running an option or wishbone offense) if he's not a decent or better passer, games against any good defenses will be slogfests as they stack the box and dare us to throw. I get shades of the 2012 Bama, ND and Nebraska games.
It's not that he can't turn the corner, but the talk hasn't been instilling much confidence that he's markedly improved from where he was last year...
The flipside view/question is: does it impact recruiting? We've been to three straight playoffs, winning this past year, and yet we haven't had much of any kind of recruiting bump (I get that NIL has had a huge impact).
The one big what-if possibility for me is if we beat OSU in 2016, maybe Harbaugh doesn't lose his fire and have that weird zombie period from 2017-2020. But given how things played out, I can't help shake the feeling like we were still going to need a wholesale overhaul of the coaching staff in order to reach the mountain top...
I'm most curious as to who all the individuals are...
Which makes sense. There's no sense burdening current coaches with unnecessary penalties to fight for the honor of coaches that aren't here anymore.
But the frustrating thing is the thought that this repeated failure to stand up to the NCAA's (and B1G's) bullshit is in part what pushed those coaches out the door in the first place...
Well it did get Warde selected as the head of the CFP Committee...
Can't say it's surprising...
Unless I'm missing it, they didn't name the individual coaches, correct?
Watch what you say, the last HUEL discussion mysteriously disappeared...
It does matter where guys are taken. As has been discussed, the team they go to is extremely important. Good luck succeeding on a team with a shitty supporting cast, especially at OL (as an aside, probably the best argument for why Brady is the GOAT isn't the seven rings, but rather that he did what he did with the offensive "weapons" he was stuck with; other than a few years (mostly 2007-2010), the offensive skill players around him were just guys...).
But draft slot is also important. Counterintuitively, a given QB will actually have a higher chance of success the lower they're drafted. The QB is the same either way, but taking them lower rather than higher allows for accumulation of other talent. For example, Brady's chances for early success were boosted by the fact that he was taken in the sixth round instead of the first (like Peyton), since the Pats got Brady and a first rounder instead of Brady and a sixth rounder...
This is a great point, but it's complicated by the further question of fit. JaMarcus Russell (for example) was probably always going to be a massive bust, but would some of these other guys have looked different on a different team (with a different coach, GM, supporting cast, etc.)? My guess is at least some of them would.
It's tough because as a fan, we're conflicted. Not surprisingly a big part of us wants our guys to go as high as possible, but on the flipside, we also want them to go to teams where they'll be likely to succeed...
Finally some good news...
I'll never get over the irony of OSU expecting us to get hammered by the NCAA...
Michigan Hockey Summ...err...Spring...
I mean, with two of the top five-ish players already gone, I'd say that prediction is completely dead...
Kind of a bummer for M fans that were thinking of attending (at least the first round). With Jenkins projected as a likely 2nd day pick, JJ was really the only hope for an in-person, round 1 pick...
I think he does better, but still flames out. Maybe more like Hoke's tenure. At the end of the day, he was the vanguard of an innovative system, but while he could add some wrinkles here and there (think some of the great first halves we had--a PSU game with Minor comes to mind--where we fizzled once they figured it out), he couldn't continue innovating once his read-option system was figured out.
Good point on the OL. Once you look closely, you see that really the only OL Hoke had that were good were ones that were initially developed under RRod and Frey. The OL brought in under Funk floundered, except for a few leftovers that Drevno got some improvement from early in Harbaugh's tenure.
Mason Cole really encapsulates the Funk thing for me. I honestly think his best year was his true Fr. year. It's as if the coaching he got in HS was better than what he got from Funk, because he (and other OL) seemed to get worse, not better, as they went along under Funk. Dude was easily one of the few worst coaches we've had here in our lifetimes...
Given that I'm firmly in the camp that what CS did was gray area at best,* this question is irrelevant to me.
*The only thing in my mind that may have actually violated the letter of the law would be the CMU thing, but to me, the Occam's Razor/most plausible scenario is that he was there to help CMU. It just doesn't make sense to go to all that trouble (and if that was him, he was clearly trying to disguise himself, i.e. he knew it was problematic to be identified) for a much inferior vantage point than just sitting incognito in the stands (not to mention that on top of it, he either wasn't recording (way inferior for intelligence purposes), or trying to record with camera glasses which, again, are much inferior to using a phone camera from the stands).
This is a very good take. While it's easy to play the "what-if" game, and I'm certain that lack of motivation after falling just short of the BCS title game played a role in our poor performance against USC, we had some major flaws that got exposed against OSU and USC that Florida very likely would have exposed as well.
While we had arguably the best DL in the country, our back seven generally lacked speed and we had a major liability at CB2. We got torched by OSU's spread (can easily see Florida doing the same thing) and USC's receivers. On the offensive side, we had an incredibly talented offense, but a reluctance to open it up until it was too late (had we come out with 2008 Capital One Bowl offense against OSU from the start, we may have won that one in a shootout...).
You're right, ND was a mirage of sorts. We feasted on their poor OL (Brady Quinn was under siege all game, and they had no running game whatsoever--it was a nearly a double rushing Rutger (47 points to 24 yards) even with sacks excluded; include the sacks and ND had 4 yards rushing), and lit up their horrendous defense (they gave up 47, 44 and 41 points in their three blowout losses, plus 37 in a win over MSU). But even despite the DL's domination ND was still able to put up three passing TDs (a harbinger of things to come).
Honestly, and especially with Harbaugh gone, I think we're the only ones that actively remember this question is sitting out there unanswered, and since it's fallen off the radar, CMU is perfectly fine letting it slide into the ether...
I had never heard of him (my first thought when I read the name was OJ's brother), so I looked him up. Among other things I found was a nice summary of the Jason-was-the-killer theory on Reddit, and while I can't speak for the accuracy of the purported facts, I'm not going to lie, it made a compelling argument...
BC is playing like we should have played in 2022, but instead we played tight as shit. Unfortunately this is trending like last year, where we just plain got outclassed. Guh...
Did some comments get deleted out of the OJ thread, or a user get banned (and thus his comments deleted)? I ask because I was part of a sub-conversation re the website design/HUEL that's not there anymore (the original top-level comment is still there, but a series of sub-comments are gone). Not that I really care one way or the other, but the thought of comments being deleted because they were critical of HUEL and the website redesign strikes me as something that Ace would do, but the current writers/mods not so much...