covid report

Via Alejandro Zuniga of 247, Michigan’s basketball game versus Michigan State this afternoon is off.

Todays’s Michigan vs. Michigan State basketball game has been postponed due to COVID issues within the Wolverines program.

— Alejandro Zúñiga (@ByAZuniga) January 8, 2022

Apparently they had fewer than seven players available. Michigan was already down Johns, T-Will, Zeb, and Frankie against Rutgers last week. Tuesday’s tilt with Purdue is probably in jeopardy as well. They’re going to work with the Big Ten on rescheduling. Likely spots would be the span between Maryland (1/18) and at Indiana (1/23), or the one between Ohio State (2/12) and at Iowa (2/17). Those are the only five-day breaks on the schedule.

More Alston takes. This is not a sponsor note, but Richard Hoeg is a law-talking guy with an hour long podcast episode on the NCAA's "slow-motion suicide":

At the Ringer, Rodger Sherman:

Time and time again, the NCAA refuses to budge, even as its position becomes more untenable. They fought NIL to the bitter end, determined to keep athletes from receiving outside money even after it became clear that the NCAA’s side would lose. They fought in the Supreme Court to keep athletes from getting money for academic purchases, even though their argument was clearly legally doomed. The NCAA’s board of governors recently gave president Mark Emmert—a man who has dug in deep to keep the NCAA’s model alive, while also making a lot of other mistakes—a contract extension until 2025. (Like the Supreme Court’s decision, the choice to extend Emmert was also unanimous.) The NCAA remains fatalistically committed to its dying business model. They will happily drown, dragged to the bottom of the ocean with the last pennies they took from this system, rather than share a lifeboat with the athletes who play the games.

At CBS Sports, Matt Norlander:

The decision itself is not surprising. After the appeal for this case was heard in March, the questions and tones of the justices toward NCAA legal counsel indicated an anti-NCAA approach. The belief among the legal experts CBS Sports spoke with was that a 6-3 or perhaps even 7-2 decision in favor of Alston was most likely.

Instead, the NCAA got swept.

[After THE JUMP: Devante Jones floater time]

1 hour and 12 minutes

The Sponsors

Thank you to Underground Printing for making this all possible. Rishi and Ryan have been our biggest supporters from the beginning. They're also behind our Ann Arbor Institutions t-shirt program. They have awesome custom tees and hoodies and low, affordable prices. They also have tons of great Michigan apparel that you can wear proudly to support the maize and blue! Check out UGP’s holiday gift guide at ugp.io/holidaygiftguide and use the promo code NEWYEAR for 25% off your next purchase!

Our associate sponsors are also key to all of this: HomeSure Lending, Ann Arbor Elder Law, the Residence Inn Ann Arbor Downtown, Michigan Law Grad, Human Element, The Phil Klein Insurance Group, FuegoBox, and Information Entropy.

1. The Shutdown

starts at 1:00

Two weeks(?) without Michigan athletics because somebody wasn’t quarantined after coming home from the U.K. We discuss why it was necessary to shut down, how it went down, and how it might play out. We’re just baffled that this failure was allowed to happen.

The rest of the writeup and the player after The Jump]