Coach twitter is interested. I cannot tell you how encouraging it is that multiple plays from Michigan's spring game have been interesting enough for the clip-it-and-describe-it wing of coaching twitter to post.

Michigan with a nice wrinkle to Boundary Pin & Pull RPO

▪️Offset Pistol I-Formation

▪️FB Pin & Pull to the Nub TE

▪️RB Swing to the Field

▪️Double Slant from the Twins

Swing + Slant puts Field Overhang Defender in Conflict! pic.twitter.com/HfucPeeU0R

— Coach Dan Casey (@CoachDanCasey) May 4, 2019

This did not happen that much the last couple years. James Light would post stuff about the run game; guys who aren't local didn't have much interest. And the things that have popped out of the spring clips have been plays on which guys are put in conflict while Michigan runs a tightly integrated set of plays that all look like each other.

A program milestone. Women's lacrosse made its first tournament ever as the #8 overall seed:

No. 8 seed Michigan earned an at-large bid to the NCAA Tournament for the first postseason appearance in program history after going 15-3 overall, including a 4-2 mark in conference play. The Wolverines will play the winner of Jacksonville vs. Mercer on Friday, May 10 in Ann Arbor, Mich.

A time has not yet been established. How they got there.

[After THE JUMP: insane ways to change the NBA!]

This is so bananas I could have wrote it. Kirk Goldsberry has a new book about the NBA and in it he proposes several different ways to "fix" the three point line. The pull-up three-pointer with no other action is a pretty boring act of basketball, admittedly. Greg Popovich:

"There's no basketball anymore, there's no beauty in it," Popovich said back in November. "Now you look at a stat sheet after a game and the first thing you look at is the 3s. If you made 3s and the other team didn't, you win. You don't even look at the rebounds or the turnovers or how much transition D was involved. You don't even care."

Goldsberry is a maniac, though:

What if every team in the NBA could draw the 3-point line wherever they wanted?

I hate it. I love it? I do not know how to feel about this. I have Schrodinger's opinion. Wait! Something decayed: the prospect of an NBA team completely doing away with the three-point line at home and then building their team around that fact is fascinating and I enthusiastically endorse this.

But seriously, Goldsberry is a maniac.

Allow goaltending on 3s

I hate this. Give me 30 minutes and I'll talk myself into it.

Devin Bush on draft day. SI has a profile up:

Bush has prepared himself for the job he’s about to have, an anchor in the middle of the Steelers defense, ever since he told his dad he wanted to play football at age 6. Bush Sr. responded by pulling out his old helmets, the ones he’d worn during his eight-year NFL playing career for the Falcons, Rams and Browns. They each put one on, buckled the chinstraps, and the former NFL safety knocked his young son over. He did it a few times, Devin Jr. popping back up again and again, the father asking his son if he was O.K., testing that he could withstand the physicality of the sport.

Why did we do this, part 3. Army is up on Bill Connelly's preview schedule, and hoo boy:

As a rule, college coaches are quite good at staying on 12 with the dealer showing a three. Monken, however, hits pretty much every time. In 2018, his Black Knights went for it 23 times on fourth-and-1 and punted just twice*. There are a couple of remarkable things about that:

1. Since 2005, no one else had gone for it even 20 times on fourth-and-1.
2. They converted 21 times! That’s a 91 percent success rate, more than 20 percentage points higher than normal. Teams running the triple option have the perfect playbook for fourth-and-1 conversions, but even by triple-option standards, Army’s 2018 success was ridiculous. While Army went 21-for-23, fellow optioneers Air Force, Georgia Southern, Georgia Tech, and Navy went a combined 40-for-52. That’s a 77 percent success rate, still better than normal, and far below 91 damn percent. In recent history, only 2015 Navy (18-for-19 on fourth-and-1) came anywhere close to Army’s frequency and proficiency.

Army took Oklahoma to overtime last year—you may remember watching that on a Twitch stream posted by a guy who took the opportunity to show 32,000 people his feet in large part because they were able to turn that game into an insanely low-possession one. Playing Army is the equivalent of signing up to play a basketball game that's only ten minutes long.

The risk/reward here is all out of whack. Michigan seems to keep scheduling these games so they can add a bunch of military frippery (skydivers, flyovers) to what would otherwise be a nondescript game against a directional Michigan. I'd rather just have the nondescript game instead of clenching all available sphincters.

Bring on Directional Michigan.

Uh, okay. There have been rumbles—and press conferences—about the possibility of Illinois adding hockey for a couple years now. This is the most concrete sign that that will in fact come to pass:

Per a Big Ten source, the conference recently instructed teams not to schedule non-conference games for the 2021-22 season and beyond, likely to allow the league time to figure out its new conference format with the University of Illinois D1 elevation gaining momentum.

— Joe Meloni (@JoeMeloni) May 6, 2019

The enterprise appears to depend on a quarter-billion dollar project called "The Yards" that's… well, it's a lot:

"The project as currently planned has an estimated cost of construction of over $250 million and includes expansion of the Illinois Terminal, new office and retail space, a hotel and conference center, residential units and a downtown arena potentially serving as the home for a new Division I Illinois hockey program as well as several other Illinois sports programs," according to city officials.

The idea that this would come together in time for 2021 is far-fetched. Maybe Illinois would play in temporary digs—they have a 1,200 seat Ice Arena already while this development is in progress.

Adding Illinois would take the Big Ten to eight members and get rid of some of the annoying late-season bye weeks, but it also creates a scheduling conundrum. 7 opponents x 4 games = 28 games, and that would leave Big Ten schools with just six nonconference games. With Michigan and Michigan State committed to the GLI they'd have just four, and once you get that thin there's a real chance a few anomalous results make your conference look a lot worse than it really is in the Pairwise.

Paring things down is tough without going away from balanced scheduling or increasing travel costs. 7 x 3 is tough logistically, and dividing the conference into two divisions makes the regular season title less fair. They'll probably pick the latter if Illinois does indeed add a team.

Adios. This hockey decommit is frankly bizarre:

UMass gets a big commit for 2019-20 in the shape of ‘00 Calen Kiefiuk. Fmr. Michigan recruit had 15-26–41 in 50 GP in third USHL season with CI Flying Aces. Kiefiuk is an aggressive winger who fits UMass mold of speed and heavy on pucks.

— Jeff Cox (@JeffCoxSports) May 2, 2019

Kiefiuk committed to Berenson, not Pearson, but he probably could have helped this year's team after a 46 point 2017-18 season. Instead he got pushed off to another year of junior and ends up flipping to UMass, which was 31-10 this year and played for the national title. Michigan probably asked him to defer again. Kiefiuk looks like a four-year player and a guy who will be a productive point producer. I don't get this one at all.

In more distant news: the Kamloops Blazers took both Mats Lindgren and Connor Levis in the first round of the WHL bantam draft. That does not appear to be a thing where player X is wired to a particular school and uses a commitment to scare other teams off. The Kamloops GM:

"There is going to be some work to be done there" is a better thing to hear than "lol they bought it," at least.

A reporter got Lindgren on the phone:

Lindgren is committed to play NCAA hockey at University of Michigan for 2022. He says he has a tough decision to make about which route to go.

— Colton Davies (@ColtonDavies_) May 2, 2019

We'll see.

Etc.: Don't click here. Baseball labor relations book at 25. Baseball projected as a 2-seed in the latest bracketology at D1Baseball. They're in with the last 1-seed but the regionals are, well, regional so that doesn't necessarily mean they're on the cusp of hosting. Sportswriter goes to Tigers game, finds out the cheap seats are 30 bucks.