Sponsor Note. Let's say you've cloned a hundred duck-sized horses and want people to fight them. That sounds like something with a lot of legal complications. Is cloning… within the city… that ain't legal either? What happens if someone gets hurt? When someone gets hurt, more like it. It's a tough balance between the incredible appeal of finding out whether you can beat 100 duck-sized horses in a fight and the potential to be sued into the ground.

Well, have I got the guy for you.

Richard Hoeg knows this stuff, backwards and forwards. He's a business lawyer from the law factory who can tell you whether or not you should proceed with your idea. (Even if he says no you clearly should.) He'll get you set up with a legal framework to cope with the inevitable disasters if you decide to proceed (which you clearly will). And insofar as anyone can be protected from the law while running a business that is essentially cockfighting between miniaturized charismatic megafauna and humans, you will be.

What other lawyer can say that?

SNACKS! Sometimes there's a thing that gets put in your twitter feed 20 times and every time you click on it. This is one of those things:

JSU wild. Ya love to see it. pic.twitter.com/EzZ5OzcBr2

— Dorian (@AllHailDorian) March 3, 2020

Jackson State was super efficient at feeding Snacks shots; he got four up in his two minutes. This led to a Kenpom glitch: Snacks finishes his career with 82% usage and, uh, took 137% of JSU shots when he was on the floor?

A legendary Kenpom page.

You may remember Snacks from the quintessential Tacko Fall reaction video:

Still our favorite video of Tacko Fall

pic.twitter.com/GV5VTMaDrd

— Ballislife.com (@Ballislife) December 10, 2019

Someone's gotta hire the play by play guy. Anyone who can exclaim "SNACKS" like that needs to be doing the NCAA tournament.

[After THE JUMP: distressing times at Arkansas-Pine Bluff.]

WHAT IS GOING ON AT ARKANSAS-PINE BLUFF? Your author was perusing the box score of this game and noticed that Jackson State's opponent played literally every scholarship player. Then he clicked on UAPB's Kenpom page and recoiled in horror. Do not show this to Craig Ross, he will have a stroke:

13 different players get at least 10% of UAPB minutes and a total of 19 guys have gotten in the game for the, uh, Golden Lions. UAPB is dead last nationally in offense; hey have a guy with 28% usage who shoots 42/21. The SWAC is wild.

Matt Painter may agree but still doesn't want to play them. Via Matt Norlander, Matt Painter was one of the main drivers of the Big Ten's 20-game schedule:

Purdue coach Matt Painter championed the cause in the spring of 2017 at the Big Ten coaches' meetings. He had to convince some in the league to join the offensive. The biggest reason for going to 20 league games was not explicitly to up the chances for at-large quota, but also to accommodate the Big Ten Network's carriage of game inventory and to lock in/protect geographical rivalries. That meant Indiana and Purdue would play twice every season in perpetuity. Same for Michigan-Michigan State and Illinois-Northwestern. …

Painter also tried to show that how trading two league games for lesser-attended "buy" games against Quad 3/4 opponents was optimal. Take the two worst nonconference games off your schedule, replace them with game 19 and 20 in the Big Ten. On the whole this will lift the conference. There were mockups and simulations of seasons, hypothetical schedules with opponents ranked 250th or worse vs. subbing in those two other Big Ten games. Comparisons of 20-game Big Ten schedules vs. 18, showing trajectories and taking into account a forthcoming metric that would be changing how teams were evaluated.

The league has stuck to that plan, with approximately the same number of meaningful nonconference games as there were before the change. 12 Big Ten schools are in the top 20 in Kenpom's SOS measure.

There's still a little work to do when it comes to buy games. Michigan should not have played Houston Baptist, which is predictably awful.

Not a good combination. Donovan Peoples-Jones finishes near the bottom of this list of receivers ranked by how many targets were accurate:

Quality QB play is obviously a large part trying to evaluate wide receivers coming into the NFL.

Using PFF data, here is how often the 2020 WR class saw an accurate pass on their targets: pic.twitter.com/1DleCybZKe

— Graham Barfield (@GrahamBarfield) February 27, 2020

Combine this fact with Peoples-Jones's nearly unprecedented vertical:

Michigan WR Donovan Peoples-Jones with a 44.5” vertical jump, good for third-best in Combine history among WRs

— Benjamin Solak (@BenjaminSolak) February 27, 2020

Michigan wasted that guy. Silver lining is that replacing a senior QB might not be as much of a problem as it might otherwise be. Shea Patterson is not expected to be drafted.

Mayfield coming. Nick Baumgardner on instate NFL draft prospects for next year; he spends a lot of time talking about Jalen Mayfield:

But during his head-to-head reps, Mayfield gave Young everything he wanted — and more — for the bulk of the game. Mayfield saw roughly a dozen head-up reps against Young during the first three quarters and didn’t allow a pressure during that time. Michigan used a running back to chip Young just twice during those reps, as most of Mayfield’s work against the likely future first-round pick was in a one-on-one capacity. Young’s first pressure of the game came with 3:35 to go in the third quarter in a rep against Runyan. Young beat Mayfield with an inside rush during the first play of the fourth quarter, his first and only clean win against the redshirt freshman that day.

Mayfield’s an athlete with great size and long arms. A 6-foot-5 tackle, Mayfield arrived at Michigan in 2018 at around 270 pounds. He wasn’t carrying sloppy weight and his natural strength impressed Michigan’s coaching staff almost from the jump, even though he was not an early enrollee. Michigan bulked him up north of 300 pounds by the start of his second year, but not enough to compromise his natural quickness and flexibility. Young tried to explode by Mayfield off the edge a number of times in this game and … found that task to be challenging.

Baumgardner throws in MSU's Elijah Collins amongst four Michigan guys, probably because he couldn't write about all Michigan guys.

The big lineup: slapdash. Via Brendan Quinn, Franz Wagner on what happened when Michigan went big against Wisconsin:

“Obviously it’s a new lineup but with a lot of big bodies out there I think we should take advantage of that on both ends of the floor,” Wagner said. “We didn’t do that. We wanted to switch a lot. We’ll look at the film. We didn’t talk. Nobody knows who to guard. That’s how (the Badgers) got their shots."

Howard felt he didn't have a choice with only two primary ballhandlers available, citing potential foul trouble. The coach has changed; the autobench remains.

Quinn also notes that the small lineup outscored Wisconsin by two in the last 7 minutes.

I'll believe it when I see it. The new Big Ten commissioner is a hockey dad from Minnesota who's talking up the sport as a potential growth area:

“I probably have seen more hockey games than I have football and basketball games in my life,” Warren said, noting that he has already attended men’s games at Ohio State and Michigan, and he will be at a Notre Dame game this weekend. “I love what it stands for, and when I came here I made it clear that hockey is a priority to me. We’re in the Midwest. We’re a legitimate hockey conference, and when you look at our schools, they’re hockey schools.”

Warren added that he feels the Big Ten has the nation’s best hockey facilities, and the goal is to create a conference that dominates college hockey. He said the plans to add staff in the coming months that will grow the “panache” of Big Ten hockey.

“It’s a sport I love. It’s a sport I admire. I love the student-athletes. I know what it has meant to my family,” Warren said. “But I want to make sure I have seasoned veterans around me who are hockey people and who can help me grow Big Ten hockey.”

Big Ten hockey has been a tad disappointing on the ice; off the ice it's been a debacle. The original playoff format was single-elimination at a neutral site, which got scrapped after the first couple tournaments were so barren they could be NCAA regionals. The compromise return to home ice is still kind of embarassing, with single-game semis and finals largely because some of the buildings teams play in have to host other stuff.

Meanwhile television access is worse for every actual Big Ten team, and the one team that's not really in the league has a TV/streaming setup that puts the rest of the conference to shame. Every ND game gets streamed. The feed is crystal clear. You can see the puck. Professionals produce the broadcast.

Big Ten games have the same quality internet games had 15 years ago, and they're staffed by students. The camera work is appallingly bad; more than one Michigan goal was scored off-screen this year. ND broadcasts are free; the Big Ten charges for a substandard product.

If you want to fix Big Ten hockey, fix that.

I didn't mean that thing I said, and now I'm going to repeat it. USC athletic director Mike Bohn told a podcast that "everything is on the table" after being asked whether USC would consider changing conferences or going independent. That is the Pac-12 equivalent of Michigan saying "we're open to anything" and naturally raised eyebrows. Bohn got enough pushback that he clarified that USC wasn't going anywhere:

"The answer is no," Bohn said when contacted by CBS Sports on Thursday. "Why would we do that? We've got 21 sports here. You know the drill. There would be no way for us to do that."

Good job! Stop talking. You have not stopped talking.

"Now, that being said, if the unexpected happened and NBC said, 'Hey we want to partner you guys with Notre Dame' … then that's different.'"

People are just in charge of things.

Makes more sense now. FOIAs for the Zavier Simpson traffic incident have returned a video of the police interaction:

Simpson does not appear to be intoxicated and probably wasn't even driving the car. It doesn't appear that the cops were covering anything up. Suspension warranted; it's nothing in the larger scheme.

Etc.: Princeton sucks so much. Strauss Mann working on his flaws, such as they are. Football players can now wear 0. 0 seems like a fullback number. Give it to Ben Mason. Philippe Lapointe features in an article about NHL offspring in the BCHL. You cannot get an AD to understand he has buckets of money because his salary depends on him not understanding it. Red Berenson still gets on the ice. John Beilein on Michigan's exiting seniors.