tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-61364870407528781092024-03-14T06:25:15.835-04:00Genuinely SarcasticBrianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16483608908590422213noreply@blogger.comBlogger324125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6136487040752878109.post-2022576636550038182018-11-24T22:09:00.000-05:002018-11-24T22:09:28.762-05:00Things Fall ApartEighteen years ago, I watched Drew Henson bootleg into the endzone in Ohio Stadium and clinch a Michigan victory. Had I known then that that would basically be the final hurrah for Michigan in the rivalry, I probably would have savored it more. Or given up following sports altogether. That would've been the smarter play, I think.<br />
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18 years later, and Michigan has exactly one win against a non-lame duck Ohio State team - and that came 15 years ago. It has been an endless, unrelenting, and caustic wave of death for basically 20 years now. It never seems to make any bit of difference what happens before the game, what shape Michigan or Ohio State are in, what the relative strengths and weaknesses are, or anything else.<br />
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The final score has always ended the same: Ohio State too much, Michigan not enough.<br />
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We tricked ourselves into thinking this might somehow be different. Two years ago Michigan flubbed the game to the point where it came down to a bad spot when it should've been a Michigan regulation win but for three ass-fuckery turnovers by the quarterback. We convinced ourselves that with a functional quarterback this year, Michigan would obtain justice for that indignity.<br />
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We forgot that the final score is always the same.<br />
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Against <b>this</b> Ohio State team, this OSU defense that got shredded into ribbons by Maryland and Purdue, got bombed by Penn State and Nebraska, how could this <b>not</b> be the year? Michigan finally brought an offense in that featured a healthy QB and what appeared to be a functional offensive line. Surely this would finally be enough to get over the top?<br />
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The final score is always the same.<br />
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It makes not a single bit of difference what Michigan does - Ohio State is always better. Michigan throws rock; Ohio State throws paper. Michigan throws paper; Ohio State throws scissors. Michigan throws scissors; Ohio State throws rock. Michigan gets fed up and pulls a knife; Ohio State has a shotgun cocked under the table.<br />
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For what amounts to a generation, they have been leaps and bounds ahead of this program. A dozen years ago the fabled "spread" was slowly beginning its matriculation through the sport - Michigan's idea of innovation was running AWAY from where their fullback shuffled. Ohio State took the field for the 2006 Game and ran 4-5 wideout sets all game; Michigan stayed in its base 4-3 and got predictably slaughtered.<br />
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A dozen years later, and Michigan still thinks it's 1975.<br />
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There is a virus in this program that has eaten away at the parts that contain critical thinking. To the screaming majority of college coaches today, 2nd and 10 is a passing down every time. To Jim Harbaugh, it's a time to line up in the I and run up the gut behind your fullback. Imagine the shock when you're in 3rd and 9 and hoping for a miracle to keep your team on the field.<br />
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I'm not even going to dwell on the nuking the defense took in this game. Michigan's fabled DL generated exactly zero pressure against Dwayne Haskins - game over. Two years ago Taco Charlton, Chris Wormley, Matt Godin, Ryan Glasgow, and Maurice Hurst ate the Ohio State offensive line for lunch and killed their offense for as long as they could before Michigan's flailing offense flailed one time too many. Today Michigan's defense laid down and died because they did not lay a single finger on the Ohio State quarterback. The outcome, when considering that, was predictable.<br />
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Offensively, Michigan is broken, fundamentally. The mindset that was created by Bo Schembechler and continued by Gary Moeller, Lloyd Carr, and Brady Hoke is still there under Jim Harbaugh. Rich Rodriguez tried to deviate from it. It is the mindset that "Michigan Football" requires you to "manball" the opponent with a tough, physical running game that you deploy relentlessly so that by the time the fourth quarter arrives, those 2-4 yard runs are suddenly 6, 8, 10 yards because you've worn them out.<br />
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This worked in 1975 when everyone ran the same thing and there were no scholarship limits and Michigan had the cream of the crop. It worked in 1985 when Jim Harbaugh ran it to success under Bo. It worked in 1995.<br />
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By 2005, it had startled to wobble. In 2018, it is a recipe for being what Michigan is and will be going forward: 10-2, noncompetitive in the only game that matters, and still no conference championship or playoff appearance.<br />
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If your offense relies on having an all-world offensive line that can simply steamroll your opponents because they know what's coming but can't stop it, then your offense will fail. Michigan brought the 1975 playbook to Ohio Stadium in 2018, and suffered one of the most humiliating losses in the history of the rivalry.<br />
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Today's humiliation, while annoying and distasteful to me, does not shatter me the way previous losses did. It should have. It was <a href="https://mgoblog.com/content/preview-game-2018"><b>armageddon, again.</b></a> It was a winner-take-all showdown that turned into a comical pantsing in front of the entire country, and my reaction is...rather tepid. Maybe the burdens of real life have numbed me to sports. Maybe deep in my soul I'm not surprised by what happened. Maybe I live in 2018 America where the shittiest people imaginable experience the wildest of successes. (And make no mistake: Ohio State fans are the most loathsome, detestable pieces of shit anyone would ever have the misfortune of coming across. They are subhuman in their degeneracy.)<br />
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Which, in a roundabout way, brings me to the point of this post: I'm closing up shop. This is not a result of one game; not a knee-jerk reaction to one exceptionally disappointing setback, except in the sense that giving up 62 points and getting Hiroshima'd in the most important game of the season should produce more agitation than a heavy sigh and a simple shrug.<br />
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To that end, at the conclusion of this post, after some 11 years, <i>Genuinely Sarcastic</i> will cease operations. This is not some earth-shattering announcement; this space has largely been quiet for several years now. I've popped my head up from time to time during momentous events. But the raw, unvarnished passion that you can read in my earlier posts has largely faded away. In my youth, the sun largely rose and set with the machinations of Michigan football. I began this blog in the crucible of fire that was the beginning of the 2007 season. During that season (and shortly after), I shared this space with Matt - someone I am sadly no longer friends with and no longer speak to. We did not have some sort of friendship-ending fight or anything so dramatic. We just...drifted away. Life makes me sad in that sense. People have a way of getting lost.<br />
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In that vein, I have lost the fire that made this blog something approaching unique in the Michigan sports blogosphere. To this day, I have no idea how <a href="http://mgoblog.com/"><b>Brian</b></a> found out about my blog. This space was originally supposed to just be my own little slice of internet where I'd rant and rave largely to myself, with the words preserved for posterity. Once I came into the MGoBlog orbit, it became something else; something more. I was, am, and will remain humbled and honored that someone like Brian Cook, whose talents I admire tremendously, thought my oft-incoherent ramblings were decent enough to land on his sidebar. Even now, when my appearances here became so scarce, I still get the occasional email from an MGoBlog reader, wondering how I am, or if I'm writing something about this game or that game. At its zenith, someone I used to know once told me that I had become something of a rock star in the MGo-community.<br />
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I am grateful for the positive feedback much of my writing here received. It was rare that I ever put excessive thought into something I wrote on this blog. Normally I would sit by myself in a locked room with the lights out at 3:00 in the morning and just bleed words onto the page. There would rarely be any strenuous editing process or anything that I guess "normal" writers go through. I just typed out the words as they came to me, and eventually it became something I was comfortable posting.<br />
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Those words no longer come to me. As I said, this is not a decision born out of the result of today's game, but more a decision a long time coming and confirmed by my decidedly numb reaction to it. This had been coming down the pipe for a while. The words I used to empty onto that blank page simply don't come as naturally as they used to; it would seem that my emotional investment in the things that used to light a fire under me is not as strong as it used to be. Once that fire has faded, it's over. One of the consequences of growing old, I suppose. Pouring your heart into a game of sport which you have no control over wears on you to the point where eventually you have to do the whole adulting thing and allocate your emotional resources elsewhere.<br />
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So...the lights will go dark here, now. I am known by various aliases in various corners of the internet; you can still find me in those places. But in terms of this place, this blog...the time has come to close the doors and lock them for good.<br />
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Farewell.Brianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07272986648979988175noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6136487040752878109.post-46324316999163918292018-04-03T20:31:00.000-04:002018-04-03T20:31:57.702-04:00The Undiscovered Country<center>
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<b><i>Villanova 79, Michigan 62</i></b></center>
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When your only tool - or even your primary tool - is a hammer, all you see are nails, and your only solution is to hit them.</center>
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Outside of the unicorn game against Texas A&M in the Sweet 16, Michigan fans - and coaches - kept waiting and waiting for the three-point shooting to show up in the NCAA Tournament. "Houston's going to be a tough game if they shoot the way they shot against Montana." "Gonna have to shoot better than this in the regional." "Gotta make shots to beat this Loyola team." "The A&M offense has to show up on Monday."</center>
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It was. They didn't. They barely did. And it didn't.</center>
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As Michigan fans, it often feels as if the walls are in a constant state of closing in around us. The hockey team is back in the Frozen Four after wandering in the wilderness for a few years. Jim Harbaugh is the football coach, and three years in we are still in desperate search of a quarterback and an offensive line.</center>
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But perhaps the most dystopian factoid is that not only did Michigan's basketball season end on a sour note because the jump shooters never arrived, but they didn't even go out against what had for so many years Beilein's kryptonite. They didn't lose to a massive team that just overwhelmed them on the boards. This wasn't Marcus Lee abusing Jon Horford, or Jordan Bell outmuscling everyone for a critical offensive rebound. Michigan was firebombed in the championship game by a team that looked like a Beilein team on steroids.</center>
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Five shooters all over the floor? Guards that can break the defense down and find the open man? Bigs that can break opposing defenses by having range beyond the arc? The most prolific three-point shooting team in NCAA history?</center>
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I suspect if you asked John Beilein to draw up a prototype of his ideal team, he'll point you in the direction of the team that just beat him in the national title game.</center>
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This feels different than 2013. I was, am, and will remain viscerally angry about the 2013 championship game for a variety of reasons: the officiating in that game was despicably one-sided, with the National Player of the Year receiving an unfair whistle all night. But even worse than that, that game was lost to a transparently corrupt program that couldn't even make it five years without having to vacate the whole thing. The 2013 championship game should have been Michigan against Wichita State. There should be a banner in Crisler Arena that says "2013 NCAA Champions" on it.</center>
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This time around was just a plain-old ass-kicking from a program that is sterling enough to not soil the banner they're about to put up. I've heard various whispers about the possibly less-than-rigorous standards Villanova has for admitting basketball players into the university; here is the amount of angst I put into that:</center>
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This isn't a flagrantly egregious program like Louisville's 2013 outfit. This isn't a mercenary factory like Kentucky or Kansas who don't even pretend to care about the NCAA's so-called rules. I'm one of those cynics who believe that any amount of sustained hyper-level of success in college basketball carries at least a little dirt. But I have enough respect for Jay Wright and the Villanova program to shrug this one off. Michigan didn't get swindled this time like they got swindled in 2013. Michigan wasn't robbed this time like they were robbed of a Final Four by one of the most renegade programs and one of the slimiest coaches of all time in 2014. If we're ranking recent Michigan tournament losses in terms of outrage, for me, the 2014 regional final against Kentucky is even a hair above the 2013 championship game, if only because if the NCAA was actually serious about enforcing the lame rules it allegedly has, Kentucky basketball would've been Hiroshima'd off the face of the planet decades ago, never to return.</center>
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But I digress.</center>
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Getting your hats handed to you by a respectable program and a respectable coach still hurts, but this isn't the type of loss that will keep people up at night. Losing on a last second shot feels much worse than getting nuked by a team that plays a style you want your program to emulate.</center>
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The pain comes from seeing this uniquely "Beilein" group of kids, cobbled together from a few coat hangers, some duct tape, and a supersoaker, fall just short of the ultimate glory. Beilein struck gold in 2011 and 2012, landing some extremely high level prospects (McGary, Robinson, Stauskas) and coupling them with a couple ace diamonds in the rough (Burke, Hardaway). When those results paid off, Beilein tried to aim higher in recruiting. The result? Identifying Devin Booker and Luke Kennard before anyone else, and then watching Kentucky and Duke swoop in and scoop them up. There was serious consternation that Beilein had made several egregious recruiting missteps that helped put together a super class for Tom Izzo: in some form or another, to some degree, decisions made by Beilein in recruiting helped put together the Cassius Winston/Miles Bridges/Josh Langford class at MSU.</center>
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Those guys sat at home while Beilein went to the Final Four with a D-3 transfer, a 3* Pennsylvania kid with offers from Rice and George Mason, a Kentucky castoff, and a lanky German kid who Beilein recruited incognito.</center>
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One of the more high profile recruiting misses after the 2013 Final Four was the point guard who just won Player of the Year for Villanova. The nominal "story" was that Jalen Brunson didn't want to come to Michigan and sit behind Derrick Walton for two years. This is very unfair, but it's hard not to imagine what this year's Michigan team would've looked like with more production from the point guard spot. Don't get me wrong, I love Zavier Simpson. One of the most tenacious defenders you'll ever see, and for my money the on-court architect behind Michigan's defensive resurgence this year. May he spend the next two years haunting Cassius Winston's nightmares.</center>
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But it was painful watching him in San Antonio. Michigan has been by-and-large blessed at the point guard position since Darius Morris was a sophomore seven years ago. Linear thinking suggests that going from Morris to Burke to Walton should have established a decent enough reputation that some really good players would've been beating down the door to play PG for a Beilein team.</center>
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Zavier Simpson is a really good player - on defense. Offensively, his struggles were one of the many factors that held this team back. But even belaboring that point is largely irrelevant. Michigan didn't lose to Villanova because their point guard can't shoot and seemed paralyzed by indecision in San Antonio. They lost because they played the best team in the country with assassins all over the floor.</center>
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Maybe one day Michigan will be the assassins.</center>
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Until then, it remains the undiscovered country, from whose bourn no traveler returns.</center>
Brianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07272986648979988175noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6136487040752878109.post-66644463783997953492016-11-28T04:00:00.001-05:002016-11-30T20:30:15.640-05:00Burial on the Presidio Banks<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-size: large;"><i><b>Ohio State 30, Michigan 27 (2 OT)</b></i></span></div>
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There's an old political adage that goes something along the lines of: In certain places, you not only have to win, you have to win outside the margin of fraud. Democrats applied this to the election in Florida in 2000. Republicans apply it pretty much everywhere there's a big city when all sorts of "funny business" comes into play - dead people voting, convicted felons voting, 110% turnout in certain precincts, etc. One particularly illuminating example that I always think of is the 2008 US Senate race in Minnesota. At the end of Election Night, incumbent Republican Senator Norm Coleman led comedian Al Franken by 726 votes. This margin would be reduced to 215 when the results were certified 13 days later (a natural occurrence that happens everywhere as results are reported to the secretary of state's office). The perilously close margin triggered an automatic recount, which, if you listen to Republicans, is when the machinations of fraud came into play. What ensued was a circus of missing ballots, challenged ballots, rejected ballots, and allegations of ballots being magically discovered in the trunk of somebody's car. At the end of the process, which dragged on until mid-2009 because of court battles, Coleman's 726-vote Election Night lead turned into a 312-vote victory for Franken in one of the closest elections in United States history.<br />
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I don't live in Minnesota, nor have I ever been. I am not intimately familiar with the process of vote-counting and election monitoring, in Minnesota or elsewhere. What I do know is that when it comes down to a coin flip, you always bet on the home team, and Democrats have been the home team in Minnesota for over four decades now.<br />
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So...that brings us to that thing that happened on Saturday, or: The Moment Where Michigan Fans Became Honorary Members of BWI™.<br />
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Let's begin with some assumptions. Let's assume that the identities of the following officials from Saturday's game are correct, and their pasts are accurate:<br />
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Daniel Capron (lead official): <b><a href="http://www.purdueexponent.org/sports/article_f22a455e-1bc6-504f-957d-876628375294.html">Fired by the Big Ten in 2002 for poor officiating.</a></b><br />
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Bobby Sagers, Jr. (side judge): <b><a href="http://www.wsaz.com/content/sports/Fifteen-Individuals-Set-to-Enter-OHSAA-Officials-Hall-of-Fame-370154551.html">A Cincinnati native who was inducted into the Ohio High School Athletic Association Officials Hall of Fame at a ceremony in Columbus earlier this year.</a></b><br />
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Kevin Schwarzel (the back judge pictured in the photo above): <b><a href="http://www.athensnews.com/news/local/local-businessman-has-interesting-hobby----he-refs/article_ff61a741-18ae-57a0-ba31-a3188493324b.html">A businessman from southeast Ohio and self-professed Buckeye fan who was excluded from officiating the 2006 Michigan/Ohio State game in Columbus because of his Ohio roots.</a></b><br />
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It's entirely possible that allowing all three of these people to officiate this game is just run-of-the-mill Big Ten incompetence, brought to you by the same league that employed Bill Lemonnier, Dave Witvoet, and degenerate gambler and sex fiend Stephen Pamon for years. The same league that put the infamously stupid Jim Augustyne in charge of video review, producing such classics as Chad Henne's "fumble" in 2005 and Brandon Minor's "touchdown" in 2008, both against Michigan State. The same league that now gives the on-field officials a tiny TV on which to watch replays during review - cutting edge technology that might have been useful in 1990. 2016? Not so much.<br />
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This is the league, after all, whose officials deemed this targeting...<br />
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...and when presented with an opportunity to overturn via replay, chose to uphold it. It's reached a point where I dread having to watch a Michigan game officiated by certified dumbshit John O'Neill, the moron who called the targeting on Bolden against MSU last year - the lowlight in an officiating career full of them. I was relieved at the start of Saturday's game to see he would not disgrace us with his presence.</div>
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Four hours later, he had been one-upped as the Big Ten's top shithead - by someone the Big Ten fired 14 years previously. Naturally.</div>
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So, when presented with the possibility of a vast conspiracy designed to screw Michigan, I tend to err on the side that says this is a conference of utterly clueless fools who would have difficulty running a lemonade stand, let alone an elaborate cabal designed to horsefuck one of their prized members.</div>
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With that said, Saturday's game was despicably one-sided in favor of the team with the stadium of angry truck drivers behind them. I'm going to actually put aside the part where they likely decided the outcome of the game. It was clear to my biased eyes that JT Barrett did not reach the line to gain on 4th and 1. I can understand how to the biased eyes of an OSU fan, he did. The fact that there was no measurement and a first down was immediately given was an outrage that should result in every official from Saturday being permanently blacklisted by the Big Ten. I knew they would not overturn it on replay; not because of some inane "they would never decide the outcome of a game by overturning a call" nonsense, but because I knew they would never achieve the 100% beyond all doubt measure needed to reverse a call.</div>
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Here are a few things they <b>did</b> screw up:</div>
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#1:</div>
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A 3rd and 7 at midfield on Michigan's second drive of the game. OSU cornerback Marshon Lattimore latches onto Amara Darboh at the snap and rides him to the ground as Wilton Speight's pass flies by and lands incomplete. No penalty is called.</div>
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#2:</div>
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Delano Hill is called for pass interference on 3rd and 7 on a pass thrown a mile over Curtis Samuel's head. Curtis Samuel is 5'11. He would've needed to be closer to 6'11 to have a chance at catching that ball, it was thrown so badly. Instead of punting (or having to go for it on 4th and long from their own 21 yard line), Ohio State gets a fresh set of downs on a possession that ends with the game-tying field goal.</div>
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#3:</div>
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On 3rd and 4 in double overtime, Ohio State cornerback Gareon Conley is draped all over Grant Perry, causing an incompletion and forcing Michigan to settle for a field goal. Despite Conley clearly making all sorts of contact with the receiver before the ball arrives, no penalty is called on this play.</div>
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And #4, in three frames:</div>
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On the 3rd and 9 play for Ohio State in double overtime, an OSU receiver grabs onto Jourdan Lewis's arm (just above the OSU logo on the ESPN on-field graphic in the first frame). As Curtis Samuel cuts upfield with the football, the hold turns into a block in the back as Lewis is driven out toward the sideline. Instead of either holding or a block in the back being called (both were committed on the play) and putting OSU back in 3rd and forever, Samuel benefits from the block and sets up the infamous 4th and 1 play.</div>
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This is of course not even taking into account the myriad of holds that Jamarco Jones and Isaiah Prince committed as Michigan's defensive ends dryhumped them all day all over the field. Jones and Prince did much of the same against Wisconsin and Penn State, with similar non-calls.</div>
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Now, here is a list of things the officials were <b>not</b> responsible for:</div>
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<ul>
<li>Senior captain Jake Butt dropping a pass that hit him in the hands on Michigan's first drive, forcing a punt.</li>
<li>Michigan wasting a redzone opportunity by using the lame "Pepcat" formation on 3rd and goal. They lost 5 yards and kicked a field goal.</li>
<li>Michigan blowing another protection call and turning Raekwon McMillan loose on Speight on a playaction call on U-M's own goalline, resulting in Speight's arm getting hit and the ball fluttering for a pick six.</li>
<li>Wilton Speight dropping the snap on the Ohio State 1-yard line.</li>
<li>Wilton Speight throwing the ball directly to Jerome Baker for another crippling interception that set Ohio State up in the redzone after accomplishing nothing to date on offense.</li>
<li>Amara Darboh dropping a pass that hits him on the hands on 3rd and 4 with under 6:00 to go in the 4th quarter and Michigan ahead 17-14.</li>
<li>Michigan accumulating five yards of offense in the fourth quarter.</li>
</ul>
Some of these were mitigated by spectacular mistakes made by the other side. OSU's kicker missed two field goals, both extremely makeable, one of them a literal chip shot. Speight's goalline fumble was sandwiched in between Barrett's interception and the fake punt fiasco. But the reality is Michigan utterly and thoroughly destroyed the Ohio State offense for three quarters, and all they had to show for it was a three point lead. For the third time in two years, Michigan lost on the final play in a game where they could not protect a 4th quarter lead because the offense could not get first downs when it mattered.<br />
<br />
In the 4th quarter against Michigan State in 2015, Michigan ran 19 plays for 24 yards and one first down. 1-6 on 3rd down.<br />
<br />
In the 4th quarter against Iowa in 2016, Michigan ran 22 plays for 62 yards and five first downs, none of which came on their final possession.<br />
<br />
In the 4th quarter on Saturday, Michigan held the ball for under four minutes, completed zero passes, and ran five times for five yards.<br />
<br />
More and more often now, I find myself thinking back to <b><a href="http://www.espn.com/college-football/story/_/id/12047640/what-jim-harbaugh-give-michigan-fans">this:</a></b><br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<br />
<i>In 2008, Arizona visited Stanford. One of the Wildcats' coaches had
made a comment during the week that Stanford wasn't very physical. Few
things will anger Harbaugh as much as questioning his toughness. So
before kickoff, he told the team: "There's gonna come a time in this
game where we're going to line up in the same formation and run the same
power play and dictate." As former Cardinal assistant Brian Polian
remembers: "He had so much resolve. You can say what you want about us,
but you're going to question our toughness?"</i></blockquote>
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>In the fourth
quarter, down 23-17, Stanford took over. On 10 of 11 plays, the Cardinal
called inside runs. On the last one, Toby Gerhart scored the
game-winning touchdown with less than a minute left. It was one of the
gutsiest and coolest things the staff had ever seen.</i></blockquote>
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>"We bludgeoned them to death," Polian says.</i></blockquote>
<br />
Jim Harbaugh lusts for the day where this can be done at Michigan. There may well come a time where Michigan finds itself leading Michigan State or Ohio State in the 4th quarter, and they call run after run after run and suddenly seven minutes have bled off the clock and the game is over. But that moment has not arrived yet, because we are still saddled with the remnants of what Brady Hoke left behind on the offensive line. Here's a reminder of what became of Hoke's fabled 2012 and 2013 offensive line classes (AKA the guys who would be 4th and 5th year players - starters - on this team):<br />
<br />
Kyle Kalis: A career of blown assignments and
getting dominated. Managed to mask a lot of it in his 5th year; still
got his shit pushed in in both losses in 2016.<br />
<br />
Erik Magnuson: An entirely average player also prone to getting
turnstiled. For a top 100 recruit from California who had offers from
every Pac-12 school, that's close to a bust. <br />
<br />
Ben Braden: A lead-footed "bulldozer" who rarely bulldozed.
Forced to play out of position after Grant Newsome's leg was destroyed.<br />
<br />
Blake Bars: A non-entity.<br />
<br />
Patrick Kugler: A non-contributor who was derailed by injuries. Possible starter as a 5th year senior in 2017?<br />
<br />
Kyle Bosch: Probably came closer to
suicide off the field than success on the field here. He and his family
needed one meeting with Harbaugh to realize it was over. He's been a
starter for WVU this year; I'm just glad he seems to have straightened
his life out. Another top 100 bust at Michigan.<br />
<br />
David Dawson: Another complete non-contributor. Another possible candidate to finally see the field in 2017? I wouldn't count on it.<br />
<br />
Chris Fox: Non-contributor due to injuries.<br />
<br />
Logan Tuley-Tillman: A disgusting sex pervert who should've been
processed from his recruiting class. He was garbage as a player by the
time he signed with Michigan. Completely gave up after his junior year
of HS.<br />
<br />
Dan Samuelson: A non-contributor who left.<br />
<br />
It's a testament to Tim Drevno's ability as an OL coach that he was able to cobble together a semi-competent offensive line considering what he had to work with. Ben Bredeson looked overwhelmed for most of his true freshman season this year; a redshirt would have been nice - if there had been anyone worth a shit able to play. But there wasn't. So this is what we had. It wasn't a "bad" offensive line, we've seen enough of those recently to recognize them (2008, 2009, 2013, 2014). But it was still a far cry from both the Michigan lines of lore and the dream that Harbaugh has in his head. Progress usually involves the anguish of close-but-no-cigar.<br />
<br />
On the bright side, Don Brown is <i>the guy.</i> The same players who got freight-trained into a fine powder in their own building last year went into the Horseshoe and spent the huge majority of 60 minutes pistolwhipping the Buckeyes into a pulp. That the end result leaves the foul coppery taste of sucking on a mouthful of pennies should not prohibit us from acknowledging their progress, and feeling giddy for the future once more. It took one year for Harbaugh to erase the gains Dantonio and MSU made on Michigan - the jailsexings of 2013 and 2014 turned into the harrowing once-in-a-lifetime miracle of 2015, and the "Hello darkness my old friend" moment of 2016. It took an extra year for the gap to be closed against Ohio State, but closed it is, to the point where one year after giving up 42 points to OSU for the third straight time, this time around Michigan fans feel outrage and indignation, while OSU fans feel the relief of dodging a bullet and getting away with something that shouldn't have been theirs.<br />
<br />
See you in 2017.</div>
Brianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07272986648979988175noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6136487040752878109.post-8867285435150050132016-08-30T22:14:00.000-04:002016-08-30T22:51:05.493-04:00How Far From Austerlitz?A wise old political science professor once taught me that there are eight stages to a revolution:<br />
<ol>
<li>The existence of preconditions</li>
<li>Fall of the old order</li>
<li>The honeymoon phase</li>
<li>Rule of the moderates</li>
<li>A counter-revolution</li>
<li>Rise of the radicals</li>
<li>The reign of terror</li>
<li>The Thermidor</li>
</ol>
The list very obviously follows the blueprint of the French Revolution - which makes sense, since most revolutions since the French Revolution have tried to follow that same blueprint.<br />
<br />
Gazing back at the last 10 years or so of Michigan football, I see vague parallels that I the historian naturally blow out of proportion to try and make my point. I have to shuffle the order and tweak some things, but I think it fits, more or less.<br />
<br />
<b>I. 2005-2007: Preconditions and the fall of the old order.</b> The 2005 season. The end of the 2006 season. Appalachian State & Oregon. Lloyd Carr's <i>Ancien Régime</i> falling behind the times and getting lapped by Jim Tressel.<br />
<br />
<b>II. 2008: Rise of the radicals and the honeymoon phase.</b> Rich Rodriguez arrives and turns the program inside out, changing the entire culture and sweeping out what were viewed as "outdated" methods. Before games are actually played in 2008, most of this was viewed as a very necessary shot in the arm for a program that had grown stale. The perhaps-apocryphal statement from former Carr assistant Steve Szabo that the spread offense was "communist football" echoes around as Michigan becomes a spread offense team.<br />
<br />
<b>III. 2008-2010: The Thermidorian Reaction.</b> From the moment games begin in 2008 (and for many, even before that), the pushback against Rodriguez occurs. As the losses pile up and the off-field gaffes accumulate, the forces seeking to restore the <i>Ancien Régime</i> grow stronger until finally sending RRobespierre to the guillotine shortly after New Year's 2011.<br />
<br />
<b>IV. 2010-2014: The Reign of Terror.</b> A term that can accurately be given to Dave Brandon's tenure as AD. Dissent is forcibly purged from the athletic department. Brandon's sycophants are given undeserved positions of power. General incompetence and bumblefuckery become the status quo from the Michigan athletic department, with Brandon making himself as visible as possible during all of it.<br />
<br />
<b>V. 2014: The counter-revolution and the Coup of 18 Brumaire.</b> As Dave Brandon's AD/dictatorship steers Michigan even further into the abyss, popular resentment reaches a crescendo. <b><a href="http://mgoblog.com/">MGoBlog</a></b> exposes the Brandon email scandal at almost the exact same time as the Shane Morris concussion fiasco explodes and dominates the sports news cycle for the better part of a week. The dictatorship is toppled, followed by Brady Hoke's ouster. With the road laid open for the native son who has performed numerous conquests abroad, Jim Harbaugh returns to be crowned <i>Empereur des le Carcajous</i>.<br />
<br />
I Googled "Jim Harbaugh Napoleon." Tip of the hat to <b><a href="http://mgoblog.com/diaries/wallpaper-season-harbaugh-mania">MGoBlog user "jonvalk"</a></b>:<br />
<br />
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<br />
There are numerous historical misconceptions about Napoleon, chief among them being the prevailing sentiment that he was some sort of dwarf; he was actually average height for the time (5'6); the thought that he was a midget came from a misinterpretation of French units of measure compared to English, and a healthy dose of British propaganda portraying him as an exceptionally puny man (in addition to a vampire, a child abductor, a cannibal, etc.). In reality he was not short for his time, and "Napoleon complex" should be renamed for someone more accurately proportioned, like Tom Izzo.<br />
<br />
The other main misconception is that Napoleon was a warmongering slaughterer in the mold of Adolf Hitler. The two have become unfairly conflated in the minds of many, even though the comparisons basically end after "authoritarian who conquered Europe until he invaded Russia." Napoleon conducted a series of almost-exclusively defensive wars in response to the neighbors of France forming coalitions in an attempt to crush the Revolution; Napoleon responded by dominating them all while exporting the ideals of the French Revolution and an enduring legal code of equality that has endured two centuries; his conquests featured none of the ghoulish race-based atrocities committed by Hitler.<br />
<br />
But I digress.<br />
<br />
In December of 1805 Napoleon led his <i>Grande Armée</i> deep into Central Europe during the War of the Third Coalition to a place in the present-day Czech Republic known as Slavkov u Brna - known in 1805 as Austerlitz, a rural town inside the Austrian Empire. Despite facing a combined Austrian and Russian force significantly larger than his own, Napoleon routed them and brought about the dissolution of the thousand-year Holy Roman Empire. In a military career that featured some of the most decisive and spectacular victories in history - and a "win-loss" record somewhere in the neighborhood of 53-7 - Austerlitz ranks near the top of Napoleon's accomplishments.<br />
<br />
Years later, as Napoleon's troops were bogged down in a quagmire in Spain and Portugal and simultaneously enduring the fate of those who try to invade Russia, a rumored refrain/lament took hold among the French troops: "How far from Austerlitz?" This was the title of Alistair Horne's seminal work chronicling Napoleon's military exploits from 1805 to 1815. It came with two meanings: the metaphorical, wondering how far the French army, at this point beginning to strain, was from its days of rousing victories on the battlefield, and, for the troops in Russia, a literal meaning: lost in the vast open spaces and desolate winter of Russia, how far were they from a place that once offered them refuge and stood as a symbol to their once exemplary success?<br />
<br />
A glance at Michigan's roster and schedule for 2016 says that we may be closer to Austerlitz than we believe. <a href="http://mgoblog.com/content/story-2016-no-dress-rehearsal"><b>MGoBlog has declared this to be "the year."</b></a> And why not? After all we've endured as a fanbase, all the close calls, all the heartaches, for the longest time it felt like we were getting further and further from our Austerlitz, whatever that was in our imaginations. Now, finally, it feels like we may be on the road back, and much closer than any of us expected so soon.<br />
<br />
This season will be especially unique to me. My relationship with my father was never very close. We never played catch in the backyard, or went fishing, or any of those other father-son events that good fathers and loyal sons partake in. He was an emotionally distant and often domineering person, which meant the older I got, the less interested I became in doing much of anything with him. The one thing that would always bring us together, though, was Michigan football in the fall. Many years ago, we had a volatile falling out that culminated with me flinging the two tickets to the game we were going to that weekend in his face, "Go to the fucking game by yourself!"<br />
<br />
That was on a Tuesday or a Wednesday. By Friday, fences had mended enough to the point where we still went together. Michigan football trumped everything.<br />
<br />
This past February, after years of depression that were sent into overdrive over the last couple months, my father killed himself in horrifically dramatic fashion. As I said, my relationship with him was a distant and strained one, so his suicide did not shatter me like it would shatter many sons. The acute trauma of it did invoke some emotional response in its immediate aftermath, but not much of anything else beyond that. In the six months since it happened, I have told the graphic and detailed version of the story to many people; all of them have been some combination of astonished and slightly repulsed at how casually I am able to retell it. My voice never breaks with the strain of a son describing how his father killed himself; my eyes never glisten with the tears of a pain that can't be fully extinguished. Several people have visibly recoiled because there are a couple grisly details that instead of breaking me as I tell the story only inspire fascination and wonder. The course of my existence on this planet has steeled me and deadened my nerves against many of the emotions that overwhelm others in the face of unspeakable tragedy.<br />
<br />
One can imagine how that might be both a blessing and a curse. It makes me able to move on rather easily from such horrors as having your street walled off by the police department while they spend an entire afternoon and evening trying to negotiate your father into custody, only to storm the house and find a corpse at 8:30 at night. It also makes me unable to indulge in the happier emotions that highlight the human condition. My relationships with my fellow people are shallow. My ability to feel sympathy and empathy for others in times of crisis is limited. My inner sensor that tells regular people to tread lightly around those who may be experiencing their own pain sometimes doesn't work for me.<br />
<br />
After all the years of tumult and the roller coaster of nonsense I have ridden, the one thing that still lights the fire are those maize and blue helmets sprinting out onto the field, hitting that banner, and listening to that fight song. The month of December in 2014, when the Harbaugh drama unfolded and ended with him addressing the crowd at halftime of the Illinois game at Crisler, was exhilarating and heartstopping for me. When it was over and the ending was a happy one, it kind of felt like the "end of history" for me. Like......oh, time goes on? There's something after this?<br />
<br />
It does. And there is. And the next chapter begins on Saturday. The first act of what might be magic; in a month, or two, or three, we may just find Austerlitz.Brianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07272986648979988175noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6136487040752878109.post-54446961431416286552016-01-21T20:26:00.000-05:002016-01-21T23:22:39.389-05:00Training DayThere is a likely apocryphal quote attributed to Otto von Bismarck. As far as I can tell, there is no sourced evidence that he ever actually said it, but it's attributed to him nevertheless because as one of history's most shrewd statesmen and most conniving and clever political intriguers, it certainly seems like the type of thing he would say. It goes something like this:<br />
<br />
"Sausages and laws are very similar in the sense that people should enjoy the end result, but never see how they are made."<br />
<br />
145 years after Bismarck unified the German states, that quote, whether he actually said it or not, could definitely be applied to college football recruiting as well. <br />
<br />
Yesterday was a day of tumult across the Michigan websites, as a large portion of the fanbase was exposed to a darkside of recruiting that they have largely been oblivious to. Erik Swenson, who was committed to Michigan since November of 2013 - and I swear I remember his name in an <b><a href="http://mgoblog.com/">MGoBlog</a></b> recruiting post from 2010 or so - "decommitted" while making it known that his spot in Michigan's class was explicitly taken away from him. This development caused a seismic stir across the various Michigan message boards - and beyond; this is as close to "mainstream" as a recruiting story gets; news of Jim Harbaugh pulling Swenson's offer two weeks before National Signing Day was headline news across the sports world yesterday, bleeding into today.<br />
<br />
The reaction from a sizable portion of Michigan fans was very predictable. This fanbase has always believed that the football program in Ann Arbor was lily white and above board in all respects. Michigan does not do all those nasty things that all the other programs do. For Jim Harbaugh, universal savior of the maize and blue, to do such a cold-blooded deed served as a violent splash of cold water to the face for many Michigan fans yesterday. Denzel Washington's character in <i>Training Day</i>, a dirty and corrupt Los Angeles narcotics officer, explains it to the wet-behind-the-ears pie-in-the-sky idealist played by Ethan Hawke thusly: "I'm sorry I exposed you to it, but it is. It's ugly, but it's
necessary."<br />
<br />
Yesterday was <i>Training Day</i> for many U-M football fans; the realization that this is what the world is like in college football, and the savior we pined for for so long has an edge about him that makes him, in the eyes of some, no better than the next guy. I've had discussions with some fans who are truly and genuinely shaken by this; they never believed something like this could happen at <i>Michigan.</i> <br />
<br />
To them, I must say this: it seems to me like you're looking for a unicorn. You want to cheer
for a program that doesn't pay players, doesn't use PEDs, doesn't keep
criminals on the team/deals harshly and swiftly with discipline issues,
doesn't run off unproductive players, and operates 100% above board in
recruiting, honoring all commitments, never oversigning, etc.<br />
<br />
Outside of Michigan, circa 2011-2014, you may be invested in the
wrong sport if this is what you're looking for. College football is
dirty. It's absolutely filthy, actually. Who was the last program to win
a national championship playing by the book? You're gonna have to go
back a ways. Michigan in 1997 might be the closest you get. This is how
it is. I'm sorry that you were rudely jolted into reality yesterday, but
that's what it is. If you had any clue the depth and pervasiveness of
what some schools do to gain an edge, you'd never follow the sport
again, if today's events disgusted you as much as you seem to let on. A certain program very familiar to all of us had a
special gym where their players would be steered to for
their "supplements." Another of our "favorite" programs somehow got a star player into school when his GPA could best be expressed as "catastrophic" - a player who would have signed with Michigan if his academics had not been a trainwreck.<br />
<br />
Half of the Michigan State roster orchestrated a massive assault on a
fraternity in 2009, and the athletic department suppressed the video
footage, because it would've smothered Dantonio's tenure in its crib.
Dantonio escorted a violent thug from his prison cell to the practice
field. Dantonio had his very own Demar Dorsey on his team (Roderick
Jeanrette), and when the kid was in court facing violent assault charges
in Florida, Dantonio told the media he was dealing with a "family
matter" back home. Nick Saban has spent a decade turning Alabama
boosters loose on the recruiting trail. Alabama under Saban and USC
under Pete Carroll always looked like 30 year old NFL vets instead of 20
year old college kids on the field - are we to believe that somehow
they had the strength and conditioning key to the mint, or did they
create a vast program-wide culture of steroid abuse and human growth
hormone usage? Ole Miss, a program with no history, no tradition, and no
advantages whatsoever other than some hot women, has suddenly turned
into a recruiting juggernaut, reeling in five stars left and right.
Should we believe that Hugh Freeze is just <b>that</b> charismatic...or did Ole Miss boosters finally tire of being an SEC punchline and decide to do things like facilitate a <i>SUBSTANTIAL</i> payoff to the cousin/handler of a 5-star offensive tackle from Texas?<br />
<br />
This is the sport you're following and invested in. Your morals
and ideals may be noble in theory, but in this environment, if applied
to a football program, they would serve as nothing more than restrictive
shackles. It's unfortunate that it's like that - but it is. With Erik
Swenson, we have two sides to the story, both of which are likely
incomplete and distorted to fit the view each side wants: Swenson claims
he was blindsided by this and had his scholarship pulled out of the
blue. The coaches have done the best they're able to to put the word out
that this is not how it happened. When you consider the fact that this was a "rumor" months ago (I first heard about it in October, through a visible Michigan recruiting analyst who has inside contacts on the coaching staff), what seems most likely?
That for some reason the coaches chose to tell a recruiting source that
they were souring on Swenson...but not tell Swenson himself? What
purpose would that serve? Or is it more plausible that the coaches, who
were not shy about dropping other recruits they inherited, told Swenson
that they liked him enough to keep him, but he would have to show
development and progression on the field as a senior, and then, once
that didn't happen, tried to let him down easy by letting him know he
should probably start looking for another school? Swenson, being the
devout Michigan fan who grew up dreaming of playing in the Big House,
would've found such news impossible to stomach (a sentiment corroborated by <b><a href="http://mgoblog.com/">Brian's</a></b> assertion that the staff tried to break the news to Swenson, and he simply wouldn't accept it), and I can speak from
personal experience, when you receive horrible news, one of your defense
mechanisms is to simply ignore it and pretend it never happened.<br />
<br />
Is
that what happened here? Who knows. We don't know the whole picture, and
we never will. But piecing together the evidence certainly seems to
paint a reasonable picture to me: Michigan likely received the first half of
Swenson's senior film in October, didn't like what they saw, and may or
may not have told him to begin looking into other schools (for the
record, a tidbit crossed my desk yesterday that Michigan put feelers out to
other Big Ten schools in an attempt to help Swenson find a soft landing
spot. I don't know when this process started, if it in fact did). We
don't know if they actually told him this or not; I would hope they did;
you would believe they didn't. Swenson's raw emotional response today
is clearly that of a jilted lover who just had his dream destroyed; it's
understandable, absolutely. And it's a regretful story. But to take
someone at their word in a moment of emotion like this is risky. To
believe Swenson when he says this blindsided him strikes me as
unreliable.<br />
<br />
This may perhaps be too simplistic, too binary, but from my perspective, you can be one of two people in this business: you can be Brady Hoke, or you can be Jim Harbaugh. Brady Hoke and Al Borges accepted a commitment from De La Salle QB Shane Morris on May 10, 2011 - when he was still technically a high school sophomore, with two full years of HS football left. At that time, Morris was touted as a left-handed Drew Henson; a mildly mobile gunslinger with a laser-guided rocket launcher attached to his left shoulder where most people have an arm. He was hyped as a can't miss 5* prospect who would serve as the foundation for Hoke and Borges's vision for Michigan going into the post-Denard and post-Gardner future.<br />
<br />
And for the next two years, Shane Morris accomplished essentially nothing on the football field. Even when he wasn't sidelined with mono, Morris showed no development, no progression, no growth whatsoever. All the promise that came with that cannon arm fizzled away as it became obvious that he did not have that fabled "it" that everyone looks for in a QB. He could not read a defense, he could not go through progressions, he could not feel pressure in the pocket, he could not do much of anything other than throw the ball hard and far.<br />
<br />
Hoke and Borges knew this. I know beyond a shadow of a doubt from someone who had close ties to the former coaching staff that they knew Morris was not progressing the way he should. This was a coaching staff that specifically bypassed taking a QB in the 2012 class so that nothing would possibly spook Morris in the 2013 class. They placed every single egg across two entire classes in the Morris basket, and when they began to realize the deadly mistake they had made, they had a choice: they could, through some process or another, break ties with the kid who had been committed since his sophomore year, and take the heat of the PR hit while looking for a replacement. Or they could honor the commitment the player made, and the one they made to the player.<br />
<br />
They chose the latter, and today Brady Hoke is DC at Oregon, and Al Borges was fired after 2013 and is now the OC at San Jose State.<br />
<br />
Now, of course, their failures at Michigan go far beyond one decision made in recruiting. But take a glimpse at what Jim Harbaugh did in 2015 with a roster composed almost exclusively of Hoke-recruited players - except at the most important position on the field. Hoke left such a gaping black hole at QB that Harbaugh had to go completely outside the program and kick the tires on almost half a dozen grad transfer possibilities before finally getting Jake Rudock to bite, and after a slow start, Rudock leaves here as a 10-game winner and a 3000-yard passer.<br />
<br />
I am very sorry about what happened to Erik Swenson. This kid quite literally dreamed of playing for the football program we all love, and that dream has been taken from him. That is an anguish the depth of which very few of us can grasp. But ultimately, as callous as it sounds (and is), this is still a business. Brady Hoke would have held onto Swenson; that's part of the reason why he is 78-70 as a head coach and was fired by Michigan. Jim Harbaugh will never accept players who are not consistently getting better; that's why he's 117-52-1 (NFL and NCAA combined) and will leave Michigan whenever he decides the job he set out to do here is accomplished.<br />
<br />
The moral of this story is twofold:<br />
<br />
1) it is unwise to make any concrete judgments about anything in
this situation, because we do not and will not ever have the complete
picture. We are not privy to the conversations that took place, and
when. We have two very incomplete and very biased accounts of what went
down. The truth is obscured, and will remain so.<br />
<br />
2) This is the nature of the beast. You are following a sport
full of unsavory people and characters. Again, look back through the
years at the national champions. Alabama, four times since 2009. Ohio
State. Florida State. Auburn. Florida. LSU. Oklahoma. Nebraska in the
1990s. Miami. Where are the squeaky clean programs? The teams coached by
morally superior and righteous men? Some of the things Tom Osborne
allowed to happen in the 90s made my stomach turn. He allowed violent
criminals to play without punishment. I'm taking people who were
sadistic and inflicted misery on innocent people; true "thugs." I myself once
<a href="http://genuinelysarcastic.blogspot.com/2011/05/dotting-lie.html"> <b>compiled a huge list</b></a> of the transgressions and crimes that occurred
under Jim Tressel's watch at Ohio State. Tressel was essentially a mafia
boss, and even when his crimes caught up to him and he was fired, 18
months later they <b>literally</b> carried him off the field on their shoulders in Columbus.<br />
<br />
This is the sport you follow.Brianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07272986648979988175noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6136487040752878109.post-49760032360978340432015-10-12T04:49:00.000-04:002015-10-12T04:49:52.138-04:00There Be Dragons Here<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://exposure.imgix.net/production/photos/h1f0gd32hdhuayvizj4txvgl0qa4te29gfcs/original.jpg?fm=pjpg&auto=format&q=60&nrs=30&dpr=1&w=1280" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="426" src="https://exposure.imgix.net/production/photos/h1f0gd32hdhuayvizj4txvgl0qa4te29gfcs/original.jpg?fm=pjpg&auto=format&q=60&nrs=30&dpr=1&w=1280" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">(Photo courtesy of <b><a href="https://umichathletics.exposure.co/michigan-vs-northwestern">Michigan Athletics and Exposure</a></b>)</td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br /></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br /></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br /></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br /></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br /></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><i><b>10/10/2015: Michigan 38, Northwestern 0</b></i></span></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<b><a href="http://detroit.sbnation.com/michigan-wolverines/2011/1/12/1931053/brady-hoke-introduced-as-michigan-football-coach-notes-from-press"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: small;">January 12, 2011:</span></span></a></b></div>
<span style="font-size: small;"></span><br />
<center>
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<tr><td align="left"><blockquote>
"All that glitters is not gold when it comes to some coaches. Sometimes the hype or PR doesn't match the person."</blockquote>
</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
</center>
<br />
October 10, 2015:<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" lang="en">
<div dir="ltr" lang="en">
Some things that glitter are gold.</div>
— mgoblog (@mgoblog) <a href="https://twitter.com/mgoblog/status/652981081411579904">October 10, 2015</a></blockquote>
<script async="" charset="utf-8" src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script>
A morbid part of my soul has wondered what the pizza man is up to on Saturdays now. Does he watch the games? As someone who gave every impression that he is not a football fan - based on his idiotic decisions regarding the football program he was in charge of - does he even bother paying any attention to it now that he is no longer paid to do so? Dave Brandon liked Michigan football insofar as it was something he could extract money from and Scrooge McDuck it into a pile of gold while the peasants - the fans - shivered outside after being swindled by Mr. Moneybags.<br />
<br />
If he does watch the games, I don't even envision him getting any joy out of it. Not <i>regular</i> joy, anyway; not the type of joy that the fans get. His joy would be the narcissistic "you see that? Yeah, that's all because of ME" type of joy. A man capable of naming his mansions "Ever After" and "Camp David" is incapable of experiencing real human emotions; he is incapable of feeling genuine human joy. When Jehu Chesson zips through a hole that Charlie Weis could roll through on his way to a game-opening KR touchdown, people like you and me feel a surge of adrenaline and serotonin associated with happiness; we look at each other and think, "oh shit...today's gonna be a <i>day.</i>" People like Dave Brandon look at flowcharts based on focus groups that tell them what type of music people of a certain demographic want to hear after an "occurrence" like a touchdown at a football game.<br />
<br />
It's The Victors, Dave. It's always The Victors, you soulless drone of a man.<br />
<br />
But I digress.<br />
<br />
When Jim Harbaugh first arrived, many fans wondered who would be the first Big Ten coach to fall into his crosshairs; who would be the unfortunate target of the first verbal jab, the first shot across the bow? Meyer and Dantonio were the obvious choices; James Franklin was a darkhorse.<br />
<br />
I'm of the firm belief that it's never going to happen. When he was in San Francisco, Harbaugh's closest thing to a "confrontation" was the energetic handshake with Jim Schwartz, followed by Schwartz freaking out. Even the feud with Pete Carroll was confined to the football field. At Stanford, Harbaugh took aim at both Michigan and Carroll in an attempt to build some buzz about Stanford, then one of the worst D-1 programs in college football. Anything to get people talking. He knew he would have to back up his bravado, and he did.<br />
<br />
At Michigan, not only is such talk unnecessary, but it would be tiresome, after listening to Brady Hoke talk tough and never deliver. I also believe Harbaugh views such things as being beneath him in his position as head coach at Michigan. I believe that Jim Harbaugh, Michigan Head Coach, makes every move under the belief that the ghost of Bo Schembechler is looking over his shoulder. He conducts himself as if Bo is watching in judgment, and to get into a war of words in the press with an opposing coach is not something a Michigan coach does; Bo would never approve of such lowbrow behavior in public.<br />
<br />
It's possible I'm wrong. Maybe Harbaugh takes the podium on Monday and issues the ultimatum to Dantonio that we're coming for that ass next Saturday. But I would be amazed.<br />
<br />
Speaking of amazed...look at where we are right now. We have reached a moment where the instant this shutout streak is broken, we will be extraordinarily disappointed. A Chicago Tribune writer asked Harbaugh on Saturday about the defensive starters still being in at the end of a 38-0 game. That's why you cover Northwestern, guy. I felt an odd sense of disinterested confidence about this game throughout the week. Less than a year removed from Brady Hoke's second-rate outfit getting faceplanted against Rutgers, Minnesota, Maryland, etc, the concept of facing a ranked Northwestern squad provided no fear. 13 seconds into the game, Northwestern was Northwestern, and Jim Harbaugh's Wolverines rose to the occasion to lay waste.<br />
<br />
Next week brings a different beast entirely. This was not how the script was supposed to go. Michigan was supposed to be a wobbly, motley bunch in 2015 while Michigan State and Ohio State ripped through the Big Ten en route to playoff bids and New Years 6 bowl games. Instead, we head into State Week with Michigan as the favorite. I think we expected to possibly make those two games competitive this year, since they're both in Ann Arbor; even Rich Rodriguez's epic dumpster fire of a 2008 team was tied with a 9-win MSU team midway through the 4th quarter. Even Brady Hoke's historic offensive disaster of a 2013 squad scored 41 points and came within a 2-point conversion of beating a perfect Ohio State. Homefield is a great equalizer, and now, with Michigan dropping the sledgehammer and MSU needing last second stands and late houdini acts to escape teams like Purdue and Rutgers, suddenly that mountain doesn't look so steep.<br />
<br />
Which, naturally, will feed into the perpetual, endless inferiority complex that <b>is</b> Michigan State football. You don't qualify as an MSU fan unless you have Little Man Syndrome when it comes to Michigan. Disrespect <b>is</b> MSU; you think, therefore you are. Generations of Michigan State fans, players, and coaches grew up under the oppressive thumb of Michigan, even convincing themselves of a fictional "Blue Wall" in the media that conspires to keep U-M prominent and keep MSU in the salt mines. Never mind the fact that it has been Michigan State's coach and Michigan State's players who have become the talkers. It's a sort of cognitive dissonance, I think. MSU's players have it hammered into their heads all the time that they weren't good enough for Michigan, that they won't be given the benefit of the doubt, that they are endlessly disrespected and insulted by the media - and then they turn that around by being one of the trashiest and loudest teams you can imagine, with a fanbase that single-handedly keeps Insane Clown Posse in business. In conjuring up these fictional insults, MSU manifests what they despise, and they <b>become</b> it. Dantonio's hatred of Michigan has turned Michigan State into that which they spent decades criticizing. Your hatred has turned you into that which you hate.<br />
<br />
But they may be in for a surprise. Don't get me wrong, they may very well win next Saturday; it strikes me as a coin flip of a game, and MSU's struggles against the rubes of the Big Ten does not diminish their status as a very strong team. But it was not supposed to be like this, this soon. After the violent maulings they delivered on Michigan in 2013 and 2014, MSU never expected to encounter a resurgent Michigan this quickly. I can guarantee you that MSU's players have little respect for Michigan, no matter what their eyes tell them. They remember the last two games. They remember making Michigan quit, and listening to Michigan's coach apologize after last year's game. Human psychology can be a tricky thing like that; no matter that Michigan has strangled the life out of every opponent since the opener; until they see them up close and personal, MSU will always view Michigan as the feeble cripples they destroyed the last two years. Their coaches will try to dissuade them of this; they will try to warn them to the possibility that maybe, just maybe, in Ann Arbor, there be dragons.<br />
<br />
<br />
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<br />
Next Saturday, Michigan State will make that choice to go down a certain road on a certain night - a choice which is of course, no choice at all. Football teams have only one option: the next team on the schedule. It is the nature of football to always focus on what comes next; what's next for both Michigan and Michigan State is a walk into the darkness to war with each other, just as they have for a century. What they will find there remains to be seen. But take heed, he who fights monsters, to ensure that you yourself do not become a monster. For when you gaze into the abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.Brianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07272986648979988175noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6136487040752878109.post-19898654130038643082015-09-03T13:35:00.000-04:002015-09-03T13:35:26.548-04:00Elysium<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br />
In
2011, Brady Hoke declared "this is Michigan, fergodsake", and thought
referring to Ohio State as "Ohio" while refusing to wear the color red
was some sort of high and mighty insult. It was the football equivalent
of a WWE wrestler taking the mic and saying, "it's great to be here in
________." A cheap pop designed to reach the lowest common denominator
of fans without providing anything of substance whatsoever. Four years
later he was apologizing to Mark Dantonio 24 hours after Dantonio's team
finished off their second straight skull-raping of the festering corpse
that was once Hoke's program. A month later, Hoke was again the bug on
Urban Meyer's windshield; a mild nuisance but in no way an obstacle. It
may legitimately take over a decade for Urban Meyer to lose as many
games at Ohio State as it took Brady Hoke to lose in four years at
Michigan - including the 11-2 2011 season.<br />
<br />
And now, <b><a href="http://www.foxsports.com/college-football/story/michigan-wolverines-virginia-tech-hokies-jim-harbaugh-frank-beamer-story-090215">an anecdote:</a></b><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>“After we take some pictures, we start talking, just the two of
us,” Beamer said. “Jim says over and over how much respect he has for
Georgia Tech. He must have said it five times. I’m just looking at him
like, ‘Are you serious?’</i><br />
<i>“Finally, I’m joking with him and I say I can’t wait to tell my
team that you called us Georgia Tech. Because, you know, we’re Virginia
Tech.”</i><br />
<i>Harbaugh then threw his infamous shark expression at Beamer: mouth
agape, eyes on fire, looking poised to chomp. Harbaugh’s assistants
have seen this look for years; he sometimes holds it for about 30
seconds without speaking, causing everyone in eyeshot to wonder what is
flowing through his mind -- if anything.</i><br />
<i>Beamer continued to lock eyes with Harbaugh for a few moments,
waiting for him to say something, anything. It may have been the most
uncomfortable silence of Beamer’s life.</i><br />
<i>“Well,” Harbaugh
finally told Beamer. “I can’t wait to tell my players that you said you
were going to play Samford, not Stanford!” He then turned and walked
away.</i></blockquote>
We have yet to see that "infamous shark
expression" from Harbaugh in a Michigan hat and shirt, but we all know
what it looks like regardless.<br />
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<br />
As <b><a href="http://mgoblog.com/">MGoBlog</a></b> might say: a window into the mind of a twisted soul.<br />
<br />
Of all the awesome analogies and metaphors Brian has made over the years, I thought the one he made about Hoke in <b><a href="http://mgoblog.com/content/if-you-pretend-you-are-statue-do-not-be-surprised-when-you-erode">this post</a></b>
was perhaps the best. Brady Hoke was Wile E. Coyote, running over the
cliff and suspending himself in midair before realizing he's no longer
on solid ground, and there's nothing for him to do but fall; nowhere for
him to go but down.<br />
<br />
It says here that Jim Harbaugh is some amalgam of Anton Chigurh from <i>No Country for Old Men</i>, and The Joker from <i>The Dark Knight</i>; a menacing psychotic who brings destruction to those who get in his way.<br />
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<br />
Would anyone really, <i>really</i>
be surprised if Jim Harbaugh jogged out onto the field in Salt Lake
City tonight with maize and blue paint on his face in the style
of The Joker? Jim Harbaugh is not interested in your thoughts, your
opinions, or your questions about Jake Rudock or Shane Morris. He only
wants to watch the world burn, preferably after he has shifted his
offensive line a couple times and run power into your face. Jim Harbaugh <b><a href="http://espn.go.com/nfl/story/_/id/11625088/san-francisco-49ers-head-coach-jim-harbaugh-thrives-chaos-difficulty">may not care who kills who now</a></b>, but I bet you he believes that whatever doesn't kill you simply makes you...<i>stranger.</i><br />
<br />
I, like many of you I'm sure, like to binge watch old football games/highlights on YouTube to get the juices flowing as the season approaches. This year, over the last week or so, I've taken a slightly unconventional approach. Instead of watching old Michigan games, I decided to watch Michigan <b>State</b> instead. A bizarre practice, I know. That included the hardcore prison-poundings MSU has demolished Michigan with the last two seasons. I tell ya, that 2013 game was paradigm-altering. Hindsight, sure. But I don't believe Devin Gardner ever truly recovered from what happened to him that day. That game didn't truly slip away into blowout territory in terms of the score until the 4th quarter, but Michigan never had any chance of sniffing the endzone that day. That game was a special type of medieval torture, the type of football porn that surpasses even what Michigan's defense did to Penn State in 2006.<br />
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<br />
This game was the moment where MSU passed Michigan. Michigan beat MSU in a vintage 1970s-style Big Ten 12-10 slugfest in 2012, and while U-M finished a mediocre 8-5 that year, MSU finished a worse 6-7, and everyone, from the deranged lunatic pizza man AD down to the fans, believed that U-M had corrected the balance that had been derailed during the Rodriguez years. During the course of that 60 minute bloodletting in East Lansing in 2013, MSU violently dispelled us of that notion. Michigan fans who still use the "Little Brother" slur or point to all-time records or ancient history are fools. There is every reason to expect Harbaugh to elevate U-M to meet the challenge; but to ignore the situation that exists right now is a practice in ignorance. In the last five years, Michigan State has three 11-win seasons and a 13-win season. Their last two squads have matched or surpassed almost any Michigan team that many of us have ever witnessed in our lives. They remain to date the only Big Ten team to beat Urban Meyer's OSU outfit.<br />
<br />
They are not a fluke, a flash in the pan, or lucky. There was a moment where Mark Dantonio's tenure at MSU could have been smothered in the crib, but they successfully squashed the video from the Rather Hall incident. Dantonio remains an unrepentant hypocrite and asshole who hides behind his Bible, but that doesn't matter, because he has surpassed even MSU fans' expectations on the field. He has turned State into everything Michigan used to be, and everything Michigan deluded itself into believing it could become again under Brady Hoke. Their defense has reached a point where graduations and early departures do not harm them in any significant way; it's next man up. Jerel Worthy and William Gholston leave, Shilique Calhoun and Malik McDowell step up. Greg Jones is followed by Max Bullough, followed himself by Darien Harris. Eric Gordon leaves, Denicos Allen steps up. Allen leaves, and Ed Davis racks up seven sacks and a dozen TFLs in his first year as a starter. Trenton Robinson is replaced by Isaiah Lewis and now Montae Nicholson at safety. MSU has sent cornerbacks to the NFL in the first round in two straight years. Wanna know the last time Michigan did that? I looked it up, and unless I overlooked it somewhere, it's never happened. Johnny Adams was a great college corner for MSU, and everyone wondered how they'd replace him after he left. In the first year without him, Darqueze Dennard - a former 2* recruit with offers from Middle Tennessee State and Utah State - was a consensus All-American, won the Thorpe Award as the nation's best DB, and was drafted in the first round by Cincinnati. Without Dennard last year, Trae Waynes stepped up to become an All Big-Ten corner and saw his stock explode to the point where he could leave early and go #11 overall to the Vikings.<br />
<br />
While Michigan dithered and chased their own tails, a juggernaut emerged within our own borders and eventually we woke up to realize that the world we had convinced ourselves would wait for us to get our shit together had in fact moved on without us, apparently tired of standing around while we sat on our own thumbs and rotated. Michigan has been in quicksand for almost a decade now. Every attempt they made to right the ship only served to sink them further. The twilight years of Carr saw a sort of stale complacency constrict the program to the point of destruction - that flashpoint occurring on the first day of the 2007 season. Michigan took the courageous step of stepping outside the box to try and correct their course, and for three years everyone spent Sunday through Friday cringing whenever Rich Rodriguez stepped in front of a microphone - the pain of those moments being surpassed only by the steaming pile of shit the team put it on the field on Saturdays. Michigan then turned the athletic department over to a megalomaniac; a genuine lunatic with no concept of anything except advancing "the brand." Dave Brandon was the right man for the moment in dealing with the stretchgate nonsense, and the wrong man for basically everything else that came with his job. He gave the head coaching position to someone who never should've been near it. College football is not exceptionally complicated; it relies on elite coaching perhaps more than any other American sport. Very rarely do you see a career mediocre coach suddenly become elite. Brady Hoke being completely out of his depth at Michigan was not a surprise; it was him regressing to his mean after pulling off one of the luckiest seasons ever in 2011.<br />
<br />
As the final incompetent moments of Hoke's tenure wound to a close, the adults in the room decided that enough was enough. The man running the athletic department like his own little dictatorship was toppled; his patsy of a coach shown the door right behind him. For six weeks, we held our breaths as we waited for the white smoke to billow from Schembechler Hall; the signal that the one man we all universally coveted for the position was coming home. Up until the moment he got off that plane and the photo emerged of him carrying his kids out of that SUV, there were NFL types who swore he would never defy the fabled "Shield". One of the best football coaches in the world "taking a step down" to go back to college?! A laughable notion. This wasn't Nick Saban floundering as coach of the Dolphins. This was a coach with one of the highest winning percentages in NFL history about to hit the open market and have his pick of essentially any job in the league. How could he even <i>consider</i> going to <i>Michigan</i>?!<br />
<br />
None of those squawking voices considered the man. They never considered what resided in Jim Harbaugh's heart, or Jim Harbaugh's soul. They viewed the situation through the restrictive perspective of material computations; in their eye, there was no human element to consider. They never placed any value on how much Michigan meant to the man. They dismissed the story of the cocky little kid sitting in Bo Schembechler's chair, declaring that one day that kingdom would be his. They had no way to imagine how important this place was to Jim Harbaugh.<br />
<br />
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Stanford meant nothing when Harbaugh arrived on The Farm in 2007. They were one of the absolute worst programs in college football, and no one saw any reason for that to change. The most restrictive and elite admissions department in the country whittled Stanford's pool of players down to a sliver before anyone could do anything. Harbaugh's battles with that process are well-known. Dealing with internal resistance and external forces should have been enough to keep Stanford in the Pac-10/12's cellar.<br />
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Instead, Jim Harbaugh took a 2* running back from Portland, whose only other offer was from Portland State, and turned him into one of the most successful two-way players in recent history - Owen Marecic. Jim Harbaugh took a 2* wide receiver with no offers from anyone, and now Doug Baldwin is an NFL wideout. A 215-pound 3* tight end from Illinois with no Big Ten offers is now in the NFL after starring at Stanford - Coby Fleener. A 3* from Georgia racked up 50 TFL and almost 30 sacks at Stanford - Chase Thomas. A 3* wideout from Compton may have conflict hardwired into his DNA, and he may hold an eternal grudge against Jim Harbaugh, simply because some men are programmed to clash with others, but Richard Sherman is one of the best players in the NFL now thanks in large part to Jim Harbaugh. Jim Harbaugh and his assistant Tim Drevno took lightly-recruited 3*s David DeCastro and Jonathan Martin, and from them formed one of the most fearsome offensive lines in football. The soul-destroying physicality that Stanford is now famous for in college football was cultivated by Harbaugh and Drevno.<br />
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There are some detractors who point to the fact that Harbaugh has never won a championship in college - a laughably basic black-and-white interpretation. Does anyone who is serious about analysis believe that Stanford reaches the heights it reached in 2011, 2012, and 2013 without the foundation that Jim Harbaugh laid? Stanford went 34-7 with two Pac-12 titles and three BCS bowl appearances in that three-year span on the backs of Harbaugh recruits and Harbaugh's former assistants. David Shaw is not a bad coach - but do people really believe he could've built that juggernaut by himself? As Harbaugh's imprint on that program gets further and further in the rearview mirror, Stanford becomes more and more mortal - case in point, their 8-5 stumble last season. Harbaugh took every facet of the Stanford program and launched it into the stratosphere. He installed a culture of no-holds-barred, take-no-prisoners physical destruction. He made <i>Stanford</i> a buzz destination for recruits, and just as he reached the zenith, he left for the NFL, passing all of that off to a trusted assistant who would reap the rewards. Does Stanford land that epic 2012 offensive line class of Andrus Peat, Kyle Murphy, and Josh Garnett without the foundation laid by Harbaugh and Drevno with players like DeCastro and Martin? Stanford's coaching search after Harbaugh left consisted of his staff left behind at Stanford, because they sought to maintain everything he built.<br />
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The results here may not be immediate, of course. Jim Tressel won seven games in his first year at Ohio State. Mark Dantonio won seven at MSU. Nick Saban was 7-6 at Alabama in 2007. Pete Carroll's first year at USC ended 6-6. Bob Stoops was 7-5 at Oklahoma. Urban Meyer at Ohio State is the glaring exception to this rule, but it's a general truth that the first season tends to be a transition season for the new coach. The job of instilling that sense of toughness into a roster that has been soft and disorganized for years won't be done overnight. The leviathans that Harbaugh faces at Michigan State and Ohio State won't be toppled in a day.<br />
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But the success that lies ahead is almost assured. Elysium awaits, as the heir to Bo's chair finally takes his rightful place on the throne.Brianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07272986648979988175noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6136487040752878109.post-84908534928612501982014-12-29T12:29:00.003-05:002014-12-29T12:29:24.572-05:00Prodigal SonOn January 3, 2011, I sat down to watch a game that was entirely uninteresting to vast swaths of the country. There was very little buzz to the Orange Bowl between Stanford and Virginia Tech; two teams without much national appeal at all, very little weight as traditional football powerhouses, and even less in terms of traveling power; there were 10,000 empty seats at Sun Life Stadium for the game. Even as a BCS game, there normally wouldn't have been much point in watching it at all.<br />
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This particular event was different. Three days earlier, I spent New Year's Eve at a friend's house and ended up sleeping on his couch in the basement. The next day, I returned home in time to see Michigan give up a million points and a million yards to Mississippi State in the Gator Bowl. Even in the moment, as it unfolded, the absurdity of having Rich Rodriguez coach that game when he was so obviously getting fired was obscene. History will damn David Brandon in his grave when he's dead and gone for the destruction he rained down on the Michigan football program. For all the inane, dumbass things that lunatic tried to pull while he was the AD, spending a month with a lameduck coach under the guise of some fabled "Process" ranks #1.<br />
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The 2010 season, particularly in retrospect, was remarkable from a Michigan perspective. Plenty of people saw the demise of Rodriguez coming when the season started. Almost no one envisioned the meteoric rise of one Jim Harbaugh from relative obscurity into a towering colossus. Sure, everyone took noticed when Stanford stunned USC in 2007 in Harbaugh's first year. Michigan fans certainly noticed when Harbaugh put Michigan in his crosshairs prior to the 2007 season. More people took notice when Stanford dropped half a hundred on Oregon and USC in back to back weeks in November of 2009, paving the way for Toby Gerhart's Heisman runner-up season of almost 1900 yards and 28 touchdowns, punctuated by the final, ultimate demise of Charlie Weis at Notre Dame. But even then, even as Harbaugh's Stanford program progressed from 1-11 the year before he arrived to 8-5 by the end of his 3rd season, the national attention was still relatively light.<br />
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As 2010 progressed, things changed. Even after losing a 21-3 lead and succumbing to the hornets' nest of Autzen Stadium in Oregon, the emergence of Stanford into a skull-crushing outfit led by the best quarterback prospect of the last 25 years turned heads with each passing week, as Stanford killed one team after another - while being Stanford. Suddenly, by the end of the season, Andrew Luck was finishing 2nd in the Heisman race, Stanford was 11-1 and scoring 40 points a game while allowing fewer than 20, and Jim Harbaugh had exploded onto the national scene as one of the best coaches in America. In an era where everyone was lining up in the shotgun and throwing the ball all over the place and running out of three, four, five-wideout sets, Jim Harbaugh made lining up in the I and handing it off <i>cool</i> again. As Michigan's experiment with Rodriguez flatlined, the militant lust for the fabled "Michigan football" of Bo, Mo, and Lloyd suddenly found its savior in a native son who personified everything we had lost from 2008 through 2010. As I commented <b><a href="http://genuinelysarcastic.blogspot.com/2014/08/where-did-you-go.html">here,</a></b> my first encounter with the emerging Harbaugh faction was an unpleasant and alien intrusion into the fanbase; a devious strain of backstabbers openly rooting for a new coach 2500 miles away.<br />
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That was at the very beginning of the final death spiral of the Rodriguez era in 2010. Following the losses to Iowa, Penn State, Wisconsin, and finally Ohio State on November 27th, I was done, <b><a href="http://genuinelysarcastic.blogspot.com/2010/11/saigon.html">as I explained that very day.</a></b> That same day, I noticed the Stanford/Oregon State game was on Versus (remember that?), and decided to see what the hype was all about. Granted, Oregon State was not a good team in 2010; they finished 5-7. But watching Stanford maul them and grind them into a fine powder to the tune of 38-0 was eye-opening. Andrew Luck completed 70% of his passes. Stanford ran for a modest 4.2 YPC while allowing an excellent 2.8 and forced three turnovers while committing none. They even blocked a punt late in the 4th quarter. They excelled in every aspect of the game. Luck threw four long touchdowns to three different players, including a running back and a tight end. Stanford's starting running back (Stepfan Taylor) ripped off a long touchdown run. They were physical and mauling and mean and precise in their actions but decisive in the outcome. They were everything Michigan fans dreamed of watching from their team on Saturdays, instead of the soft, gooey, jumbled mess they had become under Rodriguez. After watching U-M get blown away 37-7 by Ohio State hours earlier, watching Stanford complete an 11-1 regular season in such devastatingly perfect fashion was something to behold.<br />
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Two days later I published <b><a href="http://genuinelysarcastic.blogspot.com/2010/11/attention-to-detail.html">this piece</a></b> on this blog, which earned me several angry responses. I was deemed a traitor, a front runner, a coward. A certain segment of the Michigan fanbase became so permanently attached to Rodriguez the person because of the unjust smear campaign that was conducted against him personally that the results on the field became blurred to them. Even now, Arizona cannot accomplish anything on the field without certain Michigan boards lighting up with Rodriguez-themed topics, still full of his defenders. My defense of Rodriguez the person was genuine and permanent, but always contigent on him getting enough time as head coach to render a judgment one way or another. He got that, and he deserved to be fired. I am happy for him to find success at Arizona, and I cheer for them as a casual observer from a distance. But I do not invest any real energy or emotion in defending him like I once did. He doesn't coach my team anymore.<br />
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December of 2010 was an agonizing month, both as a Michigan fan and for myself personally; the latter is a different story for a different day and a different blog, but the month was dominated by talk of whether or not Michigan would successfully bring Jim Harbaugh home. By the time the new year started and the Orange Bowl between Stanford and Virginia Tech rolled around, there was...uncertainty. It had been hinted at by various insiders that there may have been a sort of "wink and nod" agreement between Harbaugh and Brandon, but there was never anything concrete, and as the "Process" dragged out, optimism faded. The San Francisco 49ers fired Mike Singletary on December 27th, and by that point Harbaugh's stock had risen to thermonuclear levels. Michigan rumors still persisted as the Orange Bowl unfolded that night of January 3rd, which progressed into full-blown football porn for Michigan fans. Luck threw a touchdown pass to a tight end, and Stanford's power run game ripped off a 60-yard touchdown run, but it was just 13-12 Stanford at halftime against Virginia Tech. The second half turned into an all-out bloodbath, though. The holes for Stanford's running backs got bigger; the time Luck had to throw grew longer. Stanford's offensive line gradually reduced Virginia Tech's defensive resistance to nothing, asserting the type of soul-crushing dominance Michigan fans fantasize about. Lining up and physically smashing the man in front of them. It reached a point where Stanford so out-classed the Hokies that this unfolded late in the 4th quarter:<br />
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The look on Bud Foster's face says it all. Complex in its design and mechinations, yet simple and sledgehammering in its execution, Harbaugh and Luck chose to simply toy with Foster and Frank Beamer, albeit to the tune of no gain on that particular play. On the next play, out of a heavy, goal line formation, Luck faked the handoff and threw a 38 yard touchdown to a <b>wide</b> open Coby Fleener; it was the third touchdown pass to Fleener since the 5:49 mark of the third quarter; the other two came from 41 and 58 yards away; the 41-yarder coming on an identical playaction fake from a goal line formation 40 yards away, leaving Fleener embarrassingly wide open downfield because Stanford's rushing attack was so feared that Virginia Tech had no choice but to sell out on it. Stanford slaughtered Virginia Tech, 40-12. They out-rushed the Hokies 247-66, averaging an even 8.0 yards per carry themselves while allowing 1.9, sacks included. They sacked the elusive Tyrod Taylor eight times. Luck was 18-23 for almost 300 yards and four touchdown passes, all to tight ends.<br />
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Two days later, after a hilarious two-day meeting, Michigan fired Rodriguez while Jim Harbaugh was in San Francisco negotiating with the 49ers; he was introduced as San Francisco's new coach the next day.<br />
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Before Jim Harbaugh took over in 2004, the University of San Diego had zero 10-win seasons in 48 years of football. After a 7-4 first year, Harbaugh went 11-1 in both 2005 and 2006 while winning the first two conference titles in school history. the 2005 team outscored its opponents 511-205; the 2006 team, 514-105. The Stanford team Harbaugh inherited in 2007 had just gone 1-11 in 2006 and was outscored 377-127, an average of about 31-10. By the time Harbaugh left, they were 12-1 and outscoring teams 40-17. Stanford's scoring average increased every year under Harbaugh (19.6, 26.2, 35.5, 40.3), while its defense allowed fewer points each year (28.2, 27.4, 26.5, 17.4). Naturally, their record got better every season: 4-8, 5-7, 8-5, 12-1. Before Harbaugh arrived at San Francisco, the 49ers had gone eight straight years at .500 or below. Harbaugh immediately went 13-3, 11-4-1, and 12-4, with a Super Bowl appearance and three NFC Championship Games.<br />
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For almost ten years now, we've wondered, both aloud and privately, where our fabled "Michigan Football™" went. Michigan Football™ was never just about winning and losing; it always had conditions and stipulations attached to it. For Michigan Football™ to exist, Michigan must win on the football field in a very specific manner. The shotgun must not be the primary means of accepting the snap from the center. The quarterback should not be the leading rusher. The offensive line must be a powerful unit designed to bulldoze, not a finesse unit designed to outflank. The running backs shouldn't be scatbacks designed to run 80 yards, they must be moosebacks (HT: <b><a href="http://mgoblog.com/">MGoBlog</a></b>) who hit the hole, shed the first tackle, and fall forward for 4-5 yards a pop. The wideouts must not be 5'9 slot ninjas who specialize in the bubble screen; they must be tall, physical types that don't wilt under the cold November sky. The tight ends must exist and be major components in the passing game. The defense must a smashmouth unit of grunting ass kickers who allow no quarter and strangle the life out of opposing offenses. On top of all that, for Michigan Football™ to exist in its purest form, the players must excel off the field in the classroom, while encountering little to no trouble with the law. There is no place for JUCO players with criminal records here.<br />
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Only then can Michigan Football™ come to be.<br />
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This is, of course, some form of absurdity. The four-decade bubble that was popped around Schembechler Hall in 2008 exposed the football program to the cold, bitter realities of football in the 21st century - but the fanbase has never caught up, and more importantly, the powers that be have largely refused to even try. The urban legend of an old assistant on Lloyd Carr's staff referring to the spread offense as "communist football" many, many years ago can never be verified - but the mentality that Michigan can only succeed at football be adhering to a certain style is very much real - even as we finish cleaning out the offices of a coaching staff that adhered to that style to the letter, with hilariously awful results.<br />
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One man can adhere to all those silly preconditions while carrying this program back to the level of success that has eluded it for so long. The prodigal son, who once sat in Bo Schembechler's chair as a high school kid, having the audacity to say he was checking to see how it felt, because one day it would be his. The tortured genius who ran the ball 10 out of 11 times against Arizona in the 4th quarter in 2008 because he told his team before the game, <b><a href="http://espn.go.com/college-football/story/_/id/12047640/what-jim-harbaugh-give-michigan-fans">"There's gonna come a time in this game where we're going to line up in the same formation and run the same power play and dictate."</a></b> He personifies everything that fans think Michigan is supposed to be.<br />
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Jim Harbaugh is all "id." The list of people he has pissed off during the course of his still-brief coaching career is pretty extensive. He deliberately poked the hornets' nest when he arrived at Stanford, issuing a very public and very obvious challenge to Pete Carroll at USC, which at the time was the equivalent of the 5'6, pasty-white computer nerd walking into class and taking a swing at the 6'5 varsity quarterback while he was chatting it up with a couple of his lady friends.<br />
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Three years later, the computer nerd left the QB a bloodied, shredded mess, muttering "what's your deal?" as he tried to get the number of the truck that just turned him into goo.<br />
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That's Jim Harbaugh. An out-of-control run-away 18-wheeler barrelling down the freeway at top speed, with a meth-fueled squirrel at the helm, jonesing for a fix. He's unpredictable, brash, and probably a little crazy.<br />
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But it just may be a lunatic we're looking for. Brianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07272986648979988175noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6136487040752878109.post-29676173973902155822014-09-27T21:39:00.000-04:002014-09-27T21:40:29.692-04:00Starve The Beast<center>
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Shane Morris had no business being in the game to be illegally destroyed like that.<br />
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And he <b>certainly</b> had no business being in the game AFTER being illegally destroyed like that.<br />
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It was in this sequence that Brady Hoke finally forfeited any remaining legitimacy he has at coaching this football team and leading this football program. Even as the product on the field has degenerated into a laughingstock and a joke, the one thing that has been unassailable about Hoke is his character. "Yeah, he's failing on the field, but he's a great guy." That statement has been repeated in 100 different forms across Michigan blogs and message boards as a last-ditch defense of the increasingly out-of-his-depth Hoke.<br />
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Let that meme be snuffed out forever after today's farce. Shane Morris could barely stand up in the third quarter after wrenching his ankle. That happened on the first play of a drive that began with <b>12:44</b> left in the 3rd. Devin Gardner took off his headset and started throwing on the sideline. But when Michigan's offense took the field again, it was Morris limping out there to quarterback them, not Gardner. On multiple plays in a row in the fourth quarter, Morris was obviously hobbled by a busted ankle, and at one point motioned toward the sideline, as if asking to be replaced but too timid to simply drag himself toward the sideline and make the decision himself. After the vicious hit GIF'd above, he was so obviously scrambled above the shoulders.<br />
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And his head coach claimed after the game that he did not notice anything wrong.<br />
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Morris stayed in for another play. After being concussed.<br />
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Then, to make an already obscene situation even worse, after three plays, Devin Gardner's helmet came off, so he had to come off the field. Russell Bellomy was - or at least he should've been - the #2 quarterback at this moment; and yet he had to scramble around on the sideline, trying to find his helmet. Brady Hoke should've taken a timeout. He's shown no reservations about wasting timeouts like an idiot before - just in this game, he used one <i>while Minnesota was hurrying to the line so they could spike the ball and stop the clock!</i> But instead, he chose to hold onto the timeout and sent the concussed, shattered Morris back onto the field.<br />
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Remember when Rich Rodriguez held Denard Robinson out of the entire second half of a must win Illinois game?<br />
— mgoblog (@mgoblog) <a href="https://twitter.com/mgoblog/status/515994760780447746">September 27, 2014</a></blockquote>
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Indeed, I do. And I also remember Brian Kelly sending in a player (Dayne Crist) back into a game against Michigan after Crist <i>said he lost sight in one eye after being hit in the head!</i><br />
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Brady Hoke chose the Brian Kelly path of player safety, and then chose to plead ignorance after the fact.<br />
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Since the final grisly seconds expired in South Bend three weeks ago, I've started a post on here, a sort of chronological account of events, dating back many, many, many years. It has a tentative working title of "Death of a Program." Every day, I dig up the specific date of another event or two to add to the timeline. I had thought that it would be completed sometime in the aftermath of another loss to Ohio State, which at this rate seems likely to be the final act of a losing season and the final act of a doomed coach. But the obscenity involving Morris today prompted me to break my silence.<br />
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There is no longer any recourse for Brady Hoke. His team is indifferent to the ass whippings they take, soft on the field, and clearly have no fear or respect for their coaches. This is the "country club atmosphere" times a thousand. There is not a shred of accountability here, because the man tasked to lead this outfit is nothing more than a clap-clap-clapping figurehead. What happened today was the most despicable thing I've ever seen from any Michigan coach. Either Brady Hoke chose to make this some sort of perverse teaching moment by sticking with a flagrantly damaged Morris, and then chose to lie his ass off after the game, or he really was completely oblivious to the fact that his quarterback had to be held up by a 300-pound lineman after getting speared in the chin and having his head bounce off the turf.<br />
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Either scenario is an abomination, and serves as the cherry on top of the shit sundae this man and his staff of clowns have assembled for us.<br />
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I now call on all Michigan fans to stomach the unthinkable: boycott this obscenity until it collapses in on itself. If you have tickets, don't use them. Don't sell them to someone who will. Don't give them away to someone who will. Do not buy tickets, no matter how cheap they become, or how many Cokes you get with them. If someone offers you tickets for free, politely decline. I understand how reprehensible that will sound to some. Many will say that it is still a fan's obligation to support these players. I implore you to reconsider. I beg of you to support these players by putting pressure on those who are destroying them. These players are having their careers derailed by people who are in painfully over their heads, and one of them was put at grave physical risk by the man he trusted with his future today. Shane Morris didn't even walk off the field after the game today; he had to be carted off because he couldn't put weight on his ankle; that's not even considering the concussion he took and then continued to play with.<br />
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I consider it the duty of all Michigan fans to stay away from Michigan Stadium until the bottom line of this athletic department is so adversely affected that the Regents have no choice but to take action against the megalomaniacal lunatic in charge of the department, and replace him with someone who will justifiably oust this entire coaching staff. Michigan's fanbase is currently under occupation by a hostile regime; a detestable athletic director who openly attacks his paying customers and then charges them even more money, while his stooge of a head coach continues to plunge the on-field product to newer and darker depths. You think we've reached rock bottom? You think this is over? Will Mark Dantonio take mercy on the team he hates more than anything? Will Urban Meyer call off the dogs when the masses in Columbus scream for blood?<br />
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It can always, <b>ALWAYS</b> get worse. And until this broken machine is destroyed, it cannot be rebuilt. I plead with you, my fellow Michigan fans, to stop giving your money to this bloated, self-righteous, hostile entity. Feeding the beast will not nurture it back to health. We must starve it into extinction before it can be reborn. Brianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07272986648979988175noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6136487040752878109.post-51150882160119629002014-08-21T15:38:00.001-04:002014-08-21T15:38:55.797-04:00Where Did You Go?<center>
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<b>On October 16, 2010,</b> I sat (stood) in the Michigan Stadium student section for the first time, quite literally right behind the band. It was, naturally, an experience quite different from sitting elsewhere in the stadium, where down-in-fronters and <b><a href="http://genuinelysarcastic.blogspot.com/2008/10/darkest-before-dawn.html">romance-novel-readers</a></b> always threaten to spoil your mood. October 16 was a week after Michigan State finished driving the bulldozer over any hopes any of us had left for Rich Rodriguez; especially in retrospect, it was just a countdown to the funeral after that. But nevertheless, the games continued. Michigan played Iowa that day. On my way into the stadium I came across two older people wearing Stanford sweatshirts. The implication of their chosen attire was obvious, and at the time it was something that extraordinarily pissed me off. I came close to saying something, but the person I was with coaxed me out of the idea (which was a bad one) and urged me forward.<br />
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The game itself was annoying and bad. That's what I thought at the time, and four years later I really don't have another way to describe it. Nothing that happened in the game was exceptionally surprising. Michigan started fast, stalled, turned the ball over a lot, Denard got hurt, Iowa did whatever they wanted against Michigan's defense, Tate Forcier did his best to lead some sort of frantic rally, but Iowa won 38-28. It was a typical mid-October Midwestern day; the high was 64, it was dry, and it was windy, like it always seems to be in Ann Arbor. There was a briskness to the chill in the air as I made my way out of the stadium with the person I was with and we started our trek back to the vehicle belonging to the person I was with. That person was always such an optimist, and as we walked, the conversation about the football program grew increasingly confrontational, until I finally stopped in the middle of the street and threw my hands up in the air.<br />
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"THIS ISN'T FUN ANYMORE!!"<br />
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That's what I yelled. It's possible that my memory has deceived me into thinking that I screamed it much louder than I actually did, but regardless, I remember yelling it. I remember the person I was with eyeballing me like I was crazy, and several of our fellow Michigan fans also making the trudging pilgramage back to their vehicles turning their heads to look at the crazy person yelling in the street.<br />
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At the time, it was just the venting of an increasingly-disillusioned blogger who was lashing out as he realized that the ship he was on was taking on water, and fast. But many times over the last few years I've found myself coming back to that single eruption of emotion. This might actually surprise some people (to others it will be a "well, duh" statement), but I'm actually not a very expressive person. For the three hours and 23 minutes of gametime that day, I spent most of them standing with my arms crossed, alternating between stoically watching the field and stoically watching the jumbotron. When Michigan did something good, I perhaps let a smile out. When they scored, maybe half the time I would give a half-hearted fist pump during The Victors. When something bad happened, I would just shake my head.<br />
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So yeah, that outburst in the middle of the street after the game resonates. Not just because it was out of character, but because the passage of time has given it even more weight. It wasn't just an anger-filled rant; it was a summation of all that had transpired over the years, and one that has only been fueled in the years succeeding it.<br />
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Outside of 2011, when was the last time Michigan was "fun"? When could we last truly get up on Saturday morning and think, "godDAMN it's a great day for Michigan football"? It's been almost a dozen years since Michigan beat Ohio State and Michigan State in the same season. Since then, we've had to watch with indignity as Ohio State filled their trophy case on the backs of mercenaries led by a serpent, and then transition flawlessly from the serpent to the sleazy salesman. We've had to watch Michigan State transform from one of the laughingstocks of college football into what we always expected Michigan to be: boring, workmanlike, and ferociously destructive to the hopes and dreams of the opponent. For all his sanctimony, hypocrisy, and play-acting, Mark Dantonio has two trophies on his mantle that Michigan fans have but fleeting, fading memories of. Michigan State went 25 years between Rose Bowls. It's been 17 years now since Michigan put a Rose Bowl trophy in Schembechler Hall. The last time Michigan had a Big Ten title drought as long as the current one, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson occupied the White House.<br />
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Since the photo that opened this post was taken, Michigan has played 16 seasons. Eight, exactly half, of those seasons have had four losses or more. Only three of them have had two losses or fewer.<br />
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The late 1990s and early 2000s are probably best described as the era of close calls for Michigan. Despite the 0-2 faceplant to start 1998, only an end-of-season loss to Ohio State in Columbus prevented a return to the Rose Bowl. In 1999 it was Lloyd's stubborn attachment to Drew Henson for far too long in East Lansing, followed by the nightmares of a 27-7 lead evaporating at home against Illinois that prevented a team with names like Backus, Brady, Foote, Gold, Goodwin, Hall, Hutchinson, Jones, Renes, Shea, Terrell, Thomas, Walker, and Williams from playing for a national championship. The 2000 team lost three games, all of which they led by double digits: 20-10 at UCLA - a 23-20 loss; 28-10 at Purdue - a 32-31 loss; and 28-10 at Northwestern, degenerating into the infamous 54-51 loss after A-Train's fumble. Michigan went 19-5 in 1999 and 2000; the five losses were by a combined 16 points. 16 points was the difference between 24 wins in 24 games and what they got: shared Big Ten titles and one BCS win while a team they beat in each season (Wisconsin) won back-to-back Rose Bowls.<br />
<br />
Over the last few years, as the fanbase has become more jaded with each indignity heaped upon us by our football program, there have been frequent discussions and lamentations about when things began to go so wrong. Ever the historian, whenever that topic comes up, either on some message board or the ruminations going on in my own mind, I often think about the Second World War. At its zenith, Nazi Germany reigned over some 240 million people, ranging from the northern tip of Norway in the Arctic to the beaches of Greece on the Mediterranean; from the west coast of France deep into the vast open spaces of the Soviet Union. Scholars of the Second World War debate endlessly about what the true "turning point" was of the conflict, because as humans, we always try to find simplicity and clarity among even the most shrouded and convoluted of subjects. To me personally, even in my youth and infancy as a historian, for me, the turning point of the war, and indeed of human history, came at the gateway to the Caucasus, in a place then known as Stalingrad. It was here, deep in southern Russia, that the war ended for some 400,000 Germans. Even after being stopped at the gates of Moscow the previous year, the Eastern Front of the war didn't truly turn against Nazi Germany until those fateful five months, one week, and three days in Stalingrad, that ended with the destruction of the German 6th Army and the surrender of Field Marshal Friedrich Paulus. At the height of their suffering in Stalingrad in the winter of 1942-43, back in Germany, General Kurt Zeitzler showed solidarity with the troops by adopting a diet similar to the rations the soldiers in Stalingrad had been reduced to.<br />
<br />
He lost over 25 pounds in two weeks.<br />
<br />
The day before the surrender, Hitler had promoted Paulus to that hallowed rank of <i>Generalfeldmarschall</i>, with a sinister undertone: no German Field Marshal had ever shamed his country by surrendering to an enemy; the implication being that Hitler expected Paulus to respond to the promotion by taking his own life as opposed to allowing himself to be captured by the Soviets as the final German defenses in Stalingrad crumbled. Paulus defied his Führer and remarked that he had "no intention of shooting myself for this Bohemian corporal."<br />
<br />
Never again on the Eastern Front - or anywhere else - did the Third Reich command the initiative in the war. Yes, they had some fleeting moments of success after January 1943, but those moments of glory were always eclipsed by the endless, creeping sense of defeat that chased them all the way back to Berlin by May of 1945. The defeat at Stalingrad marked the end of German territorial expansion. They would spend the next 26 months slowly being pushed out of the Soviet Union, and out of Western Europe, until their own borders crumbled in upon themselves, and the destruction of the empire they had built was complete, total, and absolute.<br />
<br />
Obviously, the parallels are not perfect; the metaphor perhaps a shaky fit. Comparing something as ultimately trivial as sports to real events and real people and real suffering is always dubious, but I suppose that comes with the territory of being a history major and a passionate sports fan. It's inevitable that I would see connections.<br />
<br />
So in terms of seeking out Michigan's "Stalingrad moment," some opine about the obvious: the substandard coaching hires, first of Rodriguez, and then of Hoke. Opinion about the former is nearly universal; of the latter, still divided. Others point to smaller, less obvious events: the abrupt departure of Drew Henson after the 2000 season, forcing Michigan to throw John Navarre into the fire a year too soon. Or the death of Bo the day before the 1 v. 2 apocalypse in Columbus in 2006. That hints at a type of superstition that cannot be qualified in any sense other than the post hoc reality that Michigan was 11-0 before Bo died, and then lost four games in a row, each in some fashion embarrassing, and all ways debilitating.<br />
<br />
For me, I struggle to pinpoint one critical turning point where our fortunes turned sour; where our empire began to decay. It's never as cut-and-dried as it is in the movies; you could throw a dart at a dozen different factors and events and hit one that played a part in landing us in our current state. For argument's sake, I throw a dart at the following:<br />
<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgugV0a5HOYlgZi2kV9ykab-iGoPmO-dwhfSd20qShbCG06-Cp32xn8YXwYK0kyn0b6TDS9-2NVcvt0cFi2q5KFoKg-5B9sHa5Nf3gc_wBuDJs1yraYmrrYjL-tE6NoP_bl05pOUyTeog53/s1600/Marquise-Walker.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgugV0a5HOYlgZi2kV9ykab-iGoPmO-dwhfSd20qShbCG06-Cp32xn8YXwYK0kyn0b6TDS9-2NVcvt0cFi2q5KFoKg-5B9sHa5Nf3gc_wBuDJs1yraYmrrYjL-tE6NoP_bl05pOUyTeog53/s1600/Marquise-Walker.jpg" /></a></div>
<br />
It's very grainy, I know. But in case you can't tell, contained in that fuzzy still frame is a moment that I believe contributed to our decline; perhaps even the moment when two ships passed in the night.<br />
<br />
With under a minute left in the 3rd quarter on November 24, 2001, 8-2 Michigan trailed 6-4 Ohio State 23-7. Facing a 3rd and 7 at the 10-yard line of OSU, Michigan quarterback John Navarre dropped back to pass, and saw Marquise Walker get inside of the man covering him in the slot. Navarre's pass hit Walker square in the 4 on his chest as the defender tumbled to the ground in vain, trying to get a hand on the ball. What that freeze frame above doesn't show is a split second later, the ball bouncing off of Walker's chest and hands and falling to the ground as Walker tumbles helplessly into the endzone without the ball. It was an open touchdown, and Walker dropped it. Hayden Epstein missed a 27 yard field goal attempt on the next play. Michigan lost to the Buckeyes by six points. Instead of winning the game and winning the Big Ten and going to a BCS bowl, Michigan was upset at home in Jim Tressel's first season, fulfilling the serpent's prophecy, and was then dumptrucked by four touchdowns by Tennessee in the Citrus Bowl.<br />
<br />
Would everything have been different if Walker catches that pass? Does Michigan complete the comeback in that game? Do they win the Sugar Bowl that Big Ten champion Illinois lost to LSU if that happens? Who knows. Dropping a touchdown pass when you're already down by 16 points late in the 3rd quarter is probably not that significant in the big picture.<br />
<br />
Probably.<br />
<br />
But maybe not. Imagine an alternate universe where Walker catches that pass, Michigan completes the comeback, beats Ohio State, and stalls the momentum of the sweatervested (that's probably not a word) swine. Michigan wins the 2001 Big Ten title, goes to the Sugar Bowl, and gets the requisite recruiting bump from a conference title and a BCS bowl instead of an 8-4 season that ends with a four-touchdown slaughtering. From there, who knows? Walker catching that pass almost assuredly does not alter the inherent advantage Tressel always had over Carr. Clarett still comes free on the wheel route in 2002. The drug-sniffing dogs still ambush Michigan outside Ohio Stadium in 2004. Carr still punts from the Ohio State 35 in 2005 and gives the game away. Ron English still lines up in a base 4-3 against OSU's 5-wide sets in 2006. Chris Wells still steamrolls Michigan in 2007 while Chad Henne keeps looking down to confirm his arm is still attached.<br />
<br />
Amidst all the isolated moments, all the specific instances illustrating our decline...that decline happened. Somewhere along the way, the game passed Lloyd Carr by, and the overwhelming talent advantage Michigan had over 90% of its opponents stopped being enough. In 2003, Michigan finished 15th in pass defense, 22nd in run defense, and 11th in total defense. In 2004, those rankings dropped to 43rd, 39th, and 33rd, respectively. The 2005 season (its moniker as the "Year of Infinite Pain" by <b><a href="http://mgoblog.com/">MGoBlog</a></b> is almost comical in its darkness now) in which Michigan lost five games in torturous fashion featured the 42nd-ranked pass defense, the 41st-ranked run defense, and the 36th-ranked total defense. The decline that began midway through the 2004 season when Purdue, Michigan State, Northwestern, Ohio State and Texas all took turns shredding the Michigan defense into ribbons seemed to be stemmed in 2006, only to once again be a mere reprieve from the pain. For 11 games, Michigan's defense put up historically significant run defense numbers thanks to an NFL front seven and a first-round pick at cornerback. Ohio State destroyed them though, and USC ran something like 30 out of 32 pass plays to rout Michigan in the Rose Bowl (again). Any illusions we had about Ron English were snuffed out forever after two weeks in 2007. Michigan actually finished 8th in the country in pass defense in 2007 - because teams were busy running it down the throat of the #58 run defense. There once was a fleeting moment of time where Michigan fans cherished Ron English like a precious diamond, and were terrified of him being snatched up as somebody's head coach after 2006. The passage of time has revealed him to be an absolutely dreadful coach who for 11 games in that 2006 season convinced the world that he was a genius. The loss of Woodley, Branch, Harris, Burgess, and Hall exposed him for what he was: a bad coach whose "specialty" (safety play) was the one consistently awful spot in Michigan's defense throughout essentially his entire tenure. During this 2003-2007 time period, while Michigan's once-proud defense gradually rusted into disrepair, Ohio State was constructing an elite unit that seemed impervious to graduation. It didn't seem to matter who the Buckeyes lost to graduation or early entry to the NFL, they would simply plug in the next man up and put out another elite defense the next year. Hawk, Carpenter and Schlegel gave way to Laurinaitis and Freeman, and then Sabino, Rolle and Sweat. Will Smith and Tim Anderson became Vernon Gholston and Quinn Pitcock, and then Cameron Hayward and Johnathan Hankins. Gamble and Salley progressed into Coleman and Jenkins, and so on and so on. An endless assembly line of elite defenders.<br />
<br />
Michigan, on the other hand, coped with the departure of Leon Hall, LaMarr Woodley and Alan Branch after 2006 like an alcoholic coping with his secret stash being discovered and flushed down the toilet. The unit that smothered 11 straight teams in 2006 opened 2007 with the most infamous pantsing in the history of college football. This was never a "pro vs. spread" debate. Even when Troy Smith and Terrelle Pryor were his QBs, Tressel's philosophy of power football rarely, if ever, deviated. Michigan and Ohio State had largely the same approach to the game during these years, but somewhere in those years, Michigan's staff lost the ability to develop players properly and Lloyd Carr lost the edge he sometimes showed in his earlier years. Even now, the reigning Big Ten Champions at Michigan State play a largely "outdated" brand of football, but it's accentuated by Dantonio's flair for the dramatic and sense for when to deploy the gimmick. In Carr's waning years, a "gimmick" was anything that didn't involve zone left behind Jake Long. The deployment of the transcontinental against Minnesota in 2003 seemed to be from another planet when watching Michigan in 2007.<br />
<br />
If the Rodriguez years of 2008-2010 can best be described as a bad nightmare, then four years later Michigan fans are wondering if we're still sleeping. Just as 2006 served as a lemonade stand in the desert, 2011 teased us with the possibility that we had escaped from our own hell. Problems with Al Borges still existed in 2011, but beating Notre Dame and Ohio State and winning a BCS bowl in the same season while returning to the level of recruiting Michigan is expected to be at drowned out the irritations of Borges's gameplans against Iowa and Michigan State.<br />
<br />
Except was it really <i>Borges's</i> gameplan? Or is it possible that Borges never did anything Hoke didn't tell him or specifically authorize him to do?<br />
<br />
This was a recurring theme for three years. Right from the get go
in 2011, Borges, with Hoke's direction, tried to cram Denard Robinson into being
a pro-style passing QB. The first time it came to a head was when they
trailed Notre Dame 24-7 after three quarters and had 90 yards of offense at
halftime before finally turning Denard loose to let him do what he knows
how to do. After that they let him do his thing before trying to force
him (and the offense) back toward the pro-style crap they wanted against
MSU and Iowa. They had Denard throw the ball 24 times in a swirling
hurricane of wind in East Lansing, and then they had to wait another
half+ and wait until they were down 24-9 at Iowa, with something like
150 yards of offense on the board midway through the third quarter
before finally abandoning their idiotic gameplan that involved running
the ball 37 times for a dazzling 3.4 YPC.<br />
<br />
After that they turned Denard loose in full spread mode, and he
and Fitz sliced and diced Illinois, Nebraska, and Ohio State in
back-to-back-to-back weeks, averaging 39 PPG and 408 YPG (246 on the
ground) against three above average defenses.<br />
<br />
Then the offense laid an epic dud in the Sugar Bowl against
VaTech, thanks in large part to Molk being banged up, but also thanks to
Hoke and Borges completely deviating away from the style of play that
got them to the BCS bowl game in the first place.<br />
<br />
Then the insanity of 2012. The ill-conceived scheduling of Alabama was worsened by Hoke and Borges reverting back to the "manball" concept - against the best defense in the world. It's unlikely that any gameplan existed that would have helped Michigan in that game, but the bloodbath was guaranteed by the head coach and his offensive coordinator once again deciding that Denard was a pocket passer in a pro-style offense, no matter how many times that strategy blew up in their faces. The team followed that up with a spectacular
faceplant in South Bend, although there aren't any gameplans that can
make up for six turnovers. Even in the blowout wins that year (Purdue,
Illinois, Minnesota, Iowa), Hoke and Borges tried to ram through their
"manball" philosophy with little success. All of that came to a head with
whatever the hell you want to call the second half gameplan of a very
winnable game in Columbus. Two 70 yard touchdowns in the first half, and
Michigan spends the second half running Vincent Smith into a stacked
front. Michigan had 61 yards of offense in the second half of that
game!<br />
<br />
And then of course last year, an abomination that needs no
refresher. For a FOUR game stretch last season, MSU, Nebraska,
Northwestern, and into the Iowa game, Michigan scored one offensive
touchdown in 13 quarters of regulation, and needed a once-in-a-lifetime
miracle finish against Northwestern to avoid losing that game 9-6.<br />
<br />
Borges was a consistent and frequent trainwreck during his
tenure, and even in the end, Hoke didn't want to fire him. Had to be
strongarmed into doing it. After the sparkling 13-point, 175-yard, -21
yard rushing, 7-sacks-given-up performance against Nebraska, Hoke said
after the game that he liked the playcalling.<br />
<br />
We better hope that somehow the offensive coordinator who was
executing the gameplan the head coach wanted him to was the problem. Or
we're in big trouble. Because this is not some new phenomenon. Michigan fans dealt with this exact issue from 2008 through 2010; the belief that it wasn't really the head coach's fault for one side of the ball being a radioactive, flaming dumpster fire. Some fans <b>swore</b> that firing Scott Shafer after 2008 would fix the defense. And then as 2009 and 2010 spiraled out of control, some fans <b>swore</b> that it was all because Greg Robinson was an incompetent, doddering old fool. Even now there are still some people who <b>swear</b> Rodriguez would've had the same 11-2 BCS season in 2011 if he had been given the opportunity to bring in another defensive coordinator.<br />
<br />
This is, of course, nonsense. In college football, perhaps moreso than any other sport, the team adopts the mindset and personality of its coach. Jim Tressel shows up in Columbus and dedicates all of his energy into beating Michigan, and 2-10-1 under Cooper turns into 9-1 under Tressel. Mark Dantonio shows up in East Lansing determined to change the culture of Michigan State football, and decades of hilarity, softness, and self-slapping turns into two 11-win seasons and a 13-win season in the last four years with two Big Ten championships, five January bowl games, and a level of toughness and physicality that Michigan fans haven't seen from our own team in over a decade. In that same sense, Rich Rodriguez showed up at Michigan, dedicated nearly all of his time and energy to overhauling the offense (while entrusting the defense to his friends), and the result was plainly evident, and became even more glaring the longer his tenure went on: a team that gradually improved on offense, and gradually decayed into a laughingstock and a disgrace on defense.<br />
<br />
In a way, Brady Hoke has proven to be the opposite. A re-dedication to defense, and Michigan seems poised to have one of the best defenses in the Big Ten in 2014. But at the same time, Hoke has spent over three years now preaching the philosophy of being "tough" and "physical" on offense...but the offense keeps getting worse. The offensive line continues to regress. One scapegoat has already been thrown under the bus; Borges is gone. But is Nussmeier the answer? Or is it possible that Michigan attempted to answer the wrong question?<br />
<br />
Part of Rodriguez's downfall at Michigan was his refusal to face the reality that the personal friends he hired to coach the defense, specifically the epic failure that was Tony Gibson in the secondary, were terrible at their jobs. Consider the fact that Darrell Funk has been with Hoke since 2008, Hoke's last year at Ball State. He was with Hoke in both years at San Diego State, and he's been with Hoke since Day 1 at Michigan. Hoke's defenders have a case when they point to the F- offensive line recruiting done by Rich Rodriguez. Where there should be 4th and 5th year seniors on the offensive line, there are none because Rodriguez recruited seven offensive linemen in three classes; one finished his career at defensive tackle (Quinton Washington), two were never fits for what Hoke allegedly wants to do (Ricky Barnum and Patrick Omameh), two were NFL draft picks (Taylor Lewan and Michael Schofield), one quit a week after arriving on campus (Tony Posada), and one quit football because of injury (Christian Pace). The last is particularly egregious; the 2010 recruiting class, one of the most epic failures ever assembled, contained a single offensive lineman, the aforementioned Pace. So yes, there is a case to be made that the previous coach left smoldering ruins in the middle of the offensive line, and that that is a major factor hindering us today.<br />
<br />
But how long does it take to build a competent offensive line, exactly? The five-star guard that Brady Hoke stole from Ohio State and was universally regarded by even the most hardcore of Ohio State homer reporters as one of the most physical and college-ready linemen to come out of the state of Ohio in years looks confused and tentative on the field, and now may be surpassed on the depth chart by a walkon. Kyle Bosch was a top 100 lineman and was heavily pursued by three of the quintessential "manball" teams Michigan looks to emulate: Stanford, Iowa, and Alabama. Now, even after seeing significant time as a freshman, he can't win a job as a sophomore. Patrick Kugler, Logan Tuley-Tillman, David Dawson, Chris Fox and Erik Magnuson were all universal 4-star, top 100-ish types, and are admittedly still in their infancy as players; yet only one of them is even being mentioned as a possibility for 2014 (Magnuson), while a true freshman (Mason Cole) seems to be the answer at left tackle. Perhaps the problem is made worse by a change in scheme, as Nussmeier transitions the line toward more of a zone-blocking approach. Just like the defenses of Rodriguez trying every scheme under the sky and overwhelming their already poorly developed players, Michigan has put their offensive linemen through the ringer since Brady Hoke took over. Borges threw every single thing at the wall, desperately looking for something to stick. They tried to force the manball power football down their throats right away, but they couldn't execute it, so they went back to the spread principles. They then tried again in 2012, but Barnum and Omameh and Mealer couldn't pull. They tried multiple things in 2013, including the macabre adventure of pulling Taylor Lewan; nothing worked, because they tried everything and mastered nothing. So they're trying something new again in 2014, and the offensive line, regardless of combination, was universally taken apart by every combination of defense it faced in last Saturday's scrimmage.<br />
<br />
So what happens if 2014 swirls the drain just as 2013 did? If there are multiple games where Michigan is in the red in total rushing yardage, and struggles and scrapes to put together positive plays, and can barely claw its way to more than one touchdown per game, then what? If Michigan loses the four toughest games on its schedule (@ Notre Dame, Penn State, @ Michigan State, @ Ohio State), or even those four plus another, and finishes 8-4 or 7-5, is that acceptable? Will the fanbase accept a head coach who is 1-3 against MSU, 1-3 against OSU, and 0-4 in winning the Big Ten, while the dictator of an AD continues to jack the prices up? At what point is enough enough?<br />
<br />
In nine days, Michigan will face Appalachian State, in another one of Dave Brandon's asinine ideas, as if beating this team will somehow avenge 2007. The arrival of football season is supposed to be a momentous occasion; a holiday, almost. It's supposed to be a festival, welcoming the arrival of fall, and the yearning associated with dreams of championships. The crack of the shoulder pads and the clash of helmets is something that's usually greeted with giddiness and joy.<br />
<br />
Except for Michigan fans, who nowadays welcome football season with a "yeah, but..." attitude. Because to live as a Michigan football fan is to live in paranoia, always looking over your shoulder, waiting for the other shoe to drop. It's been a long time since we welcomed a season with true, genuine confidence that the team we cheer for would be of championship caliber.<br />
<br />
So long that with each passing day, we begin to wonder if those days were but a dream; the opposite of what we seem to be living through today.<br />
<br />
I'm waiting for it to be fun again.Brianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07272986648979988175noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6136487040752878109.post-77439401445224116682014-07-02T21:23:00.002-04:002014-07-02T21:23:32.903-04:00Crossroads and PerceptionUsually not much of anything happens in sports during the dog days of summer. Baseball's usually the only gig in town, and I can't figure out this year's Tigers squad for the life of me.<br />
<br />
These past couple days, however, have been eventful. The US Men's National Team was eliminated in heartbreaking fashion by Belgium yesterday in the World Cup. My interest in soccer has always been mild at best, and truth be told my connection to the game has always been more closely connected with Germany's national team than the US. My first World Cup experience was watching the 2002 final between Germany and Brazil, and four years of German in high school leading up to the 2006 World Cup in Germany made me into a big fan of die Mannschaft. I still cheer for the US team, of course, but honestly I was more nervous and panicky during Germany's 2-1 nailbiter against Algeria on Monday than I was during the US-Belgium game yesterday. So while interest in the sport fades for many (most?) people with the US defeat, my interest in the World Cup is only intensifying because "my" team is playing France on Friday. MGoBlog's <a href="http://mgoblog.com/content/suffering-well">superb summation of the American experience in the World Cup</a> isn't something that is applicable to followers of Germany. There is no such thing as an acceptable loss in the round of 16 if you're a Germany fan.<br />
<br />
Elsewhere, yesterday was a nightmare for Red Wings fans, and today wasn't much better for Michigan football fans. Yesterday, the Red Wings offered three separate defensemen - Christian Ehrhoff, Dan Boyle, and Matt Niskanen - more money and/or years than what they ultimately accepted to play elsewhere. Along with Zach Parise and Ryan Suter two years ago, that's five players over the last three offseasons who have turned down more money from Detroit to go elsewhere. There are certainly some mitigating circumstances; Parise's a Minnesota kid, and Suter's wife is from Minneapolis; Boyle's agent allegedly told general managers around the league that all bets were off if the Rangers came calling. But alas, this is ultimately yet another stain on Ken Holland's resume as GM in Detroit, to the point where Chief over at A2Y <a href="http://kuklaskorner.com/a2y/comments/absolute-failure">finally snapped and took the flamethrower to Holland</a> like many Red Wings fans have been itching to do for a few years now.<br />
<br />
For the most part, I agree with the thought that Holland has stumbled and failed more often than not in recent years. Picking Franzen over Hossa, trading for Legwand, trading a first round pick for Kyle Quincey and then having to pathetically crawl back to Quincey after striking out yesterday (and paying him more than the Penguins paid Ehrhoff) are only the lowlights of Holland's many missteps since 2009. But I am beginning to come around to the possibility that something is rotten inside the Red Wings organization. It's been a rumor for a couple years now that Mike Babcock is viewed as a dictator and a vindictive asshole who is scaring away potential free agents. When you consider the events that took place yesterday, that seems like a more plausible hypothesis than it did two days ago. Also consider the fact that the Red Wings are not panicking about Babcock not signing any sort of extension. His contract expires after the upcoming season, he has two Olympic Gold Medals and a Stanley Cup ring on his resume. He is universally seen as one of the best hockey coaches in the world, and the Red Wings aren't pulling out all the stops to get him extended. What they <i>are</i> doing is pulling out all the stops to keep Jeff Blashill in Grand Rapids and isolate him from any NHL teams sniffing around thinking about poaching him. Some coach, I honestly can't remember who, once said that no matter how successful you are, eventually your voice will be tuned out if you stay in one place long enough. Is it possible that the Red Wings' front office is growing weary of Babcock's style and, instead of foolishly firing someone with such a resume, are willing to simply let the clock run out on his contract and let him walk away while desiginating Blashill as the successor behind the scenes?<br />
<br />
Such a fanciful scenario doesn't seem so unrealistic after the unmitigated disaster that unfolded yesterday.<br />
<br />
And then there was today, which saw 4/5* LB Justin Hilliard and 4/5* DL Jashon Cornell commit to Ohio State, along with 4* WR Miles Boykin commit to Notre Dame. All three were, at least at one point, Michigan targets. Hilliard made something around eight visits to Michigan since last summer, and Cornell came very close to committing to Michigan after the commitments of George Campbell and Damien Harris last year. At some point, Hilliard and Cornell, despite being from completely different <i>states</i>, let alone different high schools, formed enough of a friendship to consider themselves as a sort of package deal. Now, who can say what would have happened if Cornell had committed to U-M last year. Would he have decommitted once Campbell and Harris left, or would he have stayed committed and helped lure Hilliard to U-M? Would Michigan's coaches have still cooled on Cornell like they did if he was committed? I can't say. These are all irrelevant hypotheticals. The reality is both players are now Buckeyes, and will likely serve as great homing beacons in luring former Michigan commitment Harris to Columbus (the curse of "growing up a Michigan fan" strikes again). Boykin was always going to be a tough pull; Notre Dame's name is golden in Chicagoland more often than not. The disastrous 2013 season likely made the uphill climb insurmountable for Michigan in that race.<br />
<br />
These events day, specifically in the case of Hilliard and Cornell, set me off a bit against my own fanbase. I saw numerous Michigan fans across the recruiting sites dismiss the commitments as not important because, to paraphrase, "look at all the talent Urban had these last two years, and no championships" or "doesn't matter, MSU beat all those 5*s with 3*s." I tried my best to keep my composure when responding, but such lunacy begets lunacy. To try and dismiss a 24-2 record over two seasons because they netted zero championships is a special, special kind of Michigan homerism. Ohio State went 12-0 in 2012, and would've slaughtered Nebraska just like Wisconsin did in the 2012 Big Ten Championship Game if not for the probation they were on, which had nothing to do with Urban Meyer (and was in fact because the school decided that going to the Gator Bowl after the 6-6 2011 season was more important). They then followed that up with a 12-0 regular season in 2013, and lost closely contested games to Michigan State in the Big Ten title game and the Orange Bowl against Clemson. But to hear some Michigan fans describe it, this is a hilarious black mark against Meyer and Ohio State, and is a harbinger of things to come. This sort of nonsense makes me wonder what kind of world I'm living in, and what kind of people I call compatriots. I mean...do people <i>really</i> believe that Urban Meyer won't win championships at Ohio State? In a pathetically watered-down Big Ten, with the recruiting classes he's brought in? After the success he had at Florida with much stiffer competition in both recruiting and on-field competition? To try and downplay the 24-2 record, especially when Michigan is a pathetic 15-11 in that same timeframe, is disingenuous and lame.<br />
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That same line of thinking applies to Damien Harris. I've seen Michigan fans range from lamenting how a "lifelong Michigan fan" can even consider playing for Ohio State to shaking their heads about how Harris's talent will allegedly be wasted in Meyer's offense. To that, I again find myself incredulously having to defend Meyer. 1) Did anybody actually watch the two teams last season? While Michigan was churning out abortions like 27 for 27 and negative rushing outputs against Michigan State and Nebraska, Urban Meyer's offense was unleashing a battering ram at running back to the tune of 1500 yards and over seven yards a pop. 2) Followers of recruiting always put too much stock into "I grew up cheering for x" statements and sentiments from recruits. In the end, picking a college is a business decision for these kids. They are picking the school that they believe gives them the best opportunity to be a high draft pick in the NFL. After comparing the two teams last year, how could anyone possibly blame Damien Harris for liking Ohio State more than Michigan? I'll take it even a step futher: why would ANY recruit, especially on offense, pick Michigan over OSU right now? I'm not even factoring in the overall track record of Meyer vs. Hoke, which makes the argument even more lopsided. Just look exclusively at last season. It would take an enormous leap of faith to pick U-M over OSU right now. I've been taken to task on multiple occasions for voicing such an opinion. To that I respond: try and take the maize and blue glasses off. This isn't about academic rankings (which precious few recruits give a shit about) or how much of a slimeball Meyer is compared to how "genuine" Hoke is. Recruits don't care. Pete Carroll was a cheater and a liar at USC; recruits didn't care. Nick Saban cares about his players only as far as they live up to what he expects from them on the football field, and runs them off when they fall behind; recruits don't care. Urban Meyer is a liar and a scumbag who neglects his own family in favor of his job as a football coach; recruits don't care.<br />
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What they care about is winning, and stardom, and being drafted high, and making money. The perception of Ohio State right now is an elite program with an elite coach poised for many years of competing for Big Ten championships and a spot in the playoffs and a chance at national titles. The perception of Michigan is a mediocre program with a lame coach who may or may not be on the hotseat and can't develop the players on the roster. Losing 11 out of 13 games to Ohio State has created basically an entire generation of recruits who know nothing about the rivalry except Ohio State dominance. The state of Ohio is immeasurably critical to Michigan's success as a football program. High school seniors in the state of Ohio this year were born around say, 1997 or 1998. Think about what that means. These kids have literally no memory of Michigan's lording over OSU in the 1990s. Desmond Howard and Charles Woodson clinching Heisman Trophies for Michigan against Ohio State might as well have happened 100 years ago in a far-away land as far as these kids are concerned. The only memories of football they have are Troy Smith, and Terrelle Pryor, and Braxton Miller, and Chris Wells, and Ted Ginn, and all the other stars OSU has had, all having wild success against Michigan while U-M flailed around in the dying years of Carr, the apocalyptic years of Rodriguez, and the increasingly frayed years of Hoke.<br />
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Some 14 years ago, Ohio State decided they weren't going to tolerate the current course of events anymore. <a href="http://genuinelysarcastic.blogspot.com/2011/05/dotting-lie.html">So they sold their souls to a shyster who took them on a decade-long run of corrupted success.</a> Michigan is too self-righteous to sell themselves out like that, and the fans will have to bear the brunt of that hubris. Michigan will never turn the boosters loose on the recruiting trail to grease the palms of parents, uncles, coaches, and handlers around high school kids. Michigan will never set their players up with a car dealer who is a friend of the program and all too willing to hook the kids up with cool rides for next to nothing. Michigan will never set their players up with no-show jobs or no-work classes with friendly teachers and tutors who do all the work for them. Michigan will never have a special gym set up outside Ann Arbor where the players can go to get their "supplements" and "vitamins" that make them look like a professional football team on Saturdays. The existence of such aforementioned setups is denied by many Michigan fans as "sour grapes" or "conspiracy theories without merit." To those fans, I can only shrug and dismiss as people unwilling to face the reality of the situation this football program finds itself in.<br />
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Is this an insurmountable task? No. 8-5 Michigan lost by five points to 12-0 Ohio State in 2012. 7-6 Michigan lost to 12-2 Ohio State by a single point in 2013. Neither of those games resembled the skull-cavings that Tressel gave Rodriguez. The distance between the football programs narrows to a sliver when they actually play each other. Last year's Michigan offense could rarely put together a series without running into each other, turning the ball over, or creating some other cynically hilarious situation that made the fans want to die - until the Ohio State game, when they rained hellfire on Ohio State until the very end.<br />
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So what's the solution? I don't know. I know that Al Borges was an incompetent slug who deserved to be fired, but that the issues with the offense went beyond a single man fucking up at his job. I know that Jake Ryan was the only consistent source of pass rush on this defense these last two years, and he is now a middle linebacker for some reason. I know that these coaches have lied to the fans and media relentlessly for three years. I know Mattison (along with every other defensive coordinator in the history of football) has talked a big game about playing in-your-face defense and pressing on the edges, only to play the corners 10 yards off the ball, even on 4th and 2 in the 4th quarter against Nebraska. I know that since the moment he arrived, Hoke has preached of the fabled "manball" without delivering it for one instant in three years. When will reality match rhetoric? Will Nussmeier magically fix an offense that couldn't tie its own shoes a year ago without losing yardage? Will an offensive line composed almost entirely of universally-lauded recruits with offers from the entire world form into a respectable unit? Kyle Kalis was 5-star recruit with offers from the entire Big Ten plus Alabama, Notre Dame, and Auburn. Urban Meyer made a huge push to get Kalis on campus in Columbus after he took the job. Kyle Bosch was a top 100 recruit with offers from Michigan State, Alabama, Notre Dame, Stanford, Iowa, and Florida. Erik Magnuson had offers from every school in the Pac-12. Ben Braden was a 3-star recruit but had offers from Michigan State and Wisconsin, two schools who personify the mauling "manball" that Hoke wants Michigan to be.<br />
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What happens if Michigan goes 9-3 this year while losing all three rivalry games, and once again missing the Big Ten title game? Are Michigan fans, and more importantly, is the Michigan brass, ready to accept a head coach who four years in is 2-2 against Notre Dame, 1-3 against both Michigan State and Ohio State, and 0-4 on Big Ten titles? That's not even factoring in games like Utah, Penn State, Rutgers and Northwestern. Utah's a mediocre team, but until Michigan shows that last year's abomination is 100% behind them, how can anyone feel completely confident? Michigan's coaches laid down and died against Penn State last year. Rutgers is a trainwreck, but Michigan very nearly lost to UConn last year, and has looked pretty much abysmal on the road under Hoke. It took a miracle of unrepeatable magnitude to get to overtime against Northwestern last year. The optimistic Michigan fans says we were a couple plays away from 10 wins last year - a 3-point triple OT loss to Penn State, a four-point last minute loss to Nebraska, a three-point loss to Iowa that featured a Gardner fumble as we were driving for the tie late, and then of course the one-point loss to Ohio State. But on the other hand, Michigan needed a comeback and then a last second goalline stand to beat Akron, a comeback and incredible interception to beat UConn, and the miracle against Northwestern just to win seven games.<br />
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Michigan fans have had to endure an endless amount of misery for the better part of a decade. We've had to endure Appalachian State, and Toledo. We've had to endure 3-9, and 5-7, and the endless dumptruckings of 2010, and the fabrications from the Free Press. We've had to endure domination at the hands of Ohio State and Michigan State, and a megalomaniac of an athletic director who is proudly and openly hostile to his own customers, slapping them with one hand and holding his other out to ask for more money. We've endured Sailing Bill Martin and The Process. When was the last time we truly felt <i>comfortable</i> as Michigan fans? Maybe at some point in 2011, I guess? Probably in the aftermath of the Ohio State game that year, I'd imagine. Outside of that, when was the last time we could puff our chests and hold our heads high? 2003? 2006 before the end of the season?<br />
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It's been a long time. The moments of glory are fleeting and skittish, while the moments of gloom linger and loiter, only relenting enough to tease us of what could be but is not, returning with a vengeance to remind us never to feel comfortable. To live as a Michigan fan these days is to live in a state of perpetual terror, where every day is greeted with apprehension; a never-ending state of waiting for the next shoe to drop. It's not the "other" shoe; that implies that there are only two. Life as a Michigan fan is a situation where "life" is a centipede, with dozens of shoes to drop on you.<br />
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At some point, the time comes to fuck the centipede up.Brianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07272986648979988175noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6136487040752878109.post-60056803049458184652014-04-25T15:12:00.000-04:002014-08-15T01:41:40.348-04:00The Expectations of a #8 Seed<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgE2Mq1EjT3vSwNAiV20kUuzuIYnASNHG7sK9ere-vnWXRDfnz3eMWeeyEKoGHOZof9kx6H1kzZ0Q-skIAroOGuqwWJtCFttpq-AlQwPAq4EVE_BCUTaQioS3F71gmPkN7zf5bHnaw1r0Iq/s1600/red-wings-bruins-game-4.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgE2Mq1EjT3vSwNAiV20kUuzuIYnASNHG7sK9ere-vnWXRDfnz3eMWeeyEKoGHOZof9kx6H1kzZ0Q-skIAroOGuqwWJtCFttpq-AlQwPAq4EVE_BCUTaQioS3F71gmPkN7zf5bHnaw1r0Iq/s1600/red-wings-bruins-game-4.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">(Photo by Dave Reginek/NHLI via Getty Images)</td></tr>
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<i><span style="font-size: large;"><b>Bruins 3, Red Wings 2 (OT); Eastern Quarterfinals, 1-<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: large;">3</span> </span></b></span></i></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: small;">Anyone</span></span><i><span style="font-size: large;"><b> </b></span></i>who has spent more than five minutes reading a post on this blog-type thing knows I do not have a particularly rosy outlook on anything; least of all sports. To call me a cynical pessimist would be kind. I always expect the worst to happen. But there is no chance I was alone last night in fully expecting the end result to be exactly what it was. The Red Wings came out with the jump in their step - whether it was because of Zetterberg being back, or just the generic fire that comes with being down 2-1 and playing at home, it doesn't really matter. They came out and took it to Boston - and left the first period with a meager 1-0 lead. That should've been the first sign of trouble. That they got it to 2-0 is simply salt in the wound of the final result, because even when it was 2-0, it was clear that the ice began to tilt in the second period. When the Bruins made it 2-1, we scowled. When they tied it in the third, we shook our heads grimly. When they won the game in overtime, we sighed.</div>
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But at no point were we surprised.</div>
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When the Red Wings stifled the Bruins and escaped with a 1-0 win in Game 1 thanks to Datsyuk's magic, the prevailing emotion was not the relief that comes from dodging a bullet, but the relief that comes from stealing something that wasn't yours. That type of relief is directly connected to the sense of disappointment but not genuine anger associated with the end result of the next three games. This series does not have the feel of what it was like to lose to 8th seeded San Jose in 1994, or to lose the first two games at home to #8 Vancouver in 2002, or to be swept by #7 Anaheim in 2003, or be stunned in the first round by #8 Edmonton in 2006. This series is hauntingly different in that the 1 seed, President's Trophy winner, and Stanley Cup favorite is mauling the #8 seed as they should - except the Red Wings are the 8 seed.</div>
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This has been a slow swirling of the drain for the Winged Wheel. The slow trickle of talent leaving the roster and idiotic decision-making by Ken Holland combined with the all-too-common-these-days injury problems that riddle this team year in and year out now have led the fanbase to a place where we can no longer realistically expect a championship, but instead find ourselves rooting for a "gritty" and "scrappy" bunch to maybe pull off an upset or two against a juggernaut. They sort of did it against #2 Anaheim last year, but the Ducks are a lot of glitz without much substance; a typical Bruce Boudreau-coached outfit whose play generates a lot of success in the regular season and then fizzles out in the playoffs. Boudreau won four division championships in four years in Washington, and never advanced past the second round of the playoffs. In two full seasons in Anaheim he has two division championships, one first round loss to the Red Wings, and is currently in a 2-2 dogfight with 8th seeded Dallas. The Red Wings icing the Ducks last year may have been an upset in the sense that it was a #7 seed beating a #2, but Mike Babcock beating Bruce Boudreau is the exact opposite of an upset. If the 2009 Capitals had been able to hold onto a 2-0 series lead or win a Game 7 on their home ice, the Red Wings would have an extra Stanley Cup banner. That's how big of a loser Bruce Boudreau is when the playoffs start.</div>
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This current matchup against Boston feels closer to last year's semifinal matchup against Chicago. You watch the two teams play, and it becomes very obvious after a while which team is more talented. Last year Jimmy Howard stood on his head and stopped 86 of 88 shots in Games 2 through 4 to put the Red Wings up 3-1 on the Blackhawks. Over the course of a 7 game series, talent usually rises to the top, and Chicago showed that in winning the final three games to take the series, but it was apparent even in the games Howard stole that Chicago was better. The Red Wings themselves have fallen victim in past years to losing to the "less talented" team with the hot goalie. Last year the roles were reversed; just as this year, the roles are the opposite of what we are accustomed to. The arrogance that 20 years of lording over the NHL has instilled in Red Wings fans (myself included at times) cannot withstand the blatant reality that exists as we watch this series: Boston is simply better at hockey. This isn't a scrappy team deploying some godless trap and riding their hot goalie to an upset over our faster, stronger, more talented Red Wings. No. This is the best team (or one of the best) in hockey imposing its will on a depleted, undermanned, and mediocre Detroit team that simply doesn't have the talent to match up. The Red Wings scoring four goals in four games against this Boston team is not a result of laziness, aloofness, or the Bruins mucking it up with a neutral zone trap, or the referees conspiring against Detroit; it's a result of one team playing like an 8 seed, and the other playing like one of the two or three favorites to hoist the Cup 6-7 weeks from now.<br />
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Every year now when the Stanley Cup Playoffs roll around, I think back to Game 7 in 2009. That arrogance I just mentioned has clouded me into believing that if the Red Wings had been healthy, they would have won three straight Stanley Cups in 2007, 2008 and 2009 instead of just the one they got. I understand how homerish that is, and my distorted belief does nothing to change the reality of what unfolded in 2007 and 2009, but that's what it is. And it seems like nothing has ever been the same for the Red Wings since they lost Game 7 to the Penguins five years ago. The injury bug that has never, ever gone away started to set in the following season, and something in some form or another has felt "off" every year since that godforsaken night in June 2009. The 2008 Cup team was #3 in goals scored (257) and #1 in goals against (184). The next year they were #1 in goals scored (295), but plunged to 19th in goals against (244). If you recall, there was a combination of significant Cup hangover, but even after that wore off, it always felt like the desperation that comes with playing elite defense in the NHL was never there in 2009. The names and faces were largely the same as they were in 2008, with the addition of one of the best two-way forwards in hockey (Marian Hossa), yet the 2009 team was always more offense-oriented and less interested in clamping down on the other team's offense. Chris Osgood's numbers tanked from .914 and 2.09 in 2007-08 to .887 and 3.09 in 08-09; a catastrophic collapse that was fended off in the postseason until the Penguins did just enough to steal the Cup away.<br />
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The aftermath of the loss to Pittsburgh saw Hossa leave, along with Mikael Samuelsson (when he was still a semi-useful hockey player), and Jiri Hudler's sudden desertion to Russia for a year. That was 168 points from 2008-09 that wasn't there for 2009-10. On top of that, Tomas Holmstrom missed 14 games, Johan Franzen missed 55, Valtteri Filppula missed 27, Niklas Kronwall missed 34, Dan Cleary missed 18, and Henrik Zetterberg missed 8. The offseason losses and inseason injuries plummeted the Red Wings from 1st in scoring in 2008-09 to 14th (229 goals scored) in 2009-10, while the defense bounced back to 8th overall (216 goals allowed) in Jimmy Howard's first season as the #1 goalie, as it became glaringly obvious that Chris Osgood was finished. That season brought us the first subtle hint that things were no longer the way they once were when the Red Wings had to start a playoff series on the road for the first time in 11 years, and that series went an unnecessary seven games against Phoenix. The team that looked lethargic and injured all season was easy chum for San Jose in the second round. I had very vocal issues with the officiating in that five game loss to the Sharks in 2010, but nothing that could've changed the outcome of the series. The Sharks were very, very clearly the better team.<br />
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2010-2011 was an odd year. There were more injuries - Datsyuk missed 26 games, Brian Rafalski missed 19, Cleary missed 14, Filppula missed 11, Brad Stuart missed 15, and Mike Modano only played 40 games. Despite that, and despite Jiri Hudler returning only to play like someone who had spent a year playing nobodies in Russia, the Wings jumped up to 2nd in the NHL in scoring (261 goals)...only to plunge back down to 23rd in goals allowed (241). Howard's numbers in his second year (.908, 2.79) weren't nearly as good as they were the year before (.924, 2.26), but despite that, the Red Wings won the Central with 104 points - exactly one point behind San Jose, who thus got home-ice advantage again in the second round, and got to host Game 7 after the Red Wings won three straight after going down 3-0. Would things have been different if that Game 7 had been in Detroit? Who knows. Would that Red Wings team have been able to beat Vancouver in the Western Conference Finals? I very much doubt it. But it was this year that really began to show the cracks in the Wings' defense. I thought Lidstrom really showed his age in this season, along with Rafalski, whose back would force him into retirement after the Game 7 loss to San Jose.<br />
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On the surface, 2011-2012 looked much better. Injury bug wasn't as bad, team finished 6th in both goals scored (248) and goals allowed (203). But this team was 41-17-2 on February 19th, having just beaten San Jose 3-2 to win their 6th straight. At 84 points, they led St. Louis by five points, Nashville by 10, and Chicago by 13 in the Central Division. They led Vancouver by two points for the #1 seed in the West and the #1 overall seed in the entire NHL. They finished the season 7-11-4, barely ahead of Chicago by point, seven back of Central Division champion St. Louis, and two back of first round opponent Nashville. The freefall was so steep, everybody knew the postseason was going to be brief, and brief it was, a very quick five games and out against the Predators. The Red Wings scored nine goals in the five games. Nine.<br />
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And then these last two years, scrambling to get into the playoffs. Last year's abbreviated season was relatively healthy, but a complete clusterfuck of musical chairs on the blueline. Brendan Smith, Jakub Kindl, Ian White, Brian Lashoff, Carlo Colaiacovo, Kent Huskins, Danny DeKeyser, Kyle Quincey. The issue with so many of these names is not just their proclivity for brain-melting defensive zone gaffes, but their complete absence from the scoresheet offensively. That was the often-overlooked part of the system the Red Wings deployed to reign at the top of the NHL for some 20 years and win four Stanley Cups. Lidstrom, Rafalski, Kronwall, Coffey, Chelios, Chiasson, Murphy, Duchesne, Schneider. All those guys were defensemen who, at some point in their careers, were serious threats to jump in and score, or threats to make the perfect pass to set up a teammate, or quarterback a power play. Now Kronwall is the only one who seems capable of any such offense on the roster, and the prospects who were counted on to replace the departed vets have contributed nothing. Brendan Smith is still only 25, which is considered brand new in Red Wing years, but has he even shown flashes of doing what he did in college and in the AHL at the NHL level? He had 26 goals and 87 points in 95 games at Wisconsin, and followed that up with 27 goals and 86 points in 152 games in Grand Rapids. So far, in 119 games with the Red Wings, he has six goals and 34 points. Kindl was another first round defenseman pick, but the bloom started to come off his rose even before he arrived in Detroit. By the time he had to stick at the NHL level, the best thing people had to say about him was that he seemed to play better when surrounded by talent. He has nine goals and 49 points in 213 career games, and I know every single one of you that watches the Wings holds your breath when you see #4 jump over the boards, because you never know when he's going to make that ill-advised pinch, or that asinine pass that results in a giveaway. I've often joked that Quincey, Kindl, Smith, Lashoff, and assorted others besides Kronwall (and even him on occasion) have some sort of Wheel of Fortune game going on, to see which Red Wings defenseman will commit the stupidest mistake in tonight's game.<br />
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Ken Holland is currently in the process of trying to thread a needle. He's trying to transition this roster from one core of players to another, while remaining competitive at the same time, and doing it without the benefit of multiple draft picks at the top of the draft. The Penguins' championship team in 2009 was centered around a nucleus of four players - Fleury, Malkin, Crosby, and Jordan Staal - who were drafted 1st, 2nd, 1st, and 2nd overall respectively in four straight years (2003-2006). The Blackhawks are a deep and talented team, but their ascension to the top of the league and two Stanley Cups would not happen without Jonathan Toews (3rd overall in 2006) and Patrick Kane (1st overall in 2007). The LA Kings' championship team of 2012 was largely in part to Jonathan Quick, a 3rd round pick, but they were still led there by high draft picks: Dustin Brown was 11th overall in 2003, Anze Kopitar was 11th overall in 2005, and Drew Doughty was 2nd overall in 2008. Two of the younger, "trendier" teams predicted to have great success in coming years are St. Louis and Colorado. The Blues have players like Pietrangelo, Shattenkirk, Schwartz and Tarasenko who were all drafted higher than any recent pick the Red Wings have had. Colorado drafted Matt Duchene 3rd overall in 2009, Gabriel Landeskog 2nd overall in 2011, and Nathan MacKinnon 1st overall last year. They also have former #1 overall pick Erik Johnson via their trade with St. Louis (for Kevin Shattenkirk) a few years back. My point is, all of these teams have had the advantage of being able to draft sure-fire stars with very high draft picks. The Red Wings haven't had a draft pick higher than 19th (Kindl in 2007) since they drafted Martin Lapointe 10th overall in 1991. In <b>EIGHT</b> drafts since the turn of the century, they haven't even had a first round pick at all!<br />
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Now obviously I recognize that teams like the Penguins and Blackhawks had to go through some downright shitty seasons in order to draft so high, and the Red Wings were competing for championships while those teams were sucking. But the whole point of this post is to look ahead to the future, and squint really hard to try and see a path for the Red Wings back toward the top of the food chain. It's not easy to see, and Holland hasn't helped himself with some of the moves in recent years. The Red Wings are currently on the hook for nearly four million dollars a year for the next SIX years to Johan Franzen, who turns 35 in December and has completely vanished from the face of the earth. They are on the hook for nearly five million dollars a year for the next four years for Stephen Weiss, who contributed all of four points in 26 games before missing the rest of the season with hernia surgery. They decided to trade one of the best prospects in their farm system for 33 year old David Legwand. Now, in the interest of full disclosure, the scuttlebutt from the Wings' beat writers when that trade was made was that Calle Jarnkrok is unhappy in North America and is/was planning on leaving the NHL and going back to Europe. If that turns out to be the case and they simply traded him for whatever they could get, then so be it. But if Jarnkrok sticks around and turns into a player (9 points in 12 games with Nashville after the trade), that is a black mark on Holland's tenure as GM that will never, ever go away.<br />
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There is room for optimism. The Red Wings have, by all accounts, drafted well despite drafting late more often than not. They're thought to have a top 10-ish farm system, even without Jarnkrok. Gustav Nyquist was a revelation this season, and even that was (for me anyway) somewhat soured by the fact that he was stuck in the AHL for 25 games because of Holland's cap mismanagement and bizarre fascination with exhumed corpses like Todd Bertuzzi, Mikael Samuelsson, and Dan Cleary. Regardless, he's here to stay now, even though he and Tomas Tatar aren't quite "there" enough yet to cope with a defensive leviathan like Boston. We've been given teasing glimpses of defensemen Xavier Ouellet and Ryan Sproul, and goalie Petr Mrazek. I wonder how much rope the organization will give players like Smith, Kindl, Quincey, etc. when younger defensemen like Ouellet, Sproul, Adam Almquist and Alexey Marchenko are waiting in the shadows. Mrazek's star has been on the rise for a while now, too; he posted a .916 SV% and 2.33 GAA in 42 games in Grand Rapids last year, and followed that up with .924 and 2.10 in 32 games this year, in addition to the .927 and 1.74 he put up in nine appearances with the Red Wings this season. If he continues to progress at that rate, he may end up making Jimmy Howard's contract look very stupid. And I'm not a Howard basher. I think he's had some absolutely braindead moments (including in this series against Boston), but I think overall he's done a splendid job considering the defense he's had to put up with over the last few years. But if Mrazek develops into a legitimate #1 goalie, what happens?<br />
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A dozen years ago the Red Wings anointed Pavel Datsyuk and Henrik Zetterberg as the future of the franchise; the kids to whom the torch would be passed from Yzerman and Shanahan. They had their troubles at the beginning, but grew up in the 2006-2007 postseason; not soon enough to save the season in the Western Finals against Anaheim, but enough to set the stage for the magic of 2007-2008. Now, years later, as Datsyuk and Zetterberg inch toward the home stretch of their careers, the next crop is being groomed. You would think Nyquist will develop into a 30-35, possibly even a 40 goal scorer over the course of a full season. Tomas Tatar put up a respectable 39 points in 73 games at age 23 this year. Riley Sheahan is just 22, and he had 24 points in 42 games. Tomas Jurco was a point-per-game player in Grand Rapids this year, and had 15 points in 36 games at the NHL level. Anthony Mantha had 120 points in 57 games in juniors this season; how soon will the Red Wings bring him to Grand Rapids? At 6'5, 205, he certainly has less physical maturing to do than previous prospects in the system.<br />
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Between those names, and Ouellet, Sproul, Marchenko and Almquist on defense, and Mrazek in net, is there a foundation for a successful, top-tier NHL team years down the line? Hell if I know. I'm just a fan. I watched Brendan Smith put up 5 assists in the national semifinal at the Frozen Four in Detroit against RIT and thought he had the look of a top 4 offensive dynamo of an NHL defenseman <i>at worst</i>. So I don't know too much about this whole scouting thing. But I know that it's no fun being in the unfamiliar position of tomato can waiting to be stomped by the Cup favorite in the first round of the Stanley Cup Playoffs. Yet here we are.</div>
Brianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07272986648979988175noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6136487040752878109.post-83737546469686318422014-03-31T01:12:00.000-04:002014-03-31T01:15:01.547-04:00Sometimes The Bear Gets You<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><b>March 20, 2011, Round of 32: #1 Duke 73, #8 Michigan 71</b></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><b><span style="font-size: large;">March 29, 2013, Sweet 16: #4 Michigan 87, #1 Kansas 85</span></b> </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><b>March 30, 2014, Elite 8: #8 Kentucky 75, #2 Michigan 72</b></span></span></div>
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In three of the last four seasons, Michigan's season has come down to one final shot in the dying moments. That's actually pretty astonishing when you think about it. All the chaos and moving parts of a basketball game, boiling down to one shot on three separate occasions in three separate games. All three involved different circumstances, and a Michigan program at different stages of its evolution. Three years ago, Michigan was a scrappy outfit that eeked into the tournament with duct tape and paper clips holding itself together. They got hot down the stretch and played themselves onto the right side of the bubble, and proceeded to nuke Tennessee into the Stone Age in the first round. Their reward was staring down the specter of facing a 31-4 Duke team that was looking to defend its national title - in Charlotte, no less. Michigan hung in for a half, but midway through the second half, Kyle Singler converted a three point play to put Duke up 58-43. The feeling of inevitability began to sink in that Michigan's Gritty McGrittersons just didn't have enough against Duke's team of 4/5 star McDonald's All-Americans.<br />
<br />
Less than two minutes later it was 58-52 courtesy of a mostly Darius Morris-fueled 9-0 run. Duke managed to keep Michigan at an arm's length until Tim Hardaway Jr's three made it 70-69 with 90 seconds to go. It was 73-71 with 10 seconds left when Duke's Nolan Smith missed the second of two free throws, setting the stage for one final chance for Michigan's upset bid.<br />
<br />
What ensued was one of the more heartbreaking moments (until today, I suppose) in recent Michigan history: the image of Morris's floating jumper from just inside the foul line hitting the back rim and bouncing out, followed by Morris pulling his jersey over his face, if only to hide the anguish for a few moments. The difference between overtime and elimination was a few inches. The difference between the end and continuation of Darius Morris's Michigan career just that close.<br />
<br />
Just over a year ago, the Duke script nearly repeated itself, at least in terms of the game that was played. Last year's Michigan team was in a much, much different place than the one that put a psychic terror into Duke's hearts two years prior. That Michigan team finished 21-14, and an 8 seed in the NCAA Tournament is in the lower tier of bids that "big" conference teams get. Last year's team was 28-7 headed into the Sweet 16 against #1 Kansas, and had been closer to the discussion of being a #1 seed than they were to the bubble. College basketball is similar to other sports though, in the sense that when you're not one of the elites in the sport, going up against one of them seems daunting, no matter what. There's an intimidation factor that accompanies the aura that goes with teams like Kansas, Kentucky, Duke, Carolina, UCLA, or a few others. It's something that obviously has a bigger effect on the fans than the actual coaches or players, so when Kansas began to assert its dominance, many of us groaned, and felt it slipping away when Kansas got it to 68-54 with under 7:00 left.<br />
<br />
But Trey Burke wasn't on that 2011 team that came to the brink of erasing a 15-point hole against Duke only to fall short. Nobody told him that to try and fight back when one of the heavyweights hits you with a right cross was a fool's errand. That's part of what makes his shot to tie the game in the final seconds so legendary: it was the <i>audacity</i> of it. To cap an already-improbable comeback with <b>that</b> shot against <b>that</b> team with <b>that</b> amount of time left defies words, even 366+ days later. A couple inches to the left or right, or if Burke had put just a little too much oomph into it and caused it to rattle in and out, and last year's Michigan team is remembered as a team that started the season red hot only to finish 4th in the Big Ten and lose in the Sweet 16. Instead, on the weight of one shot, in one moment, Michigan lived to vanquish Kansas in overtime, firebomb Florida in the Elite Eight, outlast Syracuse in the national semifinal, and come to the precipice of a championship before Louisville beat them to the finish line. The difference between national runner-up and a Sweet 16 exist cannot be accurately quantified, but it's enormous nevertheless.<br />
<br />
Basketball, perhaps even moreso than the other sports, is a fickle, flaky, unfair dame, subject to the whims of men not engaged in the game but mere observers, often influenced by the psychotic ramblings of the masses, in between spits of Skoal. What's the difference between Julius Randle lowering his shoulder and driving it into Jordan Morgan's chest, drawing the foul on Morgan, and Caris LeVert giving a little nudge with his forearm, only to get called for the charge? The answer is there is none, other than whatever asinine rationale the officials who made the calls decided. What's the difference between Marcus Lee's putback slam in the first half that was blatant, flagrant, and obvious offensive goaltending, and his putback slam in the second half that was actually closer to being legitimate (though still illegal)? The answer is nothing; there was no difference, except the referees called one correctly, and ignored the other.<br />
<br />
This was not a foul:<br />
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And neither was this:<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><i>(HT to Dustin Johnston (<a href="https://twitter.com/DJPhotoVideo">@DJPhotoVideo</a>) for the last two images)</i> </span></div>
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But if you ask Kentucky fans about yesterday's game, they will say the officiating was poor all-around, and Michigan fans have no business complaining about not getting a fair whistle.<br />
<br />
And despite all of the above, today came down to, once again, one final shot. Unlike the first two, a miss would not have meant victory or defeat for either team, but overtime instead. And unlike the first two, it wasn't Michigan taking the shot this time. Instead, we could do nothing but sigh, hang our heads, and shrug helplessly as we suffered a dagger even greater than the one Burke plunged into the hearts of Kansas a year ago. Michigan didn't do anything wrong on the play. Harrison wasn't wide open. He didn't get to the rim while Michigan deployed its all-too-common matador defense in the lane. Michigan gave up a deep, contested three from a sub-35% three-point shooter; if you asked Beilein before the possession if that was an acceptable shot to allow, he would've taken it every time. Sometimes, the bear just gets you, and there's nothing you can do about it.<br />
<br />
I'm going to say what's on my mind next at the risk of incurring the wrath of one of America's most insufferable, intolerable fanbases: I fucking hate Kentucky. I don't have a single shred of respect for John Calipari, the program he coaches for, or the psychopaths who march in lockstep with him simply because he wins. I'm hoping that this whole Northwestern football union thing <b>does</b> lead to college athletes being paid, if for nothing else than to bring some sort of level to the playing field that serpents like Calipari currently take advantage of. And I'll never respect a fanbase that spent years denigrating and hating the man when he was at Memphis, only to magically lose their voices when he changed to <b>their</b> shade of blue. I'm also not interested in hearing any apologists who take the "what has he ever been convicted of" route. Yes, it's just a <b>coincidence</b> that both UMass and Memphis had to vacate Final Four seasons after Calipari left. He certainly had nothing to do with any of the misdeeds that went on at either school, he just had bad luck. And he certainly plays by the rules without exception at one of the dirtiest programs in the history of college sports. Kentucky basketball is the equivalent of Ohio State football: both programs fell into a rut that they were no longer willing to stay in, and they placed their programs into the hands of used car salesmen who both have a history of turning a blind eye to the cheating that happens under their watch. Kentucky basketball is one of five programs in the history of the NCAA to receive the death penalty for being flagrant, unrepentant cheaters. But we're supposed to believe that their unprecedented success in recruiting is just a result of Kentucky's gravitas as a program (built on a foundation of cheating) combined with Calipari's personal charisma and previous successes (since erased by cheating). A morally bankrupt coach and a historically corrupt program teamed up and somehow negated each other's filthiness, thus creating some lily-white pure-as-the-driven-snow outfit? Please.<br />
<br />
So yeah, this loss burns the shit out of me. "U mad"? Bet your ass I'm mad. I'm pissed. The window for a team like Michigan under John Beilein is miniscule. Beilein doesn't have the ability to buy off the next five star when he loses a player to the pros. His talent pool is reduced before he even begins recruiting because so many kids have parents, AAU coaches, and handlers going all over the country with their hands out, looking for the payoff that so many programs are willing to give. In college basketball you're only as good as your next recruiting class, and that makes Beilein's margin for error even smaller. Beilein spent years recruiting Devin Booker and Luke Kennard, and five minutes after Kentucky and Duke called, Michigan was an afterthought. And now with Stauskas almost certainly leaving, Robinson probably leaving, and McGary possibly leaving, that window gets just a little tighter, making kids like Jalen Brunson and Jalen Coleman even more important recruits than they already were; making a redshirt like Mark Donnal all the more pivotal, starting as early as next year; making it even more crucial that recruits like Kameron Chatman, DJ Wilson and Ricky Doyle pan out into great players.<br />
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This was a great, great season. Losing two first round picks to the NBA, followed by losing one of the best big men in college basketball, only to respond to all that by winning the Big Ten by three games and returning to the Elite Eight makes this perhaps John Beilein's best coaching job yet. But having to send off a warrior like Jordan Morgan, and seeing the likely end for Stauskas and Robinson by losing to that gangster and his mercenaries is a pill that is just a bit too sour for me to properly digest at the moment.</div>
Brianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07272986648979988175noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6136487040752878109.post-64486400292741319002013-11-27T16:41:00.002-05:002013-11-27T16:44:04.088-05:00Bodies Upon the Gears<center>
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<i>"There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious,
makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part! You can't even
passively take part! And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears
and upon the wheels…upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've
got to make it stop! And you've got to indicate to the people who run
it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will
be prevented from working at all!" </i>- Mario Savio, December 2, 1964<br />
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Have you reached your moment where the operation of the Michigan machine becomes so odious, and makes you so sick at heart, that you can no longer take part?<br />
<br />
I'm pretty much at mine, and I know I'm not alone. Because we cheer for a fundamentally deranged program that operates in an alternate dimension where up is down, down is up, cats and dogs live together, and disdain for the paying customers is an acceptable business model. We cheer for a program that for the better part of a decade now has seemed hellbent on jacking up alcohol sales in the state of Michigan because its specific intent each Saturday in the fall seems to be to inflict the maximum amount of psychic agony on its followers.<br />
<br />
We cheer for a program which seemingly has but one single criterion for employment as head football coach: at some point, you must be connected to the university in some obscure fashion. No coordinator experience necessary, no winning record as a head coach required, just a stint as a position coach many, many years ago. This is <i>Michigan</i>, fergodsake!<br />
<br />
...<b>THIS</b> is Michigan? For god's sake.<br />
<br />
But of course even that is twisted to inflict suffering on us, because while that asinine, stupid-as-shit job requirement specifically excludes 99% of the available people, there falls in that exclusive 1% someone who could've turned this blown up train around, but in reality wants nothing to do with this program. Maybe Jim Harbaugh saw what we tried to ignore for so long, that there is some sort of black magic voodoo hex hovering over this godforsaken thing that cannot be removed.<br />
<br />
Michigan has a shitty season, fires the coach, and fails to land the man who fit the job and time like a hand in a glove.<br />
<br />
Ohio State loses their cheating coach, has a terrible season, and lands the perfect man for the job like it was nothing. If you recall, Urban Meyer's introductory press conference at Ohio State didn't even register as any sort of "breaking" news. It was such a fait accompli, such a foregone conclusion, that when news "broke" that it was happening, it was like, "oh, okay, they're doing it now. Whatever." Ohio State's "coaching search" lasted all of two days. The last two coaching searches by Michigan have been like watching a public stoning. One heinous body blow after another. From sailing Bill Martin to Dave Brandon's ridiculous "Process," the suits behind the scenes at Michigan reek of amateur hour. If you listen to Brandon speak very closely, you can hear the Benny Hill theme song in the background.<br />
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That's the world we live in. OSU operates like a Swiss watch. Michigan operates like week-old Swiss cheese that's been left out on the counter.<br />
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Speaking of Brandon...Jesus Christ. He despises the fanbase (are you one of the lucky ones to get a snarky email in response to a complaint about the product on the field?), is a raging egomaniac, and is in the process of strangling every last nickel and dime out of the paying customers he so derides, all while the product they pay for degenerates with each week.<br />
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Meanwhile, Brady Hoke <a href="http://mgoblog.com/content/monday-presser-transcript-11-11-13-brady-hoke"><u>still likes the play calling</u></a>, <a href="http://www.mlive.com/wolverines/index.ssf/2013/11/brady_hoke_fans_who_want_to_ba.html"><u>thinks some Michigan fans should get a life</u></a>, and <a href="http://mgoblog.com/content/fickle"><u>calls even more Michigan fans fickle</u></a>. For the record, his "get a life" thing is correct. But I find it amusing that the last guy <a href="http://sports.espn.go.com/ncf/news/story?id=3710474"><u>said the exact same thing in nearly the exact same context</u></a>, and was raked over the coals for it. I mean, I'm not surprised. The belief that a "Michigan Man" would automatically cure what Rodriguez did to the program was a laughable myth that is currently in some form of disrepair, but the belief that a "Michigan Man" would be insulated from the same media attacks that ravaged Rodriguez is now confirmed as real, in all its glorious hypocrisy. Hoke has done to the offense in three years exactly what Rodriguez did to the defense, but the chances of Hoke being fired are slim to none. Just as those who held the rope for Rodriguez laid the failure at the feet of Scott Shafer and Greg Robinson, now it's not Hoke's fault the offense has regressed into one of the worst we've ever seen, but instead it's Al Borges who is being scapegoated.<br />
<br />
I ask: who is the one that turns the keys over to Borges each and every week? Who is the man who stands back and allows Borges full autonomy with this offense? The "why doesn't Hoke wear a headset?!" crowd is generally a bit kooky, but the fact is, Hoke is almost entirely hands off during a game, delegating complete authority to his coordinators. That does not absolve him from responsibility for what happens on the field; just the opposite. It makes him directly responsible, because he has hitched his horses to the Borges wagon all year, no matter how far into the water it goes. I'm not of the belief that Hoke should be fired, but if every head coach deserves one mulligan, than it's time for Hoke to use his with Borges, and the results must be immediate. Hoke's recruiting has been universally lauded as one of his very best qualities; but with that comes the expectation that you don't get worse with each season. Yes, the team is young, and young players make mistakes. Yes, Rich Rodriguez left nothing in terms of offensive line depth.<br />
<br />
For some people, that's enough of a reason for this historic ineptitude. For me, I say this goes beyond simply being young. This is a combination of repulsive play calling that I'd wager upward of 90-95% of us can predict as we're watching on TV, and something very, very lacking in the coaching department. Fitz Toussaint is a 5th year senior playing for this coaching staff for the 3rd year, and looks like a true freshman in pass protection. The musical chairs on the offensive line ensured that nothing was going to be accomplished there. Kalis and Bosch and Magnuson are young, yes, and they're paralyzed by Borges's play calling and formations that wave flags at the defense, telling them what's coming. But again, that lands on Hoke. At no point did Hoke step in and take over this offense, even when it was painfully obvious that it was fundamentally broken. Can anyone say if a <b>truly</b> elite coach was in charge here, that this team, with this roster, would look so terrible? Jim Harbaugh inherited a 1-11 Stanford team and by year three, his running back was running for nearly 1900 yards, scoring 28 touchdowns, and finishing 2nd in the Heisman voting - while taking handoffs from a redshirt freshman QB!<br />
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None of it matters. Nothing beside remains. Tomorrow is Thanksgiving. The Lions will likely find a way to biff their 10th Turkey Day in a row; a sort of perverse prelude to the pain that awaits us on Saturday. For the 4th time in 6 years, we trudge our way through Ohio State week like Soviet POWs in 1942; marched through the snow toward a shallow unmarked grave, just hoping the first shot puts us out of our misery and this hellish nightmare ends quickly. We felt confident in 2011, moreso because Ohio State's season was a brain-scrambled mess as a result of their mafia boss coach finally sleeping with the fishes. Last year most of us probably figured we'd lose, but it wasn't like this, or 2008, or 2009, or 2010, where it was just a matter of how bad it would be. We could squint real hard before last year's game and see an outcome favorable to us; not so much this year.<br />
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Instead we're treated to graphics like this...<br />
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<br />
...and the perverse indignity of watching our failed ex-coach slice and dice Oregon into little bits of confetti, while our current coach and his chum of an offensive coordinator put out obscenities like we saw against Michigan State and Nebraska, and turtle into their shells like cowards against Penn State, and lose a game at Iowa we all knew they would lose even when they led by two touchdowns at halftime.<br />
<br />
What all of this tells me is Michigan is okay with institutionalized mediocrity. They're okay with 4-5 loss seasons, just as long as the coach losing 4-5 games is a "Michigan Man," a term I'd like to see nuked and pissed upon. They're okay with being a has-been also-ran as long as they lose in a way that's pleasing to those still living in 1975. It's okay for Michigan to suck, as long as they huddle, and the QB lines up under center, and they run out of the I. The righteous moral high ground of never bending any of the rules is what matters at Michigan.<br />
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Where is the breaking point? What percentage of the crowd has to be red on Saturday for this lunacy to be ended? What margin of defeat against Ohio State will finally be too great? What indignity will be too offensive, too shameful to endure? At what point will the gears of this machine be stopped by the bodies of those no longer willing to take part?Brianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07272986648979988175noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6136487040752878109.post-8498148162643904732013-11-02T19:21:00.000-04:002013-11-04T02:08:26.921-05:00Ozymandias<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<i><span style="font-size: x-small;">(HT: <a href="https://twitter.com/aceanbender">Ace</a> of <a href="http://mgoblog.com/">MGoBlog</a>) </span></i></div>
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<b>Michigan State 29, Michigan 6; 6-2, 2-2</b></div>
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<b> </b><i> </i></div>
<i>Breaking Bad</i> fans already know what "Ozymandias" is. You didn't watch the show without looking it up and reading the sonnet at some point, and figuring out how it fit the narrative of Walter White.<br />
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Wikipedia defines "Ozymandias" as "contrasting the inevitable decline of all leaders and of the empires they build with the lasting power of art, the only thing that has any permanence."<br />
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For Michigan fans, our "Ozymandias" moment has arrived. The moment when we realized the "empire" we once had and aspired to build again is actually closer to existing up the road. There were two teams on the field today. One had a pedestrian, predictable, unimaginative offense that relied more on brute strength and precision than explosiveness and speed, coupled with a smothering, suffocating, soul-destroying defense.<br />
<br />
The other team was Michigan.<br />
<br />
For the record, Michigan State fans wanted to fire the <i><b>fuck</b></i> out of Pat Narduzzi in 2009. In 2009 MSU lost to Central Michigan at home, got bombed by Notre Dame and Wisconsin, gave up 42 points in a loss to Minnesota, got dumptrucked in a four-touchdown loss to Penn State, and gave up 41 points to a Mike Leach-less Texas Tech team in the bowl game to finish 6-7. Don't let revisionism cloud that. They despised Narduzzi and viewed HIM as the problem that caused MSU to regress from their 9-4 2008 season. They bounced back in 2010, outside of one epic failure at Iowa and one unsurprising curbstomping in the bowl game against Alabama. After 2009, MSU has grown into the defensive leviathan we saw today.<br />
<br />
So then, are we supposed to expect the light to suddenly click on for Al Borges in 2014? After three years of flailing around with no identity, no execution and an apparent dearth of talent, do we expect 2014 to suddenly be any different? The conventional wisdom is that by year three, you know what you have, and what you are. By year three of Rich Rodriguez, Michigan fans had thoroughly seen enough and were unwilling to continue the absurd experiment any further. Hoke will (and deserves) more leeway than his predecessor, but the further the Rodriguez era fades into the rearview mirror, the shorter that rope gets for the current staff; particularly after a BCS bowl win in 2011.<br />
<br />
I try to view things in the simplest terms possible, often to a fault. So from my perspective, what I see in front of me is a program that has had one excellent season, followed by two subpar ones. Only a fool would legitimately expect Michigan to beat Ohio State at the end of this month. Almost three full years in, and Michigan has an average defense that cannot generate any kind of pass rush, and an offense that either does nothing (running the ball) or plays with fire (throwing the ball). Put it all together, and I see a program still terminally ill, unable or unwilling to find any sort of competence on offense, and thus hanging a fragile defense out to dry. I see a program going in the wrong direction. For the <b>fourth</b> time in two years, Michigan failed to score a touchdown. That's a special, historic kind of ineptitude that earns the offense the grim distinction of being something close to the equivalent of whatever Rodriguez tried to do on the defensive side of the football during his tenure.<br />
<br />
In 2008, it was Scott Shafer. In 2009 and 2010, even as opposition to Rodriguez mounted, a chunk of Michigan fans still railed against Greg Robinson specifically. To this day, there are still Michigan fans who believe Robinson was the problem and Rodriguez simply needed yet another defensive coordinator to right the ship. Now, the whipping boy is, naturally, Al Borges. There are very obvious and very legitimate problems that fall on Borges, of course. Borges calls the plays, calls the formations, and rams the offense's head into the brick wall.<br />
<br />
But the coordinator is only the symptom. Nothing happens on a football team that doesn't land at the feet of the head coach. Michigan wasn't a laughingstock on defense from 2008 through 2010 because of Shafer and Robinson. They were a laughingstock because the head coach dismissed the defense as nothing more than cannon fodder for the offense in practice. Rodriguez didn't care enough about the defense; he was content to leave it up to his cronies and the coordinator, and whatever happened happened. The result was predictable.<br />
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In that same vein, the problems with Michigan's offense today go beyond just Al Borges. Michigan has been trying in fits and starts for three years now to be what Brady Hoke <i>wants</i> them to be. Hoke has a vision in his head of what he wants the team to be, and regardless of the facts on the ground, he and Borges have tried, multiple times each season, to forcefeed this vision down the roster's throat. It's because of this that Michigan trailed Notre Dame 24-7 after three quarters in 2011, got squashed by Michigan State and Iowa in 2011, and needed a series of highly improbable events bordering on miracles to win the Sugar Bowl against Virginia Tech. It contributed to Michigan's losses to Notre Dame, Nebraska, and Ohio State in 2012, and it has now castrated Michigan's 2013 season. Events like the aforementioned grabbed Hoke and Borges by their collars and dragged them kicking and screaming back into the shotgun-oriented spread offense, resulting in things like the 4th quarter against ND in 2011, 45-17 against Nebraska, 40-34 against Ohio State, and the like. There have been a small handful of games in the last two and a half years that left us wondering, "where has that been?!"<br />
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All the while, an enormous disconnect has formed. Under Rodriguez, Michigan had coaches who made fans cringe and hold their breath when they spoke, because Rodriguez didn't have the inner censor that should have prevented some of the gaffes he made. That made him appear like an oafish clown at times, and the results that followed on the field and in recruiting matched up. Now, Michigan has coaches who say all the right things and recruit like Michigan is supposed to recruit, and then when the lights go on on Saturdays, the team faceplants itself into the turf. The 6-2 record looks decent enough but is completely devoid of any merit when "wins" against Akron and Connecticut feel like losses, and the defense gets doused with gasoline and set ablaze against <i>Indiana</i>. Hoke himself is emphatic about the Big Ten championship being the one and only goal that matters. By that measure, three years into his tenure, Hoke is a failure. Most of us are more lenient because we know the dumpster fire he inherited. But all good will has an expiration date. Of all the indignities witnessed over the last couple years, today might have been the most egregious. The final realization that, with a sledgehammer of emphasis, Michigan State has absolutely <b>lapped</b> this program. MSU has ravaged this program for 5 out of 6 years now, and outside of one spectacular meltdown by MSU in the final minutes of the fourth quarter in 2009, really none of the games have been close. Each year this has happened, Michigan fans have lamented and vowed that this would be the last year Michigan gets physically demolished by Michigan State. And each year, it happens again. Rushing for -48 yards, giving up seven sacks, scoring zero touchdowns and losing by 23 points should not happen in year three. I'm not a subscriber to the internet lunatic theory that ONE game should result in firings, but this has been building for a while, and today was the final straw for me, as far as Al Borges is concerned. If you also believe that every head coach is entitled to a mulligan, then Hoke has spent his and needs to move against Borges ASAP. John Beilein did this after 2009-2010, and the results have been plain as day. The basketball program faced a sink or swim moment: following up the first NCAA Tournament appearance in a decade with a dismal 15-17 showing in 2009-10, Beilein knew that the current configuration was no longer compatible with success in the Big Ten. So out went Jerry Dunn, Mike Jackson and John Mahoney. In came Jeff Meyer, LaVall Jordan, and Bacari Alexander. The upward progression since then: 21-14, 24-10, 31-8, with a conference title and a Final Four banner, and a preseason top 10 ranking headed into 2013-14.<br />
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Does Hoke have it in him to do the same? Football coaches are notorious for their inflexibility and stubbornness. Hoke's militant dedication to this antiquated "manball" concept when, in year three, Michigan cannot move a pile whatsoever, makes him look foolish. Hoke and Borges run their offense like it's 1970 and they can simply line up, tip the play, and push the other guys around. How many of Michigan's losses since 2011 have been a result of stubborn, bullheaded offensive philosophy that is rarely applicable in today's game? Hoke wants to be Stanford, but has a fraction of the talent. If Michigan played Stanford, the result would be similar to today's abomination. And at this point there's nothing that can be done to save this season. November is less than 48 hours old, and Michigan's title chances are dead on arrival. The destination is another second-tier bullshit Florida bowl, with a quarterback who doesn't value the football, an offensive line that has as good a chance of running into each other as they have of blocking the other team on any given play, and a defense that can't rush the passer, turns guys loose in the secondary with regularity, and is increasingly erratic at tackling.<br />
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Michigan will continue this maddening trend. To expect otherwise is to expect a radical change in human nature. Michigan will continue to ram its head into the brickwall, over and over, expecting different results, until nothing beside remains. Michigan is on the path toward becoming that shattered visage of Ozymandias. The same thing, over and over again.<br />
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And each Saturday, we look on its works, and despair. Dominated by one rival for a decade, physically crushed by another, with no true end in sight, because the offense, stamped on these lifeless things, knows nothing than to do as it has done.<br />
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"Round the decay<br />
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare<br />
The lone and level sands stretch far away."Brianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07272986648979988175noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6136487040752878109.post-23983372322216181902013-06-19T15:07:00.001-04:002013-06-19T15:07:46.160-04:00This Is Neither Genuine, Nor SarcasticI know there is a large segment of Michigan fans who look down upon fellow Michigan fans who pay any sort of attention to the antics of Michigan State, but highlighting lunacy, and particularly lunacy from allegedly unbiased media types, is a hobby of mine, and this is just too good to pass up.<br />
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Matt Dorsey of SpartanMag, MSU's Rivals affiliate, posted this a few months ago:<br />
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<br />Yesterday, Dorsey released his "post camp" top 25 in the state of Michigan.<br />
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The results?<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhEjbO3IVUEmobyw1HwjKoT0j1hnqVFUjRn6ricRPgpvdiSXiuoM9NLowUkx1skfFh2fviEUzBcDobw9muuVbwhqn9dbbxhg6RleF5vMlWZUWo5MddOUJa1FQaU60ZG194YQU2O2R2Yc77V/s1600/lol-dorsey.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhEjbO3IVUEmobyw1HwjKoT0j1hnqVFUjRn6ricRPgpvdiSXiuoM9NLowUkx1skfFh2fviEUzBcDobw9muuVbwhqn9dbbxhg6RleF5vMlWZUWo5MddOUJa1FQaU60ZG194YQU2O2R2Yc77V/s1600/lol-dorsey.jpg" /></a></div>
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What could have happened in the last few months to suddenly diminish Drake Harris in the eyes of Matt Dorsey? How many licks does it take to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop?<br />
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The world may never know.Brianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07272986648979988175noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6136487040752878109.post-81323813686256631622013-06-06T08:00:00.000-04:002013-06-10T22:12:27.352-04:00Requiem: Denard Robinson<div style="text-align: center;">
<b>Denard Robinson</b></div>
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<b> </b><span style="font-size: large;">Quarterback, 5'10, 196</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Deerfield Beach, FL; De<span style="font-size: large;">erfield Beach HS<b> </b></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><b>Rivals:</b> 4 stars, #14 athlete, #188 overall<b> </b></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><b>Scout: </b>4 stars, #16 cornerback, #159 overall<b> </b></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><b>ESPN: </b>4 stars, #7 athlete, #101 overall<b> </b></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><b>Committed to Michigan - February 4, 2009</b> </span> </span><b> </b></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">I have used the "requiem" tag five times in the history of this blog; a perhaps overly dramatic way of bid<span style="font-size: small;">ding a final farewell to those who depart f<span style="font-size: small;">rom the athletic programs we love so much. Five times: <b><a href="http://genuinelysarcastic.blogspot.com/2008/06/requiem-mario-manningham.html">Mario Manningham,</a> <a href="http://genuinelysarcastic.blogspot.com/2008/07/requiem-chad-henne.html">Chad Henne,</a> <a href="http://genuinelysarcastic.blogspot.com/2008/07/requiem-mike-hart.html">Mike Hart,</a> and <a href="http://genuinelysarcastic.blogspot.com/2010/06/requiem-brandon-graham.html">Brandon Graham</a></b> for football, an<span style="font-size: small;">d <b><a href="http://genuinelysarcastic.blogspot.com/2010/03/requiem-detroit-duo.html">one for Manny Harris and DeShawn Sims,</a></b> w<span style="font-size: small;">ho stuck around to hel<span style="font-size: small;">p rescue a basketball program from the w<span style="font-size: small;">ilderness. I keep the "requiem" tag tucked deeply away, and am always hesitant to bring it out; I consider it <span style="font-size: small;">somet<span style="font-size: small;">hing close to sacred<span style="font-size: small;"> in my own <span style="font-size: small;">mind, and I don't <span style="font-size: small;">want to cheapen it by using it too often.</span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span> I consi<span style="font-size: small;">der the aforementioned pieces some of the finest writing I've done here, based primarily on the feedback I received from them. Someone once <span style="font-size: small;">told me (and later showed me in person) that they <span style="font-size: small;">printed out my Mike Hart requiem and taped it up on t<span style="font-size: small;">he wall in their office<span style="font-size: small;">. Another person told me my Graham requiem ma<span style="font-size: small;">de them cry. It was <span style="font-size: small;">later brought to my attention that Brandon Graham himself (somehow) found out about it, and wanted to let me know he appreciated <span style="font-size: small;">my words. So, yeah...I value the "requiem" tag a little bit more than the rest of the blog.</span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;">In this<span style="font-size: small;"> case...I feel as if I should have something more. I feel as if I owe Denard Robinson more than the <span style="font-size: small;">simple tag given to the <span style="font-size: small;">others. He always had something more for us. But alas, here it is.<span style="font-size: small;"> I mentioned that I use these types of posts as a final goodbye. But how do you say goodbye to someone who has meant so much, for so long? How can you simply <span style="font-size: small;">move past one of the most important players to ever wear th<span style="font-size: small;">e helmet; someone that unite<span style="font-size: small;">d so <span style="font-size: small;">many when so many w<span style="font-size: small;">ere divided? Denard Robinson arrived <span style="font-size: small;">as a<span style="font-size: small;"> cauldron of <span style="font-size: small;">fire boiled in Ann Arbor. He was handed the world and asked to guide it <span style="font-size: small;">out of the fire from which <span style="font-size: small;">he inherited it<span style="font-size: small;">.</span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span> He was asked to be perfect, at an imperfect time, in an imperfect world. He <span style="font-size: small;">never knew how to be pe<span style="font-size: small;">rfect, though; none of us do. But unlike the <span style="font-size: small;">rest<span style="font-size: small;"> of us, Denard never <span style="font-size: small;">dwelled on the negatives. To stop smiling would be <span style="font-size: small;">akin to tying his shoes, or cutting his hair: antithetical to his very essence. Denard doesn't know how to be cynical, or pe<span style="font-size: small;">ssimistic. In that sense, he's a better person than the rest of us. Today's <span style="font-size: small;">line between college and professional football is more blurred than ever. Certain programs are <span style="font-size: small;">run like cutthroa<span style="font-size: small;">t NFL franchises, buying the best recruits money can buy, processing those who don't cut it, and tossing in any a<span style="font-size: small;">nd all incentives in between that can give them <span style="font-size: small;">an edge. While this went on, Denard Robinson dr<span style="font-size: small;">ove an old beaten up car and cherished each day he was in college. It was never about him. Other quarterbacks have come through that tunnel in Michigan Stadium<span style="font-size: small;">, yearning for the spotlight and never shying away from a <span style="font-size: small;">camera or microphone. While others s<span style="font-size: small;">ought the spotlight, Denard Robinson purposefully told reporters to leave him alone on September 11, 2010, as the sun faded away into the <span style="font-size: small;">horizon in <span style="font-size: small;">South Bend, as Denard, having completed one of the most magical games any of us will ever see, desperately sought out <span style="font-size: small;">Manti Te'o to congratulate him on a spirited contest between two warriors<span style="font-size: small;">. <span style="font-size: small;">A year later, after another surreal slaying of Notre Dame, Denard laug<span style="font-size: small;">hed like a kid <span style="font-size: small;">live on ESPN when Chris Fowler told h<span style="font-size: small;">im how many yards he had <span style="font-size: small;">accumulated. It wasn't the laugh of someone yearning for accolades and acceptance. It was the laugh of someone too light-hearted and innocent to realize the magnitu<span style="font-size: small;">de of what he had done<span style="font-size: small;">; too embarrassed to <span style="font-size: small;">have the attention on him for even a second<span style="font-size: small;">. In that sense, he<span style="font-size: small;">'s a better person than the rest of us.</span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;">I spend an excessive amount of time on this blog-type thing comparing pedestrian things like football to the bigger picture of life. Sometimes when I look back on things I've written, I scratch my head and wonder where the hell I was going with it. The truth is, I never do "drafts" or "outlines" for anything that appears here. I never plan ahead or schedule things. I wait for the muse to hit me, and then I sit down and type, often at hours when everyone else is sleeping, because I abandoned the thought of being "normal" a long time ago. The peace and quiet that comes with being awake at 4:00 in the morning is mixed in with the haunting stillness of the night. But the combination suits me. I can't say when that process came to be, but that's what it is. So in the middle of the night, I type. Many times I end up erasing the words I type, or abandoning posts I've started altogether. If I were to go through the archives on Blogger, I'd find numerous unposted entries in some degree of completion. Usually it's because I lost interest in whatever I was creating, or my state of mind shifted away in another direction, so what I was writing no longer made sense, or appealed to me. I don't post here for the sake of posting - if I were to do that, I wouldn't go months between posts like I usually do now. I only create something and share it with others here when I feel moved enough to see it through to the end. My day-to-day feelings and moods often provide a significant hinderance to this process; there isn't much that moves the needle for me anymore. Politics are too frustrating to invest too much time in. Sports are always there, <a href="http://genuinelysarcastic.blogspot.com/2011/08/jenny-youre-barely-alive.html">but as I've mentioned here before,</a> the perspective of life has dulled my senses to things I used to find both joy and despair in. An optimist would look at that and comment on how that means I'm no longer a wretched, miserable mess whenever a team I cheer for loses, while the pessimist would note that victory no longer brings euphoria to me. The Red Wings just finished playing the Blackhawks in the playoffs. I know in my mind that was supposed to be a <i>big fucking deal.</i> But it just doesn't get my heart pumping like it once did. I slept through Game 2 of that series, that's how little it really mattered to me. So when I take those strolls down memory lane and see how dramatic I made things seem, it puzzles me. As if someone else entirely wrote all that stuff.</span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;">But at the same time, I can still see parallels. If football is a metaphor for life, then Denard Robinson is all of us. Every person who grows up in this world eventually has some sort of expectation placed on their shoulders, even if they don't realize it. We all have people in our lives who hold us to a certain standard, and expect us to live up to that ideal, even if we're unsure of the requirements. Whether it's a parent, or a teacher, or a spouse, or a friend, or a child, or a complete stranger, there is always someone overseeing all that we do, paying attention. Often times, we are completely oblivious to the eyes on us. Four years ago, I wonder if Denard Robinson had any idea what was ahead for him. This carefree, happy-go-lucky kid from south Florida who had a rough upbringing decided that his way out was going to be Michigan. Did he give any thought to the bigger picture? Was he even aware of it enough to know the true magnitude of that picture? High school recruits always throw out the size of Michigan Stadium as one of the positives about Michigan - but do they ever pause and consider what that really means? For a few Saturdays each fall, Michigan Stadium holds over 110,000 fans - but how many <i>don't</i> come to the games? How many people are out there, spread across this country, and even this planet, who call themselves "Michigan fans" and tune in to watch the football team each week during the season? Being a football player at the University of Michigan means something more than just putting on the winged helmet. Being a quarterback for Michigan means more than just calling plays and throwing the ball. Being a <i>starting</i> quarterback for Michigan is bigger than just leading a football team for a dozen games a year.</span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;">Starting at quarterback for Michigan means you are one of the most recognizable</span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"> people on campus. It means you have thousands upon thousands upon thousands of eyes watching you every weekend, with an often-irrational level of expectation. But it also means you have to grow up a little quicker than you expected. When you play QB at U-M, you inherit the legacy and prestige of those who came before you, and with that you carry the responsibility of continuing that tradition. Those men, long departed from U-M, were likely foreign to the undersized kid from Florida with the dreadlocks and the bright smile. Denard Robinson never grew up dreaming of following in the footsteps of Brian Griese, or Tom Brady, or John Navarre, or Chad Henne. He just wanted to find a good school that would give him a chance to play quarterback. When he committed to Michigan, most of us figured he'd get a year in at QB, and then move somewhere where he could be more useful, like running back or receiver. Two of the major recruiting sites listed him as an "athlete;" AKA, maybe he could play QB in a pinch, but he'd be more productive at receiver or something. Another site didn't even give him that; Scout listed him as a cornerback. If all things were equal, Denard probably would've gone to Florida - he showed up at his commitment press conference wearing a Gators cap. But Florida didn't see him as a quarterback; Rich Rodriguez did. The man who turned a three-star kid from some small town in southwestern Alabama into one of the deadliest dual-threat quarterbacks in college football history saw something in Denard that he liked.</span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span><br />
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But even then, there was no expectation for Denard. We all knew about his speed, and going into Florida and snagging a speed freak from the Gators excited us, but on Signing Day 2009, the discussion of quarterback was all about the kid from California who had been groomed to be a big-time QB his whole life. Tate Forcier was supposed to be the salvation; the one who guided us from the depths of the 2008 disaster. The future of one of college football's blueblood programs rested on a teenager. And for a moment in time, he appeared ready to handle that weight. Even as we as a fanbase continue to move on from the Rodriguez era (even now rarely does a day go by on The Fort where an RR topic is not brought up), we still go to YouTube to watch what Forcier did to Notre Dame on that sunny day in 2009. Denard barely saw the field that day, and Tate engineered a miracle. There was no doubt to whom the future belonged.<br />
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But Forcier wasn't able to cope with the expectations. The weight of the world proved too much for him to hold up. In retrospect, we should've known (and in fairness, many did indeed predict) what would happen. Parents who micromanage and control their children to the point of suffocation only serve to ruin them. Forcier's story is a sad one, because while opposing fans and media chastized him for being too arrogant, too flamboyant, too cocky, what else was he supposed to be? Humility is something that is taught at a young age, but can just as easily be snuffed out. Tate Forcier grew up in a world that told him he was the greatest thing since sliced bread. When you hear that enough, the need to improve in the face of adversity withers away. And as the 2009 season slipped away and Tate gradually broke down, he encountered an adversity that he had never seen, and worse, had never been prepared for. So when that offseason hit, there was no reason, in his mind, to do anything different. He had been handed the job when he got here, so of course it was going to be his no matter what.<br />
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For Denard Robinson, the opposite holds true. When you grow up in less than ideal family conditions, in a neighborhood that most of us wouldn't dare enter, and when you're a quarterback under 6'0 without any polish to your game whatsoever, adversity is all you know. People telling you you aren't good enough becomes a rallying point for you in your own mind. Complacency isn't something that ever threatens to permeate your conscience. So while Denard spent most of 2009 on the sideline, only getting occasional plays here and there, and rarely getting to throw a pass, he never doubted himself. If anything, he would look and see Forcier leading the offense, and would be even more motivated to work harder.<br />
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At some point between the 2009 finale and the 2010 season opener, two ships passed in the night. One quarterback felt secure in his position, and did nothing. Another yearned for more, and did everything. And in that process, Denard Robinson took the title of "savior" away from Tate Forcier, and never, ever gave it back. If history beckons those who seek it out, then history will remember Denard fondly, because as the storm clouds continued to gather over Schembechler Hall, and as the inferno our beloved football program was in only got hotter, Denard grabbed the bull by the horns.<br />
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Michigan fans haven't really had a "normal" season opener in a while; at least in terms of expectations, that is. In that sense, 2007 was the last one, and by the time the 2007 season opener was over, everything we thought was true simply wasn't so. Every opener that's followed has been shrouded in some degree of uncertainty: 2008 brought the dawn of an era we thought would open us up to the future we had rejected for so long; 2009, we were hoping for simplicity in the form of completed passes and a lack of fumbles; 2010 was another new quarterback and more prayers for no more goddamn fumbles; 2011 was <i>another</i> new coach and <i>another</i> "new" offense, and the uncertainty that came with all of that; last year, many Michigan fans clung to the belief that Michigan could actually hang with Alabama.<br />
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The 2010 season opener was an unusual festival of expectation, excitement, fear, and the uncertainty of what might happen if things went sour as those ever-present storm clouds still loomed over all of our heads. UConn was viewed as a very sturdy opponent with a defense that was expected to (and ultimately would) lead them toward a possible Big East title and a BCS bowl. Michigan was starting a new quarterback for the fourth time in four seasons, and for the third straight year under Rodriguez. We had seen glimpses of what Denard was capable of as a runner in his freshman season, but his passing wasn't anything anybody had anything good to say about. Forcier was the football equivalent of a pencil that had been ground down to the eraser by the end of the 2009 season, but there was still much trepidation and worry among the fanbase when the offense took the field to start 2010 and it was Denard, not Tate, at quarterback.<br />
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Denard's first drive as Michigan's starting quarterback started at his own four yard line, and 96 yards and six minutes later, it ended in the endzone. His second drive ended with him running 32 yards for a touchdown, during which Matt Millen declared "that's six" with Denard still 20 yards from scoring. By the end of the day he had completed 19 of 22 passes for 186 yards and a touchdown, and run for 197 more, leaving most of us wondering what exactly we had just seen. The wide-eyed kid who ran with such exuberance and had no touch or skill behind his passes as a freshman now resembled some sort of ninja.<br />
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But Denard couldn't save Rich Rodriguez, because only Rich Rodriguez could save Rich Rodriguez. Doing so would've required a radical and fundamental uprooting of his philosophy - if you've ever met a football coach, you know that change is not something that tolerate kindly. Denard could only do what was asked of him; it wasn't his job to save the defense - that task was placed in the hands of an old man with some sort of stuffed animal on the sidelines. All Denard could do was take the field, regardless of what the defense did previously. He opened our eyes against UConn, and captured our hearts and minds the following week. What Denard did in Notre Dame Stadium that day is something none of us will ever forget; the fact that he somehow managed to eclipse that performance the following year is almost unfathomable. History is written by the winners - nobody remembers Michigan's offense stalling for large, yawning portions of the 2010 game in South Bend; we remember Denard's breathtaking 87-yard touchdown, and the final drive that won the game. Nobody remembers (or just chooses to forget) three quarters of flailing ineptitude in 2011; we just remember perhaps the most electrifying quarter of Michigan football any of us will ever bear witness to.<br />
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Even as the 2010 season started to fade, and Rodriguez entered the walking ghost stage of his Michigan tenure, Denard never wavered. Iowa, Penn State and Wisconsin all raced out to huge leads against Michigan; leads that they would not relinquish. But nevertheless, Denard wowed us. Against Penn State in particular, Denard brought the team to a position where a defensive stop meant a chance to tie the game. The defense failing in that task does not diminish what Denard did, even as the brutality of the season took its toll on him physically.<br />
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I sometimes wonder what Denard was feeling when the axe finally came down on his head coach in the wake of the atrocity against Mississippi State in the Gator Bowl. Was he angry? Was he distressed? Did he blame himself, or the AD? Did he cry for the man who brought him to Michigan, or did he swallow that despair? I imagine there is always a sense of guilt for players when their coach is fired. It seems it would be a very helpless feeling, knowing that you gave your best, but things ended badly anyway.<br />
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Did you know there were only six days between Rich Rodriguez's firing and Brady Hoke's hiring? I looked that up, and did a double take. I guess because it seemed so obvious for so long that Rodriguez was DOA, that the time between firing and hiring felt like weeks. 12 days after Rodriguez was fired, and six days after Hoke was hired, Denard Robinson announced he was staying at Michigan. It would've been easy, and understandable, for him to transfer. He could've gone elsewhere, taken a redshirt, and still played two more years of football. But the same fundamental attitude that allowed him to eclipse Forcier following the 2009 season is the same attitude that did not steer him away from Michigan once the man who brought him here was cast away. "Those who stay will be champions" is a punchline used by Ohio State fans nowadays because Michigan hasn't won a Big Ten championship in nearly a decade; and it is in that two-dimensional line of thought that said OSU fans expose their ignorance, and the mentality that nothing outside the football field matters. In Columbus, <b><a href="http://www.gannett-cdn.com/media/USATODAY/gameon/2012/11/24/2012-11-24-ohio-state-4_3_r560_c560x380.jpg">no transgression is too egregious; as long as you win on the field, any sin you commit off it is just background noise.</a></b><br />
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Things are <i>slightly</i> different at Michigan. Being a champion on the field is important, certainly. But that's not the only definition of "champion" that is valued. Chris Webber had more success on the court at Michigan than Denard Robinson had on the football field. One of them has been exiled from the university for over 10 years now; the other is and will always be welcomed with open arms as long as he lives. In a twisted sense of irony, the kind that life always loves to throw in our faces, for all the "Michigan Men" that have coached Michigan over the decades, the one who was decidedly <i>not</i> part of that group was the one who brought Denard Robinson to Michigan, and I can think of no one who better exemplifies what Michigan stands for than Denard. A sub-6'0 quarterback with average passing ability on his best days would never have been recruited by Moeller, Carr, or Hoke today. Only under Bo, during his dalliance with the option, would a QB with Denard's measurables and skillset have been an option (ha!), and even then that was because Bo (and the era as a whole) didn't give much thought to passing the ball. The "prototype" that came to exist at Michigan was cultivated by Harbaugh, Grbac, Collins, Dreisbach, Griese, Brady, Henson, Navarre, and Henne, and will continue going forward under Gardner, Morris, and Speight: tall, big-armed quarterbacks who would very rarely run under any circumstance and would operate almost exclusively under center in a "pro-style" offense. Tossed in the middle of all those names though will be Denard; rarely under center, and often scampering for huge chunks of yardage. In terms of actually passing the ball as a quarterback, Denard would likely rank near or at the bottom of that long list of names. Does that tarnish what he did in his time at Michigan? To some, I suppose it does.<br />
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I, on the other hand, contend that Denard's legacy is bigger than the stats. He arrived at the darkest moment in the program's history, went through two years of nonstop controversy, when seemingly each day brought another piece of bad publicity for his coach and his program. At no point did he allow any of this nonsense to affect his play, and that showed. Denard willed the program through the storm, not just on the field during games, but off the field. If Bo's death on the eve of the Ohio State game in 2006 was the beginning of a period of immeasurable suffering for the program, then I say that Denard announcing he was staying after Hoke was hired was the end of that pain. One of the biggest arguments fans used (myself included at times) in defense of Rodriguez was the thought that another coaching change would bring about more transfers and defections and the steep hill we were already trying to get over would become steeper still. We assumed that the mass exodus that occurred in the wake of Rodriguez's hire was the norm during transitions from one coach to another. Brady Hoke not being the volatile bomb thrower that Rodriguez was certainly played a big part in that nightmare not repeating itself; but Denard Robinson was the face of the program in mid-January 2011, and him announcing that he believed in the new head coach enough to stick around despite everyone knowing that they were not a perfect match for each other transcends anything Denard accomplished on the field in a helmet and pads.<br />
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In the four games against Ohio State following the 2006 game, Michigan scored 27 points. <i>Total</i>. In each of these games, it felt like any sort of positive yardage on the ground was a major plus, because Michigan was so thoroughly outclassed in the trenches. It felt like any defensive stop shy of 10 yards was significant, because the defense degenerated into such a jumbled puddle of goo that it seemed like Ohio State could and would score on every play. When Chris Wells scored in 2007 to make it 7-3, that game was <b>over</b>, that's how non-existent Michigan's offense was. When Wells scored in 2008 to make it 7-0, that game was <b>over</b>, because that was the worst Michigan team ever and that game was basically over before it started anyway. Michigan showed one tiny glimpse of fight in 2009 when they scored early in the second half to make it 14-10, but Ohio State responded with nine straight runs before scoring on a touchdown pass, and that game was <b>over</b>. In 2010 that game was <b>over</b> before it began because Michigan's coach was a walking ghost and everyone knew it; it was just a matter of how bad Ohio State wanted to make it. The gap between the two programs that began under Carr exploded to Grand Canyon levels under Rodriguez to the point where we genuinely didn't expect anything to go right. Like I said, any miniscule gain of yardage was a success.<br />
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The lead-up to the 2011 game was unfamiliar. Ohio State was flailing around through an aborted season because their crime lord had finally bitten the dust after 10 years of cheating, while Michigan was surprising everybody and looking like a pretty decent football team. Two weeks before the Ohio State game, Michigan was 7-2 and headed into Champaign to play an Illinois team with a pretty lofty defensive ranking. U-M had a hitch in their giddyup because of that frustrating 24-16 loss at Iowa the week before. The 7-2 record looked precarious with games against Illinois, Nebraska and OSU still to come. When Michigan responded with shocking, sledgehammer-like brutality against Illinois (31-14) and Nebraska (45-17), we as fans found ourselves in a spot we weren't used to: we <b>expected</b> to beat Ohio State. The offense that stalled out against Michigan State and Iowa found some sort of groove against the Illini and Huskers. At the same time, the scars of the previous years against Ohio State kept us humble, and afraid. When Ohio State's opening drive ended with a 54 yard touchdown and Michigan's opening drive ended with three plays, five yards, and a punt, that same cold knot of dread grew inside all of us. We had seen this goddamned movie before. We knew the ending.<br />
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On the second play of Michigan's second drive, the script changed. Denard Robinson pulled the ball out of Fitzgerald Toussaint's stomach, made a one-step juke on Etienne Sabino, found the sideline, and raced 41 yards into the endzone with no one close to touching him, smiling the whole way home. On the next drive, after a safety gave Michigan its first lead against OSU in four years, Denard lobbed a pass some 30 yards down the middle of the field, into what seemed to be a mass of players, both Wolverine and Buckeye. As it turned out, though, the pass had a planned destination after all, as Junior Hemingway appeared to materialize out of nowhere in the endzone, plucking the football out of the air and putting Michigan ahead 16-7.<br />
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<img src="http://www.mikedesimone.com/m11/ohiostate/tb06.jpg" /></center>
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Denard's performances against Notre Dame in 2010 and 2011 are the ones most often cited as his best, or most electric, or whatever superlative you prefer. His virtuoso performance against OSU in 2011 almost feels overlooked at times, for reasons I can't figure out. Few players have worn the winged helmet and performed better against Ohio State than Denard did in 2011. The years of psychological torture that were laid to rest that day were done so almost entirely by Denard.<br />
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If you look through photos of Denard in action in a Michigan uniform (including the one above), he's smiling so much, so often. I can't think of any player who smiles on a football field as much as Denard. Football is a violent, destructive game, with less and less emphasis on the "game" part with each passing year. It's all about glory and power and ultimately money now; you don't really see anybody playing the game for the sheer joy of it. Denard was unique like that. He plays football the way I wish all of us could live life: light-hearted and with a smile, having fun.<br />
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One of the few times that I vividly remember Denard not smiling was against Michigan State last year. The win over Ohio State in 2011 left the Spartans as the only blackmark on Denard's resume at Michigan. The outrageous spectacle of the Spartans running their stupid mouths on Twitter during Michigan's loss to Alabama to open last season made it personal - the comedy of MSU players talking trash about someone being whipped by Alabama aside. Mark Dantonio's entire program is built on hypocrisy; for Denard to have gone winless against them during his career would've been a perverse indignity.<br />
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I get the sense that Denard felt the same way. Last year's game was one of the more "smashmouth" games I've seen Michigan involved in. Both defenses were A+ on that day (despite being stuck with a D- Big Ten Network crew that honestly made the broadcast dull and listless for such a big game, but I digress). MSU spent three years focusing every ounce of their energy on defense on stopping Denard, and they succeeded three times - the difference last year being that Michigan's defense kept MSU's offense in its rightful fetal position all day, giving Denard one final chance to exact the vengeance he specifically set out for before the season. After he completed the final pass to Dileo and spiked the ball to stop the clock, Denard marched toward the sideline, a scowl on his face, as if ordering Brendan Gibbons onto the field to win the game, as if to say, "I've had it with these motherfuckers. Enough is enough."<br />
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As I mention on here far too frequently, they're called storybook endings, not "real life endings." So, naturally, Denard couldn't ride off into the sunset. He would instead be strong-armed to the sideline with a weakened arm. With each game, it seemed like Al Borges grew more and more impatient with the mish-mash hybrid offense he had thrown together to accomodate Denard's skillset. Thus, even as Denard's third year as a starter progressed, his effectiveness and ability to put points on the board seemed to flounder. Even then, the instant he went off the field that night in Lincoln last year, we all witnessed just how precious and valuable he was. That was a very winnable game that lost all possibility of victory when Denard's elbow hit the turf in the wrong spot. Michigan lost the Legends Division to Nebraska by one game.<br />
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Denard was never perfect. He was an imperfect passer in an imperfect offense on an imperfect team at an imperfect <span style="font-size: small;">point in history</span>. He was recruited for one thing and ended his career doing another. The coach who recruited him at the start was fired; the coach who had him at the end wouldn't want him under regular circumstances. He had moments of strangled ineptitude mixed in with moments of sheer brilliance; the inconsolable sadness on his face after the Iowa loss in 2009, and the visceral, primal screaming of euphoria as he raced onto the field after the Sugar Bowl against Virginia Tech. What he inherited was a once-great civilization that was unraveling and depended on him and him alone to hold it together; what he leaves behind is a civilization on its way toward being great again, and has evolved to the point where he was no longer the savior, but just along for the ride. The lunacy of 67-65 triple overtime wins and last minute 42-35 wins has been replaced with boring, uneventful 45-0 and 44-13 slaughters, and in that transition, the base need for Denard Robinson to be all things at all times faded away.<br />
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Denard Robinson's college career represented everything about the everyday lives we lead: fleeting moments of both despair and delirium sprinkled amongst the everyday dramas and burdens, while always trying to move forward and make the best of what we have. An equal part tragedy and triumph, we close the book on Denard's career with the memories of Notre Dame, editions 2010 and 2011, Ohio State 2011, and Michigan State 2012, and a BCS bowl win. We remember 200 yards of offense against Bowling Green in ten minutes, and two long touchdown runs that turned out to be crucial against Air Force, and taking Illinois and Purdue and bludgeoning them back into their proper places after the horrors of 2008 and 2009. We remember him bowing in prayer and giving thanks each time he scored; ironic, because it was us who gave thanks to him even more.<br />
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The future that lies ahead for the football team we all hold dear is a bright and prosperous one. But while we anticipate it and eagerly wait to see what the five-star running back from Virginia or the five-star cornerback from New Jersey can do, let us never forget the one who set the stage for this bright new frontier; the one who bridged the gap between the darkness of yesterday and the dawn of tomorrow.<br />
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There's a little Denard Robinson inside all of us, I think. People like to talk about little angels and devils sitting on shoulders. Maybe there's a little Denard there too; that voice that encourages improvisation and creativity, and making the most of a situation, no matter how grim; a voice that tells us to smile, and to enjoy what we have, in the time we have it; a voice that doesn't take no for an answer. The next time life throws a 300 pound lineman at you, the Denard in you will help evade it. And when it clings to your ankles, desperate to drag you down in defeat, your inner Denard will give you the strength to press forward and complete the pass anyway. And when you find yourself rapidly running out of space, and your obstacles and burdens bear down on you, the Denard inside you will give you just enough to escape and move forward.<br />
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You may not reach the endzone. But you will be closer to your goal. You may drop the ball, but you'll be able to pick it up. Your best laid plans may go awry, but you'll always have a contingency.<br />
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That was Denard Robinson. Never perfect, often smiling, always humble. He helped us remember how to fly, even at our darkest moments when we thought we had forgotten forever. And for that, <i>he</i> will be remembered to Michigan fans for what he is.<br />
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A hero.<br />
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Brianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07272986648979988175noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6136487040752878109.post-10217782254907033282013-04-09T02:23:00.000-04:002014-03-16T00:23:46.418-04:00So Long, Lonesome<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<b>NCAA Championship: Louisville 82, Michigan 76</b></div>
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<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=6136487040752878109#" style="color: #2793d8;">Explosions in the Sky - So Long, Lonesome .mp3</a></div>
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<br />
There's a reason storybook endings are confined to the pages on which they're written and the imaginations in which they're conceived. In real life, someone's happy ending is someone else's tragedy. It's a zero-sum game. There is no pot of gold at the end of everyone's rainbow. Somebody inevitably gets stuck in the rain.<br />
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The storybook ending for Michigan basketball would've involved the final chapter of a lengthy, sordid tale; a 20-year drift through the wilderness that finally came to an end while the ghosts of Final Fours past watched from afar as the current team tried to cement their own legacy. The end of their story is a bittersweet one, and our hearts are currently some degree of broken. But eventually - whether it's tomorrow, the next day, next week, next month - our pain will subside, and we will fully appreciate the ride these kids took us on. At their best, they were a breathtaking display of execution. At their worst, they were a muddled mess of errors and youthful mistakes. Missing free throws to lose the Big Ten title on their homecourt against Indiana hurt them a hell of a lot more than it hurt us. But we don't get to see those moments. We didn't get to see the locker room after that loss to the Hoosiers. We just had ourselves, and the worst of human nature. The rage on Michigan's Rivals site whenever something goes wrong is visceral and ugly. The fans' version of their "worst" involves profanity-laced rants calling for coaches to be fired, players to be run off, and other senseless ramblings of people tapping into the inner psychopath we all know we have.<br />
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For the team we pour our hearts and souls into, their worst is showing up in a hornets' nest in East Lansing and getting their heads caved in. It's letting Wisconsin drag them down into the gutter and pulverize them like only Wisconsin does, the ugliest form of "winning" basketball that anyone could possibly draw up in their worst nightmares. For us, the fans on the outside, we cannot sway these events, or influence the way things unfold. We have our superstitions, our prayers to sports-related deities and otherwise, but ultimately, we are powerless, and all we can hope for is that those we cherish so dearly make us proud, and give their best.<br />
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Last night, Michigan's basketball team gave their best. We can nitpick, complain about some players having a rough game, the defense having not nearly enough answers, and the officiating being inconsistent at best and abhorrent at worst. But when all the analysis is complete, the truth sets in. Michigan shot 52% from the field, and Trey Burke left his heart on the court in Atlanta, but Michigan's best just wasn't as good as Louisville's best. It would've been one thing if they had gone out there and fallen flat on their faces and gotten run out of the gym, disgracing themselves and the stage they found themselves on. But that didn't happen. They showed up, teeth bared, ready to fire. They came up a few points short against the #1 overall seed in the tournament, coached by one of the best coaches of all time.<br />
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God knows I haven't been immune to the lunacy that captures us as fans. I've ranted and raved too, and even penned a piece on this slice of the internet after the ghastly 2010 season finale in East Lansing, wondering if Beilein had reached his ceiling as Michigan's coach.<br />
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Three years later, if you were to conduct an opinion poll of the Michigan fanbase, I can't imagine a scenario where John Beilein's approval rating dips below 90%.<br />
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The tournament is an imposing creature. Success is rarely, if ever, measured by having the crystal basketball at the end of the Monday night in April. If Michigan had triumphed last night, Louisville fans wouldn't be deeming their season a failure. Michigan State fans didn't toss their 2005, 2009 and 2010 teams by the wayside because they came up just a bit short. They celebrate those teams, and hold them in the highest regard. Because they realize what I hope all Michigan fans realize: there's a reason even the bluest of blue bloods in college basketball celebrate and raise banners in honor of Final Four appearences. Because being the last team standing when the tournament ends is one of the hardest things to accomplish in team sports. Go look through the history of the NCAA tournament, see some of the droughts the titans of the sport have gone through in regard to winning it all.<br />
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Duke made eight Final Fours before finally winning it all in their ninth appearence in 1991. After repeating in 1992, they had to wait another nine years before winning again, and another nine after that.<br />
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North Carolina went 25 years without a championship until Jordan's shot in 1982. They then went another 11 years until beating the Fab Five in 1993, and a dozen more after that before their next title in 2005.<br />
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Kansas, one of the Meccas of the very sport of basketball, has all of three national championships. They had to wait 36 years to get their second (1952-1988), and another 20 years for their third.<br />
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Kentucky won four national titles in a 10 year span from 1948-1958. They have four total in the 55 years since then, including droughts of 20 years (1958-1978), 18 years (1978-1996), and 14 years (1998-2012).<br />
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UCLA, the last true "dynasty" of the sport, went 20 years without a championship after John Wooden retired, and are currently on an 18 year drought since that last one in 1995.<br />
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Indiana, the only "basketball school" in the Big Ten, hasn't won a championship in 26 years.<br />
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Every other sport has teams that don't expect anything less than a championship. The Red Wings have won four Stanley Cups in the last 16 years, but even I often dwell on 1995, 1996, 2003, 2007, and especially 2009. The pressure on that 2009 Wings team was immeasurable, and they finally couldn't withstand it at the end. In the NBA, fans of the Lakers have been disappointed with every season that doesn't end with a championship for over 30 years now. Ditto the Spurs for the last decade and a half. Ditto the Heat now. In baseball, George Steinbrenner single-handedly built an atmosphere in New York where anything short of a World Series title was unacceptable. The Patriots haven't won a Super Bowl in almost 10 years now (!!), but they still measure themselves up to that standard they set in 2001, 2003, and 2004. Even in college football, Alabama's upcoming season will be deemed disappointing if they don't three-peat. USC's teams that won a dozen games and ended the year by shredding a Big Ten team in the Rose Bowl still left a bitter taste in their fans' mouths because they never returned to the top of the mountain like they did in 2004.<br />
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In college basketball, that is hardly ever the case. Can you name a team and a season where the mindset was "win the national title or your season is a failure"? The only two examples that come to mind for me are 1991 UNLV and 2007 Florida, both of which carried the burden of having the expectation of repeating as champions because the entire team returned from the previous year. The 2007 Gators lived up to that expectation. The 1991 Rebels won their first 34 games and lost by two in the national semifinal to Duke in what's regarded as one of the biggest upsets in tournament history. Think about that: <b>DUKE</b> winning a game in the <b>Final Four</b> was seen as a colossal upset. <i>That's</i> how massive the burden was on UNLV. They weren't supposed to even be challenged by anybody, let alone beaten.<br />
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Outside of those rare examples, your season is automatically a smashing success if you get to the Final Four. And for Michigan, this is a season for the ages. Why?<br />
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Because we remember the Ellerbe years, when Michigan had MAC-level talent on the floor.<br />
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We remember the indignity of watching Tom Izzo run up the score against Michigan on Mateen Cleaves' senior day.<br />
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We remember multiple 40-point losses to Duke.<br />
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We remember the shame of having those banners come down; the darkest point in Michigan history. After that there was a time when I couldn't even bring myself to tell people I cheered for Michigan basketball, it was that tarnished.<br />
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We remember starting 16-3 in 2006, thinking that Daniel Horton, Dion Harris and Lester Abram were finally going to get us over the hump - only to lose six of eight down the stretch, no-show in the Big Ten Tournament opener against Minnesota, and spend the postseason in the NIT. Again.<br />
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We remember the Amaker era being personified as Senior Day in 2007 against #1 Ohio State wound down and Harris and Courtney Sims turned to mush.<br />
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We remember losing 22 games in Beilein's first year, culminating with a loss to Wisconsin in the BTT in which they scored 34 points - total. An offensive performance that made the 2004 Pistons look like Showtime.<br />
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We remember that euphoria of finally, <i>finally</i> making the tournament; something so basic and so commonplace for so many teams was the greatest thing in the world for us.<br />
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We then remember the erratic faceplant of a season that followed, when it seemed like Manny Harris was really, really tired of playing for Beilein at times.<br />
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We remember the turning point of the program, that snowy, blustery night in East Lansing, when a team on the brink rose up to slay the dragon with Stu's three. Before that game, Michigan had lost six in a row and had a precarious 11-9 record, 1-7 in the conference. Since that win in East Lansing, Michigan is 63-23, 32-14 in the Big Ten.<br />
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We remember taking the sledgehammer to the walking ghost Bruce Pearl in the first round of the 2011 tournament, and then the heartbreaking image of Darius Morris pulling his jersey over his face after his last second floater against Duke rimmed out. And then the insult to injury when we learned that that would be the final time we saw Morris in a Michigan uniform, and the fear that any progress we had made would be lost because our star point guard was (foolishly) leaving early for the NBA.<br />
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We remember desperately clinging to the recruitment of kids like Nate Lubick, Casey Prather, Russell Byrd, and Trey Zeigler. I in particular was crestfallen when Zeigler picked Central Michigan. I (along with a large portion of Michigan fans, I believe) always had serious doubts about the appeal of Beilein's system to true difference making recruits. They said Beilein's offense wouldn't prepare you for the NBA. So every high-profile recruit Michigan was in on seemed like the biggest deal in the world, because it felt like the "sleeper" types like Novak and Douglass and Horford and Morgan were the norm.<br />
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We remember this scrawny three-star kid from Columbus coming in and having to fill D-Mo's shoes - and leading Michigan to its first conference championship in a quarter century. And then even that seemed to go up in smoke when Michigan lost to Ohio and it appeared that Trey Burke was going to bolt after one season. In the chaos leading up to Burke's final decision, Michigan secured the commitment of some 5'11 3* white kid from Indiana who called himself Spike for some reason.<br />
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And now, at long fucking last, through all the drudgery and chaos...we will remember the Final Four. We will all remember where we were when Burke hit The Shot against Kansas, and how confident we felt when Stauskas released his fourth....fifth....sixth three against Florida. And that euphoric tidal wave of adrenaline when Jordan Morgan pulled away for the dunk that finally vanquished Syracuse.<br />
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And yeah, we'll remember the frustration and disappointment of the title game. But while we're doing that, think about our enemies, too. Michigan State, Ohio State and Indiana were all sitting at home watching while Michigan played for a national championship. And only the most meat-headed neanderthals among them could possibly bash Michigan for losing. The sensible among them will respect the effort.<br />
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History as a whole largely forgets the runners-up, and this Michigan team deserved a better fate. The makeup of this team was unique and enjoyable: a three-star undersized point guard who won literally every Player of the Year award; a three-star shooting guard with a famous name who ended up at Michigan only because Casey Prather picked Florida; the three-star wing with another famous name who blossomed into a five-star super-athlete well after Beilein identified him; the five-star big man who took the leap of faith and turned down the establishment of the sport and put his faith in a coach and program in which he saw potential; the three-star nobodies off the bench who weren't viewed as big-time players, aren't ideally sized, were almost redshirted, etc...and then played significant roles in shooting Michigan into the title game.<br />
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Burke will be gone; we've known that since he announced he was coming back one year ago today. Hardaway will likely join him; not because he's going to be a high draft pick (honestly, I don't see much more than Manny Harris out of him in the pros), but because he's maxed out on his potential in college. If we're particularly unlucky, McGary and/or Robinson may make the jump too. Both of them would help themselves immensely by returning, but as we've learned in the recent past, college kids don't always make the proper choices for their future.<br />
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But regardless, Michigan has finally reached the point as a program where losing players doesn't automatically equal death. You don't lose the Player of the Year and not take a step back, but Derrick Walton is the absolute truth, and is the most talented point guard (coming out of high school) that Beilein has recruited. After seeing how the last two blossomed here, there is essentially zero doubt in my mind that Walton will star.<br />
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For the longest time, Beilein was compared to Rich Rodriguez by the more cynical among us. At times it seemed like he just didn't understand what you had to do to succeed in this conference. But somewhere along the way, probably with the assistant coach shuffling a couple years ago, Beilein was able to adjust to the Big Ten's style of play, and he has now built a program with staying power. That light we see in the distance is no longer a train bearing down on us, ready to steamroll us into oblivion. Now it represents the beacon of hope that exists on this new frontier we find ourselves on the precipice of. 20 years after they broke up, the Fab Five still loomed large over Michigan basketball. The memory of their two-year run and the specter of the sins committed still lurked in the corners of Crisler, the ghost in the machine that seemed to place a ceiling on where this program could go. The trangressions of Webber and his successors Traylor, Taylor and Bullock stained the university to the point where the higher-ups at Michigan opted to place their own basketball program in a form of exile; almost a sense of crushing the institution in order to discourage any future dabblings in the muck that got them into the gutters in the first place.<br />
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Last night, with the Fab Five - all of them, as Webber finally emerged - looking on, even while coming up just a bit short, Trey Burke and the Wolverines closed the book on the Fab Five chapter forever. The future that lies ahead no longer has the ghosts of Wolverines past hovering overhead. The final score last night did not end in our favor, but the last three weeks have been bigger than the scoreboard. They've been a catharsis; an exorcism; a cleansing of the palate so that we can finally enjoy the future instead of fearing it. They will return to Ann Arbor as champions, and they will send a banner to the rafters that will never, ever come down. Ever.<br />
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And when the heartache from last night fades, we won't be sad that it's over, but will instead be happy that it happened. And we will be prideful. We will hold our heads high and be proud that we can tell people we cheer for Michigan basketball. Because last night, even in defeat, it was great to be a Michigan Wolverine.Brianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07272986648979988175noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6136487040752878109.post-47061032281535545812012-10-18T18:08:00.000-04:002013-06-13T23:35:45.580-04:00Careful With That Axe, Dantonio<center>
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Do you know why South Vietnam was never able to beat North Vietnam, even with the backing of the most powerful country in the world? It wasn't because the North had superior firepower; they didn't. It wasn't because the North had more men; they didn't. The North was decimated after the First Indochina War. Their two major allies - China and the Soviet Union - were reluctant at best to help them, while the United States, on the other hand, poured money in hand over fist to prop up the South. But it didn't matter. Why?<br />
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Because no matter how much support was given, the South Vietnamese leadership never controlled the hearts and minds of the people. South Vietnam on its own had more manpower and weaponry than the North did, even before factoring in the Americans. But South Vietnam was a rudderless ship with a captain whose best attribute was doling out cushy jobs to his cronies, whereas North Vietnam, impoverished and undermanned as it was, was led by a single, authoritative voice who won the souls of those he implored to follow him. Ho Chi Minh didn't need coercion or graft to convince his people to go to war for him; they were all too willing to do so anyway. Meanwhile, South Vietnam was beset by an insurgency that could never be stopped. They would plug one hole, and another would burst open. They could never get ahead of it, and they could never convince themselves that they were truly in control. Not when they could scarcely get through a single day without another government official being gunned down by Viet Cong snipers.<br />
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In this metaphor, Michigan was, for the longest time, South Vietnam, led astray by a man incapable of coping with the gravity of his position, and besieged by those in his midst who pretended to be his friends. Meanwhile, Michigan State played the role of North Vietnam; they never have and never will have the resources available to them like Michigan. Their recruiting classes never measure up to the ones Michigan rakes in, on paper. But in the years Michigan caved in on itself, Michigan State got their shit together and found a leader capable of rallying the masses. Dantoni-o Chi Minh, indeed. And under his guidance, MSU has grown to exceed the sum of its parts, turning 2-3 star nobodies into all-conference performers capable of toppling the menace to the south.<br />
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Where this metaphor collapses, then, is with Brady Hoke. There never was any suitable replacement for Ngo Dinh Diem in South Vietnam; once he was murdered in the back of a truck with his hands tied behind his back, there was no recourse for South Vietnam; no one to fill that void except the United States. For Michigan, Hoke is the savior that none of us expected but all of us dreamed for. Under Hoke, any so-called "insurgency" in Ann Arbor and the Metro Detroit area has been snuffed out. Ironically, this has ushered in the return of the East Lansing people who claim that the media in southeastern Michigan is, has always been, and always will be in the tank for all things maize and blue. It's a bit of cognitive dissonance I suppose, where both sides are paranoid and convinced that the media's out to get them.<br />
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But nevertheless, Dantoni-o Chi Minh has pulled off the feat none of us had ever seen before: beating the Michigan juggernaut four years in a row. His tenure at East Lansing has been a colorful one, to be sure. I remember several of my MSU friends, pining for Bo Pelini or Butch Davis, wondering "WHO?!" when Dantonio was named the guy. Since then we've seen mocking Dantonio - "moment of silence," "go Bucks" - progress into defiant Dantonio - "I found a lot of the things they do amusing," "they need to check themselves," "pride goes before the fall," "it'll never be over" - to victorious, arrogant Dantonio - "this one counts as more than one," "the little brother grows up," "winner takes all." More recently, however, Dantonio's cheery demeanor (...) has given way to a kind of petulance. His interruption of Michigan recruiting coordinator Jeff Hecklinski in front of a room of Michigan high school coaches in January was the type of thing you see from someone who has a ticking clock in his own mind but is never quite sure of when it will strike zero - or perhaps in his case, midnight. In April, petulant Dantonio took it another step, asking "where's the threat?" in regards to Michigan; as if it was somehow beneath him to talk about Michigan now after finding ways to do so every chance he got since arriving in 2007. In the course of beating Michigan for four years, Dantonio has become that which he famously derided after Michigan's win in 2007. The arrogance he accused Michigan of oozing now emanates from every pore he has. The dismissiveness he saw in Michigan he now sees when he looks in the mirror, even though he would never acknowledge it. If pride is to go before the fall, then what is it to be called when someone asks "where's the threat?"<br />
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Many MSU fans reject the notion, but the truth is that Michigan State, and their coach in particular, is incapable of coping with any sort of sustained success. Their football program is founded on a perpertual inferiority complex; everything they do, they measure against what goes on in Ann Arbor. Mike Hart's "Little Brother" comment was crass and unfiltered, but it was not untrue, and that was what drove MSU fans crazy about it. There was no audacity because he said something scandalous and false, they reacted with outrage because he illuminated a truth that MSU fans try to shy away from. Michigan State <b>needs</b> Michigan to lord over them, because it gives them something to aspire to. On the treadmill they run, and Michigan is the stick that dangles in front of them, prompting them to continue their quest for acceptance. To remove that stick would be to remove their motivation for being. It's never news when Michigan beats Michigan State four years in a row, because that's the way things are supposed to be; the status quo interests no one. It's when the established order is turned on its head that everyone loses their minds.<br />
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They tried to change this narrative as the Rodriguez era unfolded in Ann Arbor; they created what they wanted to be the new normal; a world where Michigan was relegated to a sideshow circus, lorded over by the uninspiring, workman-like efficiency of Michigan State. This was prominently displayed in Ann Arbor in 2010, when Michigan came in flashy, only to fizzle out as MSU gradually ground them down into dust. That game was the tipping point for the majority of Michigan fans who still clung to the notion that things could be different; I was among those fans. When the clock hit zero in 2010 and it was MSU 34, U-M 17, I knew that our hopes and dreams were just that; that our fearless leader who promised so much, who had drawn us in with the lure of change, and moving forward, was in reality in well over his head and doomed to fail. The Penn State game that followed a couple weeks later may have been the final straw, but in retrospect, it's plain to see that it was the Michigan State game that revealed that the emperor had no clothes.<br />
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Where then, is the road back to what Michigan fans consider "normal?" Well, it's a simple answer after all. Back to the future we are headed, where our head coach guards injury news and practice reports like state secrets and treats the media the way they deserve to be treated - as a fifth column whose only goal is to produce a "gotcha" moment. Denard is still here, but his time is fleeting, his presence waning, and with him, the "spread" will depart from Michigan, and the sometimes-derided "manball" will return. Even now it's trying to assert itself, because that's what it does. It knows no subtleties, no crafty sense of nuance. It knows only how to impose itself on everything it touches. And with that return to what is known but was forgotten is the inevitable demand, the ultimatum - the demand that the Spartans accept their place. Because the reality is that Schembechler, Moeller, Carr and Rodriguez all lost their first games against MSU just as Hoke did, and those first three all followed it up with a win in their second try. I ask you: does Brady Hoke remind you more of Bo, Mo, and Lloyd, or Rodriguez?</div>
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The axe of Paul Bunyan (not to be confused with Paul Bunyan's Axe) rests in Dantonio's hands. He wields it with a sense of purpose, but only with a fleeting sense of caution. He knows that his grip on it is threatened, and that if he were to lose it, he risks losing much more than that which lies in front of his own eyes. He risks this because from his side he hears voices pleading for Dan Roushar's ouster, while others clamor for the arrival of basketball season. A season hyped up to Rose Bowl-levels teeters on the brink of complete collapse for Michigan State, with their most hated nemesis standing before them, anxious to seize that axe out of Dantonio's hands. That leaves Dantonio no choice but to swing. No time to aim, no time to contemplate. No time to think. Just time to swing.</div>
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Swing away.</div>
Brianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07272986648979988175noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6136487040752878109.post-70638224992728236762012-08-09T22:29:00.001-04:002012-08-09T22:29:47.906-04:00The Mahatma"First they ignore you. Then they mock you. Then they fight you. Then you win."<br />
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-- Mahatma Ghandi<br />
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Since June 10, 2011, basically 14 months, Brady Hoke has landed eight (8) players from the state of Ohio who held Ohio State offers:<br />
<ol>
<li>2012 DE Tom Strobel</li>
<li>2012 OL Kyle Kalis</li>
<li>2012 DE Chris Wormley</li>
<li>2013 S Dymonte Thomas</li>
<li>2013 LB Mike McCray</li>
<li>2013 RB Deveon Smith</li>
<li>2013 LB Ben Gedeon</li>
<li>2014 LB Michael Ferns</li>
</ol>
In the previous <b>TEN</b> classes <b>COMBINED</b>, from 2002 to 2011, Michigan landed <b>seven</b> (7) players from Ohio with OSU offers:<br />
<ol>
<li>2003 LB/DE Shawn Crable</li>
<li>2003 S/LB Prescott Burgess</li>
<li>2004 DE/TE Mike Massey</li>
<li>2005 WR Mario Manningham</li>
<li>2006 OL Justin Boren</li>
<li>2008 TE Kevin Koger</li>
<li>2009 DB Justin Turner</li>
</ol>
They will deflect with dismissiveness and rationales ("Tressel was fired," "_____'s offer wasn't commitable," "We like other players better," etc). They will come up with creative ways to insult Hoke (jokes about his weight, or the even more clever "Brady Choke"/"Brady Joke" nicknames). Yet for the last decade, they have crowed about the vaunted "fence" that was assembled, declaring that Michigan could never succeed, and certainly never beat Ohio State, without quality Ohio talent, and that UofM had finally been choked off from the pipeline to the south.<br />
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And now that that narrative has been collapsed in just over a year, they will scramble for a new one to make themselves feel better, which, ironically, will sound a lot like the bravado Michigan fans had when Rich Rodriguez arrived in 2008.<br />
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One of the best fallacies they always and will continue to cling to will be that it doesn't matter who Michigan lands, Ohio State will still land their own stars; as if this has not been the case for 60+ years. Ohio State has always landed the lion's share of talent from their home state; what changed in the last 10 years to swing the rivalry in OSU's favor was the failure of Michigan to land high-level state of Ohio talent.<br />
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And now that those circumstances have changed, they will have nothing of substance to say. When you have the facts on your side, you pound the facts. When you have the law on your side, you pound the law. When you have neither on your side, you pound the table.<br />
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Plenty of table-pounding going on in Ohio right now.Brianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07272986648979988175noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6136487040752878109.post-3363797893185894142011-12-02T10:04:00.001-05:002011-12-02T10:04:00.118-05:00Learning to Fly<center><div><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"><tbody><tr valign="MIDDLE"><td style="background-image: url(http://beemp3.com/player/corner-topleft2.gif);background-repeat: repeat;font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size: 12px;vertical-align: bottom;"><br /></td><td style="background-image: url(http://beemp3.com/player/bkgnd-top2.gif);background-repeat: repeat;font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size: 12px;vertical-align: middle;"> Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers - Learning To Fly .mp3</td><td style="background-image: url(http://beemp3.com/player/corner-topright2.gif);background-repeat: repeat;font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size: 12px;vertical-align: bottom;"><br /></td></tr><tr valign="MIDDLE"><td style="width: 16px;background-image:url(http://beemp3.com/player/left-ltrow2.gif);" width="16"><br /></td><td style="background-image: url(http://beemp3.com/player/light2.gif);background-repeat: repeat;font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size: 11px;vertical-align: bottom;"><embed class="beeplayer" wmode="transparent" style="height:24px;width:290px;" src="http://beemp3.com/player/player.swf" quality="high" bgcolor="#ffffff" allowscriptaccess="sameDomain" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer" flashvars="playerID=1&bg=0xCDDFF3&leftbg=0x357DCE&lefticon=0xF2F2F2&rightbg=0x64F051&rightbghover=0x1BAD07&righticon=0xF2F2F2&righticonhover=0xFFFFFF&text=0x357DCE&slider=0x357DCE&track=0xFFFFFF&border=0xFFFFFF&loader=0xAF2910&soundFile=http%3A//beltrane.com/prdj/amsterjam/mp3/TomPetty/Learning%20To%20Fly.mp3%0A%0A" align="middle" height="24" width="290"></embed> <img style="padding:0;border:0;vertical-align:bottom" src="http://beemp3.com/player/logo_small.gif" /> </td><td style="width: 16px;background-image:url(http://beemp3.com/player/right-ltrow2.gif);" width="16"><br /></td></tr><tr><td width="16"><img style="padding:0;border:0;" src="http://beemp3.com/player/corner-bottomleft2.gif" /></td><td style="background-image: url(http://beemp3.com/player/bkgnd-bottom2.gif);background-repeat: repeat-x;font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size: 11px;vertical-align: top;text-align: center;padding:0;border: 0;margin:0;">Found at <a href="http://beemp3.com/download.php?file=8424664&song=Learning+To+Fly">bee mp3 search engine</a></td><td width="16"><img style="padding:0;border:0;" src="http://beemp3.com/player/corner-bottomright2.gif" /></td></tr></tbody></table></div></center><br />In early 1942, as the Japanese flexed their military muscles and ran roughshod over southeast Asia, their barrage left General Douglas MacArthur and his contigent of men isolated in the tiny Bataan province of the Philippines. The situation was hopeless, with only two possible outcomes: either fight and die (or worse, be subjected to the brutality of being prisoners of war under Japanese control), or surrender, something most military personnel would choose death over.<br /><br />MacArthur was ordered to withdraw and relocate to Australia. He did so, but he also gave a speech in which he made a promise to the people of the Philippines, vowing that he would return one day to liberate them from Japan's looming oppression. Only a few short months later, Bataan was under Japanese control. While the Japanese consolidated their power in southeast Asia, the Allies regrouped and reconfigured their strategy. This led to the Battle of the Coral Sea off the northeast coast of Australia in May 1942, which stretched the Japanese too thin, which led to the Americans crushing them at Midway in June, which put Japan on their heels for the remainder of the war. Following Midway, the grueling Guadalcanal Campaign from August 1942 to February 1943 finally tipped the scales in the Allies' favor. From there, the Allies slowly tightened the noose on the Japanese, hopping from the Solomon Islands to the Marshall Islands, to Saipan, and the Philippine Sea, and Guam, and numerous others...until finally, in October of 1944, MacArthur fulfilled the promise he made, iconically wading through the water onto the shore of Leyte, returning to the Philippines.<br /><br />Ten years ago, the sinner masquarading as a saint put Michigan on the defensive, dealing a shocking blow in November of 2001 at Michigan Stadium. The tide that was stemmed two years later was only temporary, as another ambush was released on us the next year, when a mediocre Ohio State team throttled Big Ten Champion Michigan in Columbus. If it wasn't obvious in the aftermath of that game, it should've been: Ohio State had seized control of the rivalry. Michigan had a precious few number of opportunities to stop them in their tracks:<br /><ol><li>Leading 21-12 in the 4th quarter in 2005, only to humiliatingly hand the game to the Buckeyes with a gameplan that can generously be described as cowardly and accurately described as pussy-like.</li><li>Chad Henne overthrowing a <span style="font-weight: bold;">w i d e</span> open Mario Manningham in the first quarter of a 7-7 tie in 2006, squandering a chance to recapture momentum in the game.</li><li>Mike Hart slipping on Ohio State's ice rink of a field making a cut on 3rd down early in the third quarter. If he stays up, he runs untouched into the endzone and ties the game at 28. Instead Michigan has to settle for a field goal, and continues to play from behind.</li></ol><p>From the moment that game in 2006 ended, nothing was remotely close between the two teams. Ohio State held Michigan at arm's length in victories in Ann Arbor in 2007 and 2009, and polished their brass knuckles before punching Michigan's skull in in Columbus in 2008 and 2010 against crippled, flailing UM teams that were bringing knives to gunfights.</p><p>Headed into this season, with the names largely the same as the previous one, it was assumed that UM would once again bring the knife. Even with Ohio State's (self-inflicted) mess, most people figured they'd still bring the firepower, if only to a lesser degree than recent years.</p><p>Imagine the surprise, then, as the season unfolded and showed that Ohio State was in possession of little more than a BB gun, and Michigan's knife was actually a bayonet attached to a rifle; a microcosm of life, where fortunes turn on a dime, with almost no warning. What was dull and desolate one day can suddenly be bright and shiny the next. A 37-7 farce of a game one year can turn into a landmark 40-34 insurrection the next.<br /></p><p>Saturday rekindled feelings we had long forgotten, but had always lusted for. The feeling of Michigan's running game imposing its will on Ohio State, instead of feeling like a two yard gain was a success like in recent years, or the abomination that was 2007. The resolve that this team had the talent and fortitude to respond when OSU threw a haymaker, as opposed to the last four years, when it was plain as day that we were <span style="font-weight: bold;">done</span> after an OSU score. The schadenfreude that comes with petulant little shits (I cleaned it up for the kids) like Zach Boren crying about Michigan celebrating.</p><p>If the last eight years are to represent the general status quo of life - full of a harrowing combination of hope, fear, and ultimately, disappointment and bitterness - then days like Saturday are the moments that justify all the haste and drudgery of the world around us. The unfortunate few among us that are stricken with the compulsion to overanalyze things to the point of stripping them of all meaning often twist, warp, and distort things in our lives until some of them blend together, with the lines of separation becoming too blurry to distinguish. Sometimes this is acceptable, and even desirable, as combining two things we enjoy often produces an entirely new level of enjoyment greater than the parts that compose it. Other times, though, when one of our pleasures is tainted or destroyed, the entire well ends up poisoned, because we find ourselves unable to separate them anymore; they've become linked, and as one goes down in flames, it takes the other with it. When that happens, only a transcendent event can overcome the ghost in the machine.</p><p>For me, Michigan football no longer brought me joy, because I made the mistake of associating it with other aspects of my life, and they became too intertwined. So when those "other aspects" swirled the drain, it dragged with it the one thing I had been able to keep clean for years. The result was this season almost being seen from a distance. When Roy Roundtree jumped over Gary Gray to send Brian Kelly's head the way of Hiroshima, I registered maybe a five on the excitement scale. When Sam the Eagle's Traveling Band of Righteousness dealt Michigan its first defeat, what should've been overwhelming frustration and anger was only general annoyance from the realization that I would once again have to tolerate sophomoric trash talk from the most ignorant of fanbases. When Junior Hemingway's touchdown against Iowa was called back due to the traditional incompetence that is frequently exhibited by the trained apes wearing zebra shirts in the Big Ten, my agitation that would usually result in something in the house being broken faded within an hour. When Michigan began to drag the blade across Nebraska's throat, my enjoyment was muted at best.</p><p>On Saturday, to quote a vaguely familiar movie, I had what alcoholics refer to as a moment of clarity.</p><p>The 2007 class arrived with the quarterback from Texas with a thermonuclear missile attached to his right shoulder and the star cornerback we pulled over the wire of Pete Carroll's SoCal fence in some sort of bastardized hostage exchange because USC came to our backyard and turned Ronald Johnson and his family into mercenaries. Also much-hyped in the 2007 class was Toney Clemons, whose legacy in the eyes of Michigan fans is that of a rat; a snitch who couldn't keep his mouth shut, choosing to spew lies to spite the coach he didn't sign on for. After one season, Ryan Mallett flew the coop, hated by his teammates and shrouded in mystery by the fanbase. Donovan Warren cut short his serviceable Michigan career because he was no longer willing to destroy his future under Tony Gibson's so-called coaching. So Warren's time in a winged helmet came and went without merit, lost in the inferno that settled over Ann Arbor during his tenure.<br /></p><p>But from that inferno came battle-worn, weary, loyal soldiers: Junior Hemingway. David Molk. Ryan Van Bergen. Brandon Herron. Troy Woolfolk. Mark Huyge. Individuals who pledged their allegiance to Carr, saw everything that had appealed to them about Michigan came under siege under Rodriguez, only to make it through to the other side under Hoke.</p><center><img src="http://www.mikedesimone.com/m11/ohiostate/dn01.jpg" /></center><br />During one of the endless waterboardings we took in 2008, I vividly remember someone saying, "Molk is going to have to go." Condemning the redshirt freshman center, calling for his expulsion, his excommunication, his exile.<br /><br /><center><img src="http://www.mikedesimone.com/m11/ohiostate/um05.jpg" /></center><br />At their sides, the remnants of the 2008 class, the ones who endured the death by a thousand knives more than any of us. The class that saw the local star defensive back flame out in a horrifying reminder of what can happen when young men lose their way in life. The class that brought a quartet of four-star linebackers to Ann Arbor, only to see one of them never make it to campus, another leave after the first fall practice, and yet another fail to realize his potential and spend his career as a backup, his development chopped at the knees by a staff guilty of criminal negligence on defense. It was the class that brought Justin Feagin, Dann O'Neill, Brandon Smith and Kurt Wermers. It gave us Sam McGuffie, the YouTube sensation who never got the chance to fly. And Michael Shaw, who scored the first touchdown of the Rodriguez era on a playaction pass into the flat from Nick Sheridan, back when the world was our oyster, and the uncertainty of the frontier that lay ahead didn't frighten us, but excited us.<br /><br /><center><img src="http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v335/Psyblast/2008-0830-jg-UMvUtah-557s.jpg" /></center><br />That class brought us not just Elliott Mealer, but the Mealer family as a whole, and their story that was too heartbreaking for words and illustrated all that was unfair about the world we take for granted - and the perseverance that reminded us of the power of the human spirit.<br /><br />The journey is over for much of the 2008 class. Mike Martin, the high school wrestling champion who very nearly flipped to Notre Dame after Lloyd Carr retired, only to honor his word, fight his way through the fog and go out on Senior Day with a lion's roar, avoiding the tragic martyrdom that Brandon Graham had to endure two years earlier. And Kevin Koger, the Ohioan who dared to defy the Empire in favor of Michigan, at a time when Tressel's hold on the state was at its zenith. On Saturday, the tight end from Toledo got the last laugh.<br /><br /><center><img src="http://www.mikedesimone.com/m11/ohiostate/df40.jpg" /></center><br />Never to be forgotten is Martavious Odoms, one of the most unsung heroes I can ever recall wearing the maize and blue. Undersized, not especially fast, nothing about him stood out. Our earliest vivid memory of Odoms, aside from the random punt return touchdown against Purdue, was how he seemed to disintegrate in November of that first year, as the temperatures fell and the precipitation increased. The pint sized receiver from Pahokee seemed to wilt under the conditions of Big Ten football. But for the next three years, no one would surpass Martavious Odoms when it came to effort and sheer will to win. Countless touchdowns and big runs over the last three years came as a result of Odoms throwing a block downfield; the type of contribution too easily passed over.<br /><br />The 2008 class's final chapter will be written next season. One more season for Kenny Demens, and Ricky Barnum, and JT Floyd, and Patrick Omameh. One more year for Roy Roundtree. One more year for Darryl Stonum to find some kind of salvation.<br /><br />Earlier this year, I compared Michigan's explosion on the recruiting scene this cycle to the Arab Spring, an allusion to UofM rising up and challenging MSU's reign as recruiting king in the state. In my mind, the "Arab Spring" of Michigan recruiting began on March 24th when Ben Braden picked UofM over State, and ended on August 8th when Saginaw native Ondre Pipkins also picked the Wolverines, capping a four and a half month stretch that saw Michigan land 22 commitments. But as it turns out, I was wrong. The Wolverine Revolution didn't end with the pause in recruiting. It simply shifted into the seasonal phase, where the team no one expected anything out of fired back at the status quo. The defenders tossed aside as slow, small, weak and clueless in 2010 rose up in 2011 to oppress their oppressors. The same tortured souls that endured some level of Dante's Inferno against Northwestern in 2008, and saw the 2009 season slip away in one surreal sequence at Illinois on Halloween, and felt the weight of the world finally come crashing through in 2010 as Michigan State, Iowa, Penn State, Wisconsin, Ohio State and Mississippi State sealed the fate of their coach in ruthless and draconian fashion...they found a measure of vengeance last Saturday.<br /><br />They made it through the storm. And against the ghost in their machine, their most corrupt and deceitful of adversaries, they learned to fly on dreadlocks of gold.<br /><br /><center><img src="http://www.mikedesimone.com/m11/ohiostate/gi28.jpg" /></center>Brianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07272986648979988175noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6136487040752878109.post-31574607011627857272011-08-29T12:47:00.001-04:002011-08-29T12:50:18.012-04:00Jenny, You're Barely Alive<center><div><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"><tbody><tr valign="MIDDLE"><td style="background-image: url(http://beemp3.com/player/corner-topleft2.gif);background-repeat: repeat;font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size: 12px;vertical-align: bottom;">
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<br />Sports are funny. If you ever have the ability to step back and look at this thing called fandom and athletics, you may see how illogical and bizarre and insane the whole thing is. People investing so much energy and time and emotion in events they cannot control orchestrated by people they will never meet. When you look at it in that light, it comes across as lunacy. If you look at life as one big struggle for control, an endless series of events and encounters that people are hell-bent on grasping and controlling for themselves, then the concept of being a sports fan makes no sense whatsoever. Putting so much into something you have no sway over - in the real world, people get locked away in padded rooms for such nonsense.
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<br />But it is in that distinction that fandom makes sense. Because no matter how hard we try, no matter how hard we fight, we will always be confronted with things in life that are not only out of our control, but are outside our realm of understanding. Life is full of tragedies in that sense; the most gut wrenching and most painful things you can imagine often come down on the shoulders of those who don't deserve them, because life isn't about what you deserve. It should be, but it isn't. It's about what you get, regardless of what you do before then. The randomness of the universe is something I've never been able to cope with. Genuine, warm, loving, affectionate people shouldn't find themselves staring down the barrel of a disease that will eventually rob them of their ability to function. People who go about things the right way, who treat others with courtesy and respect, who embrace those around them and fit every possible definition of being a "good person" shouldn't have it all taken away in the blink of an eye because someone got distracted while driving and barreled through a red light and took a life because of their carelessness. But it happens. Amazing people are cut down in the prime of life. Reckless, clumsy fools walk away clean. People who fall in love and finally try to embrace it are tossed aside without a second thought, leaving them shattered and ruined and questioning how they could have been so stupid.
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<br />Being a sports fan often provides us with an escape from all of the above. We all spend our lives, whether we realize it or not, trying to reduce the misery. We seek out things that make us smile; things that occupy our time and make us feel good. That's what something like football brings. Every Saturday in the fall, we are provided with a little three-hour window that allows us to shed the shackles of life. We don't have to worry ourselves with things like bills, or working, or school. We don't have to dwell on the drama that comes with relationships, romantic or otherwise. We don't have to toss and turn at night, replaying the past in our heads to the point where we feel a perverse combination of sadness, insanity, and rage. For that one little sliver of time on Saturdays, the only thing that matters is what takes place on that field. And whether it's a conscious decision or not, many of us realize that this is our reprieve from the madness. So we throw ourselves headfirst into it. We pour every ounce of emotion we have into it. We shiver when we hear the fight song. We get goose bumps when we run across Schembechler sound bytes on the internet. We see winged helmets shining under the waning summer sun, and then under the looming grayness of autumn, and we feel content. We feel a sense of belonging. We feel like the 110,000 strangers around us are our family for those three hours. Because they know the words to the same song that we do. Because they get the same goose bumps that we do when Bo's gravelly voice echoes over the speakers. Because we all look at this grinning 20-year old from somewhere in Florida with dreadlocks pouring out the back of his helmet, and we see hope.
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<br />I've been miserable for a very long time now. Long enough that I can't recall a time when I felt differently. Anyone who has browsed this space of the internet for longer than 10 minutes isn't exceptionally surprised by this. I made the decision many years ago that life was wretched, that people were inherently evil and selfish, and the easiest way to deal with all of it was to never trust anyone, never let anyone get close, destroy any real meaning associated with anything, and to never place any expectations on anyone or anything, because without expectations, there can be no disappointment. A little over a year ago, something entered my life that delivered a wrecking ball to the wall I had erected between myself and the outside world. It brought destruction to the darkness, shook the foundations of everything I had programmed myself to believe, and shined some light in through the wreckage, opening my eyes to the possibility that there was more out there than I perceived. It presented me with the chance for happiness outside of those Saturdays in the fall. For the longest time, I fought it. I lashed out at it and spewed venom at it in an attempt to drive it away. But I wasn't able to. It seeped in through the cracks, because all along as I built the wall, some latent undercurrent of hope was busy chiseling away, leaving the door cracked for the future. And once that began, the wall crumbled. Three years ago, something similar happened in Ann Arbor, as the Schembechler-reinforced bubble around Michigan football was popped by Rich Rodriguez, who promised to lead us to greatness, while simultaneously exposing us to horrors we had never encountered before; horrors that had been unable to get through previously.
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<br />And just like the Rodriguez era turned out to be smoke and mirrors and ultimately hollow and without the greatness it portrayed, this intrusion into my life turned out to be corrosive and toxic. It tore through the wall, but with its potential it brought all the atrocities associated with life that I had spent years excising. And when that potential went up in an unceremonious puff of smoke, all that was left was the coldness of the outside world, once again permeating everything and making up for all that time it had been away. And so I saw my world crumble. The world I had established was empty, uninteresting, and colorless. The world I have now is the opposite - it's full, interesting, and colorful; full in the sense that it's full of pain, and hatred, and retroactive self-loathing. Interesting in the sense that it's full of unpredictability, like whether or not I'll have the strength to get out of bed, or whether or not I'll have any interest in living the next day. And it's colorful in the sense that there is an awful lot of red now; the type of metaphorical red that you see when you're infuriated and frustrated to the point of violence, and the type of literal red that comes with blood.
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<br />It's around this time that sports, while always being there as a crutch, as a pause, finds itself firmly put in perspective. The misery that always overcame me when Michigan would lose pales in comparison to the misery I feel now. The pain I felt when Michigan lost the Rose Bowl to Texas, or the 2006 Ohio State game, or pretty much anything from the last three years is nothing compared to the pain I'm in every second of every minute of every hour of every day now. The cold sense of dread we all began to experience at some point or another over the last three years, that one that told us that this was destined to fail, doesn't hold a candle to the chilling realization that I have almost every day that maybe I'm just not supposed to find happiness. Maybe I'm supposed to be alone and misanthropic and bitter and whatever else you want to use to describe it. Just as Rich Rodriguez's fate was out of all of our hands, maybe my own fate is out of mine. Perhaps in the ultimate battle for control in a life full of battles for control, I have none, and while things are bad now, fighting that would only make them worse.
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<br />On Saturday, Brady Hoke will lead the Wolverines into battle for the first time. The anticipation of a new season is amplified by the arrival of a new coach, and the fan base is abuzz as usual. Except for me. I feel nothing. Because I've allowed the one thing I truly loved, the one thing I thought was above all the chaos, Michigan football, to be tainted and poisoned by the spectacular tragedy that I've allowed to unfold over the last year. I don't anxiously await kickoff on Saturday. I dread it. Because I'm no longer watching a game. I'm watching a nonstop reminder of what has hollowed me out and left nothing but a shell. I'm not escaping from my own personal hell, I'm sinking deeper into it. Michigan was able to escape their hell. They put Rodriguez on the slow boat to China. But just as the metaphor perpetuates itself, things are never as simple in real life as they are on Saturdays in the fall.
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<br />I've received a lot of praise over the last few years for some of my work here, and while I don't think much of my writing in general, I appreciate all the compliments I've gotten for some of the things I've posted here. Being my own worst enemy, even this blog reminds me of things I'd much rather erase from my memory forever. But it is what it is. I've never particularly enjoyed my own writing because from my perspective, I write my best work when I'm feeling the worst. If you're a longtime reader, go back and read any of the pieces that you enjoyed. You won't find a single one that conveys optimism. They're all whimsical, or tragically nostalgic, or sometimes downright depressing. From that angle, I suppose this is my best writing of all.
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<br />Anyway, I'm glad that my work here has been able to move some of you in some way. I can't predict when the next post will appear here; I can't predict where I'll be in a day, or an hour. Planning for the future creates expectations, and I'm not about to create any, for me or for you.
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<br />So...I'll see you when I see you.
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<br />--TOB
<br />Brianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07272986648979988175noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6136487040752878109.post-71360655789157046182011-05-27T23:16:00.007-04:002011-05-30T13:40:20.930-04:00Dotting the Lie<center><iframe src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/oDOXwSwvwO8" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="349" width="425"></iframe></center><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">1986: </span>Youngstown State, trying to boost morale to the economically devastated region of northeast Ohio, hires Ohio State offensive assistant Jim Tressel as head coach.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">November 17, 1987: </span>Ohio State fires head coach Earle Bruce after three straight losses. Four days later, Bruce's final game as head coach is a win in Ann Arbor over Michigan.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">December 31, 1987:</span> Arizona State head coach John Cooper is hired by Ohio State to replace Bruce. Conventional wisdom says Cooper became the most appealing candidate to Ohio State because of his victory over Michigan in the Rose Bowl 364 days earlier.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Spring, 1988: </span>Quarterback and Youngstown native Ray Issac arrives at Youngstown State. Around this time, Tressel introduces Issac to Michael Monus, chairman of the Board of Trustees at Youngstown State and CEO of the drug store chain Phar-Mor. During their first meeting, Monus gives Issac 150 dollars, the first of what will become a habitual series of payments that will total roughly $10,000.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">December 21, 1991: </span>Isaac quarterbacks Youngstown State to a 25-17 win over Marshall in the I-AA National Championship Game.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">July, 1992: </span>Youngstown State chairman Michael Monus is indicted on fraud and embezzlement charges related to cooking the books at his drug store chain, Phar-Mor. The case would become known as one of the largest cases of corporate fraud in U.S. history. During the course of the investigation, Monus's relationship with Ray Isaac is brought to light. Tressel says he has no knowledge of Monus's payments to Isaac.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">January, 1994:</span> The NCAA delivers a notice of allegations to Youngstown State. Tressel, along with Youngstown State Athletic Director Joe Malsimur and Youngstown State President Leslie Cochran assure the NCAA that they will conduct a thorough internal investigation into the matter. This turns out to be a sham, as Malsimur never contacts Monus, and Tressel never speaks to Isaac. In December 2003, Tressel would claim that he can't recall whether or not he talked to Isaac about the allegations. Isaac says he never spoke to anyone.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">December 18, 1995</span>: Michael Monus is convicted of one count of conspiracy, two counts of bank fraud, five counts of wire fraud, two counts of mail fraud, two counts of filing false income tax returns, 96 counts of interstate transportation of stolen goods, and one count of obstruction of justice. He is sentenced to 19 and a half years in prison. Shortly before this, Monus and Isaac are both implicated in the bribing of a juror in Monus's first trial, which resulted in a hung jury. During this time, Isaac reaches out to Tressel for help, but Tressel distances himself, saying he doesn't want to know anything and Isaac should simply cooperate with authorities.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">November 23, 1996:</span> #21 Michigan, losers of their previous two games, beats 2nd-ranked and undefeated Ohio State 13-9 in Columbus, making this the third time in four years that Michigan has ruined an undefeated season for the Buckeyes. It is at this particular game in 1996 that Ohio State fans openly rebel against John Cooper, hurling insults and obscenities at him as he leaves the field.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">March 4, 1998:</span> During the course of Michael Monus's trial for jury tampering, more rules violations are exposed at Youngstown State. The NCAA accuses Youngstown State with lack of institutional control, one of the most serious violations in the NCAA. The NCAA determines that Youngstown State's internal investigation in 1994 was not thorough or in-depth.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">February 28, 2000:</span> The NCAA concludes its investigation, accepting Youngstown State's self-imposed penalties, which include a reduction of two scholarships in 2000-2001, 2001-2002, and 2002-2003. Because the NCAA's statute of limitations expired in 1996, they cannot take away Youngstown State's 1991 National Championship. The NCAA also chooses not to sanction Tressel.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">January 2, 2001:</span> John Cooper is fired by Ohio State the day after losing to South Carolina in the Outback Bowl. Cooper finishes his career at Ohio State with a 3-8 bowl record and a 2-10-1 record against Michigan.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">January 17, 2001: </span>Ohio State hires Jim Tressel away from Youngstown State to replace John Cooper as head coach. The next day, during halftime of the Michigan-Ohio State basketball game, Tressel delivers his famous line that has become Ohio State lore: "I can assure you that you will be proud of our young people in the classroom, in the community and most especially in 310 days in Ann Arbor, Michigan."<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">January 20, 2001:</span> Youngstown native Maurice Clarett, the star rusher for Harding High School in Warren (14 miles northwest of Youngstown) and the #1 running back recruit in the country, commits to play for Jim Tressel at Ohio State.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">March 21, 2001:</span> Ohio State cornerback Derek Ross is arrested on charges of driving without a license and providing false information to police. He is sentenced to 30 days in jail and suspended for the spring, but returns for the season and leads the Big Ten in interceptions.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">November 15, 2001:</span> Ohio State quarterback Steve Bellisari is arrested for driving drunk two days before OSU's game against Illinois. Tressel suspends him, only to reinstate him and allow him to play in the team's bowl game.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">November 24, 2001:</span> Tressel makes good on the promise he made 10 months earlier as Ohio State beats Michigan 26-20 in Ann Arbor. During the game, Maurice Clarett takes an official visit to Michigan on UM's dime, and spends the game on the Ohio State sideline cheering for the Buckeyes.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">March 2, 2002:</span> Ohio State tight end Redgie Arden is arrested for drunk driving. He spends three days in jail and is suspended from spring practices. Tressel reinstates him before the season and he plays in 11 games in 2002.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">April 27, 2002:</span> Ohio State linebacker Marco Cooper is arrested for felony drug abuse and carrying a concealed weapon. In November, he pleads out and is put on probation.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">July 26, 2002</span>: Ohio State fullback Branden Joe is discovered asleep in his car on a highway ramp near Ohio State's campus. He refuses a breathalyzer test, and is suspended for three weeks of preseason camp, along with the first game of the 2002 season.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">July 29, 2002:</span> Ohio State wide receiver Angelo Chattams is suspected of being involved in a theft, but prosecutors allow him to enter a program for first-time offenders and avoid a criminal charge. He is excused from the team, but never suspended.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">August 17, 2002:</span> Ohio State defensive tackle Quinn Pitcock is arrested for underage drinking. He is suspended for three weeks of offseason workouts, but is not suspended for any games.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">August 24, 2002:</span> Ohio State wide receiver Chris Vance is arrested for underage drinking. He is held out of the first two games, and goes on to be Ohio State's 4th leading receiver in the 2002 season.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">October 13, 2002:</span> Ohio State linebacker Fred Pagac, Jr. is arrested for persistant disorderly conduct. Arrested at 3:45 AM, police say he was intoxicated and had a role in a fight involving two women, and did not stop fighting when ordered by police. He is suspended for one game, and is allowed to play in the National Championship Game against Miami in January.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">October 30, 2002: </span>Ohio State long snapper Kurt Wilhelm is arrested for felonious assault. He is held out of Ohio State's game against Penn State.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">April, 2003:</span> Maurice Clarett files a report stating that a car he borrowed from a local dealership was broken into and thousands of dollars in cash, CDs, stereo equipment, and clothing was stolen. Clarett calls the police from a phone in Jim Tressel's office. He is later charged with lying about the value of the items and falsification of a police report. He pleads guilty, is ordered to pay a fine, and does no jail time.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">May, 2003:</span> Ohio State cornerback/receiver Chris Gamble and nine other players are ruled ineligible for signing autographs at a convention, during which they took an hourly salary.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">June, 2003:</span> Ohio State tight end Redgie Arden pleads innocent to his second drunk driving charge in 15 months.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Fall, 2003:</span> The NCAA begins an investigation at Ohio State amid allegations of academic fraud and ineligibility. The investigation revolves around Maurice Clarett, and a teacher admits that Clarett received preferential treatment. The teacher is fired, and Clarett is found to be in violation of 14 conduct bylaws, two violations of receiving extra benefits because he is an athlete. The investigation also discovers that the Monte Carlo Clarett is driving was a loaner from a used-car lot. To make things worse, and forcing Ohio State's hand, is the fact that Clarett was regularly receiving benefits from Youngstown acquaintance Bobby Dellimuti. Dellimuti provided Clarett with 500 dollars in cash, and paid for thousands of dollars worth in cell phone bills for Clarett. Ohio State suspends him for the entire 2003 season. It is later revealed that Jim Tressel knew Dellimuti and knew who he was before Clarett's freshman season in 2002.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">October 27, 2003:</span> Ohio State tight end Louis Irizarry is arrested on three counts of first-degree misdemeanor assault. He is suspended two days later, and is found guilty of one count of assault, one count of negligent assault, and one count of disorderly conduct. He is put on probation, and is listed as second on the depth chart at tight end on Ohio State's spring 2004 roster.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">November 16, 2003:</span> Ohio State wide receiver Santonio Holmes and quarterback Troy Smith are arrested six days before the Michigan game on charges of misdemeanor disorderly conduct after a fight on campus in the early morning hours following Ohio State's win over Purdue. Holmes is held out of the starting lineup against Michigan, but plays the majority of the game and catches two touchdowns.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">April, 2004:</span> Ohio State fullback Branden Joe is cited for a misdemeanor open container violation, his second alcohol-related offense.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">May 1, 2004:</span> Ohio State tight end Louis Irizarry and cornerback Ira Guilford are arrested and charged with robbery after a student is assaulted and his wallet is stolen at 3 AM. They both plead innocent, and Guilford is released on bond, while Irizarry is held until the determination can be made whether or not he violated his probation from his October 2003 conviction.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">May 5, 2004:</span> Ohio State punter A.J. Trapasso is charged with underage drinking.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">May 17, 2004:</span> Ohio State punter A.J. Trapasso is arrested for underage drinking for the second time in 12 days.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">June 7, 2004:</span> Ohio State tight end Louis Irizarry is arrested for criminal trespassing after police pull him over and discover he has been banned from the campus of Ohio State.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">October 23, 2004:</span> Ohio State running back Lydell Ross is arrested for attempting to pass fake money to a woman at a gentlemen's club.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">November 9, 2004:</span> Maurice Clarett blows the whistle on Ohio State, attempting to expose all of the alleged corruption going on at his former school. He claims he "took the fall" during the 2003 investigation into his academics at Ohio State, and is now trying to clear his name. Clarett says that Jim Tressel arranged for Clarett to have access to several loaner vehicles, and that Tressel's brother Dick set up lucrative jobs that Clarett did not have to show up to. He also says that members of Tressel's staff introduced Clarett to boosters who provided him with cash benefits based on his performance on the field. Clarett says he would have been ineligible for the 2002 season, but that the Ohio State coaching staff set him up with an academic advisor whose only goal was to keep him eligible. He claims the academic advisor put him in Independent Study courses with hand-picked teachers who would pass him regardless of attendance. His allegations are corroborated by former Ohio State linebacker Marco Cooper. Cooper, who was kicked off the team because of multiple drug-related arrests, says he too was set up with fraudulent jobs and was provided with cars in exchange for signed memorabilia. Clarett says he is blowing the whistle on Ohio State because he feels they "blackballed" him from the university after suspending him for the 2003 season.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">October 12, 2004:</span> Louis Irizarry is sentenced to three years in prison.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">December 20, 2004:</span> Ohio State quarterback Troy Smith is suspended for the Alamo Bowl and the 2005 season opener for accepting $500 from a booster.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">December 21, 2004:</span> Ohio State wide receiver Albert Dukes is arrested on two felony counts of second-degree lewd and lascivious conduct involving a 12 year old girl. Tressel allows Dukes to travel with the team to the Alamo Bowl in San Antonio, and the charges are later dropped when the parents refuse to let their daughter testify in court.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">February 16, 2005:</span> The NCAA reprimands Ohio State offensive line coach Jim Bollman for trying to set up a recruit with a car, a loan, and a tutor. Jim Tressel is also reprimanded because Bollman is his subordinate.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">May 11, 2005:</span> Ohio State kicker Jonathan Skeete is arrested for drug trafficking. He is suspended.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">May 19, 2005:</span> Ohio State running back Erik Haw is cited by university police for smoking marijuana outside a dorm.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">May 21, 2005:</span> Ohio State lineman Tim Schafer is charged with disorderly conduct after police had to break up two fights between Schafer and another man. Both men were bloody and smelled of alcohol.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">July 20, 2005: </span>Ohio State athletic officials investigate a possible second NCAA rules violation by quarterback Troy Smith. Smith attended a quarterbacks camp run by Tennessee Titans quarterback Steve McNair, but because Ohio State runs on quarters instead of semesters, Smith may have missed class to attend, which would be an NCAA violation. Jim Tressel declines comment, saying the university's compliance department has not finished its inquiry.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">December 6, 2005:</span> Police say that Ohio State linebacker A.J. Hawk and center Nick Mangold reported a burglary at their apartment following their win over Michigan. According to the police report, the robbery took place sometime between 6:00 PM on November 22 and 8:00 PM on November 23rd. Hawk and Mangold tell police that $3000 in cash, $1425 in movies, two laptop computers, a $500 Gucci watch, and $750 worth of PlayStation and X-Box equipment was stolen. Police were not told about the crime until November 28.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">December 22, 2005:</span> Ohio State offensive lineman Andree Tyree is suspended from the Fiesta Bowl for a violation of team rules. It is later revealed that Tyree failed his third drug test.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">March 7, 2006:</span> Former Ohio State kicker Jonathan Skeete returns to the team as a walk-on following his arrest on drug trafficking charges in May 2005. He was convicted in October 2005, and despite his status as a convicted felon, he is readmitted to the university and reinstated to the football team.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">April 2, 2006: </span>Ohio State offensive lineman Alex Boone is arrested after driving under the influence and being involved in a two-vehicle crash. Jim Tressel says that Boone will not be suspended for any practices or games.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">August 9, 2006: </span>Ohio State tight end Marcel Frost is suspended for the 2006 season for violating team rules. Although the athletic department refuses to comment on the nature of the violation, spokesman Dan Wallenberg says Frost will remain on scholarship and be eligible to return in 2007.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">September 18, 2007: </span>Ohio State wide receiver Ray Small is arrested for driving with a suspended license.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">September 24, 2007:</span> Ohio State quarterback Antonio Henton is arrested for soliciting a prostitute.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">December 12, 2007:</span> Jeannette, Pennsylvania businessman Ted Sarniak is cleared of allegations of bribery as a result of police opting not to arrest Sarniak in October 2006 when he crashed his car into a utility pole following the Jeannette-Catholic Central football game. Sarniak smelled of alcohol, but was not taken into custody. Though cleared of the bribery accusations, Sarniak has a documented history of providing Pittsburgh Steelers football tickets and other gifts to police officers in Jeannette.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">December 20, 2007: </span>Ohio State cornerback Eugene Clifford is suspended for violating team rules.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">January 17, 2008:</span> The night before heralded Jeannette quarterback Terrelle Pryor takes an official visit to Michigan, Ohio State coaches have dinner with Jeannette businessman Ted Sarniak, who is a friend and mentor to Pryor.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">March 19, 2008:</span> Terrelle Pryor signs with Ohio State.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">April 11, 2008:</span> Ohio State defensive backs Eugene Clifford, Jamario O'Neal, and Donald Washington are held out of practice but not officially suspended. It is rumored that all three players failed drug tests.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">July 7, 2008:</span> Ohio State defensive back Eugene Clifford's career at OSU ends, as he is arrested again, this time for assault after allegedly punching two men in the face. He transfers to Tennessee State later in the month.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">July 26, 2008:</span> Ohio State defensive tackle Doug Worthington is arrested and charged with operating a vehicle while intoxicated. He misses no game action in the 2008 season.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">December 11, 2008:</span> Ohio State defensive end Nathan Williams is arrested for shoplifting. He receives no punishment other than "internal" from the coaches.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">February 2, 2009:</span> Ohio State offensive lineman Alex Boone is arrested after being belligerant and uncooperative with police while he jumps on car hoods in a drunken tirade. Boone flees from police, who find him under a patio and have to taze him to subdue him.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">June 11, 2009:</span> Ohio State running back recruit Jaamal Berry is arrested for felony possession of marijuana in Miami. He pleas down and agrees to take a six-month drug program online in exchange for having the charges dropped. He is allowed to enroll at Ohio State and join the football team without issue.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">September 9, 2009: </span>It is discovered that violations were committed during Ohio State's recruitment of quarterback Terrelle Pryor. Pryor's official visit to Ohio State for the game against Wisconsin in 2007 came with a discounted hotel rate. The other violation involves former Ohio State quarterback Troy Smith working at an Ohio State football camp in the summer of 2007, during which time Smith encourages Pryor to pick Ohio State. As a result of the hotel violation, Pryor is quietly ruled ineligible in August 2009 until he repays $158. Ohio State files a request to the NCAA to reinstate Pryor on August 21, and he regains his eligibility in time for the season opener on August 30.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">April 2, 2010, 2:32 PM: </span>Jim Tressel receives an email from Chris Cicero, a Columbus attorney. Cicero informs Tressel that several players have been selling signed items to tattoo parlor owner Edward Rife, who is under heavy investigation from the authorities on suspicion of drug trafficking. Rife informs Tressel of all of this, and details Rife's criminal history.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">April 2, 2010, 6:32 PM: </span>Tressel responds to Cicero's email, telling him he will "get on it ASAP."<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">April 16, 2010, 9:43 AM: </span>Cicero emails Tressel again, giving details of cleats, jerseys, Big Ten championship rings and a national championship ring being sold.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">April 16, 2010, 11:20 AM:</span> Tressel responds to Cicero once more: "I hear you!! It is unbelievable!! Thanks for your help keep me posted as to what I need to do if anything. I will keep pounding these kids hoping they grow up. jt"<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">April 16, 2010, 2:26 PM: </span>Cicero recommends that Tressel ban his players from going to the tattoo parlor and having any contact with Rife. He asks that Tressel keep their email communication private.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">June 1, 2010, 7:33 AM: </span>Tressel emails Cicero, informing him that the team will be receiving their 2009 Big Ten Championship rings, and asks if there are anymore names that Cicero can give him.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">June 1, 2010, 4:09 PM: </span>Cicero tells Tressel he has no new names, but that the names he gave him previously "are still good."<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">June 6, 2010, 9:15 PM: </span>Five days later, Tressel thanks Cicero in what is their last known communication.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">September 13, 2010: </span>Jim Tressel signs an NCAA certificate of compliance, which indicates that he has reported any knowledge of any violations.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">December 7, 2010: </span>Authorities contact Ohio State, notifying them that they have raided Rife's tattoo parlor, and discovered several Ohio State items. The authorities, obviously unaware of any NCAA implications, are simply inquiring as to whether or not the items may have been stolen. The Ohio State athletic department is notified of this the next day.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">December 9, 2010:</span> Jim Tressel is informed that federal officials know about the items. Tressel still does not inform his superiors of his email exchanges with Chris Cicero. During the next week, Ohio State plans an internal investigation into the matter.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">December 16, 2010: </span>Ohio State interviews the six players implicated: quarterback Terrelle Pryor, running back Daniel Herron, wide receiver DeVier Posey, offensive tackle Mike Adams, defensive end Solomon Thomas, and linebacker Jordan Whiting.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">December 17, 2010: </span>Ohio State informs the Big Ten and the NCAA that they are preparing to self-report violations.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">December 19, 2010: </span>Ohio State releases its report, and declares the six players ineligible.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">December 21, 2010: </span>The NCAA contacts the six players, asking for additional information. Ohio State provides this information the next day.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">December 22, 2010: </span>The NCAA notifies Ohio State of its decision: 5-game suspensions for Pryor, Herron, Posey, Adams, and Thomas, and one game for Whiting. Incredulously, all six players are allowed to play in the Sugar Bowl on January 4.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">December 23, 2010: </span>Jim Tressel and Ohio State Athletic Director Gene Smith hold a press conference, announcing the findings and sanctions.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">January 13, 2011: </span>Ohio State's office of legal affairs stumble upon Tressel's email correspondence with Chris Cicero. They conduct a search of the email accounts of all members of the football staff, and discover that no one else knew of the players' contact with Edward Rife before December 2010.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">January 16, 2011: </span>Jim Tressel is questioned by Ohio State officials, and he acknowledges his contact with Chris Cicero.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"></span><span style="font-weight: bold;">February 2, 2011: </span>Ohio State offensive lineman recruit Chris Carter is arrested the day before Signing Day on a charge of sexual imposition. He is accused of fondling up to eight girls at his high school under the pretense of measuring them for ROTC uniforms. Despite having a confession from Carter, authorities drop the charges five days later, and Carter is allowed to sign with Ohio State.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">February 8, 2011: </span>During an interview with NCAA and Ohio State officials, Jim Tressel admits that he knew violations were committed when he did not report what Cicero told him.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">March 7, 2011: </span>Yahoo! Sports reports that a source has told them that Jim Tressel knew of the violations in April 2010 and did not tell anyone else. Ohio State Athletic Director Gene Smith accelerates the process of the completion of the university's self-report.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">March 8, 2011: </span>Ohio State releases its report, disclosing Tressel's violation and announcing a two-game suspension and $250,000 fine for the head coach.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">March 17, 2011: </span>Ohio State and Jim Tressel announce that the two-game suspension will be increased to five.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">March 25, 2011: </span>It is revealed that Jim Tressel in fact didn't keep the email correspondence with Chris Cicero all to himself. He forwarded the emails to Ted Sarniak, the Jeannette businessman with an affinity for giving gifts to police officers, and friend and mentor of Terrelle Pryor from Pryor's days as the #1 recruit in the nation at Jeannette High School.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">April 25, 2011: </span>The NCAA delivers a notice of allegations to Ohio State and Tressel, accusing Tressel of failing to "deport himself in accordance with the honesty and integrity normally associated with the conduct and administration of intercollegiate athletics as required by NCAA legislation and violated ethical-conduct legislation when he failed to report information concerning violations of NCAA legislation and permitted football student-athletes to participate in intercollegiate athletics competition while ineligible."<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">May 1, 2011:</span> Ohio State linebacker Dorian Bell is suspended for the entire 2011 season for an unspecified violation of team rules, with all rumors pointing to a persistant marijuana issue. Bell immediately leaves school with the intent to transfer; his hometown Pitt Panthers turn him away.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">May 7, 2011: </span>The Columbus Dispatch reports that Ohio State will investigate used-car purchases by dozens of Ohio State athletes at two Columbus car dealerships. The Dispatch discovers that at least eight athletes and 11 athletes' relatives bought used cars from two specific dealerships during the past five years.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">May 23, 2011: </span>Former Ohio State basketball player Mark Titus posts a lengthy blog post detailing his eyewitness accounts of "an unusually high volume of brand new Dodge Chargers driving around on campus, and just about all of them had tinted windows and rims on the outside with Ohio State football players behind the wheel on the inside."<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">May 25, 2011: </span>Former Ohio State receiver Ray Small tells the Ohio State student newspaper that he sold items for cash during his time at Ohio State, and he also mentions that "the best deals came from the car dealerships." After facing blistering criticism from former and current Ohio State players, in addition to Ohio State fans, Small backtracks on his story, saying the newspaper twisted his words.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">May 27, 2011: </span>Ohio State announces that it will not disclose the correspondence between Jim Tressel and the Jeannette businessman, Ted Sarniak.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">May 30, 2011:</span> Jim Tressel interrupts his vacation in Florida to return to Columbus and deliver his letter of resignation to Athletic Director Gene Smith and university President E. Gordon Gee. The resignation comes on the eve of what is believed to be a very destructive Sports Illustrated article that is rumored to put Tressel and Ohio State even deeper in the hole.<br /><br />=================================================================<br /><br />Nothing Ohio State has accomplished in the last ten years is valid anymore. From Clarett, to Smith, to Pryor, and all the others in between, with the cars and the cash and the discounts and the cutting of corners, Ohio State is essentially an SEC school operating in the Midwest. Tressel is a proven, documented cheater, and if the NCAA has any balls at all, they will slap him with a show-cause order, blackballing him from ever coaching again. He has successfully manipulated his public perception so he comes across as a righteous, homely, ethically pure gentleman, when the reality is he's basically a gangster, willing to do whatever it takes to win, and turning a blind eye toward the corruption that he himself endorses. He distanced himself from Ray Isaac at Youngstown when the NCAA came calling. He distanced himself from Maurice Clarett while simultaneously shredding Clarett's credibility when he tried to destroy Ohio State. If some injustice is committed and he somehow survives this latest storm, he will distance himself from Terrelle Pryor and his friends, too.<br /><br />Tressel entered into a perfect marriage with Ohio State back in the winter of 2001. A native son with enormous success at a lower level, but more than ready to take the next step. And a school so desperate to reverse their fortunes in that final game in late November, so eager to erase the sour taste of 2-10-1 from their mouths, willing to sell their souls at all costs if it means claiming dominance over "That School Up North." That is the culture of Ohio State football. The means don't matter whatsoever. As long as the end is a victory over Michigan, they will tolerate anything that comes their way. And now they deserve the darkest of fates. They knew what they were getting in Tressel: a faux-superior thug, who shares the win at all costs mentality of his followers. They are essentially a hostile regime, with Tressel leading the masses in "Death to Michigan" chants. And any dissenters, anyone who dares speak out against the regime - Kirk Herbstreit, Bruce Hooley, Mark Titus, Ray Small - is thrown to the wolves, their credibility and character put through the meat grinder by the bloodthirsty masses. The brainwashed followers, from the dusty streets of Youngstown to the outskirts of Cincinnati, from the shores of Lake Erie and Glenville High School to the backwoods of Westerville, and Centerville, and the epicenter in Columbus, they all march in lockstep as Senator Tressel commands them. And eventually, he will lead them off the cliff, and they will follow him without question, even it means their own destruction.<br /><br />Sources:<br /><br /><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://sports.espn.go.com/ncf/news/story?id=1920867">Souls of the departed haunt Youngstown</a><br /><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_hb3007/is_n1_v18/ai_n28663765/">Former Phar-Mor COO sentenced</a><br /><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://fs.ncaa.org/Docs/NCAANewsArchive/2000/division+i/infractions%2Bcase_%2Byoungstown%2Bstate%2Buniversity%2B-%2B2-28-00.html">Infractions case: Youngstown State University</a><br /><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://michiganagainsttheworld.blogspot.com/2008/07/buckeye-milestone.html">Michigan Against the World: Buckeye Milestone</a><br /><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://sports.espn.go.com/ncf/news/story?id=1919059">Clarett claims cash, cars among benefits</a><br /><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://www.dispatch.com/live/content//local_news/stories/2009/05/31/FERPA_OSU.ART_ART_05-31-09_A14_D4E14K6.html">Oversight vs. privacy at OSU</a><br /><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://mgoblog.com/content/who-ted-sarniak">Who is Ted Sarniak?</a><br /><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/news/westmoreland/s_542366.html">DA clears businessman, police</a><br /><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://www.cleveland.com/osu/index.ssf/2009/09/when_it_comes_to_osu_and_usc_s.html">When it comes to OSU and USC stars, the spotlight often includes scrutiny</a><br /><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://www.dispatch.com/live/content/sports/stories/2011/03/10/tressel-timeline-is-lengthy.html">Tressel timeline is tricky</a><br /><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://www.cleveland.com/osu/index.ssf/2011/04/ohio_state_receives_ncaa_alleg.html">Ohio State receives NCAA allegations, faces Aug. 12 hearing</a><br /><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="https://www.nmnathletics.com//pdf8/760724.pdf?ATCLID=205142506&SPSID=87743&SPID=10408&DB_OEM_ID=17300">Notice of Allegations</a><br /><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://www.dispatch.com/live/content/sports/stories/2011/03/25/tressels-emails-were-forwarded.html">Ohio State football: Tressel's emails were forwarded</a><br /><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://www.cleveland.com/ohio-sports-blog/index.ssf/2011/05/ohio_state_to_probe_car_purcha.html">Ohio State to probe car purchases by athletes and relatives to see if they meet NCAA rules</a><br /><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://clubtrillion.blogspot.com/2011/05/less-than-week-away.html">Less Than A Week Away (Mark Titus's blog)</a><br /><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://www.thelantern.com/campus/ray-small-tells-all-ex-buckeye-says-he-sold-memorabilia-some-players-don-t-think-about-rules-1.2256503">Ray Small tells all: Ex-Buckeye says he sold memorabilia, some players don't 'think about' rules</a><br /><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://www.cleveland.com/ohio-sports-blog/index.ssf/2011/05/ohio_state_ex-receiver_ray_sma.html">Ohio State ex-receiver Ray Small changes story, says school paper twisted words on car deals, memorabilia sales</a><br /><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://sports.espn.go.com/ncf/news/story?id=6600129">Ohio State Buckeyes decline to give info on Terrelle Pryor, mentor Ted Sarniak</a><br /><span style="font-size:180%;"><span style=" ;font-family:times new roman;font-size:78%;" ></span></span>Brianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07272986648979988175noreply@blogger.com15tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6136487040752878109.post-2577842390069287652011-05-11T20:48:00.001-04:002011-05-27T06:00:36.210-04:00The Battle of Michigan: The Arab Spring<span style="font-style: italic;">Welcome to Part 5. Part 1: <a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://genuinelysarcastic.blogspot.com/2010/07/battle-of-michigan-numbers.html">The Numbers.</a> Part 2: <a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://genuinelysarcastic.blogspot.com/2010/08/battle-of-michigan-war-of-perception.html">The War of Perception.</a> Part 3: <a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://genuinelysarcastic.blogspot.com/2010/08/battle-of-michigan-psl.html">The PSL.</a> Part 4: <a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://genuinelysarcastic.blogspot.com/2011/02/battle-of-michigan-2011-and-2012.html">2011 and 2012.</a><br /><br /><center><img src="http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v335/Psyblast/michigan-2012.jpg" /></center><br /><br /></span><span>There's a Latin saying I like to use a lot, mainly because it makes me look much more cultured than I actually am, partially because Kiefer Sutherland used it in Desert Saints, and also because it's pretty damn true.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">De gestibus non est disputandum.</span><br /><br />Literally translated, it means, "there is no disputing about tastes." Its meaning, in case it's not obvious, is that when it comes to matters of opinion, debate is pointless. If you're trying to engage someone in an argument about something they have strong belief in, you're never going to win. You can't talk people out of their beliefs, whether it be religion, politics, music, or...football.<br /><br />For the past three years, many (most?) Michigan fans did everything they could to excuse Rich Rodriguez. The list of deflections and excuses is extensive, ranging from everything between the red wristbands he wore to the actual play on the field. Only when faced with an excessively overwhelming heap of evidence did the vast majority of Michigan fans finally agree that he simply wasn't going to get it done, and that the future no longer held any promise of improvement under his guidance. But until the evidence was mountain-high - increasingly laughable losses to Michigan State, Iowa, Penn State, Wisconsin, Ohio State, and finally Mississippi State - did the diehards (myself included) finally abandon ship. The breaking point was different for everyone - for me the MSU game put one foot out the door, and the PSU game put the other one out and slammed the door shut - but until we each reached that point, we stood strong in our beliefs and convictions, no matter what anyone else said.<br /><br />That is why Michigan fans won't win the fight against Michigan State fans, and vice versa. It's like Muslims vs. Jews at this point. Neither side can convince the other out of the belief that the other side is destined to lose the endless struggle. There's always some sort of excuse, and that applies to both sides. For three years, we've heard MSU fans (and recruits) jabbering about Michigan disrespecting the state by not pursuing many of the in-state players, and how Michigan State was "turning the state green" and that "Michigan State is THE university of Michigan", and other superlative, hyperbolic nonsense. During this time, Michigan fans had some good reasons and some bad reasons for this. A good reason was the blatant and obvious influences of certain people on the recruitments of certain star prospects now residing in East Lansing and Columbus. There was nothing Rich Rodriguez could've done to change these situations, because they began to fester under Carr. A bad reason was the "Michigan doesn't have enough talent, we'll recruit nationally anyway" schtick. Yes, Michigan is down the totem pole in terms of sheer numbers when it comes to high school talent in football. But if you toss it by the wayside, the stars you miss on will almost always come back to bite you, and that's as painful as not having them on your team. We got lucky in the Epic Fail 2007 Class when Ronald Johnson, Dionte Allen, Joseph Barksdale, and others left entirely, instead of picking local rivals of UofM. Not so lucky in recent years; regardless of how they got there, William Gholston and Lawrence Thomas at Michigan State are problems. Johnathan Hankins at Ohio State is a problem. When the neighbors set up shop in your kitchen and start cherry picking your groceries, it's not as simple as going back to the market to get more.<br /><br />So now, present day. Three years of submitting to our East Lansing Overlords has given way to an uprising and demanding an end to the Dantonio regime, and our new leader dares to tread on the dictator's territory. And once he does, and has, a different line of rhetoric begins, one that is inherently laughable: that Michigan State is evolving into a national recruiting power and can afford to miss out on the state's best players, because they'll get equal or better ones from elsewhere - sounds eeriely like the comments from Michigan fans the last three years that MSU fans heartily laughed at while hanging their "Mission Accomplished" banner over the mitten.<br /><br />Another excuse is "All the kids Michigan is landing were scUM leans anyway." Oh, so you're implying the playing field wasn't fair? And you feel comfortable stating this while Gholston, Fred Smith and Ed Davis put on MSU jerseys while their high school coach spends his days fetching Dantonio's coffee and bran muffin each morning? You're okay with that position while Lawrence Thomas and Mylan Hicks suit up for the Spartans, knowing that their coach from Renaissance famously threw UofM under the bus while bouncing Dantonio's balls off his chin? Things considerably soured for Michigan at OLSM during the latter years of Carr and Rodriguez's three years, and yet when Hoke comes in and immediately lands James Ross (the best player in the state), you get one of two excuses. One follows the mindset summed up by the title of a post on a Michigan State message board: "(OLSM coach George) Porritt showing his true Blue colors again", the comical notion that Porritt favors Michigan despite sending Kalin Lucas, Jon Misch and Dion Sims to East Lansing in recent years. The other is "Ross is too small anyway." He's the same size Greg Jones was in high school. I think he worked out pretty well for MSU. Ross was also a high priority for both Ohio State and Penn State, two schools that I'm <span style="font-weight: bold;">pretty</span> sure know a thing or two about linebacking.<br /><br />And then when presented with the cases of Mario Ojemudia and Devin Funchess, students at a notoriously pro-MSU school in Farmington Hills Harrison (Agim Shabaj, Drew Stanton, Mark Dell), a school still heavily influenced by former Spartan Mill Coleman, MSU fans play the "playing time" card. Lifelong Michigan State fan Ojemudia was obviously scared away by depth chart at MSU and was sold on a dream by Hoke and Mattison. So basically, Hoke's taking the same approach Dantonio took when he arrived at Michigan State, but it's a shallow and flimsy pitch this time. At Cass Tech, MSU fans were all excited to be in the top two for Dior Mathis, and got their hopes up when MSU offered Royce Jenkins-Stone and Terry Richardson before Michigan did. And then when Dior was clearly ticketed for Oregon, and Richardson seems bound for Ann Arbor, they're both far too small and too Cissoko-like to ever be impact players. Never mind that Oregon is developing a pretty impressive track record with defensive backs, or the fact that Richardson has offers from Alabama, USC, Ohio State, Penn State, and other elite programs. If Nick Saban offers you as a defensive back, chances are you're pretty good at football. But by all means, pigeon-hole the kid because his size resembles that of another player who had already graduated from Cass by the time Terry got there. If Richardson went to Renaissance, MSU fans would be comparing him to Mylan Hicks. But because he goes to Cass Tech, he's Cissoko part two. Comparing players because they go to the same high school is one of the dumbest things I've ever heard.<br /><br />If Richardson was too small, Dantonio wouldn't have offered him. If Ross was too small, Dantonio wouldn't have offered him. If Ojemudia was too small, Dantonio wouldn't have offered him. You don't offer recruits a year before they sign if they aren't at the top of your board. I'm pretty sure James Ross was the first recruit either school offered for this class. He isn't "ideal" linebacker size, and isn't a physically imposing specimen like Gholston or Thomas. But he's also much, much more advanced as a football player than either of those two. That's not to say Gholston or LT won't be great. They absolutely can be. But so can Ross. His instincts are unmatched, and MSU fans trying to dismiss his commitment to Michigan as "he's too small" or "UM has more playing time" or "he was always a Michigan lean" are chewing on some exceptionally sour grapes.<br /><br />Stop trying to spin what is plainly obvious: your "in-state dominance" was more a result of Michigan being thrown in the tank for three years. "Lifelong Michigan fans" still went elsewhere during Rodriguez's tenure. Whatever infrastructure Dantonio built in the state has already been surpassed by Hoke. If you think a bumpy first year will suddenly open the eyes of the recruits who have committed, and there will be some mass defection, you are sorely, sorely mistaken. Even Rodriguez never lost a single in-state recruit he got a verbal commitment from. The only in-state kid Michigan lost in recent memory (who was <span style="font-style: italic;">publically</span> committed) was Jake Fisher, and that was because of the coaching change. Michigan State is coming off a (shared) Big Ten Championship, and an 11-win season, and now they can't even convince kids who grew up cheering for MSU and go to an MSU-friendly high school to commit to them. MSU <span style="font-style: italic;">may</span> be able to salvage Aaron Burbridge - but it's unbelievable that Hoke has already pulled Michigan even. This is a kid that should've been committed to State months ago, and now Michigan has a real shot of stealing him away. Hoke has beaten Dantonio heads up in every single recruiting battle to date, and the future looks bleak too.<br /><br />As for those who say Hoke is a terrible coach and was Michigan's Plan D or E or whatever (and even cite other Michigan people who wanted nothing to do with him): don't pretend to know how Michigan's coaching search went down. Even the vast majority of Michigan fans aren't sure what exactly happened. The general consensus is that Dave Brandon had a wink and nod agreement with Jim Harbaugh, and that it fell apart at the last minute when Harbaugh's NFL stock went nuclear. After that, no one knows for sure. There's a line of thinking that Les Miles was genuinely pursued, and politely declined, and then Michigan moved on to Hoke (making him a Plan C at the worst). There's another that says Miles was "pursued" only to placate the Miles faction that spent the last three years pouting and raving that they were ignored in 2007. This line of thinking points back to Brandon allegedly saying he would never hire Miles (everyone knows about the skeletons in his closet), and that he never offered Miles the job and was focused in on Hoke immediately after the Harbaugh agreement fell through. If that's the case, then that's not a bad Plan B. Brian at <a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://mgoblog.com/">MGoBlog</a> was <a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://mgoblog.com/content/profiles-cronyism-brady-hoke">famously opposed to Hoke's candidacy in 2007</a>, and there remains a certain segment of the UM fanbase that believes Hoke is a patsy and Lloyd is really Emperor Palpatine, pulling the strings behind the scenes.<br /><br />The fact is, Dantonio never did anything as a head coach prior to arriving at MSU that was more impressive than what Hoke did as a head coach prior to arriving at UM. Dantonio had success as a coordinator - on the staff of a proven cheater on a team that rode a felon and an ineligible athlete to a national title. As a head coach, Dantonio did nothing of merit at Cincinnati, and yet has proven himself to be a very dependable coach at State. Hoke also had success as an assistant, and he has a national championship ring on his finger too, from 1997. So he had an under .500 record at Ball State. Can you name a coach that had success at <span style="font-weight: bold;">Ball State?</span> Can you even tell me where <span style="font-weight: bold;">Ball State</span> is located? And yet he managed to win 12 games in his final season there in 2008, their first 10-win season since 1978. They scored the most points in school history that year, with 489. The second most was 2007, also coached by Hoke, with 409. After that, in third place? 377, in 1977. At San Diego State, Hoke took over a program that was 4-7, 5-7, 3-9, 4-8, and 2-10 in the five years prior to his arrival. Two years later, they were 9-4, losing four games by a combined 15 points, being the only team to stay within striking distance of TCU (until the Rose Bowl), and winning the Poinsettia Bowl by three touchdowns. No evidence exists to suggest Hoke is any worse of a coach than Dantonio was prior to taking over MSU's program. Using the aversion many Michigan fans had to him as proof he's a lousy coach is amusing, but useless.<br /><br />Throw out all the excuses you want. "MSU's depth is scaring recruits away." "Some of these kids are too small." "Some of these kids are lifelong Michigan fans." "Hoke is selling a dream." "There will be mass decommits when we kill UM on the field this year."<br /><br />Thank you, Rationalization Man. You have saved the village.<br /></span>Brianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16483608908590422213noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6136487040752878109.post-40946134870755145082011-05-05T12:37:00.000-04:002011-05-05T00:40:13.126-04:00A Slow Parade<center><img src="http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v335/Psyblast/wings-lose.jpg" /><br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-size:130%;">Sharks 4, Red Wings 3 (OT); Western Semifinals, 0-3</span></span></span><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><br /> </span></span><br /><div><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"><tbody><tr valign="MIDDLE"><td style="background-image: url(http://beemp3.com/player/corner-topleft2.gif);background-repeat: repeat;font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size: 12px;vertical-align: bottom;"><br /></td><td style="background-image: url(http://beemp3.com/player/bkgnd-top2.gif);background-repeat: repeat;font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size: 12px;vertical-align: middle;"> A.A. Bondy - A Slow Parade .mp3</td><td style="background-image: url(http://beemp3.com/player/corner-topright2.gif);background-repeat: repeat;font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size: 12px;vertical-align: bottom;"><br /></td></tr><tr valign="MIDDLE"><td style="width: 16px;background-image:url(http://beemp3.com/player/left-ltrow2.gif);" width="16"><br /></td><td style="background-image: url(http://beemp3.com/player/light2.gif);background-repeat: repeat;font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size: 11px;vertical-align: bottom;"><embed class="beeplayer" wmode="transparent" style="height:24px;width:290px;" src="http://beemp3.com/player/player.swf" quality="high" bgcolor="#ffffff" allowscriptaccess="sameDomain" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer" flashvars="playerID=1&bg=0xCDDFF3&leftbg=0x357DCE&lefticon=0xF2F2F2&rightbg=0x64F051&rightbghover=0x1BAD07&righticon=0xF2F2F2&righticonhover=0xFFFFFF&text=0x357DCE&slider=0x357DCE&track=0xFFFFFF&border=0xFFFFFF&loader=0xAF2910&soundFile=http%3A//themusicninja.net/mp3s/A%20A%20Bondy%20-%20A%20Slow%20Parade.mp3" align="middle" height="24" width="290"></embed> <img style="padding:0;border:0;vertical-align:bottom" src="http://beemp3.com/player/logo_small.gif" /> </td><td style="width: 16px;background-image:url(http://beemp3.com/player/right-ltrow2.gif);" width="16"><br /></td></tr><tr><td width="16"><img style="padding:0;border:0;" src="http://beemp3.com/player/corner-bottomleft2.gif" /></td><td style="background-image: url(http://beemp3.com/player/bkgnd-bottom2.gif);background-repeat: repeat-x;font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size: 11px;vertical-align: top;text-align: center;padding:0;border: 0;margin:0;">Found at <a href="http://beemp3.com/download.php?file=9576533&song=A+Slow+Parade">bee mp3 search engine</a></td><td width="16"><img style="padding:0;border:0;" src="http://beemp3.com/player/corner-bottomright2.gif" /></td></tr></tbody></table></div><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><br /></span></span><div style="text-align: left;">I suppose I could just link to <a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://genuinelysarcastic.blogspot.com/2010/05/there-are-things-that-drift-away.html">this post</a> from exactly one year ago. It's essentially the exact same thing.<br /><br />One of the biggest cliches in this world is "all good things must come to an end." And as is the case with almost all cliches, it's a cliche because it's true. There is nothing in our lives that has an infinite lifespan. When we encounter something good, or even decent, something we deem to be worthwhile, even if we resist it at first, we eventually come to rely upon it, and we subconsciously do whatever we can to preserve it. We try with all our might to keep the decency in our lives, clinging to whatever joy we find in an otherwise cold world.<br /><br />But it's irrelevant. The passage of time inevitably brings with it the winds of change. Regardless of what we do, sooner or later, the things we cherish slip through our hands, in some way or another. The most tragic among us witness the greatness fading away, while the blissfully ignorant remain blind to it until they realize it's gone. Either way, the end result is the same: we all feel the same emptiness when we lose something we held dear. We all feel the same pain in our hearts that accompanies the void that was once filled. In the end, all we have left are the memories we forged, the images we burn into our minds, and the sounds of a lost paradise that we use to fill the silence that dominates the present after what we loved has faded into the clouds of history.<br /><br />For Red Wings fans, the past 20 years have instilled in us a righteous sense of superiority. We acquired the feeling that not a team in hockey could match the skill of the Red Wings, and if the Wings played "their" game, their precise execution would win the day. We never acknowledged the possibility that another team was actually "better" than us. In 2006, Edmonton wasn't "better", they simply employed the trap to suffocate the Wings' offense, a crutch used by a clearly inferior team. In 2007, Anaheim wasn't better, they had to resort to goonery and thug tactics to muscle their way past the Wings in the West Finals. In 2009, the Penguins weren't better, they were simply able to drag their bodies across the finish line just ahead of ours, because we had to endure injuries upon injuries and terrible officiating and the brutality of the Western Conference playoffs. Detroit fans have this romantic notion that if the Wings were in the Eastern Conference, we would've won every Stanley Cup since 1996.<br /><br />I'm (mostly) exaggerating, of course, but the base point remains the same. By and large, we've never accepted the possibility of a team being better at what we do than us. But now, as we stare own the barrel of another elimination from San Jose, as we swallow the bitter pill of a seventh loss in the last eight playoff games against the Sharks, the reality is as obvious as it is painful: they are truly and genuinely <span style="font-weight: bold;">better</span> than the Red Wings. They're not deploying some gimmicky defense, nor are they taking advantage of pussy ass referees and pulverizing the Red Wings after every whistle. No, they're doing what the Red Wings have done for the majority of the last 20 years. They're dominating in the faceoff circle. They're winning the battles in the corners. They're backchecking and forechecking with relentless vigor, and for the most part they are destroying us in the special teams department as the Red Wings' penalty kill swirls the drain for the third year in a row under the incompetent eye of Brad McCrimmon - while former Red Wings assistant Todd McLellan dominates the Wings in the areas he himself built to elite status while in Detroit. Our own weapons, used against us. Beaten at our own game.<br /><br />The reality we all want to ignore but can't deny now lies ahead of us, plain as day and right out in the open. The days of overbearing dominance by the Red Wings in the West is over. The mystique is no longer there. These same Sharks wilted away like spineless cowards in the face of the Winged Wheel four years ago when Robert Lang scored in the final minute to tie Game 4, a game the Red Wings would win in overtime to tie the series. The Wings dominated the next two games to eliminate the Sharks. For Michigan fans, this is a familiar experience. For 40 years, Michigan occupied the minds of the other Big Ten programs, a phenomenon we sometimes refer to as "Winged Helmet Paranoia." In that same vein, "Winged Wheel Paranoia" has enjoyed a reign of nearly two decades. And it's gone now. Teams don't fear the Red Wings anymore. The Sharks and Penguins have shattered the aura of invincibility that surrounded Joe Louis Arena since the early 90s. The mind games are gone, just as the last three years (some would certainly argue more than that) saw the mystique fade from Michigan football. Teams no longer fear coming into the Big House; just the opposite, in fact. They see it as an opportunity to exact vengeance for years of tyranny under the oppressive thumb of the Wolverines; a chance to snatch a pound of flesh 40 years in the making.<br /><br />But the thing is, as Brady Hoke and Greg Mattison have the grand opportunity to restore the mystique, as they plunder the state of Michigan and lay waste to Mark Dantonio's grand vision of "turning the state green", as they dare to encrouch on the evil empire's territory to the south of us, there exists much smaller chances for the Red Wings to fight off the wave of insurgency against their power. College football provides the luxury of a clean slate every few years as the entire roster turns over and the chance for younger, better players to step in presents itself. We're already seeing the beginning of it for Michigan football, as we can rest assured that greatness lies ahead with James Ross, and Royce Jenkins-Stone, and Joe Bolden, and Kaleb Ringer, and other stars in the making whose best days lie ahead. This isn't the case in pro sports. The usurpation of Detroit's throne in the West by teams like Chicago, and San Jose, and Vancouver - these are teams with nuclei much younger than ours. The future doesn't hold promise for the Red Wings as much as it holds uncertainty. Lidstrom and Rafalski are on their last legs; behind them resides unproven talent that will need to be proven lest an enormous hole in our already-shoddy defense be torn open. The Wings had great hope for Jonathan Ericsson, and instead we've been treated to three years of incompetence and utterly dreadful play. Up front, Datsyuk and Zetterberg and Franzen are on the wrong side of 30. Bertuzzi and Holmstrom are almost out of gas. The youth that exists in the system - players like Tatar and Nyquist and Pulkkinen and Kindl and Smith and Mursak - is completely and utterly unproven at the NHL level, and as the transition from old to young takes place over the next several years, we'll have to rely on these prospects to live up to their full potential, all while competing against teams that will have their young stars entering their prime.<br /><br />A future that contains the unknown is a future to be feared. And for those of us who invest far too much emotion in trivial things like sports, the angst of the unknown is surpassed only by the agony of the present, as we watch the one thing we could always rely on be laid to waste. For me, the socially inept, self-loathing, clinically depressed jerk, what little energy I have left as I struggle to find a reason to get out of bed each day is zapped as the Red Wings fade away into the sunset. I get to watch them break apart and slip away, just as all good things in my life have already done so. My shattered existence just fractures more, the spider web of cracked glass growing each day, with things like hope and optimism being conspicuously absent, and worse, the concept of them becoming more and more foreign.<br /><br />Three things in life are certain. Death, taxes, and the expiration of all things pleasant and comforting. Some of those things last longer than others. Some can last 20 years. Some can last 15 months. But they all end. Whether it's via a three minute phone conversation or an unexpected snap shot from the right circle, time always catches up.<br /><br />And time brings everything to an often-unwanted conclusion.<br /></div><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="font-size:100%;"></span></span></center>Brianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16483608908590422213noreply@blogger.com0