Thanks to a bad internet connection this morning, I'll run down the links quickly.
Ranking the Big Ten football facilities - Michigan comes in third on the list behind Ohio State and Nebraska. Not a huge surprise, but one would think that the coming renovations to the eyesore that is Schembechler hall would help boost MIchigan up to the top of the list.
College change: College coaches will BRB, hope recruits become BFF
Under the current structure, coaches are permitted by the NCAA just one phone call per month to a recruit from June 15 after his sophomore year to July 31 after his junior year. The coach is then allowed two phone calls per week, but text messages are banned. The recruit is allowed to call coaches without limit. Now, the floodgates are open for two-way constant communication, which might lead to even quicker decision-making in the already hasty world of verbal commitments.
Somebody at the Trib is probably mighty proud of him or herself for that headline.
I think one of the problems with college football is that the media is too busy worrying about who the 7th best team in the country is going to be rather than actually writing about anything substantive. The ramifications are, of course, the masses are more worried about where their team or favorite player stands on some idiot's list of conjecture than doing the right thing for the athletes. This is how the beat continues to go on year after year, without anybody asking any real questions on anything that actually matters. (Maybe this is how we arrived at "schools" paying shadow technology companies thousands of dollars to stalk the social media of student-athletes. Everybody is allowed to make money in college football, you see, except for the athletes.) Though, as I stand here awaiting the annual tsunami of conjecture, I'm left to ask... what in the hell is the point of pre-season polls in the first place?
I don't think Pre-season polls are bad, per se. However, when you invest in them the kinds of power and influence that they have without providing reasonable checks on bias and laziness, it creates a system where the polls become popularity contests. Polls like the SBNation blogpoll take a lot of different opinions into account, and most of those people are heavily invested in college football. The coaches's poll, to contrast, takes a lot of people's opinion into account, and most of those people are heavily invested in the team they are coaching. To have either of these polls indirectly affect the race for an MNC is ludicrous. No matter how well intentioned the poll, there is nothing concrete to rank. Pre-season polls are meant to be forecasts based on gathered data. Even if we don't break down in interpreting that data (ahem, coachess poll), we still shouldn't let our perception of how things are going to play out alter our thoughtful reaction to how things actually play out. Keep the pre-season polls, but divest them of power and influence.
Just as with traditional option plays, then, the idea of combining concepts allows the quarterback to attack one defender to make them wrong every time and thus evening out the offense's perpetual arithmetic disadvantage. But it also has the added advantage to attack the defense across the field horizontally, rather than amassing at the point of attack.
The way college football strategy continues to change and evolve is incredible.
Pro Combat Goes B1G: Ohio State Edition
When asked if he thought he was perhaps being too hard on the Ohio State faithful, Polyblend held firm: "There may be a few relatively innocent people in the crowd -- children too young to know better, spouses who are just humoring their husbands, foreign exchange students -- but for the most part these are people who are fully aware of what they are doing. They are freely cheering for the Ohio State Buckeyes." Polyblend sighed and took a drag on his Gaulois. "I mean, who does that? It's like cheering for the Luftwaffe."
BHGP closes out its Pro-Combat series with an absolute masterpiece. Ohio State fandom as hell? Sounds about right to me.
AND THEN A TINY CHIP KELLY TELEPORTS INTO YOUR LIVING ROOM
10:15 p.m. ET. A picture of exhaustion: pizza boxes on the floor, a few scattered beer bottles serving as prelude to the glass of liquor on the table, and the fan, holding down the couch with a carcass stunned from day drinking. The air is thick with the sweat of someone who has paced for a day in front of the television, sweating out alcohol, stress hormones, and the hopes the first day of the football would not be a long series of blown blocking assignments, dropped balls, and horrendous defensive coverages. (It was exactly this, for nine hours straight.)
At 10:30, a tiny hologram flickers to life on the coffee table. It is using profanity. A lot of it, quickly.
It only gets weirder from here, but it is EDSBS so you already knew that.
B1G 2012 // Keeping The Enemy Close: Michigan Football Is Back...ORLY?
Michigan football is tweaking your already godawful uniforms by dipping them in a 55 gallon drum of nostalgia ridden 1980's 1890's shit, and having them come out worse on the other end, if that was even possible. And you had the lack of foresight to do it for a BCS game, no less. For those of you who watched the then-WWF wrestling back in the day, at times you looked like the old Killer Bees tag team of B. Brian Blair and Jim Brunzell. Take a look at their warmup suits and tights at the beginning of this video and tell me I'm wrong: Dear Michigan, the 1980's called and they want their uniforms back Really, the best you can do is get inspiration from a mediocre 1980's tag team wrestling duo? Well, the Killer Bees were as over rated then as you are now, so I guess we should expect nothing less. They won a lot of meaningless matches, spewed a lot of hot air, were in the spotlight a lot, yet couldn't win a title. Just like your football program.
Ted Glover of OTE finishes out Michigan week with a bang. The hate is strong with this one, eh?