clock menu more-arrow no yes mobile

Filed under:

Monday Happy Hour is reading into things

By Zach Travis

Let me clue you in on something: recruits know you follow them on twitter, they know you feed off every word, and they love it.

I'm not saying it is a bad thing (except when it is) or that there isn't interesting recruiting information to glean from the often inane ramblings of 17-year-old kids with a wide reaching social platform, but it is easy to get carried away and read too far into things. There is probably some truth to a few of these tweets, but others may be a little far fetched.

That being said, you can bet I'll be paying attention tomorrow around 10am when four-star DT Henry Poggi announces his decision.

Time for some links to help shake off that weekend rust.

Breaking Down the Rivals Rankings - Tremendous takes a look at the movement of Michigan players on the Rivals.com recruiting re-ranking that happened last week, only Tremendous focuses on position rank and not overall rank. This should further calm any panic.

If it does, the commitment of Maurice Hurst Jr. should help.

2014 Offer List - What's that? 2013 recruiting is old news you say? Feast your eyes on a list of offers for the class of 2014. I'll be there in six months (or when the 2013 class fills up completely, whichever comes first).

What they make in the Big Ten, from Fick to Strick - Joe Rexrode from the Lansing State Journal runs down a full list of coordinator salaries around the Big Ten. For the record Greg Mattison is tied with Luke Fickell for top DC salary (750,000) while Al Borges leads OCs.

SEC lenient on discipline for marijuana, investigation says - ESPN continues its in-depth expose on the fact that college kids sometimes like to smoke weed. Be honest, which is more outrageous: that the SEC gives its players four and five chances on postitive weed tests, or that the NCAA has a full year ban for positive tests?

If you answered the latter you are going to shit when you turn on the TV and see the kinds of stuff on there nowadays, because you obviously just stepped out of 1950.

Justin Blackmon and the Sad State of Pro Athlete Posses

Mitigating Factors: In the Stoudaposse's defense, there are a few in play here. First, while posse duties in local modes of conveyance like an Escalade are pretty clear-cut, once air travel comes into the mix it's not always clear who, if anyone, should be traveling with the athlete in question. Additionally, there's the Fuckin' Magnets - How Do They Work? corrolary: predicting the interaction between a metal detector and a sheet of tinfoil is well beyond the scientific acumen of the average NBA player or posse member, particularly when you consider that how can tinfoil be metal if you can fold it and shit?

There were points during this that I had to stop reading because I was laughing too hard. This may or may not make me a terrible person. I'll let you be the judge of that.

An Interview with Chris Brown Part II: Urban Meyer at OSU

The first predicate condition is Meyer needs a mobile quarterback, and he has that at OSU When his offense didn't do as well -- in his first year and in his last -- he did not have Tim Tebow, instead working with Chris Leak and John Brantley. This isn't to say that Miller needs to lead the team in rushing like Cam Newton did a few years ago for Auburn, but the entire theory behind Meyer's offense is that an athletic quarterback changes the fundamental arithmetic of the game by occupying a defender and being a threat to run the ball on any play, even if he only runs it a few times a game.

Know thy enemy.

And to finish out this Monday morning roundup, a double dose of David Roth -- whose work I have been enjoying immensely as of late -- at The Classical:

At Least There's No TMZ Sports

But also, alongside and throughout that chuckling horrorshow of abasement and unearned dumbass superiority, there is something encouraging. There is the broadly good recognition that this could never have worked. It's not just that it's too dumb, although it is that. It's that there's no life in it, none of the offhand love that is the central ingredient in being a fan. It's just uncut and uncurated prurience, all tearing down without any sense of considering (let alone consideration for) the things that have, rightly or wrongly, been built up.

Undercover Bosses

There are many—a small-minded and extravagantly monied many and an aspiring mass chasing them—who still believe in the old model and vision of success that gave us both this Heat team and Goldman's alpha a-holes. That being the idea that systems and communities and most people/things exist solely to thwart and slow and hinder the change-makers and job-creators and game-winners who would and should achieve and conquer, and that loosing the winners to win would give those deserving a not-one-not-two-but-a-thousand-year dynasty. This, in basketball as everywhere else, is a cruelish but moreover a silly and wrong thing to believe. A more modest and unified Heat could be beautiful; we should hope that they someday are, because that would be great. This one, conceived in the most grandiose smallness, is not great. They're villains, but not in the happy sorry-haters mode they envisioned; in their prickly bigness they're pitiable and loathsome at once, emblematic of all the self-important vanities and self-important vanity cases that have choked the nation's front pages and so much else over the last decade and more.

If this last piece doesn't make the rounds on the year-end "best of" sports writing lists, I'll eat the computer I read it on.