Thursday Morning Brews: Freewheelin’

Happy Thursday, folks. Welcome to Morning Brews. We have a mix of football centric content today to help ease your way to the weekend. As usual, there is a song referenced in this morning’s article. There are at least two clues. Clues may be words, phrases, or photos and may reference lyrics, the album, or the artist. If you think you know this morning’s song, fire away down in the comments.

Let’s get to it:

Football team counts 45 Academic All-Big Ten honorees. The conference released its fall sports list of academic honorees yesterday and 45 Wolverines made the cut. To be eligible for Academic All-Big Ten honors, a player must be on a varsity roster, be enrolled full time for at least one year, and carry a GPA of 3.0 or better. Starters on the list include Devin Bush, Rashan Gary, Will Hart, Carlo Kemp, Ben Mason, Kwity Paye, Donovan Peoples-Jones, and Ambry Thomas. For the full list, check out the link above.

Players say they’re moving past the Ohio State loss. I have no reason to doubt the players when they say something like this, but I’m firmly in “believe it when I see it” mode on a storyline like this. That loss was brutal. I’m still on the dark side of the road about it, and I just write about the Wolverines. I have to think that’s also, and in many ways more, true for the players that lived through it. But Tyree Kinnel recently said, “People were down. We’d rather be practicing, getting ready for Northwestern. But it happens. We’ve got to move on from it.” Jim Harbaugh and crew have 23 days to move on and get ready for Florida.

What happened with Urban Meyer at OSU. This is one of what will probably be dozens of post-mortem pieces on Urban Meyer’s time at Ohio State. Spencer Hall over at the SB Nation mothership had this (and more) to say about what happened: “Overclocking is the word for it, when a computer is made to run faster than it was designed to run. It’s how Meyer makes a program work. Things happen fast, sometimes too fast for their own good. Coaches come and go quickly, titles fly in the window, and after five or six years, the parts start to wear down, make unforced errors, to write checks against that success, checks that will begin to bounce.” The whole take is interesting, so I recommend taking the time to read this one.

Undeniably one of the most accomplished Michigan Men in athletics, Charles Woodson finally took his rightful place in the College Football Hall of Fame this week. After Woodson laid waste to opposing teams, he filled his shelf with a who’s who of college awards: Heisman, Nagurski, Bednarik, Thorpe, and Camp—and that’s in addition to his 1997 National Championship ring. He of course also went on to win a Superbowl and earn nine Pro-Bowl appearances, retiring from the NFL after the 2015 season. From all of us at Maize n Brew, congratulations Charles. This is well-earned.

Michigan doesn’t have a role in this one, but it’s a cool bit of college football history. In 2004, Navy faced off with New Mexico in the Emerald Bowl. Total snoozefest, right? Well, it was. The Midshipmen never trailed the Lobos en route to a 34-19 victory. So why does it constitute college football history?

In clock time, it took 14:26, almost wiping out the entire fourth quarter of the 2004 Emerald Bowl. In real time, it took 31:30 from the first snap to the end. It officially included 26 plays, thought it had even more snaps than that.

It’s the longest drive on record in either college football or the NFL.

For the full story behind this sports oddity, check out the article above.