Thursday Morning Brews: Gdansk

Happy Thursday, folks. Welcome to Morning Brews. With the football spring game behind us and basketball over, we’re now officially heading toward the summer quiet period that can seem as slow as an empty playground in a ghost town for Michigan sports. Not to fear, though, there are still spring sports being played—and speculation, analysis, and everything in between, about football’s upcoming season.

As usual, there is a song referenced in this morning’s article. There are at least two clues. Clues may be words phrases or photographs and my reference lyrics, the artist, or the album. If you think you know this morning’s song, fire away down in the comments.

Let’s get to it:

Softball returned to their winning ways on Tuesday with a 12-1 trouncing of Michigan State. The Spartans opened the scoring with one run in the first, and then never scored again as the Wolverines converted 13 hits into 12 runs on the afternoon. Meghan Beaubien started the game pitching for the Wolverines but retired from the game after only 12 pitches. Freshman Alex Storako came on in relief, striking out 15 Spartans and allowing only one run over seven innings of work. The win moves Carol Hutchins’ team to 30-11 (12-1) on the season. They’ll play a series against Illinois this weekend.

With Michigan’s spring practice last weekend, the takes from the various football talking heads about the state of Michigan’s offense have abounded (our own Trevor Woods opines here, just in case you missed it). Weighing in on Tuesday was Nick Baumgardner over at the Free Press. There’s some nuance in his analysis, but the basic upshot is: “And, for the most part, it came with familiar concepts in an expected organization with a similar goal at every turn. Create as much space as you can for athletes who can do something with it.” After the play calling of the past few years, I think most Michigan fans will welcome a change of, well, pace. For the full take, check out Nick’s article in the Tweet above.

You can never have enough strong players in the secondary, and Vincent Gray looks to be on the path to being just that for Michigan. Aaron McMann over at MLive says, “Gray enrolled at Michigan last summer, missing out on the opportunity to practice and get a jump on things last spring. But having gone through a full season, an offseason worth of conditioning and the benefit of extra reps this spring, things have fallen into place for him” and that, “Vincent Gray is making the case for why he should be in the defensive backfield rotation this fall.” For McMann’s full mini-profile on Gray and his development, check out his article above.