channing stribling

Gray made a distinguished list [Patrick Barron]

This week in grimace emoji. Good news: COVID case fatality rates are plummeting. Bad news: it seems like a large reason why is that the average age of the infected is also plummeting, because:

I am dubious that The Youth are going to change their behavior, and The Youth cluster around college football players for obvious reasons.

Meanwhile, what happens if and when someone has to go to the ICU? This is napkin math but napkin math is probably enough in this situation:

That probably shouldn't be the reason. We accept the inevitability that football will produce Eric LeGrands already. The reason should be the inexorable exponential math when R > 1. But that's not easy to put in a news broadcast.

Anyway, buy HTTV! We'll figure out something you'll enjoy even if the season is one FCS game! 30 pages of hardboiled detective Phil Martelli novella? Wait, come back, I didn't mean it!

[AFTER THE JUMP: some good cornerbackin']

Cloning was the answer. [Bryan Fuller]

Our ongoing series covering Michigan's 2010s. Previously: Our Favorite Blocks, QBs, RBs, and WRs, TEs, FBs, and OL, Defensive Line, Linebacker, The 2000s.

Methodology: Going by individual years but only one per player can be nominated. We discussed them and decided together, then split the writeups. There will be a special teams and then we're taking requests on offbeat editions to fill the long offseason.

SAFETY: Jordan Kovacs (2011)

Blessed Order of St. Kovacs

Today, even after Michigan has exhausted the eligibility of an entire generation of Glasgows, we call the walk-ons who emerge into draftable players members of the "Blessed Order of St. Kovacs." Secondaries of the rest of the decade would be filled with top-100 types whose natural abilities contributed to top-five defenses. But to get there first Michigan had to survive Never Forget plus three years of Rich Rod and Tony Gibson.

In 2009 I made a sad depth chart to introduce a series—The Decimated Defense—about the recruiting and attrition that led us to the program's defensive back nadir. On said depth chart, all walk-ons, including a redshirt freshman student body one that then-DC Greg Robinson had recently mistook for Matt Cavanaugh, were represented by suicidal cats.

Corner Safety Safety Corner
NFL-ready junior guy (Donovan Warren)

(Jordan_Kovacs)

Current Infinite Safety Disaster, who is worse than the walk-on (Michael Williams) Legacy who is halfway decent and was our FS until a few weeks ago (Troy Woolfolk)
Dust mite true freshman who was a running back until a few weeks ago (Teric Jones)

(Floyd_Simmons)

True freshman recovering from knee surgery who can't be that great if he hasn't seen the field (Vladimir Emilien) Redshirt freshman with clear talent deficiency to be serviceable (JT Floyd)

Cats were all the rage on the internet back then, as was abject failure in Michigan's secondary. Many players who might have helped plug the holes abandoned Michigan. We even had a banner.

image

But then a funny thing happened that we did not expect. In 2011 Michigan was suddenly getting impact safety play from the unlikeliest of creatures: a Hobbit.

And then there's Kovacs. That is a record-shattering performance for a member of Michigan's secondary and it is absolutely deserved. Kovacs led the team in tackles, only half-missing a couple of those. He led ballcarriers into other defenders, which is why Western had to go on long marches—they couldn't bust it past Kovacs. He annihilated Carder on two sacks, one of which produced a game-sealing fumble. While Mattison got him those runs at the QB, his execution was flawless. On the first, he had the agility to slash back inside of Herron and the technique to put his helmet directly on the ball. And he added two PBUs for good measure.

His Kovacsian limitations made him not the guy you want carrying a future NFL slot receiver down the seam—particularly in 2012 when they slapped a Legends jersey on him to honor three historic linemen and Mattison tried to get away with some Ed Reed crap. But even in 2010 Kovacs thrived as a two-high box safety who could come down and play a Viper-like role, and in 2011's patchwork secondary those edge blitzes were a feature.

Also a feature: busts in the front seven that never, ever, ever, ever led to a gain of 40 yards. Remember this was a defense playing high-risk up front because the serviceable depth chart was guys Lloyd Carr recruited and Jake Ryan. After the afore mentioned WMU game Mattison was asked if having a guy like Kovacs allowed him to do more with the defense. Answer: "Well… he allows you to call it without wincing."

This was the Kovacs you had to be a bit of a wonk to fully appreciate, but over the course of 2011 the Kovacs who was ALWAYS THERE when that guy was supposed to arrive was the main thing giving viewers a sense of peace they hadn't felt since the days of…Jamar Adams? Marcus Ray? Tripp? When an option pitch went outside the last defender on the screen, it was Kovacs who appeared, already at top speed, at the perfect angle to end it at the sideline. When a linebacker went the wrong direction on a stretch run and you braced for a long chase, Kovacs came. He was our binky.

We could go with 2011 or 2012; we chose '11 only because there was more Alex Carder annihilation, and because that's the year, at the moment everything was about to fall apart, it didn't, because Kovacs was always there.

-Seth

[After THE JUMP: The Old, the Boring, and the Cat-like]

We could do this in the middle of Texas or at home. It's not hard to figure out how neutral site games are viable when home and homes sometimes aren't:

Ticket prices for the Bama game were similar. Throw in a corporate sponsorship and voila: both teams can get close to home game money. We're in a weird place when schools find it necessary to outsource these kind of things. If I was AD I'd ask season ticket holders how much of a surcharge they'd be okay with to get a game like Florida at the Big House. I'm guessing it would cover a lot of the costs of a real game relative to a bodybag game, if not all of them. Michigan doesn't need to cut in a middleman*.

*[Except maybe in this particular case. This game is happening because of the ND cancellation that left Brandon scrambling. This is probably the best alternative to a negotiated agreement. I'll leave it to the reader to decide how much of the situation Michigan found itself in was Brandon.]

Color me unconcerned. Crain's engages some concern-trolling about Michigan's debt load:

The University of Michigan athletic department sits atop $240 million in debt at a time when several major college athletics programs are grappling with enormous and potentially crippling debt loads.

Michigan is not. They make 160 million annually, so their debt load is manageable. Someone making 80k with a 120k mortgage is in fine shape, and unlike a mortgage Michigan's debt load largely exists because Bill Martin built the boxes to increase revenues. A mortgage does not throw off income.

The article itself admits this by way of the bond market:

Unlike some of its cash-strapped peers, Michigan has a packed Big House on fall Saturdays, deep-pocket donors, an elite credit rating, and it expects its share of TV money to keep increasing — a mix the university expects to give it the financial maneuverability to readily pay what it owes and to keep borrowing to build or refurbish its facilities.

This seems to defeat the purpose of this article, which goes on to discuss the slow decline of ESPN and fracturing of the cable unit—none of which has slowed the explosive revenue growth Michigan and the Big Ten has not only seen recently but locked in for the next six years. It also invokes Cal as a potential disaster situation. Cal was 22 million dollars in the red last year and has almost twice Michigan's debt. The situations are not at all similar.

Dave Brandon was a lot of things, but he wasn't Tom Goss.

Interesting twitter exchange. PFF likes Channing Stribling's coverage a lot. His run D, not so much.


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Stribling noticed this and tweeted about it, leading to a brief, interesting conversation between Stribling and James Ross:

I'm with PFF after some boggling missed tackles but he can fix that, and his coverage was just as good as Lewis's.

This won't be a surprise to Chat Sports aficionados. James Yoder, "CEO" of Chat Sports, tried to buy the Cauldron, another website, for about two million dollars. This naturally resulted in a fraudulent term sheet, a ton of finger-pointing, and ham-handed cover-up attempts. Yoder comes off as completely unhinged in the story:

Yoder says that Jamie O’Grady is a “master of creating fake emails.”

As a demonstration, Yoder sent me, at my work email address, a fake email that made it look like I had emailed Yoder asking for help finding clean urine. Yoder stressed that he faked an email from me strictly to show me what O’Grady does.

c1ad015de7f656fb4debcc1c1c4f0db6 (1)

After I privately forwarded the email to my editors, Yoder emailed me again asking why his email had been opened multiple times; he had tracked the email. “We track every email we send,” he says. “We use an email tracking service.”

This is because he is totally unhinged. "Spoofing and phishing tactic mastered by the other party." Cumong, man. Even OJ Simpson didn't go around giving stabbing demos.

The article briefly mentions the aspect of Chat Sports most infamous around here, but doesn't quite get it right:

In its early days, Chat Sports posted original content from many different writers—some of those bylines, like Rick Steele or Tipp Smith, have Twitter accounts that have tweeted only one time. Were they fake? Yoder says yes. “Absolutely we had fake writers,” he says. “That’s because we’re a scrappy company. What do you have when you start a company? You have zero traffic, you have zero name brand… So we had a writer program for college-aged kids… and sometimes they had information about things that they didn’t really feel comfortable writing in their own names. Some people think that’s such a terrible thing—‘journalistic integrity!’—that’s called growth hacking.”

The problem with the fake writers was not that they were operating under pseudonyms but that the stories they "reported" were made up. Chat Sports has the same business plan that Macedonian teenagers did during the election: say anything at all shocking or controversial that dullards on the internet propagate because they can't tell the difference between Chat Sports and something with a smidgen of credibility. Buzzfeed has an article about a similar company that spews out near-identical posts for political dullards on both left and right. The parallels go all the way down to the obvious stock photos used for author bios. 

The only truly surprising thing in the story is that Yoder was able to find a dupe despite coming off like Borat The Investor. Remember Borat? NOT! Good times.

Anyway, don't post Chat Sports stories here.

Austin Davis: good? Michigan's center situation this year is bogglingly shallow, which naturally makes one wonder how good Austin Davis can possibly be if he's redshirting. Beilein says he's all right, though:

"He's really good, that's all I'm going to tell you," Beilein said today. "I wish, I knew what I know now." ...

"In the middle of January, it all started slowing down," Beilein said. "Guys just throw him the ball and he puts it in. There's no drama, there's no Kardashians. The ball is in. The ball goes in."

I'm not sure how to react to that. If Davis was in fact very good and was doing that well in January, keeping the redshirt on him is an odd decision. OTOH, he might not play even if he is very good. The only thing Beilein hates more than playing a freshman point guard is playing a freshman post. Not even Mitch McGary got much run until really late in the year. (Jordan Morgan took a redshirt before emerging into a starter.) Wagner barely got off the bench last year despite Michigan's center situation being Mark Donnal and a guy with literal narcolepsy.

I do think Davis is going to be a breath of fresh, rebound-y air next year. He's a burly dude, something Michigan hasn't had since McGary.

I very much want to see a Michigan lineup that goes Teske/Davis-Wagner-Wilson-Matthews-Simpson. That will look like the Monstars with Webster at point guard.

Etc.: Spencer's take on Ole Miss is kinder than mind and good. More croot profiles: Andrew Stueber. Goodbye, eggs. Peppers draft stuff. HSR on Wagner. Get The Picture with more Ole Miss fallout. Jim Harbaugh is not sticking to sports. Lewis draft stuff. Harbaugh thinks Grant Newsome will be back this year.