santa ono

[Patrick Barron]
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95

Unverified Voracity Has Notified Person
Brian • January 18, 2023 • 11:28am

A sponsor note of a different variety. The long-term sponsor of this post, Richard Hoeg, is a good guy and and excellent lawyer who we've had on our podcast a couple times. He also recently suffered a stroke. His family has a gofundme up as he embarks on his recovery.

It's already done quite well because Richard had spent years building his own online community, which you may know if you leaked over from here to there. If Richard was important to you in some way I encourage you to donate.

I have informed the guy whose job it is to do the thing I just did. Harbaugh back, hooray, but also this is a pretty weird way to go about informing the world:

Ono tweets a lot about the stuff he's doing but as of yet I haven't detected a tendency to self-aggrandize. They're mostly anodyne boilerplate things. The Harbaugh's back tweet stands out, and has caused the conspiracy-minded sections of the internet to wonder if this is fallout from a frosty relationship between Warde Manuel and some combination of Ono and/or Harbaugh. Harbaugh's quote on the matter mentions Ono but not Manuel:

This kind of thing usually doesn't happen even if there is some tension between the parties. I'd caution against reading too much into it; on the other hand "I have communicated the news to our athletic director" is indicative of a process that the athletic director did not accomplish himself.

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Somewhat relevant, I promise [Bryan Fuller]
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91

Unverified Voracity Mounts Horse
Brian • July 19, 2022 • 2:05pm

HI. Let's get back on the horse. Hello, horse.

Local politics bits. I won't be writing a full-fledged endorsement post this year largely because two other people have done the work for me. I endorse the endorsements of Damn Arbor and Brandon Dimcheff. If you are an Ann Arbor resident please check those posts out; over the past two years we've seen a sitting councilmember drop a homosexual slur because he was mad at a local reporter for supposedly taking unflattering zoom screenshots of him; his faction on city council declined to even slap him on the wrist. There are two toxic CMs running for re-election in Wards 4 and 5 who need to get the boot.

Oh so that happened. The Big Ten added some schools, as you may have heard. USC and UCLA will get a full revenue distribution immediately, unlike Maryland and Rutgers. This is because uh well:

…the price tag for the Big Ten’s rights will exceed $1 billion, first reported earlier this year. Interestingly, Ourand claims that the additions of UCLA and USC to the conference could result in the rights fees increasing “more than 15%,” which would be (at least) another $150 million.

I'm long past the point where I look at this as good news since it doesn't seem to do anything to help close the gap with the SEC but does presage even more commercial breaks. If all that TV money didn't help Michigan retain Erik Bakich when a school getting relatively pathetic ACC money came in, what's it really going to do for fans?

I am in broad agreement with the Ringer's Kevin Clark:

College football, I believe, is not built on TV markets and cable sub fees. It is built on crisp, perfect fall days, and pure spite. College football is propelled by a type of fury that is completely unintelligible to anyone who does not experience it. Fury at your rival, their coach, your own coach, the people who make recruiting rankings, the people you work with who once taunted you after the wrong loss. It is about the most American force possible: vague, mostly unexplained hostility toward your coworkers and neighbors.

Most people have never set foot on their rival’s campus—some fans have never set foot on their own team’s campus—and yet college football is their favorite thing in the world. Not, crucially, because it’s a farm system for the NFL, or even because it makes them happy: The only real goal is for your rival to be more miserable than you are.

I guess it'll be fun to play USC and UCLA occasionally, but I'd rather lose 13-11 to Iowa. Is this a cry for help? No. Probably not. Maybe.

[After THE JUMP: Oh hi, Ono.]
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