Both made the All-Rookie team. Cunningham is the sixth fastest player ever to reach 2,500 career points and 800 career assists (putting him the same category as Oscar Robertson, Allen Iverson, Luca Doncic, Trae Young, and LeBron James.) He missed nearly all of his second season, so it's a bit early to judge this guy as "not even come close to living up to his billing."
Roughly 60% of lottery picks play 5 or more years in the NBA. It's not like the NFL where you can snag a starting-caliber player in the fourth or fifth round sometimes. Not much more than half of the first 15 picks are out of the league in a few seasons. The NBA is incredibly difficult, and yet Weaver has selected several players in only a few years that will play beyond 5 seasons.
Let's pump the brakes a bit on acting like these guys are scrubs.
It sucks, but current draft odds are in response to fan complaints about teams tanking. Still not a perfect system, but let's be careful what we wish for.
People love to dunk on NBA GMs but drafting in basketball is probably the hardest league to draft for, and Weaver has hit on more picks than he hasn't, which is actually pretty exceptional in the NBA.
Defense will be very good, but I'm not sure about better than last year. The depth isn't going to be what it was last season, which was a major strength for Michigan.
Michigan has a run first offense, yes, but they lose Corum, JJ, and the offensive line won't have the same depth it had last season either. While they aren't starting freshmen, they will be breaking in a new lineup on the line, and that typically takes some time to gel. Nearly every position on offense will be taking a step back to varying degrees, and the offense was very overlooked last season. I'm not saying they are going to be in trouble, but I also don't expect the 2024 team to be better than 2023 in almost any way.
The defense will be very good. As good as last season? Probably not, but still very, very good.
However, the offense will likely take a few steps back from what was the most efficient offense in the country last season. I think that is going to be a bigger difference than the defense.
Welp, the lights visited a few hours early and I was able to catch a glimpse before the clouds rolled in. Index is still very high, but visibility is now very lowm
Still holding out hope I can get further north in a more remote area during a storm one day, but this was still a first for me. Hope other were able to catch it before the sky shut down for the evening.
The kP index reached 9.0 already tonight. For reference, the scale only goes up to 9.0. I've never seen it above 5, but I'm also not watching it every night. Regardless this is a unique event.
Their offense doesn't need to be great. It just needs to be good enough. Their defense is likey to be among the absolute best in the country this season.
Yes. The vast majority of transfers seem to transfer somewhere they already have a connection in which an assistant or head coach has moved to. Recruiting, even in the age of the portal, is still largely based on relationships that begin to be built while a player is but a middle-teenager.
Yes, there are some that are strictly about NIL, but for the most part you can usually find a previous connection.
Roughly 20% of quarterbacks taken in the first round become a franchise quarterback, so that would be a good bet. Most end up as journeyman backups/bridge QBs or are out of the league within 5 years.
Rare? Sons of athletes have better careers than their fathers all the time.
Steph Curry, Kobe Bryant, Kyrie Irving, Moises Alou, Prince Fielder, Peyton and Eli Manning, Ken Griffey Jr., Barry Bonds, Cal Ripken Jr., Floyd Mayweather Jr., Clay Matthews Jr., Andrew Luck, Matt Hasselbeck, Christian McCaffrey is one his way, etc., and this is just a start.
National fanbase, and as you said, wide brand recognition. This is about money. Why would they carve out one of the biggest brands when they're trying to drive up revenue?
Of the top 15 most watched regular season college football games last season, noon was the most watched time slot, taking up 7 of the of those 15 spots.
Just because it's primetime doesn't mean it's the most attractive time slot for football on a Saturday.
Yeah, Pippen was criminally underpaid while he was with Chicago, partially due to poor advice and partially due to not understanding his worth until later. He still cashed out well with the Rockets and Blazers, but his career earnings are a lot lower than they could/should have been.
Ticket sales from basketball wouldn't cover $10.5 mil. Michigan makes about 90% of its ticket sales revenue (usually around $50-60 mil total) from football. So, we're already talking about operating at cost or at a deficit just to build a college basketball team at a football school.
Now, a team competing for titles would naturally generate higher ticket sales, but I'm not so sure it would be enough of an increase to justify the NIL budget.
You're getting downvoted, but our tackles were getting dusted with high frequency before we decided to keep it on the ground, and guys were making some dumb mistakes, likelt due to crowd noise. Moral of the story is that was a good move strategy-wise, but it also seemed as much out of necessity as it was "they can't stop the run."
Yeah, I think you're actually right, and I am thinking of the year before. Moral of the story either way is that it's way too early to be judging a recruiting class.
Remember last year when MSU, OSU, and Notre Dame fans were dunking on Michigan's recruiting class in March and April and it turned out just fine? Let's pump the brakes a bit on the state of the class at this point, especially considering they turned over almost the entirety of the coaching staff.
Fun fact: The Super Bowl makes up the entirety of the list for top 10 most-watched telecasts (by average viewership) of all-time. Even further, it holds 19 of the top 20 spots. The only non-sports/non-Super Bowl telecast to crack the top 20 is the series finale of M*A*S*H in 1983.
The SEC isn't a powerhouse basketball conference, so that isn't saying much. Since the year 2000, Arkansas has missed the tournament more times than they've made it
Tubby and Cal both win national titles at Kentucky. The Minnesota's and Arkansas's of the world don't get the chance to hire a guy who's already reached the mountain top very often. They ain't Duke or North Carolina; you take a chance on the guy who's already done it and see what he's got left.
In football, it's less. ~13 programs have won close to 80% of all AP national championships, not in the past 10, 20 or 30 years -- all time. The AP began naming national champions in the 1930s.
Let that sink in. College football is the furthest thing from a level playing field in all of American major sports.
2017 also brought four WRs (DPJ, Tarik Black, Nico Collins, and Oliver Martin), five if you want to count Brad Hawkins who was a receiver coming out of high school.
There is an excellent documentary about the Barkley Marathons. I had never heard of it until the doc popped up as a suggestion somewhere, and I was pleasantly surprised by how fascinating it is.
If somebody made a documentary or series for every year, I'd watch it every single time.
This. If athletic departments operated like fan sentiment does, teams would cycles through two or three coaches in a single season.
Whether we like it or not, Michigan handles decisions like this as a major corporation would, which takes a little longer but often has longer term thinking in mind rather than knee-jerk decision-making.
Also, Jerry Stackhouse had head coaching experience. It may not have been in college, but he spent time in the G-League, many years as an assistant in the NBA, and was considered a "rising star" in basketball coaching ranks before coming to Vandy. He wasn't a former-player fresh off taking his jersey off. He'd already cut his teeth and had a strong reputation. Pretending he was some inexperienced guy who only got a foot in the door because he played professionally is foolish and shows a lack of knowledge on the subject.
I love this site for football content, but it has a lot of blind spots when it comes to the shooty hoops
Also Jerry Stackhouse had head coaching experience in the G-League. He even won Coach of the Year and a championship, as well as had several years as an NBA assistant.
There are also several coaches who were former players with little or no head coaching experience who have been very successful. OP is grasping at low-hanging fruit.
If we're going to split hairs, then it technically has still been only one year since this season's tournament hasn't started yet nor have set a complete field, and technically Michigan could still earn a bid by winning the B1G tournament. Technically.
A bunch of dudebros with Twitter accounts and super-homer regional beat reporters is still nothing compared to NY media and the outsized attention the city's teams get from every major media outlet simply due to the size of both the market and it's fanbase.
You have to be really crazy or in a really precarious situation to gain mainstream attention. For the NY market, you often simply have to be in the NY market because that market gets more eyeballs worldwide than any other.
The thing is, though, that none of this is new other than it being openly "legal." Compensation without regulation or guidelines has been happening since the 1900s. Now that it can happen out in the open under the guise of NIL hasn't changed anything other than the fact programs are getting much more aggressive about it, probably spending a bunch more, and players can transfer freely now, which just exacerbates the issue even further.
Major college sports, especially football, have always been a pretty wild, wild west landscape. Now, it's just openly wild, wild west so programs and players are acting just a little more brazenly, especially since many are now able to hide behind the threat of legal action from their home state governments.
I love comments like this that state we definitely do/don't know what players are getting in NIL offers and how they are more/less than we think as if we can actually verify any of this and all these numbers aren't hearsay.
I don't know either way, but I would not be shocked to see multi-million dollar offers being passed around like hotcakes for a lot of high-level players.
Agree with this. A lot of fans seem to be very optimistic with Tuttle Time, and incredibly excited for Orji, but we haven't seen anything from either one of them.
Tuttle is entering year 7 with a substantial injury history and little else of substance. He could be our Stetson Bennett or he could be Shea Patterson 2.0, which the 1.0 version doesn't come with much fanfare these days.
Orji hasn't even thrown a single pass yet. We don't even know if he can do the "quarterback" parts of playing quarterback even remotely well yet.
I don't say any of this as doom and gloom, but I think a lot of fans have forgotten how frustrated and negative they were just a few short years ago when this team had good-not-great quarterback play, which is what Michigan might be staring down as a ceiling next season.
I don't think anything like this would happen for at least close to a decade. CBS has an almost $9 Billion broadcast deal with the NCAA for March Madness that runs through 2032. The NCAA also owns copyrights to March Madness. In addition to all the other logistical nightmares breaking away from the NCAA would create, broadcast partners who already have massive money on the line are not going to be on board with junking it cuz footbaawwll.
Recent Comments
The Thunder have had 14 draft picks in the past three drafts. They are an outlier.
Both made the All-Rookie team. Cunningham is the sixth fastest player ever to reach 2,500 career points and 800 career assists (putting him the same category as Oscar Robertson, Allen Iverson, Luca Doncic, Trae Young, and LeBron James.) He missed nearly all of his second season, so it's a bit early to judge this guy as "not even come close to living up to his billing."
Roughly 60% of lottery picks play 5 or more years in the NBA. It's not like the NFL where you can snag a starting-caliber player in the fourth or fifth round sometimes. Not much more than half of the first 15 picks are out of the league in a few seasons. The NBA is incredibly difficult, and yet Weaver has selected several players in only a few years that will play beyond 5 seasons.
Let's pump the brakes a bit on acting like these guys are scrubs.
Yes. Fans pretty regularly voice their displeasure with tanking in the NBA to get a top draft pick.
It sucks, but current draft odds are in response to fan complaints about teams tanking. Still not a perfect system, but let's be careful what we wish for.
Cade Cunningham, Saddiq Bey, Isaiah Stewart, Isaiah Livers, Jalen Duren, Jaden Ivey.
Weaver has made some stellar picks relative to draft position. Unfortunately, they can't get a decent free agent to come to Detroit.
People love to dunk on NBA GMs but drafting in basketball is probably the hardest league to draft for, and Weaver has hit on more picks than he hasn't, which is actually pretty exceptional in the NBA.
Defense will be very good, but I'm not sure about better than last year. The depth isn't going to be what it was last season, which was a major strength for Michigan.
Michigan has a run first offense, yes, but they lose Corum, JJ, and the offensive line won't have the same depth it had last season either. While they aren't starting freshmen, they will be breaking in a new lineup on the line, and that typically takes some time to gel. Nearly every position on offense will be taking a step back to varying degrees, and the offense was very overlooked last season. I'm not saying they are going to be in trouble, but I also don't expect the 2024 team to be better than 2023 in almost any way.
The defense will be very good. As good as last season? Probably not, but still very, very good.
However, the offense will likely take a few steps back from what was the most efficient offense in the country last season. I think that is going to be a bigger difference than the defense.
Welp, the lights visited a few hours early and I was able to catch a glimpse before the clouds rolled in. Index is still very high, but visibility is now very lowm
Still holding out hope I can get further north in a more remote area during a storm one day, but this was still a first for me. Hope other were able to catch it before the sky shut down for the evening.
The kP index reached 9.0 already tonight. For reference, the scale only goes up to 9.0. I've never seen it above 5, but I'm also not watching it every night. Regardless this is a unique event.
Yep, Grand Rapids here but same. My long chase to finally see the Aurora shall continue. ::sigh::
Their offense doesn't need to be great. It just needs to be good enough. Their defense is likey to be among the absolute best in the country this season.
Yes. Michigan even had two first place votes in the preseason poll!
Yes. The vast majority of transfers seem to transfer somewhere they already have a connection in which an assistant or head coach has moved to. Recruiting, even in the age of the portal, is still largely based on relationships that begin to be built while a player is but a middle-teenager.
Yes, there are some that are strictly about NIL, but for the most part you can usually find a previous connection.
Herm Edwards had an eye for talent.
The portal giveth, the portal taketh, and now the portal returneth.
Do you have data to back that up? All the guys I just listed had parents who played at a professional level, and it is just scratching the surface.
Roughly 20% of quarterbacks taken in the first round become a franchise quarterback, so that would be a good bet. Most end up as journeyman backups/bridge QBs or are out of the league within 5 years.
Rare? Sons of athletes have better careers than their fathers all the time.
Steph Curry, Kobe Bryant, Kyrie Irving, Moises Alou, Prince Fielder, Peyton and Eli Manning, Ken Griffey Jr., Barry Bonds, Cal Ripken Jr., Floyd Mayweather Jr., Clay Matthews Jr., Andrew Luck, Matt Hasselbeck, Christian McCaffrey is one his way, etc., and this is just a start.
National fanbase, and as you said, wide brand recognition. This is about money. Why would they carve out one of the biggest brands when they're trying to drive up revenue?
Of the top 15 most watched regular season college football games last season, noon was the most watched time slot, taking up 7 of the of those 15 spots.
Just because it's primetime doesn't mean it's the most attractive time slot for football on a Saturday.
Yeah, Pippen was criminally underpaid while he was with Chicago, partially due to poor advice and partially due to not understanding his worth until later. He still cashed out well with the Rockets and Blazers, but his career earnings are a lot lower than they could/should have been.
Ticket sales from basketball wouldn't cover $10.5 mil. Michigan makes about 90% of its ticket sales revenue (usually around $50-60 mil total) from football. So, we're already talking about operating at cost or at a deficit just to build a college basketball team at a football school.
Now, a team competing for titles would naturally generate higher ticket sales, but I'm not so sure it would be enough of an increase to justify the NIL budget.
You're getting downvoted, but our tackles were getting dusted with high frequency before we decided to keep it on the ground, and guys were making some dumb mistakes, likelt due to crowd noise. Moral of the story is that was a good move strategy-wise, but it also seemed as much out of necessity as it was "they can't stop the run."
Oh crap, are we the new Georgia?
In all seriousness, an Uber or taxi are cheaper than the alternative. Be safe and be smart, folks.
Yeah, I think you're actually right, and I am thinking of the year before. Moral of the story either way is that it's way too early to be judging a recruiting class.
Remember last year when MSU, OSU, and Notre Dame fans were dunking on Michigan's recruiting class in March and April and it turned out just fine? Let's pump the brakes a bit on the state of the class at this point, especially considering they turned over almost the entirety of the coaching staff.
Fun fact: The Super Bowl makes up the entirety of the list for top 10 most-watched telecasts (by average viewership) of all-time. Even further, it holds 19 of the top 20 spots. The only non-sports/non-Super Bowl telecast to crack the top 20 is the series finale of M*A*S*H in 1983.
Even if we have the bag to throw, there ain't any of those guys left and/or not likely to enter after spring. This team is rolling with what it's got.
It's pretty simple: the top three teams from each division are in. After that, they take the top two of the remaining teams regardless of division.
The SEC isn't a powerhouse basketball conference, so that isn't saying much. Since the year 2000, Arkansas has missed the tournament more times than they've made it
Tubby and Cal both win national titles at Kentucky. The Minnesota's and Arkansas's of the world don't get the chance to hire a guy who's already reached the mountain top very often. They ain't Duke or North Carolina; you take a chance on the guy who's already done it and see what he's got left.
Funny what a national championship and the longest active streak of consecutive tournament appearances will do for you.
That being said, Go Blue! 〽️
In football, it's less. ~13 programs have won close to 80% of all AP national championships, not in the past 10, 20 or 30 years -- all time. The AP began naming national champions in the 1930s.
Let that sink in. College football is the furthest thing from a level playing field in all of American major sports.
2017 also brought four WRs (DPJ, Tarik Black, Nico Collins, and Oliver Martin), five if you want to count Brad Hawkins who was a receiver coming out of high school.
There is an excellent documentary about the Barkley Marathons. I had never heard of it until the doc popped up as a suggestion somewhere, and I was pleasantly surprised by how fascinating it is.
If somebody made a documentary or series for every year, I'd watch it every single time.
Agreed. This is an argument I could definitely get behind. NBA and NCAA can be two totally different universes.
This. If athletic departments operated like fan sentiment does, teams would cycles through two or three coaches in a single season.
Whether we like it or not, Michigan handles decisions like this as a major corporation would, which takes a little longer but often has longer term thinking in mind rather than knee-jerk decision-making.
Also, Jerry Stackhouse had head coaching experience. It may not have been in college, but he spent time in the G-League, many years as an assistant in the NBA, and was considered a "rising star" in basketball coaching ranks before coming to Vandy. He wasn't a former-player fresh off taking his jersey off. He'd already cut his teeth and had a strong reputation. Pretending he was some inexperienced guy who only got a foot in the door because he played professionally is foolish and shows a lack of knowledge on the subject.
I love this site for football content, but it has a lot of blind spots when it comes to the shooty hoops
Also Jerry Stackhouse had head coaching experience in the G-League. He even won Coach of the Year and a championship, as well as had several years as an NBA assistant.
There are also several coaches who were former players with little or no head coaching experience who have been very successful. OP is grasping at low-hanging fruit.
If we're going to split hairs, then it technically has still been only one year since this season's tournament hasn't started yet nor have set a complete field, and technically Michigan could still earn a bid by winning the B1G tournament. Technically.
It's been years? Last year was the first year Michigan wasn't in the tournament since 2015.
Two words: Matt Flynn.
A bunch of dudebros with Twitter accounts and super-homer regional beat reporters is still nothing compared to NY media and the outsized attention the city's teams get from every major media outlet simply due to the size of both the market and it's fanbase.
You have to be really crazy or in a really precarious situation to gain mainstream attention. For the NY market, you often simply have to be in the NY market because that market gets more eyeballs worldwide than any other.
Everybody steals signs? Next you'll tell me that everyone is tampering with other team's players!
Anybody who thought NIL was going to even the playing field was incredibly naive.
The thing is, though, that none of this is new other than it being openly "legal." Compensation without regulation or guidelines has been happening since the 1900s. Now that it can happen out in the open under the guise of NIL hasn't changed anything other than the fact programs are getting much more aggressive about it, probably spending a bunch more, and players can transfer freely now, which just exacerbates the issue even further.
Major college sports, especially football, have always been a pretty wild, wild west landscape. Now, it's just openly wild, wild west so programs and players are acting just a little more brazenly, especially since many are now able to hide behind the threat of legal action from their home state governments.
I love comments like this that state we definitely do/don't know what players are getting in NIL offers and how they are more/less than we think as if we can actually verify any of this and all these numbers aren't hearsay.
I don't know either way, but I would not be shocked to see multi-million dollar offers being passed around like hotcakes for a lot of high-level players.
Agree with this. A lot of fans seem to be very optimistic with Tuttle Time, and incredibly excited for Orji, but we haven't seen anything from either one of them.
Tuttle is entering year 7 with a substantial injury history and little else of substance. He could be our Stetson Bennett or he could be Shea Patterson 2.0, which the 1.0 version doesn't come with much fanfare these days.
Orji hasn't even thrown a single pass yet. We don't even know if he can do the "quarterback" parts of playing quarterback even remotely well yet.
I don't say any of this as doom and gloom, but I think a lot of fans have forgotten how frustrated and negative they were just a few short years ago when this team had good-not-great quarterback play, which is what Michigan might be staring down as a ceiling next season.
And thus you have summed up both how hard it is to win in the NFL and how hard it is to make it in the first place.
When you have the top 0.3% of all athletes in the sport/world, inches or less can make all the difference.
I don't think anything like this would happen for at least close to a decade. CBS has an almost $9 Billion broadcast deal with the NCAA for March Madness that runs through 2032. The NCAA also owns copyrights to March Madness. In addition to all the other logistical nightmares breaking away from the NCAA would create, broadcast partners who already have massive money on the line are not going to be on board with junking it cuz footbaawwll.
Things might get really, really awkward soon.