I remember lurking and reading the blog from a job that I left in April 2005, so it has been a long, long time. I didn’t make an account or post until over a decade later!
I can't think of Matt Maloney without remembering his Penn team coming into Crisler for an early-season game in December 1994, with Michigan coming off the departure of Howard and Rose. Penn went out to a 25-4 lead, largely off Maloney's shooting. Michigan clawed back from there, but ended up running out of time and taking a 60-62 loss.
It's hard to believe Braylon Edwards wouldn't have put up a good decathlon performance. He ran track in some seasons at Michigan, competing in sprints and high jump (6'11"). Unlike Peppers (and Tyrone Wheatley, former Big Ten hurdle champ) I can picture Braylon closing out a 1500m with some dignity. He put up 22 bench press reps in the NFL combine, suggesting the throws wouldn't kill him, either.
He was also, like Duncan Robinson (and me), a Williams College alum. I overlapped with him for a year, and his college band (which included another Fountains of Wayne member) was pretty good.
What I posted doesn't rule out an 0-5 or worse start against some team, if there were enough Michigan wins later in the series to bring the overall record up to .500 or better.
There are 11 teams we're 0-1 against. (Three of these are athletic clubs, one is Div.3 Wesleyan, with all four of those games happening in or before 1891. The other seven we could conceivably play again.)
We're 1-2 against Florida State and North Carolina.
We're 4-5 against Army.
We're 4-6 against Southern California.
We're 1-3 against South Carolina and Utah.
We're 6-12 against Cornell.
We're .500 or better against everyone except these 18 teams.
And, unless they've changed the rules in the last few years, each school can only score one men's track season and one women's track season (indoor or outdoor, not both).
Looks like in the Div. III version Duncan Robinson's (and my) Williams College is set to win again. They've been just slightly less dominant than Stanford in DI -- they've failed to win it twice.
That was the game where Juwan took his shorts off in front of President Clinton. (He had blood on them and compression shorts underneath.) I forget which bench player donated his shorts to the cause.
I was in grad school in 1993-1994. One semester my schedule and Juwan's coincided, so I'd see him near the corner of S. University and E. University (I think leaving East Hall [then East Engineering]) every MWF after one of my classes. I never approached him, but it was good to see that he was steadily attending class.
I've never been to a Rutger game, but live 20 minutes away. I'm going tomorrow with two kids. It looks like we got seats pretty close to the cannon -- section 109, row 4 for about $100 with fees bought last weekend. I also got an orange parking pass (the most distant, cheapest lot).
As another Williams/Michigan alum, I was all over the story from the start. It is sad to see him go. It was weird this spring to get braggy stories from both schools' Facebook feeds.
I wonder how many of us are around on here -- Blueph certainly appears to be one going by name and avatar, though I don't think I've ever seen confirmation of it.
I have a VHS tape with some stuff from the 1996-1997 season I've been meaning to transfer in some manner for years. It has a few clips of the Traylor broken backboard from the Ball State game (local news and SportsCenter), plus (I think):
Michigan @ Duke, 12/8/1996
Michigan vs. St. Johns, 12/11/1996
Michigan vs. Arizona, 12/21/1996
Is that the game you were referencing? The game played in 1997 was at Crisler, and I think this one ended with an epic Duke collapse. (They led something like 61-54 and lost 62-61. It was one of several games that year where Maceo Baston blocked the other team's final, potentially game-winning shot.)
It was the move of the outgoing Marist coach, Mike Maker, from Williams to Marist that helped prompt Duncan Robinson’s transfer to Michigan. On a related note, Robinson’s historical performance in National Semifinal games is strong: 30 points and 6 rebounds as a freshman: https://www.ncaa.com/game/basketball-men/d3/2014/03/21/williams-amherst
I was a little surprised that the article didn't point out the same dynamic was there in Brady's early career at New England. Bledsoe was a real star, and beating him out to start would have been a tall order without Bledsoe's (gruesome, life-threatening) injury. I'd think the time he unseated the starter from the backup position has more relevance when they talk about his attitudes around Garoppolo.
The transformation of the industry into an oligopoly has been aided by lots of state laws passed at the behest of the telecom industry that prevent local governments from creating local ISPs. In places where this hasn't been prevented, there are several success stories where cities have provided better service at lower prices than big telecom. The industry has spent a huge amount of money trying to prevent these services legislatively, rather than compete with them on price/service. Makes it hard to take seriously the claims that "the market will sort this out."
I was at the matches yesterday, and was excited to see that she was scheduled for Tuesday when the draw went up. I saw enough Michigan gear on enough other spectators that I think she would have had good fan support.
This is exactly why I'm suspicious of this being a publicity ploy engineered by ESPN. Who indeed would notice that the game assignments were switched ten days out and make a stink about it? If they had wanted to quietly change the assignments, they could have.
My guess is it's either an intentional publicity ploy or a disgruntled insider decided to publicise the switched assignment. Either way, someone decided to get peoples' attention and succeeded.
Several years ago I was messing around with all-time records of UM vs other teams, and Cornell really stood out. It's the only team we've played appreciably sub-.500 against (6-12). It would just take scheduling a few double-headers against Cornell to set things straight.
I got tired of hearing about our total destruction of PSU last year at the end of the season discussions about bowl berths, etc. They had none of their starting LBs against Michigan. The unfairly ejected guy was a walk-on. (They were good enough to be conference champs in anything but a huge fluke, but they weren't generally the team Michigan had the fortune to meet.)
Winning margin was one of the first things I thought of after the game, too. Illinois' worst conference loss was to MD by 25, but they lost to West Virginia by 32 out of conference.
Michigan probably did that for the entirety of my first year in Ann Arbor (1992-3). I'm sure it happens not too infrequently, but only a handful of the teams that tend to have good hockey teams are routinely ranked in football or basketball. The Big Ten happens to have most of the prime candidates for this, so it might be more interesting to know when it happened last to a non-conference team.
I looked at this a dozen years ago, so maybe the intevening years did some damage, but: I looked at Michigan's all-time records against all other teams. We had a winning record against every team we had played a reasonable number of games. (There are schools where Michigan has a losing record, but only where there have only been a few games.) The only school against whom Michigan has a badly losing record is Cornell (6-12).
My suggestion is that we schedule a few years of double-headers against them to set things right.
Looks like the Div. I record is held by Penn State, which held Syracuse to -47 total yards in 1947. A couple of years ago a Div. II team managed a -100 yards total defense game:
As far as Michigan goes (from the Record Book on mgoblue.com):
Michigan held MSU to 10 yards in 1942, but we can't taunt much on this, since MSU held UM to 6 yards in 1951.
I noticed this (in banner form) when I went to the UM @ Rutgers basketball game season before last. Rutgers went into the Final Four 31-0, only to lose to... Michigan. No wonder we're rivals.
Full story here. Odd tidbit: Dickie V. was an assistant coach for Rutgers then.
The price at issuance was 98.993, so the yield was actually a bit higher. It's federally taxable, too, for what it's worth. The most unusual thing about it is that it's a 100-year bond: maturing 6/1/2111.
It only happens early on -- solid food and growing children cut the muzzle velocity down to something less alarming. A highlight of my daughter's infancy was a ten-foot shot (aided by the height of the changing table) that hit both the white carpet and the keyboard of a laptop. Thankfully the laptop was from my wife's work and was otherwise undamaged.
This led to a move of the changing table into a bathroom, where I discovered some residue beneath an outlet cover when painting the room a few years later.
I missed the beginning of the game and turned it on with Michigan up 15-4. From there, ouch!
During the big run, we just weren't moving the ball on offense. The rare times we did get someone driving in, they either got swallowed by the IU defense (lots of times it looked like they were going for contact and the foul, and when the foul wasn't called it was a turnover) or kicked out for a decent perimeter shot, which was missed. It was ugly, but I don't think the sky is falling. This team can get it together.
I read it in the late '90s when it first came out in paperback. It's clearly very cleverly written and I liked it a lot. Without giving any explicit spoilers, I was expecting a fantastic and extremely intricate climax and resolution, which did not come (at least to my satisfaction). All of these separate threads, elaborately described and developed, should have come together in a surprising and (in retrospect) inevitable fashion.
I don't regret reading it (and would consider rereading it), but it was good enough to disappoint me that it wasn't perfect.
It's a minor quibble: Robinson was a solid contributor and starter as a freshman at Williams, but was not the "alpha dog". Robinson trailed senior center Mike Mayer (not to be confused with coach Mike Maker) in points, rebounds, and assists. (On assists, they were second and third on the team; they led in points and rebounds.)
Mayer was a first team All-American and Robinson fourth team, with Robinson also picking up Div. III National Rookie of the Year.
4/7 on 3's against YSU brought his average down a bit. I haven't tried to keep track, but he's also had a few attempts that were forced by shot clock or otherwise not by choice. In the national Div. I 3-point shooting percentage stats he has more attempts than anyone above him.
One could argue that probably anyone shooting around 60% on 3's should be taking more (presumably somewhat harder) attempts. This team is going to be able to spread out opposing defenses remarkably well. The only questions are whether the shots are falling on a particular night and whether our defense can do enough to keep us in the game.
Last year before LeVert's injury he was putting the team on his back way too often. Maybe he had to because no one else had developed to the point they could carry some of the load, but it made the team way too one-dimensional. The scouting report for opposing defenses is a lot longer this year.
I was a math GSI. I never had a football or basketball player in my class, though I did collect Bobby Crawford's Calc II final from him (going up to the top of a big lecture hall so he wouldn't have to come down all the stairs on his crutches).
I did have some non-revenue sport athletes, and even they had some additional paperwork attached to them. I think the athletic department was anxious to stay out in front of any developing problems, while options still remained. I had a wrestler drop my (fall semester) class while he was doing OK (probably around a B or B-) with the drop-add deadline approaching, because he knew the approaching season would keep him from putting in the effort he wanted to give it.
I remember seeing Beilein's comment, maybe after the first game in the Bahamas? He said something to the effect that they were going to increase Spike's conditioning load with less regard to the game schedule: trading less playing time for a while for a quicker return to game shape.
Recent Comments
I remember lurking and reading the blog from a job that I left in April 2005, so it has been a long, long time. I didn’t make an account or post until over a decade later!
I can't think of Matt Maloney without remembering his Penn team coming into Crisler for an early-season game in December 1994, with Michigan coming off the departure of Howard and Rose. Penn went out to a 25-4 lead, largely off Maloney's shooting. Michigan clawed back from there, but ended up running out of time and taking a 60-62 loss.
As a Williams and Michigan alum, I'll chime in a Go Duncan, Go Blue, Go Ephs!
It's hard to believe Braylon Edwards wouldn't have put up a good decathlon performance. He ran track in some seasons at Michigan, competing in sprints and high jump (6'11"). Unlike Peppers (and Tyrone Wheatley, former Big Ten hurdle champ) I can picture Braylon closing out a 1500m with some dignity. He put up 22 bench press reps in the NFL combine, suggesting the throws wouldn't kill him, either.
Brandun Hughes was a community college transfer who played one season and was dismissed from the team: https://digital.bentley.umich.edu/midaily/mdp.39015071755487/115
He was also, like Duncan Robinson (and me), a Williams College alum. I overlapped with him for a year, and his college band (which included another Fountains of Wayne member) was pretty good.
My guess is that in high recruiting season they don't have as much to talk about (or at least, not as much they're allowed to talk about).
What I posted doesn't rule out an 0-5 or worse start against some team, if there were enough Michigan wins later in the series to bring the overall record up to .500 or better.
I've been thinking we could schedule three double-headers and that would take care of the problem.
There are 11 teams we're 0-1 against. (Three of these are athletic clubs, one is Div.3 Wesleyan, with all four of those games happening in or before 1891. The other seven we could conceivably play again.)
We're 1-2 against Florida State and North Carolina.
We're 4-5 against Army.
We're 4-6 against Southern California.
We're 1-3 against South Carolina and Utah.
We're 6-12 against Cornell.
We're .500 or better against everyone except these 18 teams.
On the subject, could we schedule some doubleheaders against Cornell? They're the school we have the worst record (6-12) against.
Or Scottie Pippen, coming from NAIA school (at the time) Central Arkansas University.
The OP links to the latest Spring report which only breaks out the Spring sports that have completed their championships.
The Fall results are here: https://nacda.com/documents/2019/1/9//JAN10Overall.pdf?id=3486 and the Winter results here: https://nacda.com/documents/2019/4/23//April25DIOverall.pdf?id=3592
There will be one more update on 6/12 (with Softball and Men's and Women's Track and Field) before the final results (with Baseball) on 6/27 or 6/28.
And, unless they've changed the rules in the last few years, each school can only score one men's track season and one women's track season (indoor or outdoor, not both).
Looks like in the Div. III version Duncan Robinson's (and my) Williams College is set to win again. They've been just slightly less dominant than Stanford in DI -- they've failed to win it twice.
That was the game where Juwan took his shorts off in front of President Clinton. (He had blood on them and compression shorts underneath.) I forget which bench player donated his shorts to the cause.
I was in grad school in 1993-1994. One semester my schedule and Juwan's coincided, so I'd see him near the corner of S. University and E. University (I think leaving East Hall [then East Engineering]) every MWF after one of my classes. I never approached him, but it was good to see that he was steadily attending class.
Or the Big Dripper?
I've never been to a Rutger game, but live 20 minutes away. I'm going tomorrow with two kids. It looks like we got seats pretty close to the cannon -- section 109, row 4 for about $100 with fees bought last weekend. I also got an orange parking pass (the most distant, cheapest lot).
As another Williams/Michigan alum, I was all over the story from the start. It is sad to see him go. It was weird this spring to get braggy stories from both schools' Facebook feeds.
I wonder how many of us are around on here -- Blueph certainly appears to be one going by name and avatar, though I don't think I've ever seen confirmation of it.
I have a VHS tape with some stuff from the 1996-1997 season I've been meaning to transfer in some manner for years. It has a few clips of the Traylor broken backboard from the Ball State game (local news and SportsCenter), plus (I think):
Michigan @ Duke, 12/8/1996
Michigan vs. St. Johns, 12/11/1996
Michigan vs. Arizona, 12/21/1996
Is that the game you were referencing? The game played in 1997 was at Crisler, and I think this one ended with an epic Duke collapse. (They led something like 61-54 and lost 62-61. It was one of several games that year where Maceo Baston blocked the other team's final, potentially game-winning shot.)
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It was the move of the outgoing Marist coach, Mike Maker, from Williams to Marist that helped prompt Duncan Robinson’s transfer to Michigan. On a related note, Robinson’s historical performance in National Semifinal games is strong: 30 points and 6 rebounds as a freshman: https://www.ncaa.com/game/basketball-men/d3/2014/03/21/williams-amherst
Very insightful!
I was a little surprised that the article didn't point out the same dynamic was there in Brady's early career at New England. Bledsoe was a real star, and beating him out to start would have been a tall order without Bledsoe's (gruesome, life-threatening) injury. I'd think the time he unseated the starter from the backup position has more relevance when they talk about his attitudes around Garoppolo.
The transformation of the industry into an oligopoly has been aided by lots of state laws passed at the behest of the telecom industry that prevent local governments from creating local ISPs. In places where this hasn't been prevented, there are several success stories where cities have provided better service at lower prices than big telecom. The industry has spent a huge amount of money trying to prevent these services legislatively, rather than compete with them on price/service. Makes it hard to take seriously the claims that "the market will sort this out."
Every time I run across a mention of this tragedy the impressively vague "Spartans will" slogan flashes through my mind. Then I feel guilty.
I was at the matches yesterday, and was excited to see that she was scheduled for Tuesday when the draw went up. I saw enough Michigan gear on enough other spectators that I think she would have had good fan support.
This is exactly why I'm suspicious of this being a publicity ploy engineered by ESPN. Who indeed would notice that the game assignments were switched ten days out and make a stink about it? If they had wanted to quietly change the assignments, they could have.
My guess is it's either an intentional publicity ploy or a disgruntled insider decided to publicise the switched assignment. Either way, someone decided to get peoples' attention and succeeded.
Several years ago I was messing around with all-time records of UM vs other teams, and Cornell really stood out. It's the only team we've played appreciably sub-.500 against (6-12). It would just take scheduling a few double-headers against Cornell to set things straight.
It's hazy for me, but didn't the OKC bomber have ties to the Michigan Militia? That was what I thought he was referring to.
I got tired of hearing about our total destruction of PSU last year at the end of the season discussions about bowl berths, etc. They had none of their starting LBs against Michigan. The unfairly ejected guy was a walk-on. (They were good enough to be conference champs in anything but a huge fluke, but they weren't generally the team Michigan had the fortune to meet.)
In December 1993, with a team that made the Elite Eight, they started off in a 25-4 hole in Crisler. They battled back to lose by two.
I don't remember the source, but one description of the accident I read said that the plane stopped just short of a ravine.
Winning margin was one of the first things I thought of after the game, too. Illinois' worst conference loss was to MD by 25, but they lost to West Virginia by 32 out of conference.
It didn't occur to me this fall, but it's a good thing Wilton got his helmet on before Harbaugh worked his way up to the head!
If you look into injuries, our win over linebacker-less PSU looks a lot less impressive.
Michigan probably did that for the entirety of my first year in Ann Arbor (1992-3). I'm sure it happens not too infrequently, but only a handful of the teams that tend to have good hockey teams are routinely ranked in football or basketball. The Big Ten happens to have most of the prime candidates for this, so it might be more interesting to know when it happened last to a non-conference team.
I looked at this a dozen years ago, so maybe the intevening years did some damage, but: I looked at Michigan's all-time records against all other teams. We had a winning record against every team we had played a reasonable number of games. (There are schools where Michigan has a losing record, but only where there have only been a few games.) The only school against whom Michigan has a badly losing record is Cornell (6-12).
My suggestion is that we schedule a few years of double-headers against them to set things right.
Looks like the Div. I record is held by Penn State, which held Syracuse to -47 total yards in 1947. A couple of years ago a Div. II team managed a -100 yards total defense game:
http://www.sbnation.com/college-football/2014/9/5/6109995/ncaa-football-record-lowest-offense-rushing-eww
As far as Michigan goes (from the Record Book on mgoblue.com):
Michigan held MSU to 10 yards in 1942, but we can't taunt much on this, since MSU held UM to 6 yards in 1951.
I noticed this (in banner form) when I went to the UM @ Rutgers basketball game season before last. Rutgers went into the Final Four 31-0, only to lose to... Michigan. No wonder we're rivals.
Full story here. Odd tidbit: Dickie V. was an assistant coach for Rutgers then.
The price at issuance was 98.993, so the yield was actually a bit higher. It's federally taxable, too, for what it's worth. The most unusual thing about it is that it's a 100-year bond: maturing 6/1/2111.
It only happens early on -- solid food and growing children cut the muzzle velocity down to something less alarming. A highlight of my daughter's infancy was a ten-foot shot (aided by the height of the changing table) that hit both the white carpet and the keyboard of a laptop. Thankfully the laptop was from my wife's work and was otherwise undamaged.
This led to a move of the changing table into a bathroom, where I discovered some residue beneath an outlet cover when painting the room a few years later.
Tyrone Wheatley was a Big 10 champion and All-American in the hurdles, and managed to play football reasonably well, too.
I missed the beginning of the game and turned it on with Michigan up 15-4. From there, ouch!
During the big run, we just weren't moving the ball on offense. The rare times we did get someone driving in, they either got swallowed by the IU defense (lots of times it looked like they were going for contact and the foul, and when the foul wasn't called it was a turnover) or kicked out for a decent perimeter shot, which was missed. It was ugly, but I don't think the sky is falling. This team can get it together.
I read it in the late '90s when it first came out in paperback. It's clearly very cleverly written and I liked it a lot. Without giving any explicit spoilers, I was expecting a fantastic and extremely intricate climax and resolution, which did not come (at least to my satisfaction). All of these separate threads, elaborately described and developed, should have come together in a surprising and (in retrospect) inevitable fashion.
I don't regret reading it (and would consider rereading it), but it was good enough to disappoint me that it wasn't perfect.
It's a minor quibble: Robinson was a solid contributor and starter as a freshman at Williams, but was not the "alpha dog". Robinson trailed senior center Mike Mayer (not to be confused with coach Mike Maker) in points, rebounds, and assists. (On assists, they were second and third on the team; they led in points and rebounds.)
Mayer was a first team All-American and Robinson fourth team, with Robinson also picking up Div. III National Rookie of the Year.
4/7 on 3's against YSU brought his average down a bit. I haven't tried to keep track, but he's also had a few attempts that were forced by shot clock or otherwise not by choice. In the national Div. I 3-point shooting percentage stats he has more attempts than anyone above him.
One could argue that probably anyone shooting around 60% on 3's should be taking more (presumably somewhat harder) attempts. This team is going to be able to spread out opposing defenses remarkably well. The only questions are whether the shots are falling on a particular night and whether our defense can do enough to keep us in the game.
Last year before LeVert's injury he was putting the team on his back way too often. Maybe he had to because no one else had developed to the point they could carry some of the load, but it made the team way too one-dimensional. The scouting report for opposing defenses is a lot longer this year.
I was a math GSI. I never had a football or basketball player in my class, though I did collect Bobby Crawford's Calc II final from him (going up to the top of a big lecture hall so he wouldn't have to come down all the stairs on his crutches).
I did have some non-revenue sport athletes, and even they had some additional paperwork attached to them. I think the athletic department was anxious to stay out in front of any developing problems, while options still remained. I had a wrestler drop my (fall semester) class while he was doing OK (probably around a B or B-) with the drop-add deadline approaching, because he knew the approaching season would keep him from putting in the effort he wanted to give it.
I remember seeing Beilein's comment, maybe after the first game in the Bahamas? He said something to the effect that they were going to increase Spike's conditioning load with less regard to the game schedule: trading less playing time for a while for a quicker return to game shape.