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Ah, man, I'm sitting here…

Ah, man, I'm sitting here sobbing in my home office, Ace. It's so good to hear from you.

At the end of the podcast, people were talking about how everyone has their favorite MGoBlog piece, and I realized that, as much is it was Brian's writing that kept me coming back, the first thing that came to mind for me was your Derrick Walton retrospective. That's one of the best pieces of sportswriting I've ever read, so thank you for that.

"His crowning achievement was not that he missed his last shot, but that everyone believed it was going in."

I felt the same way, and it was so wonderful to see it expressed so perfectly.

Take care of yourself!

the successive hires of Bill…

the successive hires of Bill Callahan, Bo Pelini and Scott Frost

This is Mike Riley erasure.

A couple things:

I actually…

A couple things:

  1. I actually don't think JJ McCarthy was a five star to any single recruiting service, but he was a five star to the 247 Composite, because when every single service agrees that you are the highest kind of four star, that consensus makes you a five star overall. Just a funny (but correct!) mathematical quirk.
  2. Another thing it's important to remember about NIL money: people are quick to throw around "easy way" and "greed" and stuff like that when they see athletes accepting money from the highest bidder. But it's important to remember that for most people, the money isn't *just* money: it's a proxy for respect and for how the person offering the money values you. The person who offers you more money isn't just making you richer, they're also saying, in the most concrete terms possible, "I value you more than these other people. I think more highly of you than they do. I want you more than they do." Even if you weren't a slave to the almighty dollar, who doesn't want to go where they are most highly wanted, respected, and valued? Yes, there's more to respect and value than just money, but it talks very, very loudly, and not just when appealing to the materialistic side of our natures.
When Michigan beat Ohio…

When Michigan beat Ohio State in the 100th game of the series in 2003... I was a sophomore in high school

Aw fuck, I'm old now.

bronxblue, I love your work…

bronxblue, I love your work on this diary series. It's been one of my favorite things here on MGoBlog for a long time, but I have to disagree with your analysis of Don Brown versus Urban Meyer.

Meyer's classic offense wrecked exactly one Harbaugh Michigan team: DJ Durkin's 2015 unit. Because of how embarrassing 2018 and 2019 were and because it was Harbaugh's first season, I think many people have forgotten exactly how bad that game was. Zeke Elliott and JT Barrett just ran it down Durkin's throat all day long. It was embarrasing.

Michigan then hired Brown and the defensive game plans against Meyer's classic offense in 2016 and 2017 were incredible. Brown's defense was designed to stop Meyer's power spread, and it absolutely did. That's why the 2017 game turned defensively when Barrett got hurt and Haskins came in.

In 2018, Meyer promoted Day to OC (2017 was Day's first year on the staff, as QB coach/co-OC) and transitioned his offense away from the power spread he was known for towards the modern offense we see under Day today. Haskins was not a running QB; he was a passer, first and last. Fields could certainly run, but Day was not running Meyer's power spread in 2019. OSU's performances against Brown in 2018 and 2019 happened precisely *because* Meyer abandoned his traditional power spread to counterpunch against Michigan's hire of Brown. And kudos to him, because it worked incredibly well. Brown's defense does not know how to defend Day's offense.

Harbaugh has now also counterpunched, and while it was a year or two late, it has been just as effective as Meyer's counterpunch. The ball is in OSU's court now.

On Friday, I was sent out to…

On Friday, I was sent out to get balloons for my soon-to-be-two-years-old son's birthday party. We'd been staying with my mother-in-law in Toledo for Thanksgiving. I went to a local Party City, sporting my Michigan jacket, as usual. I walk in. There are two extreme Buckeye fans checking out, decked head to toe in scarlet and gray gear. The clerk is making small talk. She asks if they're Ohio State fans ("haha! how'd you know!?"), and they reveal that they're here to buy some fireworks (or whatever) so they can set one off for every Ohio State touchdown the next day. And, they said, to their great disappointment, Party City only had six left in stock. Only. Six. These soft, entitled babies were prebuying fireworks to celebrate OSU touchdowns, and thought they would need more than six. In THE GAME. That's how fat and happy they'd become. And I just kind of looked up to the heavens and thought to myself "My god, it's time."

I wonder what they're gonna do with their three extra fireworks. Go Blue.

I had a 12 Yr Old World Cask…

I had a 12 Yr Old World Cask Finish Whistlepig Rye that I'd been saving for this occasion. It was magnificent.

This isn’t a designed rub… https://twitter.com/SpaceCoyoteBDS/status/1454835097098768386

SC had the same take, fwiw.

This is my favorite feature…

This is my favorite feature every Monday morning, bronxblue, and that goes double after a loss. I want to take issue with the way you framed one thing though:

Kenneth Walker had three big runs for TD (58, 23, and 27) but otherwise was largely held in check (89 yards on 20 carries)

That's 4.5 yards per carry after removing three huge runs. That's pretty much getting dunked on, not holding a guy "in check." We think of 4.5 yards per carry (as 89 yards on 20 carries is) as merely decent because of the variance it implies: there will be some big runs and some stuffed runs, and on balance that's merely OK. You end up having too many stuffed runs to make up for the big ones. We all know that if you could guarantee 3 yards every time you ran the ball, it's the only play you'd call, but in reality an average of 3 ypc is abjectly terrible. Why? Variance. It implies too many stuffed runs. A run of zero yards is far more costly than a run of six yards is beneficial.

But when you chop the top of that curve off, 4.5 ypc is excellent. We're counting all of Walker's poor runs and none of his good ones and he got 4.5 ypc? That's basically getting owned. Honestly, I think Michigan was lucky that MSU chose to pass as much as they did, because their best play was far and away give it to Walker and let him exploit Michigan's defense. There's a lot you could say about why that worked against Michigan (youth, transition costs, defensive line depth, some poor positional fits, first year DC, etc), but it did work, and I think trying to frame it as "we mostly did well against Walker" is too blue-sky even for me, and I'm a serial optimist.

Personally, I'd be…

Edit: Apparently I don't know how to reply to the right post, so never mind.

I would be disappointed if…

Edit: responded to wrong comment somehow?

The offense got a lot of…

The offense got a lot of great field position, which is attributable to defense and special teams. The offense may have been putting the ball in the end zone or through the uprights, but defense and special teams were doing a lot of the work to get it there. For example, being held to a field goal after recovering a ball on the four yard line is going to register as a negative EPA series for the offense; even a touchdown wouldn't have boosted EPA that much, since most of the work was already done before the offense got the ball. I suspect we will see the EPA chart for the defense go through the roof.

Also: getting to +5 EPA against a great defense shouldn't treated as underwhelming. That's a very, very good offensive performance, just not a totally dominant one.

"M gets away with an illegal…

"M gets away with an illegal formation (refs+1) since there are 8 guys on the LoS."

Wait. What? I'm pretty sure it's legal to have *more* than seven on the LoS. You just can't have *less* than seven. Am I wrong about this? A quick googling of football rules says eight on the LoS is OK.

This is a highlight of every…

This is a highlight of every Monday morning for me during the season, bronxblue. Thanks for doing these, and keep up the good work!

(No subject)

In fact, it looks like this…

In fact, it looks like this is taken from an entire instructional video that any of us degenerates could purchase for $30. Gattis himself is in a bunch of other videos, which are apparently a part of an entire series done by the Michigan coaching staff. Not sure how useful any of this would be, but I do wish I'd realized this earlier in the offseason!

Just to note: that's not the…

Just to note: that's not the only video on the YouTube channel that features Gattis breaking down plays from his offense and talking in detail about this philosophy. I was able to pull up more just by searching that channel for "Josh Gattis." Definitely worth doing, in my opnion. 

Yeah, I'm not saying I have…

Yeah, I'm not saying I have a full explanation here either. All I'm saying is that we have strong evidence from this clip that, in fact, Michigan quarterbacks are capable of blowing a read so badly that Brian believes the play cannot be a read. That should cause us to consider how many "fake read" plays really are fake, as opposed to just horrible decisions by the quarterback.

It that encouraging or discouraging? Hard to say. Would you rather find out that the design of the offense makes sense but that our quarterbacks have been unable to execute it or that the design of the offense is nonsense and our quarterbacks have been executing it well? We fired our QB coach and retained our OC, so to me that indicates that Harbaugh thinks the problem is the former, not the latter.

They CANNOT slip back into…

They CANNOT slip back into this “we’re reading nobody” idiocy that we saw again last year after it was banished post-Notre Dame 2018. I wish I could blame that on Harbaugh.

Seth, I must know, and this seems to be the right place to ask it: have you watched this clip from Josh Gattis?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bgSW4XqZK7Q

The reason I ask is that I went back and looked at this play in UFR (it's play five of the second drive against MSU in 2019). Brian determined that this play was "probably not a read," because no one would make a read this bad. And yet here we have Josh Gattis, the absolute highest authority on how this play should be run, telling us that this is absolutely a bad read from Shea Patterson.

I highly doubt that this was an isolated incident, and we should be willing to entertain that a number of situations in which it looks like we're running fake reads, we actually aren't. Does that indict our quarterback coaching? Probably! But it does mean that there's a greater possibility that Gattis' offense is doing the thing we want it to do, and we haven't had a quarterback execute it.

Seth, is it possible for…

Seth, is it possible for Kickstarter backers to get access to the Kindle edition, or nah? If not, that's cool, it's just that the PDF is pretty hard to read on my phone, and I'm wondering if the Kindle edition would be easier.

Exactly this. Four playoff…

Exactly this. Four playoff teams has turned out to be the worst possible number. When you had only two teams making a National Championship game, there was enough variance to prevent the top handful of teams from stockpiling all the best talent year in and year out. No team had an iron grip on a championship game spot, so there was much less incentive to go to any single school just to get into the championship game.

But four has turned out to provide a near guarantee to a handful of schools who can turn around and use this near guarantee to stockpile talent, further cementing the guarantee. With eight or twelve teams, you'd see more schools able to plausibly argue that they can get into the playoffs. Why go to Bama or OSU and be stuck behind a bunch of other five star talent when you can be the star player on a playoff team at Penn State or Michigan or Florida or Texas A&M?

So of course Dabo is against expansion: he loves the situation where there are only four or five teams worthy of making the playoffs because his team is one of them and will remain one of them if nothing changes.

Brian, whatever's going on,…

Brian, whatever's going on, I wish you and your family all the best! We'll be here for you when you get back!

I feel like an actual Mike…

I feel like an actual Mike Hart tribute video would be nothing but two yard runs where he was contacted behind the line of scrimmage but ground something out anyway. Hart saved an unfathomable amount of yardage the way he finished runs, especially the "bad" ones.

Currently live in Urbana,…

Currently live in Urbana, can confirm Jarling's is fantastic.

Seth, I don't know how much…

Seth, I don't know how much insider content I'm allowed to refer to, but as a paying 247 member, I can say that Domani was being directly quoted by Michigan Insider staff as being a package deal with Will Johnson. It's straight from the horse's mouth.

Not sure how, but can you…

Not sure how, but can you attempt to infuse some of the same dispassionate analysis into the veins of the rest of us?

So the thing is: there are actually a lot of us out here! It's just that "dispassionate analysis" and "desperate need to fire off the hottest possible takes on Twitter" are basically diametrically opposed by definition. And it's not a matter of not caring! The Wisconsin game was super depressing and got me really down, but in these situations rather than run to a message board to flame as many people as long and as hard as I can, I prefer to mull things over, maybe complain to one of my friends, and try to disentangle some meaning from whatever that was.

Anyway, bronxblue's "Best and Worst" are some of my favorite Michigan reading, and probably my favorite thing to read after a loss, because he's one of the few writers out there who's able to simultaneously tap into the emotions of being a Michigan fan without allowing his analysis of the program succumb to his feelings.

Absolutely impeccable timing…

Absolutely impeccable timing on this post.

Brian said on Twitter that…

Brian said on Twitter that he was working on the UFRs but that they were being slowed by election related distractions.

https://twitter.com/mgoblog/status/1324497523541741570

Hell, yes. I love Mounds…

Hell, yes. I love Mounds. Almond Joy is alright, but I actually think the almond gets in the way of enjoying the coconut, and I prefer the dark chocolate with how sweet the coconut filling is.

Too soon.

Too soon.

I like Arby's too.
This…
  1. I like Arby's too.
  2. This only ranks Michigan and teams Michigan is playing this year, and we don't play Purdue, so they aren't ranked as part of this exercise.
The problem with Maizen wasn…

The problem with Maizen wasn't his desire to see Michigan recruit top tier four and five star talent like Xavier Worthy. The number of people who think stars literally don't matter one iota is vanishingly small. There's obviously some correlation between stars and talent, and we all want talent, so we're all very happy getting highly ranked guys. If that's all Maizen was on about, he'd be fine.

The problem is that his entire schtick was to don sackcloth and ashes every time Michigan accepted a three star commitment, shit all over everyone who tried to be positive about it, and moan that we weren't recruiting like Alabama, Clemson, or Ohio State, as if Michigan had the option to recruit like that and was just like "Nah, let's grab these New England three stars instead."

The fact is that, given Michigan's achievements (or lack thereof) over the last two decades, filling out the back part of our classes with (hopefully) overlooked talent that fits what the coaches want is going to be necessary. Maizen's inability to accept anything remotely like this and insist on the maximally rude and negative reaction to every commit that didn't meet his quality threshold is why he's both wrong and insufferable, not his love of highly ranked recruits, which is completely rational and widely shared by everyone here.

Can confirm, this call was…

Can confirm, this call was awful.

Born and raised in Ypsilanti…

Born and raised in Ypsilanti Township.

Exactly this. When two teams…

Exactly this. When two teams are very evenly matched, the game is almost always going to come down to little details, including mistakes your team made and mistakes the officials made. Since no team ever plays a perfect game, you're always going to be able to find areas for your team to improve, and if you're a coach, this is what you should absolutely focus on in a close loss, because that's something you and your team can control; officiating is not, so a coach should never focus on that with his team.

But we aren't coaches or players, so it's absolutely fair to complain about bad officiating. We should also acknowledge when we're the beneficiaries of bad officiating. We also need to keep in mind that, as fans, we're going to have an unavoidable bias towards believing the officials screwed our team. Every fan believes their team has been screwed over far more than they really have.

But no one, not even neutral fans, not even some Ohio State fans, disputes that Michigan got the bad end of a number of very important calls in the 2016 Ohio State game (and, in my opinion, the "JT was short" call wasn't even one of them, just a judgement call that could have gone either way). There are plenty of instances where complaints about officiating are misplaced because our fan bias is clouding our perception. This is not one of them.

A team shouldn't have to win by 21 to win by 3. And when the scales are so obviously tipped against one team, it's fine as fans to complain about it.

It's often many hundreds of…

It's often many hundreds of samples before you start being able to make decent inferences. Certainly an entire baseball season is enough for some things, though it's also worth remembering that these samples aren't IID and can contain biases that you'd want to control for, which complicates things.

Almost anything that looks just at *games* is going to be a small sample in any sport, even baseball. But once you start looking at shots, or plate appearances, or plays, you can start to get your samples over a full season up into something potentially worthwhile.

The dirty secret about…

The dirty secret about college basketball stats: a full season is still a small sample size.

Thank you, Ace. This is one of the hardest things for people to wrap their heads around.

Also how does Michigan have…

Also how does Michigan have a catch rate of just 75% if Bell, who got the most targets, is the worst guy in the country with an 83% catch rate?

Not saying this is for sure the reason, but there's a minimum target cutoff of 50 targets, so if you have enough guys under 50 targets with sufficiently poor catch percentages, you can drag Bell's number down. On the other hand, presumably other guys with more than 50 targets are dragging Bell up, which means you'd need an astronomical drop rate for guys below 50, so... yeah I got nothing.

Yes! My wife and I had to…

EDIT: the wording of your post was a little unclear to me. Do you mean no SUVs at all or just no three row SUVs? The Edge is a two row SUV, so not sure if that's what you have in mind.

Anyway: my wife and I had to fit two three year old twins (obviously requiring child seats) and a newborn into one vehicle a few years ago. We had decided to go the SUV route, and I scouted for this exact purpose. The best option for us was far and away the Ford Edge (2015 model in our case). It was a bit wider in the back than some of the other SUVs out there and made it much easier to get three seats in just the back row. We did have to find some slimmer seats for the twins (newborn was obviously in a traditional bucket) and went with a couple Diono Radian R100.

Anyway, the Edge was a great purchase. I've loved owning it, and it absolutely got the job done for us.

OK, then we're both…

OK, then we're both basically on the same page. I also am cautiously optimistic about our shooting, even though we can't expect it to be great.

I would also note that there's more to the randomness than the exact shooting percentage and its distribution. The same distribution can yield different results depending on a bunch of other factors. That's why it's been so galling that we've paired these two horrendously bad shooting efforts with two otherwise winnable games, both featuring better than expected shooting performances from the opposition. Shoot poorly at Louisville or at Michigan State and you just lose a game by more than you otherwise would have lost it; shoot poorly at home on the same night your opposition is banging home 30-footers and you lose games you otherwise would have won. These were two pretty bad games to go ice cold.

But that's the thing with…

But that's the thing with randomness: it's not at all evenly distributed. And when it isn't, our brain immediately latches on to the perceived pattern and turns it into a story.

Could the explanation be something other than just randomness? Of course. The problem is that we'll never get a sample size large enough from one season of basketball to substantiate it statistically, and any non-statistical explanations are all colored by the fact that our brains are just dying to attach a story to the noise. The brain loves just-so stories. The amount of rigor necessary to find and support a story without statistics and without the bias our brains want to introduce is gargantuan.

And so in the absence of a statistical story or a deep, convincing, hard-to-produce, unbiased, non-statistical story, all we can do is fall back on the evidence we have about basketball in general, and that evidence is that what we've seen is almost certainly unsustainable. That's the good news.

The bad news is that, as good Bayesians, we also do need to lower our expectation of how good a shooting team this actually is. Of course, these are small incremental updates, not drastic ones, but we do need to slowly be walking back our expectations.

This feels horrible, of course, because the human brain is wired to find explanations for problems. We all want answers! Alas, we are unlikely to find any for the distribution of our three point shooting percentages.

And anyway, it's not as if the team doesn't have a lot of other stuff to work on. For me, it's almost not even worth worrying about our three point percentage, because if we really *are* actually as bad at three point shooting as we've been recently, nothing else really matters. Might as well work on the stuff that's highly likely not to be just random and hope the probably really random thing sorts itself out.

Not just bad luck, of course…

Not just bad luck, of course. There's almost never a solitary reason why a team wins or loses a game. I don't want to deny that there was plenty for Michigan to work on. My point is that, despite all the stuff they could have done better, they still did more than enough to win the game. Again, how often does a team:

  • Dominate points in the paint (34-22)
  • Dominate offensive rebounding (27%-10%)
  • Achieve turnover parity (13-13), including twice as many steals (8-4)
  • Get to three free throw line twice as much (before silly time at the end)
  • Generate 12 additional field goal attempts, including 9 additional threes

And lose? Despite all the bad, it's just shooting at that point, and while Michigan definitely took some ugly shots, there were also a plethora of excellent looks that just didn't fall.

Yeah, Michigan had some bad defensive possessions; so did Penn State. Michigan had some bad offensive possessions; so did Penn State. The difference was almost entirely that Penn State made Michigan pay and Michigan didn't return the favor. And since we know that 17% is an astronomically unreasonable three point percentage for basically any NCAA basketball team, yeah, I'm saying luck played a significant role. Absolutely.

Anyway, that doesn't make the loss feel any better. Damn near ruined my night, it was so frustrating. I get people being frustrated. I am too. But basketball is a sport with such a prominent, in-your-face, random element that you'll drive yourself insane if you don't take a step back and account for it, even (or maybe especially) when things feel bad.

For all the complaining…

For all the complaining about everything last night, it's actually incredible that Michigan didn't win this game by a comfortable margin. Michigan took 12 more field goal attempts than Penn State, and until silly time at the end of the game, had also created an advantage at the free throw line. To take a dozen more field goal attempts than your opponent and half a dozen more free throws and lose by almost double digits is almost unfathomable. Michigan had more steals, the same number of turnovers, considerably out-rebounded Penn State (by offensive rebound pct), got to the line more; everything but actually putting the ball through the basket. And most of those three point looks were pretty dang good. And even with all that, Michigan is still in this game if Curtis Jones, a 30% three point shooter, doesn't play out of his mind in the second half.

Yes, there were some sloppy periods in this game (perfect games are rare), but we saw some good stuff too. Johns did a good job early keeping Stevens from getting to the rim and stayed out of foul trouble; unfortunately Stevens made something like 80% of his baseline turnaround two point jumpers. Juwan finally shortened his bench up; Nunez and Castleton didn't play. I'd rather they improved to the point where they're playable, but as long as they aren't, we'd rather Juwan not force them into the game. We also continued to play different coverages on Stevens when he attempted to post up. Just digging down on the post a couple of times a game is a good adjustment.

This stretch reminds me a lot of the stretch of basketball in 2016-2017. We had a great tournament showing in New York that year, and then ran into a stretch of basketball where our defense wasn't tight enough and opponents benefited from an extreme amount of three point luck. People were losing their minds, the Fire Beilein crown was getting more and more vocal, then Michigan's defense crawled back towards respectability, our opponents didn't continue hitting unsustainable numbers of threes, and Derrick Walton erupted after the "white collar" comment in Illinois.

Now I'm obviously not saying the same thing is going to happen here. There are definitely issues for this team to work on, and it's unreasonable to expect anyone to do what Walton did. But you've got to take a deep breath after shooting performances like this one. Even a bad shooting performance from Michigan wins this game; it took a catastrophic performance to lose it, one that is almost certainly unsustainable going forward. And if it doesn't largely correct itself, Michigan has way worse problems then some lax defensive rotations or sloppy turnovers; no modern basketball team is gonna win while regularly shooting under 20% from three.

For what it's worth, The…

For what it's worth, The Athletic also put us in the Citrus Bowl against Auburn. That would be pretty cool.

Hahaha, came here to post…

Hahaha, came here to post just this! He said this earlier in the season, and I tried to correct him them too. Come on, Craig!

I had the same thought. This…

I had the same thought. This seemed to me to be more a list of "memorable" games or "games with memorable plays in them." That's fine, and I guess that's one way to define "greatness," but it's definitely not a list of the games where the greatest football was played.

For example, it's crazy to me that the 2015 "Trouble with the Snap" MSU game is on here if you're trying to list "great" games. That game was a horrid ref show with a insanely random ending. It's memorable as hell, sure. If I were an MSU fan, I'd never let Michigan fans forget about it (and they haven't). But just because it ended with a really weird play didn't make the rest of the game great.

And then if you're gonna have that game on there for its crazy ending, then how the hell is UTL I not on there? As a neutral (which, yes, I'm not) would you ever trade the final two minutes of UTL I for one stupid punt snap in 2015 MSU? Hell no, you wouldn't.

So that's my major beef: it's really more a list of memorable games, but then then has some weird choices from what constitutes memorable. Well, that and all the ND games. FFS.

Just wanted to say thanks to…

Just wanted to say thanks to Seth for addressing this openly. I too miss getting the podcasts promptly on my MGoPodcast feed, and it's nice to at least have some clarity as to why. Thanks, Seth!

Just want to add another…

Just want to add another recommendation for The Athletic. It's everything a sports journalism website should be: clean presentation of original journalism, no fluff, no ads, no clickbait. I've been loving it.

Sorry, I was forming…

Sorry, I was forming additional thoughts as you were responding to this, so they're posted in reply to your previous comment. :)

As to whether Michigan…

As to whether Michigan should relax standards for athletes, I have a few thoughts:

  1. These athletes help market the university. They are its face to much of the public, and help the public form an attachment to the university. This benefits the university a great deal when it comes to securing donations, public funds, etc. It's not just the athletes who benefit from Michigan, Michigan also benefits from the athletes to increase its prestige, which the other students who are admitted then benefit from in turn.
  2. The university isn't strictly focused on pure academic performance for any student. It has long argued that fostering a diverse atmosphere is a priority, because they believe it benefits all students to be exposed to many different people with different points of view and experiences.
  3. No one "deserves" a place at Michigan just because of their raw academic performance. This was hard for me to accept when I was graduating high school. I felt I was more qualified than some of my high school classmates that were admitted to Michigan and was bitter about this for a long time. Happily, I was able to buckle down, put the work in at Washtenaw Community College, and transfer to Michigan for my junior and senior year, ultimately earning my degree from Michigan. The university has standards for admission that go beyond pure academics, and that's OK. No one should feel entitled to admittance just because of their test scores or GPA.
  4. Brian has long argued that admitting athletes to your school isn't really taking the spot that would go to some other student, because there isn't really a hard cap on supply; you can always squeeze another student into a lecture hall, right? I'm not sure how true this, but it's probably got at least a grain of truth to it.

And with all that said: yes, while you're a student at Michigan, the university should require you to take your education seriously, even if that isn't Plan A for the student-athlete in question.