Dear Diary Needs to Stop Raining

dramatization

I've got this dresser I'm painting to go with our bedroom furniture. A few weekends ago I got one coat on it. Then it rained and ruined half the second coat. So I took it out there again but it started to rain on and off and I had to hide it under the garage overhang. Every day I check to see if there will be six good hours of sunlight somewhere to stick the last coat on it, and every time there's a dollop of drizzle here, a sprinkle there, and at least one good pour per day.

It is as hopeless and infuriating as being a Michigan fan. I know we can't complain too hard because there are places like West Lafayette where it just rains all the time, or Champaign where the weatherman predicts sun so you'll be outside when the softball-sized hail comes.

Your April shower was Urban Meyer coming to piss on your attempt to add a grad-year transfer to the OL, and now May flowers with a boatload of puritan crap.

I'm still livid. For a second there it looked like at least one of Michigan's major sports was going to be sustainably great, so of course that's when the most insane decision yet by an organization best known for blithering stupid decisions knocks basketball from a likely 1-seed to something way less than that. McGary's mad too, but the NBA's not a terrible fallback plan. Michigan got screwed the most.

The last guy I could find to get the one-year ban was a role player at UNLV who lost his 5th year to it in 2010. We've been scouring Google to turn up polls and quotes to give you some idea of how ubiquitous pot-smoking is among college athletes. The NCAA's own study came back at 1 in 5:

I'm suddenly liking lacrosse more

So how is it, even if the draconian rule only applies to the playoffs, that the merciless league can only manage to tag one guy every four years? There's a synthetic version that regular pot-smoking athletes will use during the season to beat the tests. So when they do catch a guy with good ol'fashioned THC in his system, it's usually only because he's a total amateur. No pun intended.

Whence the leapers?

I know Jones is 10, but I keep getting Dukes (83) and York (81) confused.

The 2012 receiver class had a pair of high 4-star types with similar I-saved-my-family-from-a-terrible-place-in-Africa stories. The 2014 class had the guy who rewrote the in-state record books and what already looks like a gem in Freddy Canteen. Lost in the narrative have been the three large-and-leapy 2013 guys who redshirted last year. What do we expect from C'sonte, Jaron and Da'Mario? That's a good question.

This year I expect depth. In addition to Gallon we also graduated Dileo and Jackson and Reynolds. If Nussmeier indeed goes 3-wide a lot more as we hope, then at least one of them ought to figure on the two-deep in 2014.

Jones is more "slot-like", i.e. thin, though he's not at all short. I think his upside is Roy Roundtree, and so long as they leave him in the slot that'll be just fine. Dukes and York represent a specific type of receiver who can simply muscle past the type of legal-unless-they-call-it press coverage en vogue these days, and simply out-leap the 5'8 buggers who won't have any trouble staying with them. They're development projects: it takes years to perfect off-the-snap and route techniques to make this work. Unfortunately, Michigan only bothered to get a redshirt on Dukes last year, which, given Mathlete's finding that receiver experience is a big deal, is infuriating. Mo Ways is in this vein too, FWIW.

Etc. Hoops previews of Illinois, Maryland, and…Iowa? Hmm. Prediction for the remainder: Michigan (we should be below Iowa), Ohio State, Michigan State, Wisconsin.  Photos from the Go Blue Bowl. The 2013-'14 cagers'contributions to the season's gifs. Lacrosse potentially could go green…I mean more green.

[After the jump: why 2014 offense isn't 2011 defense, I enter the ranks of MGoBloggers who rant about Brandon]

Best of Board

CAN THE OFFENSE 2011 ITSELF?

Remember how the defense was such a mess by 2010 and could only hope to become average by 2011, then Mattison came in and they would up in the teens in scoring D while actually, you know, stopping people when it mattered? Why can't new OC Doug Nussmeier do the same with the offense? It could happen, but there are some factors in our way here:

1. Mattison walked in already one of the most accomplished DCs in football from stints at Michigan, Notre Dame, Florida and the Ravens. Nussmeier doesn't have that kind of standing, and the degree to which he was carried by Saban's monstrosity of a program is unknown.

2. Graduations will hurt more. Here's a chart of 2010 to 2011 defensive attrition and replacements versus this year's offense:

On the left: better, better, better, better, better. That Heininger turned out to be a pretty useful defensive piece was attributed to Hoke/Mattison magic; that he was an improvement over Greg Banks wasn't that great of an accomplishment. Similarly what they got out of Morgan and Ryan and T.Gordon and Countess was a mark of great coaching, but they were replacing only one NFL player (Mouton) and he a maddeningly inconsistent one drafted on potential, not college performance.

If you grant that Funchess and Gardner = RVB and Martin, who's the Kovacs of this offense? Who's the Roh? Is there a Demens? A Woolfolk?

On the right there's reasonable hope that a guard will outperform Mags's freshman campaign, that one or two young receivers will have more production than the critically underutilized Dileo, and that an RB's ability will actually be relevant, but even the ceiling of expectations doesn't have anyone performing at the level Lewan, Schofield and Gallon did.

3. The offense is still really young and has very few useful pieces. Pieces that remained to the 2011 defense included Mike Martin, RVB, and Craig Roh up front, Kenny Demens, and Jordan Kovacs. You can also count no-longer-a-freshman Courtney Avery and Woolfolk coming off injury. That's enough upperclassmen with experience to have some strength if glaring weaknesses can be fixed in the other spots. Ryan, Morgan, and T.Gordon were minor miracles, while Heininger and J.T. Floyd were biblical ones. The 2014 offense returns Gardner, Funchess, and after the first few games Butt and Glasgow. That leaves a good seven to nine J.T. Floyd-level acts of divine providence to match the 2011 defense's leap.

4. They STILL haven't played together. Mags's injury and Glasgow's joy-ride couldn't come a t a worse time. They'll enter fall with half the options at open positions still unable to contribute (e.g. LTT, Fox and Mags at OT), which almost guarantees lineup shuffling deep into next season. The only personnel changes to happen from Spring 2011 to the Sugar Bowl were Morgan seized the open WLB job five games in, and various guys (first T.Gordon, then Countess) displaced a beat-up Woolfolk.

5. The position coaches haven't changed. The difference between Tony Gibson and Curt Mallory was immediately evident to everyone from the fans to opponents to the players themselves. Obi and Mouton seemed to regress every year under GERG's tutelage, while under Mattison Demens became a very good player, the WLBs played to their limited abilities, and Jake Ryan started going smash. And once you compare what Hoke got from walk-ons on the DL rotation versus the play of 5th year seniors Patterson/Banks/Sagesse in 2010, well the differences in position coaching were staggering. If the same guys couldn't teach A.J. Williams to block, and an offensive lineman is yet to pull effectively twice in a row under Funk, why would they start now?

6. Borges > GERG. This statement will get me into trouble, but there were times (Notre Dame, Ohio State) where Al Borges just had himself a GAME. Can you remember one time in 2009 or 2010 when you thought "wow, Greg Robinson really out-thought their offensive coordinator today"? Borges was prone to GERG-level performances and he was ABSOLUTELY the wrong choice for a team with two years of eligibility remaining to Denard Robinson et al., but he did have good days.

7. It wasn't as much of a jump as you remember. Well, it was a leap from purely awful to okay, but as we've been over before and seen since, the 2011 defense wasn't really elite. Rather it was a significant improvement that helped itself with timely fumble recoveries (these are random) and an astounding stoppage rate on short situations.

THE ONE THING THEY HAVEN'T SOLD OUT

As predicted, a combination of a mostly unwatchable 7-win season, the worst home schedule since Horace Prettyman, and the most predatory ticket policies in the history of amateur athletics, has finally done it: Michigan is having trouble filling the house that Yost built.

The board tried to do an informal poll but got few responses. If somebody with an unlimited monkey-thing account (you know what I mean) would like to put that together I'll put it up next week. Most of the responses echoed this sentiment from user umumum:

All for the tradition

but right now that is about all there is.  I renewed again for the umpteeth plus year.  But the "product" gets worse every year (of late) and I'm not talking about only wins and losses.

I get why some are letting their season tickets go.  It doesn't necessarily mean they are less of a Michigan alum or "Man".  Otherwise, we should just get out rulers and start measuring.

The athletic department's response: for a limited time only, you can pay a higher preferred seat donation to move up into a higher pool of unguaranteed seats. Give 'em credit: they know how to milk a dime, even if the cow's already been slaughtered and sold to the butcher. If you're doing this, it is advised that you tell the athletic department exactly where you'd like to sit as a condition of the extra donation.

The historic low in ticket demand warranted a Brandon-explains session at a public business luncheon, wherein DB unveiled the latest in wow-that-was-callous experiences:

“We all think ofevery home Michigan football game like a miniature Super Bowl. We’ve got to have enough going on that people want to be there to listen to it. We know who our competitor is: your 60-inch, high-definition, soon-to-be-3-D television set that you will choose instead of my $65 ticket. And we work really hard at that.”

Does Brandon really believe those of us who didn't renew our tickets did so because the stadium experience isn't NFL enough, or that we've all got 60-inch, 3-dimensional HDTVs and three devices in arm's length with which to pull up replays from BTN (and the 30-second commercials affixed to them of course)? No. Of course not.

It has almost assuredly crossed his mind he may have priced out lifelong fans with $110 (with PSD) tickets, even if he can't see what's wrong with turning Michigan football into 4 hours of dog groomer RAWK, commercial breaks, and a great big reminder of that time Chad Henne and Mike Hart lost to a I-AA team. Just as cable networks and providers know damn well that families paying off two cars, a mortgage, and student loans can't afford 190 channels they won't watch just to get BTN.

The fact is the poor man's dollar is worth half of the extra $2 that the moderately well-off man will grudgingly allow you to fleece so as to not interrupt his lifestyle. Michigan's mercenary decision to pursue that dollar sends a clear transmission: if you can't afford to watch his athletes do things athletically improbable, go do a thing that's anatomically impossible.

I know, I know, I'm the nth-teenth writer on this site to jump in on the Dave Brandon bitch-fest. Since I rarely use the press passes and my family rage-quit our tickets a few years ago, drowning out the band and insidious advertising are secondary concerns to just being able to afford my Michigan habit on an MGoSalary. In my interactions with this athletic department over the last few years, I've had twice the "Damn you!" experiences as positive ones. I can only imagine what that number looks like for people who don't go to softball games.

SOFTBALL GAMES

It's the last weekend of Big Ten play. Do you know where your Wolverines are?

Etc. OFFER TINY BREES ALREADY! Apparently not everyone goes for the "we have wings" recruiting pitch.

Your Moment of Zen:

I AM an angry goalie