Unverified Voracity Plays Catch

As the Harbaugh turns. There were two main appeals to Jim Harbaugh as Michigan coach. One: he wins a lot. Two: he makes things interesting. After the last couple years, when the only interesting thing was finding out just how incompetent an offense can be, that latter is a breath of fresh air. 

Harbaugh's swooping down upon injured people by the roadside, he's getting tweeted at by Judge Judy, and then he's… uh…

…OAKLAND IS STILL IN PLAY

HEAD FOR THE HILLS

WE DIDN'T LISTEN, NFL REPORTERS

WE DIDN'T LISTEN

…

False alarm. Harbaugh was just out there making fine distinctions between classes of lions:

"The A's to me, the way they compete, the team, the different way they think, they are jungle lions," said Harbaugh, who also coached at Stanford before joining the 49ers. "Zoo lions get tired of zebra after a while and want filet mignon. Not jungle lions."

No one ask him about the Detroit variety.

Oh, and if you're worried that he's slacking off because you're a crazy person:

"He's quite the competitor and a winner. We've been trying to work this out for a long time, but the day after he left the 49ers he was out recruiting for Michigan. There hasn't been that much time."

We get the crazies around here some.

Like the head coach. File under "too good to check." This story from around 2000 involves Harbaugh wanting to throw the ball around with some girls at Dominicks. An observer feels this is flirting until…

He said to the first girl, “keep your hands up, thumbs down,” and he showed her the proper motion with his own hands. When she didn’t get quite right, he grabbed her wrists and showed her how to position her hands. He then paced off 15 yards, held the ball in front of him, squatted like he was under center, patted the ball hard, took three hard steps back, planted his back leg and fired the ball at the first girl. As he let the ball go, you could hear it click as his fingernails hit the ball and, I shit you not, as the ball whizzed through the air you could hear it ssssssssssss… THUNK! It hit the girl in the shoulder and knocked her down. Jim wadn’t playin’.

“Come on, let’s go!” Jim barked. While Girl #1 picked herself up, Girl#2 gamely grabbed the ball and lobbed it back. Again, Jim got in his QB squat, smacked the ball, did a hard three-step drop-back and fired the ball at Girl#3, she ducked but the ball hit off the top of her head and went into the street. Girl#2 ran after it while Girl#3 sat on the ground rubbing her head. When Girl#2’s throw back to Jim was short, Jim got a bit annoyed, and set the girls up in a relay so that two girls were about 25 yards away, and the third girl was halfway in between so that that girls could throw to her, and she would run the ball to Jim. For the next 5-10 minutes, he was firing balls at these two poor girls, knocking them down or hitting them in the face about half the time. He was 100% oblivious.

…until it becomes clear that the only context in which Harbaugh has ever heard the word "flirt" is immediately preceding "…ing with disaster," and associates it with throwing over the middle late.

Bo post OSU, 1986. Dr. Sap is a treasure:

I'm going to find that high school teacher and tell her what a grave mistake she made almost twenty years ago. Long story short, wrote a funny ha-ha paper that would no doubt make me cringe today, teacher gave it a nice grade and wrote on it something along the lines of "you could be the next Mitch Albom!"

Flash forward to the present day:

Yo @MitchAlbom the Lions have never won a super bowl what the heck are you talking about pic.twitter.com/xqQKSOPSr6

— Michael Proppe (@mikeproppe) March 9, 2015

Woof.

Is that good

Aubrey Dawkins shot 48% from three in #B1G play. Let's just say he's a fan of high-percentage shots: https://t.co/bsIEkuvqdR

— Alejandro Zúñiga (@ByAZuniga) March 8, 2015

I feel another "what the hell were people thinking not recruiting Aubrey Dawkins" podcast segment is in our future. Also I accidentally typed his last name "Dakwins," which is either Andrew Dakich's rapper alter-ego… or his dad's.

Fisch's contract. Interesting piece by a 247 board member on Jedd Fisch's contract, which is relatively paltry compared to the rest of the staff's… and only for one year. Why:

Since Fisch was fired with a year remaining on his Jaguars contract, Michigan found themselves in an odd position with him. It’s somewhat uncommon to see a coach simultaneously drop in both level of sport and title, but Fisch went from the NFL to college and from OC to a position coach. Thus, even if Michigan were to make Fisch the highest-paid position coach in college football, it’s unlikely he’d even approach his NFL salary. From a financial standpoint, it pretty much doesn’t matter to Fisch what his Michigan salary is – in 2015, he’ll be getting the Jacksonville money either way. From Michigan’s side, Michigan now has motivation to pay Fisch as little as possible, since they still get the full benefit of Fisch’s services, while the Jaguars have to pick up the tab. Fisch doesn’t care, so the only real obstacle to Michigan paying Fisch $1 for the year would be the Jaguars.

Michigan gave him something plausible—200k, just over what JayBaugh is making. Otherwise he'd be making in the 300-400 range the rest of the staff is, especially with the "passing game coordinator" title.

This is a nice change from the previous regime. Brandon paid way over the market for Hoke and then did the same with Borges, giving him a ludicrous bump after his first year. (One that ended with Michigan gaining fewer than 200 yards, remember.) He paid people to make them look like they were good ideas. Now Michigan is saving money where it can, like on Fisch's contract, so it can pay the right amount of money to people who are likely worth it.

Something something master… slingers? I'll work on it. 6'10" German F Moritz Wagner was at Crisler over the weekend, hanging with the governor:

#Michigan recruit Moritz Wagner hamming it up with the ushers. Even Gov. Snyder got into the love fest. #GoBluepic.twitter.com/0jIvJnCLbR

— Yvo M (@_YV0) March 7, 2015

It's hard to tell how big of a prospect Wagner is. An NBA scout who Evan Daniels pinged makes him sound a bit developmental:

“He’s a versatile kid who knows how to play ball,” a NBA scout that has evaluated him multiple times told Scout. “He’s not an athlete, but with his length and coordination he manages to deceive his opponents and get to the rack quite easily. Once he becomes a more consistent shooter he will be a nightmare on the wing.”

“He reads the game well, gets his teammates involved and is unselfish player,”

Sounds a bit like Chatman, actually.

Hackett on Project Unicorn. This is a very smart section of his radio interview:

"It was more about "What did the institution need?"," Hackett said. "It can't afford to experiment a lot more. If you look at the last seven years going back to Rich Rod's arrival, there was a seven year period where these were experiments that we weren't sure were going to turn out. There was a gradual decay of "something" because of that. You can call that "winning", you can call that "fan support", you can call it "enthusiasm for Michigan's history". This is the winningest program ever in this sport and it carried the day for a long time. It wasn't behaving that way now though. That Sunday night (after the Ohio State game) I called the President and told him that I don't think we can experiment anymore."

The rest is history.

Etc.: Tom Crean and Indiana fans aren't really having a good time together. I almost feel bad for the guy. The Aubrey Dawkins show.