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Dear Diary Recommends the Obvious

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S02P05

Stuffing the Passer, accidentally ironic for once.

You SERIOUSLY cannot be telling me we have to entrust our lives to--- So Everett Golson is leaving Notre Dame, and Harbaugh is all take ALL THE QUARTERBACKS so this is now a thing. I doubt it happens now that Rudock is committed—why walk into anything like the same situation he's walking out of?

But do we even have to have the "would you take him?" conversation? The cost to Michigan is zero (the cost to one walk-on is one year of college), and the upside is perhaps a redshirt on Morris and one more bullet in the chamber at the most important position. Worst case scenario is still the current scenario, except with 100% more Sockface.

"All the World's a Stage. Except that Couch. That Couch is not a Proper Stage. Do not perform on that couch!" –Shakespeare, full quote.

In 2011 a Theater student named A.J. Holmes arranged a choral performance of the Victors and the chants everybody knows, and last weekend the Theater students performed it for their parents at a graduation party. This got recorded on someone's dad's phone, posted on Facebook, and was instantly adored by everyone except the UM Theater Dept version of Dave Brandon (Orr is the dad):

Orr said the post was taken down at the request of the Chair of the Musical Theatre Department, Brent Wagner.

"The chair of our department is interested in preserving the department and he just wanted to make sure that whenever it's performed it's done so in a professional manner and we completely respect that," Orr said.

Despite such ruinous production value, over half a million people shared it, generating more positive comments about the department in a day than 100,000 performances of Equus ever got them. To his credit, in face of righteous blowback, Wagner relented and let the dad re-post it. I suggest you watch the hell out of this:

Listen to this! What happens when 22 talented UMich musical theatre grads sing their version of the University of Michigan fight song at their graduation party. An amazing arrangement by Michigan MT alum A.J. Holmes (who we just saw starring as Cunningham in the Book of Mormon Broadway National Tour). Awesome!

Posted by Scott Orr on Sunday, May 3, 2015

Marvel at the talent of those singers. Also marvel at Scott Orr, who not only just paid for four years of Theater education at the University of Michigan, but can also use a camera phone, and manipulate the privacy settings of Facebook. I hereby award Scott Orr the inaugural Jim Harbaugh Heroic Dad of the Year Trophy.

[After the jump: what % of Michigan's 3-/4-/5-stars were NFL draftees]

Sports Information. Unless you were one of the early internet obsessives you probably never realized that Michigan was way ahead of the rest of college athletics in disseminating information about their programs. We created the online statistical reporting that the NCAA adopted as standard for football. MGoBlue.com was the first official website dedicated just to an athletic department. Bentley Library's football page looks so outdated now because it was built nearly a decade before most other schools got theirs up. I say "we" but really this was all Bruce Madej, Michigan's SID from 1982 until Loch-Dogg was installed to be his antithesis.

WIP '05
Beginning in 1998 I used to make these backgrounds in Paint every year using the photos they put on MGoBlue. This was 2005's.

Madej was too loved, too much of a team player, too much the greatest icon of the SID profession to be unceremoniously dumped like most of the legacy staff Brandon inherited, so Bruce was kept on to do projects like design the Bo Museum and fill the Crisler Center displays with content. Madej officially retired before the 2013 season, going into consulting, after a long and uncomfortable coexistence with a department that believed marketing is Eminem riding a firework into your face (and making sure injury-necessitated temporary changes in roster data don't end up on calendars three years later). He and Daniel Okrent are my two professional heroes.

I wanted to get that tribute down so you know what I mean when I say that Wolverine Devotee's recent work in the diaries reminds me of the delight I experienced throughout the late-'90s whenever I'd go on MGoBlue.com and find Madej's latest project. The latest WD effort is this thorough list of Michigan football's historical draft picks. It includes NFL back to the 1930s, as well as AFL, Canadian leagues, AAFC, WFL, USFL, and XFL.

Michigan has had a player drafted every year since 1967, one of only six such schools. Of this year's seniors I expect at least Bolden and Ross to be drafted. G.Glasgow, Morgan, Wilson, Countess, Rudock, Lyons, and Blake O'Neill are guys I expect to be on some kind of NFL roster by this time next year, and someone would be smart to give Pipkins a tryout even if he can't crack a very deep DT depth chart now. If a junior goes it's probably Jourdan Lewis.

I've added NFL draft round to my classes since 1993 roster database and compared to recruiting hype:

NFL DRAFT ROUND OF MICHIGAN PLAYERS BY RECRUITING STARS
(Avg *s of available sites, 1993-present)

NFL Round1st2nd3rd4th5th6th7thNot Drafted (%)
5 stars3411 21912/21 (57%)
4.5 stars3  1 22148/22 (36%)
4 stars33323336820/88 (23%)
3.5 stars142  11479/56 (16%)
3 stars 211 1510210/112 (9%)
2.5 stars       110/11 (0%)
2 stars       190/19 (0%)

This jives almost precisely with the going "recruiting rankings matter" consensus: every star doubles the likelihood of a player being NFL-caliber, with your standard 5-star barely better than a coin flip.

How to Get to the Final Four This One Time. Champswest had an interesting little look at the individual minutes played by each guy for this year's Final Four teams plus Michigan to contrast the methods used to build their runs:

  • Kentucky: Have a two-deep of one-and-planned-to-be-dones
  • Duke: Supplement senior top-100 types with lottery picks
  • Wisconsin: Recruit top-200 players and develop them over 5 years in a system
  • Michigan State: Whiff on the Duke guys, luck into the easiest bracket ever

I decided to graph his numbers, normalizing the averages so that everyone is represented as if they played a 40-game season:

Capture

The lesson is if you're trying to build like Wisconsin, don't accidentally be as young as Kentucky. This is known.

Introduce Yourself Thread 2015. It has been gotten out of the way. If you're so inclined to be yourself among the MGoCommunity they asked age, occupation, location, alumni status, and most MICHIGAN thing you've ever done. I went as the Little Brown Jug for Halloween. There's another getting personal thread for where you tailgate.

Etc. Jake Butt as Bond in a wallpaper. Transfer linebacker saying he wants to be a petroleum engineer means brace for Penn State to get Ferns.

Your Moment of Zen:

If you choose to go Office Space on your printer-copier this is the correct way to do it:


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