Unverified Voracity Bites The Bullet

I listen to Colin Cowherd for you. Jim Harbaugh tried out his best Jim Tomsula impression on Colin Cowherd's show this morning:

I dunno man. I wonder if Harbaugh, a high-functioning lunatic, has points at which his function isn't so high. There is a general antipathy for press conference questions… a lot of the time. There is a general antipathy for lazy questions… some of the time. The questions Cowherd fired off were typical Cowherd: somewhat off-putting but nothing that an average person would get his dander up at, and Harbaugh is immediately in I Don't Know mode.

There are ways I think you can rescue it when he gets in that mode. Number one is talking about his players. Harbaugh loves talking about guys he has coached. But I don't think Cowherd really did anything. Harbaugh just wasn't in the mood from the drop. Steve Lorenz accurately describes it as "troll on troll crime."

Happy first-ish day of work at your new Harbaugh-wranglin' job, Zach Eisendrath! It's a very good idea to have a specific person whose only job is to wrangle Harbaugh, but I worry about the men who try to bridge the gap between beast and overman. I await the day the relentlessly upbeat Eisendrath turns his twitter feed into the SID equivalent of Nihlist Arby's.

Draw the blinds. shut out the sun. Cry. The pile of meat has been on the table for weeks. Just eat it & go back to bed. Arbys: edible.

— Nihilist Arby's (@nihilist_arbys) July 1, 2015

I am surprised that I have not already been followed by thirty different "parody" accounts called Nihilist Harby's.

Colin should have read the operating manual though. When this Sacramento Bee story came out we all had a laugh about it and forgot. And then…

Your Harbaugh does not function like other head coaches. An innocuous query about the weather, for instance, could trigger a florid quote from Admiral William Halsey. And yet a routine question about a running back’s knee injury may cause your Harbaugh to wince, pause and grimace as if a malodorous scent has wafted into the room. Your Harbaugh’s default in this instance is: “We don’t really talk about that here” or “I can’t get inside his body” or “He’s working through something.” This is a design flaw our technicians in California have not yet worked out.

Also:

Your Harbaugh will be enormously affectionate one day and cold and distant the next. This is normal.

After Eisendrath starts wearing eyeliner and listening to My Chemical Romance 24 hours a day, Matt Barrows of the Sacramento Bee has a job waiting for him. A job he should not take. Yes, even if he works for a print newspaper.

Brock Mealer wants to help other people walk. You won't know that you've missed Mike Barwis's gravel truck of a voice until about ten seconds into this:

They are raising money at charity funding site Crowd Rise; you can also grab a shirt on Barwis's site.

Whyyyyyyyy. SBNation's Steven Godfrey has a piece on why there are so many neutral-site games and they continue to increase:

College football's neutral-site games are gaining in popularity because they make a lot of money for the companies and institutions involved.

But demand is even higher among schools suddenly looking to schedule tougher opponents. Consider it knee-jerk hysteria in the wake of Baylor's exclusion from the College Football Playoff, a move often explained as a product of weak non-conference scheduling.

"If you can break your $600,000 [deal for a game against] Akron to go cash $1.2 million from Allstate ... well, there's no catch any more," the agency rep said. "TCU not getting in [the Playoff despite being] at No. 3 the week before scared every athletic director shitless."

Now, you might be thinking to yourself "why would a neutral site game make more money than a home game?" There are three main reasons:

• You can get away with more sponsor stuff at a neutral site. The Blank And Blank Classic, etc.
• You can jack up ticket prices. When Michigan played Alabama at Jerryworld, the minimum price to get in the door was $125, with non-suite tickets ranging up to $245 face. It sold out because it was Michigan against Alabama. Neither school dropped their PSDs a cent.
• The neutral site (sometimes) controls the TV revenue. Most conferences have stipulations that TV revenue  is shared, even nonconference TV revenue. This goes for "neutral site" games in the geographical footprint of the conference, but generally does not extend past that. That's why Washington State played Notre Dame in Texas several years back—ND wanted to control that revenue and could not do so in the Pac-12 footprint. That was not the case for Michigan-Alabama, however.

Now, even with all those advantages a neutral site game could only come up with 4.7 million for Michigan—less than they would have gotten for beating up on a cupcake. For a team like TCU, though, the financial equation is much different.

Michigan's got another one coming up because they had a terrible contract against Notre Dame and got left in the lurch; after 2017 against Florida they should never play a neutral site game again. In this, at least, Jim Delany is an aid:

In 2013, Big Ten commissioner Jim Delany issued a memo requiring any Big Ten school playing off-campus games to be designated the home team in at least half of the matchups, and that half of the games take place in the Big Ten's footprint. The two-game series between LSU and Wisconsin in Houston and Green Bay is the example.

Never say Jim Delany didn't do one thing right in his whole life.

Instead of having a neutral site game with those ticket advantages, you should ask your fans if it's okay to have big prices for a big game, and when they say YES YES YES then do it.

YOU WERE. There was a time in the 90s when Ohio State would roll in to The Game with a shiny record and national championship aspirations and a 7-4 Michigan team would destroy them. It wasn't exactly halcyon since, uh, 7-4, but there was a grim satisfaction in dragging those bastards into the pit with us. This happened so often that I can't remember which of these games featured this exchange between myself and an Ohio State fan deep into the third quarter:

"You guys are pathetic! You're 7-4! We are national championship contenders!"
"You WERE national championship contenders."
/merriment

Better that than the recent stuff, I guess. Anyway, ERASE THIS GAME—which still hasn't tackled #M00N—features the 1993 version of La Brea Tar Stadium, in which Tyrone Wheatley* did this:

And Ohio State did this:

Ohio State:

- never crosses into the Michigan red zone
- goes two of twelve on third down
- averages two yards per carry compared to Michigan's five
- gets shut out by the Wolverines for the first time since 1976
- misses going to the Rose Bowl after Wisconsin beats Michigan State in Tokyo because the tiebreaker at the time eliminated the most recent Rose Bowl invitee
- seriously, that was a way the Big Ten decided who got to go to the Rose Bowl, and it's basically "aw heck you're due"

I would prefer that we keep this game, and possibly bronze it.

*[Whenever I watch Wheatley run these days I think that Brandon Minor was born 20 years too late to be a somewhat disappointing first round NFL draft pick.]

Etc.: Harbaugh throws out first pitch, talks to media personably afterwards. This is normal. An oral history of Barry Alvarez making Wisconsin into Wisconsin. You should probably read it. Harbaugh on the Tigers.