• Beneath the Big House

    Last night I attended a fundraiser benefitting Ronald McDonald House of Ann Arbor, held in the stadium at the Jack Roth Stadium Club.   The event included tours of the field and inside the stadium locker room.  A few observations: More evidence that the The Legends program is going away—the Legends lockers used to look like this:   Last night the engraved Legends patches were gone from the back of the lockers: There are also a few new displays up closer to the entrance of the locker room that are pretty nicely done.  I don’t recall seeing these before.   First, a very conspicuous tribute to Tom Brady:   Further down the hall several great moments in Michigan football history are immortalized: Along with the ones you can see (OSU 1997, OSU 1969, #BraylonFest, Desmond Heisman pose), they also have 1979 Indiana (Ufer/Carter), and 1985 Harbaugh to Kolesar, and a couple others (Ron Kramer?).   Follow MVictors on Twitter

  • Brady’s Brilliance and Football’s Sweeping Rule Changes a Century Ago

    If you read this site somewhat regularly you’re familiar with the work of my pal and football historian (Natural Enemies) John Kryk.   Well, in good news for football fans everywhere, Kryk recently was named as the NFL columnist for the Toronto Sun, & according to the paper he’ll be “the first full-time, year-round NFL beat columnist in Canadian sports journalism history.” So what can we expect from Kryk?  We’ll see—but based on the evidence his first few columns there’ll be the occasional nugget of Michigan football history.   Check Kryk’s piece on Tom Brady this week that focuses in on a single moment of brilliance in the ‘99 Penn State game.   It wasn’t a TD toss or a sharp pass or even the start of a key drive.   It was a critical, seemingly unconventional decision to do nothing…that is, just let the play clock run out despite having a couple timeouts.  Kryk explains here. And yesterday Kryk took us back a century ago Friday when football enacted sweeping rules changes (including the opinion of Fielding Yost) that altered the face of the game forever : It was exactly 100 years ago Friday — Feb. 3, 1912 — that the U.S. college football rules committee (there was no pro league yet) agreed to pass the last of a series of sweeping, epochal…