“Double personal foul #23: Excessive No. 1’s and unjustified use of a neck roll” Via Lance at umgoblog who dug up this gem.  It’s Rich Rodriguez, #23 for West Virginia picking off a punt pass against Joe Paterno and Penn State back in 1984:   Jeeeezz coach, lighten up on the vintage 1980s Miami #1 celebration.  And I love the former walk-on, patrolling the secondary with a neck roll!

Someone dialed up WTKA this morning to offer an explanation as to why the MMB went with the ‘Opera’ set, after Delaware State’s band did their thing.  He said that a parent of a band member told him the more traditional set was a deliberate attempt to come off as more of a stereotypical “Ivy League”-like routine, almost as a joke in the wake of The Approaching Storm’s performance.  I don’t know if that’s true, or if as some have suggested, Michigan simply didn’t want to upstage TAS, or maybe more likely, the MMB wanted to demonstrate acoustic quality over flash.  It’s certainly not a huge deal to me, but with much talk about bands I’ll offer this: I grew up watching games in Spartan Stadium.  I remember one year the Michigan band came in and did their thing, probably in the early 80s.  At one point they dropped their instruments and ran around, I forget why, but I remember thinking, ‘Wow, those bastards guys are damn creative.’ This band seems to have stretched traditional limits over the years, including my favorite, the Jaws theme played at the 1976 Orange Bowl (white pants!) where they formed the shape of a person swimming along peacefully before being engulfed by the Great White shark: The Oklahoma band was thoroughly ‘served’ in ‘76…

Given we’re halfway through the schedule, I’m reinstituting the weekly MVictors Power Index, which rates the Big Ten and Notre Dame.  As discussed last year, while there’s many solid polls out there including the excellent BlogPoll, the thought would be that it’d be cool to rate the teams tightly within our purview. Each weekend pollsters (select group of contributors from Michigan, Ohio State, Wisconsin and Michigan State) will rate each team against the others and assign a simple score: * ‘2? indicates Team A would beat Team B in the upcoming week with reasonable certainty (approximately 80% of the time) * ‘1? indicates a toss-up * ‘0? indicates a loss with reasonable certainty (80% of the time). Ratings assume the teams would play on a perfectly neutral field. The totals are tallied and an index is created using a perfect score (11 match-ups x 2 points or 22 points) and the teams are ranked.  What I like about this: * Having the Irish rated in the mix of the Big Ten teams. As a Big Ten fan, you know you slot the Irish in your head; now we’ll have a data point. * I think this beats simply slotting these teams 1-12. The index shows a more detailed level of separation between the teams (although maybe not this year). *…

Former Michigan fullback Aaron Shea dialed up Ira Weintraub and Sam Webb on WTKA on Friday to fire back at the comments made by Rick Leach on Thursday.  Notes: “I wanted to talk about what Rick Leach said yesterday.  I was really disturbed about how he called out Coach Carr.” “There’s not a bigger Michigan Man than I know than Lloyd Carr, and look who he learned from: Bo.  Bo coached Rick Leach and for him to call Lloyd Carr really, frankly, pisses me off.” Shea then went on to defend Carr’s decision to sit in Erik Campbell’s suite in Iowa City, and I agree. “I want to let everyone know—don’t ever question Coach Carr’s loyalty and for Rick Leach to say that…I tell you what, I hope I don’t cross paths with Rick Leach for a long time.” You can hear all of the WTKA 1050AM podcasts here.

A few notes from the game, a few minutes after Michigan resounding win: No offense to Delaware State, The Approaching Storm and the nice folks from Dover.  But if we must put these FCS teams on the slate they’ve got to at least be upper-tier programs, like maybe our winged brethren Delaware.  Having a game today beat a bye week— but just barely.  This game was no fun for me after watching the first two possessions.  The student section was maybe 3/4 full at kick-off: The closed captioning at Michigan stadium was debuted today.  I think it’s a nice idea and I’m all about improving the game experience for the handicapped, but I wonder how helpful this really is to the hearing impaired: Rodriguez emptied the bench of course, but didn’t go to “R. Calhoun”…a fan who was in full pads, helmet, gloves, etc., and ready to get in the game.  Seated right up the gut in section 23, he even wandered down to the sideline gate to share a few observations: The prohibition of bags into the stadium of was in full effect again today, and I noticed these guys atop the northeast tower looking for serious troublemakers.  I want these guys on that wall.  I need these guys on that wall: I enjoyed checking out WTKA’s Bud Light…

Bob Bland has been Michigan’s assistant equipment manager for 23 years, and I’m pretty certain he’s second in command on Jon Falk’s staff.  One of Bland’s duties is to retrieve the tee from the field after kick-offs and bring it back to the sideline.  During the first half of the Delaware State game I timed his round trips (sideline-tee-sideline), in seconds: As you can see that Rodriguez wasn’t the only one to empty the bench.  Bland passed the torch of tee retrieval to his student assistants after the 5th touchdown and they made the most of the opportunity.  The young bucks clearly wanted it more on this day, turning out easily the best times of the first half including the only sub ten second trip. 

  Photo of the dunk, from AP’s Tony Ding, via a Tweet from @mikerothstein  Via Dylan at UMHoops.com, a nice clip of Zack Novak’s winning dunk at last night Midnight Madness event…high bounce, through the legs and down:   From the other side, via AnnArbor.com:

Check out the downfield blocking and note the tight spiral in the face of the rush  A few details about the SAE Mud Bowl, which will happen prior to the Penn State game this year on October 24th.   Per a couple of true gentleman: Kick-off of the game is planned for 11:30am. SAE’s opponent in the fraternity portion will be finalized next week, as the tournament used to determine the opposition is incomplete.  As of last night the remaining teams included Fiji, Theta Chi (who need to complete a semi-final game) and Phi Psi. For the ladies, the squad representing Kappa Kappa Gamma will face a partnership of the sororities of Alpha Phi and Delta Delta Delta.  Get this– this joint team is a result of a punishment put down by the Greek council (Panhel) thanks to bad blood between the sororities due some to teasing, taunting, tattling and other nonsense between their chapters.  My suggestion of a pillow fight to settle this was quickly shot down.  Elsewhere…according to AnnArbor.com, in the spirit of the great University protests over Viet Nam and Willis Ward, students today at 3pm will protest the recent crackdown on postgame partying around town.  From the story: More than 1,400 students have confirmed on a Facebook events page they plan to attend a 3 p.m. protest…