Act fast! As part of the charity auction to benefit the Pat Maloy memorial scholarship, Lloyd Carr and the football program offered up 2 pre-game field credentials (and 2 tickets) to the big game this Saturday against Minnesota. The auction ends at 6pm EDT today so act fast! There’s plenty of other cool stuff being auctioned over the next several days. Check out Featured Items for the premium including a Tom Brady Super Bowl autographed ball which already has an asking price of $1,200. I still can’t believe what has happened to that dude.
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Path to Pasadena Now Clear
What a great win last night for this team and for Henne, the kind of gutsy performance that people will remember for years. By coming off the bench twice to save this game and this season, Henne put his footprint on this post-apocolyptic 6 game run right next to that of Hart. And hats off to Manningham and Arrington who played their butts off all day. Quick takes on this game: Fumbos in the Booth – Why wasn’t the Arrington catch in the endzone immediately reviewed by the replay officials? Carr had to use a timeout to get them to look at it- what were they doing? Just because it was correctly overturned (eventually) doesn’t excuse those clowns in the booth. That was a huge, huge play and if Carr didn’t step in it looks like it wouldn’t have been overturned. The Difference – Carr deserves a lot of credit here for how this team played. Other than Ryan Mallett’s miscues and a bad pass from Henne that resulted in a pick, the team played a very error-free game. Their first penalty wasn’t until the fourth quarter and you saw solid play in the kicking game and M didn’t drop many passes. This is a well disciplined team while Illinois could have won this game if not for bad penalties,…
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WTKA to broadcast Ufer Game today
Ann Arbor’s WTKA will be broadcasting the 1976 Michigan vs. Stanford game, which the Wolverines won 55-0. You can hear the great old Ufer voice starting at 1:30 pm EDT today. If you’re out of town you can catch the stream on wtka.com. More on Ufer here from this site. Beat Illini!
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Danielson is Still a Cock, but…
He’s right about this stance. I heard CBS color man and former Detroit Lion/Boilermaker Gary Danielson raising his concern about the college football overtime rules. He’s not opposed to the format; his issue is with the suits that steer policy on NCAA statistics. His beef is that the NCAA recognizes overtime statistics on level with those that occur during the first 4 quarters. As we know, the start-from-the-25-until someone-wins approach to handling regulation ties was instituted in 1996. What hasn’t been widely discussed is that dispensation of the stats rolled up during the indefinite OT period. Big Gary maintains that the numbers rolled up in overtime shouldn’t count in the books. Teams should get a win or loss in overtime, and the record books should leave it at that. I don’t know why he started this stance; I don’t know if it is personal (he doesn’t appear to hold any Purdue records of note) or whether it is just a bonafide take. Either way he’s right. Statistics in college football don’t hold the same distinction as those in sports such as baseball. Records related to the quarterback position, for instance, have been written and rewritten over the past two decades without a lot of fanfare. There can never be pure apples to apples historical comparisons in stats in most major…
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It’s Fumblitis, Daddy-o – Michigan’s First Night Game (1944)
More on the First Night game With the night game with Illinois this Saturday this is a good opportunity to follow-up to my post on Michigan’s first night game back in 1944 at Marquette. Greg Kinney of the Bentley museum recently sent me a few articles he found on microfilm that provided another photo from the game and a few more tidbits. In the original post I found a picture from the Marquette yearbook of the game, and it was clear that Michigan was playing with some type of painted ball. The info Kinney sent me shed some light as a reporter noted “The Wolverines have been using a yellow ball in practice sessions this week..” This new game photo provides another shot of the pale pigskin: A few other choice quotes from the pre- and post-game stories about the trip to Marquette: The M coaches on playing at night: “Crisler and his aides would rather have met in an afternoon contest. “But,” as one Michigan coach said, “variety is the spice and maybe we’ll like night football. Who knows?”. From the post game article, some criticism from the local press: “If Michigan is to successfully open defense of the Big Ten football title…Fritz Crisler’s gridders may have to display a better brand of football..” Wow, origins of a football…
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Bo Exhibit starts this week
I caught this tidbit during the 4th quarter of the Purdue game. Looks like the University library is opening a special exhibit this week honoring Bo. A quick scan of umich.edu and mgoblue.com came away empty, but thankfully the Freep had a few details. Here’s more from the Detroit News.
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Jalen’s Billboard
The Free Press just ran a story on Jalen Rose and the Fab 5. I haven’t seen this before – check out this billboard that Jalen Rose posted at 7 mile and the Lodge: I love Jalen. There’s something about the guy that to me, all the negativity around Webber and the Fab 5 seems to not apply to Rose. While I’m still bitter toward Webber around the whole thing yet having been in school with these cats, I can’t say I regret the whole experience that these guys brought to Michigan. I was there for their first game together in Ann Arbor and I saw the last from about twenty rows behind the bench from where Webber called the timeout. It was an incredible time. For recent grads, picture for a minute huge lines of students waiting outside Crisler for general admission seats – hours before the game. As for why he didn’t put the billboard closer to campus Jalen told the Freep “I didn’t want to put it in Ann Arbor because I didn’t want people to think it’s me making a negative statement. Maybe it should be there, but it’s not.” Jalen did talk a little bit about the penalties put down on Michigan coming out of the investigation and he adds an interesting perspective: “Unfortunately, what…
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Alive and Clicking: Purdue Recap
What a performance on both sides by the Blue. Honestly, the first half was pretty shocking. Michigan beat Purdue down in the first 20 minutes like you expected M to lay it on EMU. With both Illinois and Wisconsin losing, Michigan is right back into the picture and Ohio State just might be #1 in the first BCS standings on Sunday. While the battle was won, and more impressively than anyone would have expected, we’ll have to check Hart’s status before anyone gets giddy. It didn’t look good when the M sideline put in the full-on KGB ‘Circle of Trust’ around 20 right after he went down. Check it out: On a good note, Hart did walk back to the locker room on his power and didn’t have to spend the second half in the tub or at the medical center. Here he is next to Ryan Mallett in sweats checking out the play calling in the second half: After losing Brandon Minor just minutes into the second half it lood pretty bad but Carlos Brown lost his fumble cast and looked great. I tell you, he seems to be a natural for the zone blocking scheme; it doesn’t seem to fit Minor. More takes on this homecoming game: – Officially Hart now has somewhere around 970 consecutive carries without…