What did Michigan do to PO Gregg Easterbrook?

You know, for a guy who writes an NFL column, Gregg Easterbrook spends an inordinate amount of time talking about College Football and looking at space porn. A couple of questions:

1) When did it become en vogue for older columnists to creepily ogle cheerleaders? Forde does it with his "Dashette." Easterbrook does it with his cheerleaders of the week, celebrity shots, and world's hottest woman updates. It's weird and serves absolutely no purpose. If I want to look at hot girls, I can: I own the internet. Easterbrook and Forde both live on the internet, and haven't figured this out yet. I click over to ESPN.com so that I can read about sports - not to look at girls.

2) Does anyone actually read Easterbrook? His opening paragraph gets the dreaded "tldnr" from me.

3) What's with the space talk? There is a fantastic blog called "damn interesting" that details some of the crazy shit that goes on in the world, and looks at questions that are, frankly, awesome like "how long can you survive if you were jettisoned into space?" (spoiler: not long. not long at all.) Once again, I know where to click if I cared about space, particle colliders, or the various nebula's that make up our galaxy. I clicked onto ESPN to, and I can't stress this enough, read about sports. Stop it with the space garbage.

4) You write an NFL column. It's actually called "Tuesday Morning Quarterback." If it were a college football column, it would be called "Sunday Morning Quarterback" and you would be stomping on the feet of Matt Hinton, who is infinitely better than you in terms of content, style, and general "not being a douchebagness." In the latest TMQ column, you rail against those evil bastards at Michigan - putting in press boxes that will cost Joe Taxpayer millions of dollars. Just like the Colts did when they built Lucas Oil Stadium. Or the Yankees are doing with their new home. Or the Mets. Or the Univesity of Minnesota is doing with their entirely new stadium. Welcome to sports Mr. Easterbrook.

The end of his "Michigan" blurb:

"That's fairly disgusting. Perhaps a fitting punishment for all those subsidized wealthy twits is … Rich Rodriguez. The football gods have, after all, a sense of humor."

I understand. In the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, you've decided that Rich Rodriguez makes you mad, and thus, you're going to harp on it. We know this schtick. We've seen it before with Easterbrook refusing to let "spygate" die despite the fact that there was nothing there to see. You've railed against the Rodriguez hire from the beginning, despite overwhelming logic that the hire wasn't actually evil.

The difference, of course, between your vilifying the Patriots and you vilifying Michigan is that you're an NFL expert: not a college football expert. There are countless of other places that are much better suited to explore College Football, so you talking about it makes about as much sense as talking about hot cheerleaders and space. Zero.

Yay Journalisms!!!!

Well, as the countdown reaches a fever pitch round these parts, the daily battle to stay occupied and to soak up any bit of news concerning your team or any team for that matter sometimes yields fantastic results... observe dear reader:

An anonymous author for the Hazelton, PA Standard Speaker gives you the kind of low-down nitty gritty football detail that you and I crave:

"I disagree on Penn State. The Nittany Lions will win nine or 10 games. I’ve been accurate on my Penn State predictions the past few seasons."

Naturally, you read on with great interest as you are certain that there will be a reality-altering explanation for this assertion... and you read on, and you scan further down the page, and.... well... really there is none. Zip. In fact it simply jumps on to another topic completely. What do you expect? The man has been accurate, and damnit that was certainly good enough for Sam By-God Walton, it will have to be good enough for us.

10-2 I say!!!!!!!!!!!!!

What makes this "article" fantastic is it is the kind of non-sequiteur rant that you can only get from a crotchety old fan of any team. What takes it to the next level is that this was published by a paper. News worthy? Certainly not. An entertaining read? Well it certainly had me chuckling away.

Which brings me to this... Stew Mandel's glorious response to a questioning of the validity of Michigan's occupation of the 24th spot in the first Coaches Poll... (second page just over half-way down).

"I hate to beat this to a pulp, because I've said it several times before, but Michigan's offense is going to stink this season, and nothing short of Charles Woodson's return and/or a 1997-caliber performance from the defense will render Michigan a top-25 team. Which leaves only one possibility: There must be a bylaw in the coaches' poll -- much like the one that requires them to vote the BCS title-game winner No. 1 -- mandating the Wolverines' inclusion."

If someone would like to point out the difference between the first quote further up on the page and this one, by all means educate away. No knee-jerk responses here, no need to get into a spitting contest, but I think it will be nice to have this quote to look back on as the season rolls along, you know just in case ol' Stew happens to be correct... or if all the moons around Jupiter align and we make a first-down this year we can ask Stew what happened with his crystal ball. I don't know how after 125+ years of never having to replace playmakers on the offense it finally caught up with us... God, I wish we had recruited some more players!

Have we really reached a point where it's time to lambaste a team that's ranked 24th as overrated?? Stew seems to think so:

"I wrote a few years back about the recurring phenomenon of Michigan's overinflated preseason rankings (quite prophetically, I might add; that was the year they started No. 4 and finished 7-5) -- but this is the most flagrant case yet. [...] All at a time when the new coach is trying to implement an offense for which he currently lacks the proper personnel?"

Ding, ding, ding!!! There it is! Lacking the proper personnel for his offense! Journalism sticker for you Stew! That brings the running total of references to this lazy and completely devoid-of-any-sort-of-research point to 2,743 thus far this offseason... and still two weeks left to go!

Now listen, if you happen to think that Michigan is not deserving of such a lofty ranking, by all means you are entitled to your opinion... but, uh, to say this is the "most flagrant case yet"... at 24th?

I honestly cannot think of another time when Michigan lost a bunch of play-makers and guys on the O-line and was able to so much as cross mid-field the following year or ever got so much as a contribution from guys who had to step up to replace former stars... (videos courtesy of WolverineHistorian)

The Cycle of Journalism

Or, more appropriately, the cycle of Sports Journalism. You see, Sports Journalism is unique in that it does significantly more prognosticating than its brethren on the serious pages of the newspaper. It does much less reporting, and much more guessing. Take a look at your morning Newspaper, MSM website, or Yahoo's front page. Today, there will be speculation on where Manny Ramirez is headed, what the Packers will do with Brett Favre, and how the USA Basketball team will fare in Beijing. These are the stories that are dominating the front pages of sports sections across the country, and they are largely speculative pieces. The hotter the topic, the more speculation.

What the naive believe is that sports writers write pieces designed to get at the truth; what they, with all their access that us common folks don't have, believe will actually happen. In reality, sportswriters write what they believe will get people to read their articles, click their links, and make their newspapers money. Drew Sharp in Detroit, Dan Shaughnessy in Boston, Colin Cowherd on the Radio; they all are controversial, and they all get you to read their article, and in so doing, patronize their news outlet.

Within this framework, there is a specific cycle that Sports Journalism prognotications follow. It is as follows:

Step 1: Pick this year's "hot topic" prediction
Step 2: Find out what everyone else is saying in said prediction
Step 3: Print your own article rehashing what everyone else has said - tow the company line, make sure it pisses off a large section of your readership. You are a parrot at this point, simply repeating what has been said.
Step 4: Once the market has become super-saturated with the prediction that everyone is saying - write an article claiming that said prediction may be wrong, thus endearing yourself to the readership that your original prediction pissed off, and giving you the option to be "right" no matter the outcome.

Applied to College Football, it looks something like this:

Step one: Identify Michigan as a "hot topic" for predictions.
Step two: The media, including blogs, message boards, etc. has universally panned Michigan's chances for success this season.
Step three: Write your own article saying what everyone else is saying.
Step four: Ahh, the saturation point. It has been reached, and now you're seeing pushback.

Soon, the view of "Michigan may not be that bad" will reach the saturation point, and the cycle will rinse, and repeat. It happens all the time. Look for me to be writing a post about how good Michigan's going to be despite what everyone is saying in the near future - that way I can be right no matter what too.