gehringer_2

Trade was good for Jason at the time though IIRC. The Tigers were really overloaded with LHH and were thus seeing a lot of LHP. When Jason went to the Pirates it was a more right handed team and I have to think that helped his results.

Isn't the received wisdom that Sparky disliked HoJo as much or more for personal -as in off the field reasons?

what's trickier is that higher interest rates have put an end to free money investments - someone is going to have build a business plan that is actual defensible if Sinclairs newly minted ivestor/owners ever hope to unload the asset they are about to have dropped in their lap.

Yup. And the disparity is even worse when you consider that if you buy a premium channel you pretty much get 24 hrs of content for the day. Buy Bally you get ... one game.

Yeah - if there were anyone interested they probably would have gotten a late round pick for him in a trade or something. So if they want to bring back Vrana (which they may not) some-one else gets waived? A Dman next time?

Unfortunately, the crashed hulk will probably be nowhere near as photogenic as Gary Powers was.

both are true, decreased audience shows up as decreased ad rates/revenue, but the cable carrier fees were a significant piece of the RSNs income and every person who has canceled Comcast or other full service carrier and switched to a streaming service that doesn't carry the RSNs (which is most of them) is a couple of bucks a month straight out of Bally's income. But declining audience is what makes them so afraid of a single service subscription service. They may set up to offer it and find no-one shows up to buy it. The cable carriage fees were a gold mine for baseball because they got paid whether anyone watched or not!

Hmm. Was thinking Suter, but they seem to like him more than I do.

you may have a point there.....

These Regents are definitely a major fallback from any group I can remember - that goes back a ways. The GOP has been running wackos and the Dems have been running people whose interest in actually serving the University seem tenuous to me at best.

It's true that college towns are similar all over, but also consider that despite the town being what it is, the powers that control those colleges follow the overall state culture/politics - so governance at UT is Tx politics and that is miles further from Austin than Lansing Politics are from Ann Arbor. The UM regent's slate would not have been elected in Tx. That goes for Ill also. Indiana is maybe your better argument I think - but Indiana is Indiana - football there has been screwed up since forever. Don't have much to show for it! PSU's best win was over....Purdue? ND did upset Clemson, on the way to 9-4.

Buddha, I hope they find a way to do great under the new rules, but aside from the conversational value of being the Debbie downer about the program, it does strike me that over a long series of years, recruiting rules have changed, academic requirements have changed, scholarship limits have changed, etc., and at many of these junctures there was great optimism that MI or the B10 in general would now have a more level playing field against the southern heathens, but it never happens. I find it hard to envision a future where Northern Midwestern schools ever catch up with the schools in the South no matter how the system changes. The overall reason is always the same - that HS and College football is a bigger deal across the South than it is in the North. Has been for decades and I don't see much reason to think it will change. (If anything, HS FB in the Midwest and West coast continues to get weaker.) People go to FB games in the North, and they watch them on TV in big enough numbers, but you just don't get the same kind of pressure from the inside. Do you think Harbaugh could have lasted through the OSU losses for as many years as he did if he were coaching Alabama and was losing to LSU? He'd have been gone in the 3rd yr probably. So I think no matter what you do, that MI, MSU, Neb, WI or even PSU anymore, can vault into into consistent SEC style powerhouse status seem unlikely to me. OSU is the outlier, but OSU is less than 100 miles from the KY border. Their 'Southerness' is almost the B10 exception that proves the rule. And on top of that you lay the inescapable overlay of the warm whether recruiting advantage.

lets not make it too complex. The simple question is whether the Tigers net actions with the ML team - whether that be instruction, data presentation, pregame agenda emphasis, workout schedule, batting practice methods - whatever, singly or in composite, had an overall result of lowering the team offensive output to a level below what it might otherwise have been had they been doing nothing (our null hypothesis). Of course it's a black box function because that is all the numbers give you - an inference that makes you suspect something, but not any view of what the possible mechanism may have been. To simplify the analogy, if you watch someone flip a coin and heads is hitting 80% of the time, you suspect some input is taking place that you aren't seeing. But the simple existence of a statistical result that tells you threre is a probability something may be wrong gives you zero insight beyond that into what it might be - or even if you are simply (un?)lucky enough to be witnessing a set of improbable yet still randomevents - i.e. a whole bunch of hitters having bad years who are actually having it happen to them for no particular reason.

Michigan's recovery for all the 3.2 beer sales lost to Toledo back in the day.... 🍺

What I fear is that is has been the Tiger's team management actions are the 'unknown' forcing function. Actually I would have been more accurate to maybe use 'exogenous' rather than 'unknown' in the earlier post - because I meant to indicate something coming at the hitters from the 'outside' of their own initiative that was depressing their ability to produce. Not to get any BVDs too bunched, it's just a fear. And at this point, if they come out of the gate hitting poorly again, it doesn't necessarily support or refute the theory since it looks like it's going to be mostly the same cast.

but that's the point. They are plugged into the AD. It's a silo and an echo chamber for the coaches. Just consider the motivations for a minute. If you are Harbaugh, you want the world to think what you want is easy to get, that's how you put pressure on the admin to get it for you. Don't look to people who live by PR for truth - only agendas.

I look at it this way - you have a certain probability in any season of a guy slumping, you have a certain probability in a given year that a guy excels. When a whole team slumps and no-one excels, you are witnessing an outcome which is the product of individual probabilities all below 50%, or IOW a net low probability event; OR there is an unknown forcing function driving the result. If you are going to take a statistics based approach to baseball, you shouldn't ignore what probability is trying to tell you.

The Lions can't trade the 6th pick, don't you know this is the last chance in the history of civilation for them to draft a franchise QB? - or so goes the drum beat on Det sports radio. LOL, I suppose Holmes could do a complete 180 after chasing Goff across the country twice, but I'm not putting any money on it. 🏈

When he walked in the door he gave lip service to the same low walk/control the zone ideas Harris has repeated. He just never executed a strategy to get there. And I'm still very suspicious that the implementation of hitting advice in the Tiger clubhouse last year was doing more harm to hitters than good.

this is certainly what they hope. My only argument with Buddha is that as I see it they have to go out and beat the bushed to find those folks, and it's going to be a significant effort. My argument is with people who think they have a queue of people knocking down the door and they have just been snubbing them out 'arrogance' or some such. I think that is an unrealisitic take. The U has very little pride when it comes to taking money. 😂

If you don't think culture in Alabama is different from Michigan, check your election results.

Michigan alums are willing to spend a lot of money, and they do. But they have been plugged into a different kind of fundraising for generations. You aren't going to move that donor base into a different philosophical stance in 12 months. More importantly, you ignore that there are very powerful interests within the University - at least as powerful as the AD, that have no interest in seeing any of the money they get now go anywhere else. It's naive to ignore the pressures the university as a total institution faces from all it's non-athletic stakeholders. The fans want desperately to believe that all UM has to do is flip a switch and tomorrow they are suddenly competitive with Georgia because that the way fans want to think. Manuel has no easy hill to climb.

Buddha, I don't believe you are even close. The university can already find a million ways for anyone with a nickel who wants to spend it on the U to do it. Their fundraising budget is probably bigger than some schools whole budget. The idea that there is a hidden mob somewhere just waiting to write checks is fanboy wishful thinking fantasy. I bet at least 9 of every 10 dollars that end up in NIL will be $$ that come out of funds they now getting for something else. UM does fundraising by the Billons. You don't do that by leaving many stones unturned.

Yeah - I think too little, too late is pretty much Al's epitaph. I think directionally his ideas were right, he just never got far enough on enough of them.

I got to be a pretty decent straight pool player in college. On my best days I could run a full rack. Customized a 2 piece cue. I've been trying to talk myself into buying a pool table ever since I've had a house. Never have..... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯