Boys’ hockey, women’s hockey, and the differences thereof
[Listen to the audio version by clicking here: TheBacon_final_2-17-2012] The Michigan women’s club hockey team beat the #1 ranked Michigan State women’s team twice down the stretch to finish second in the league, and earn a spot in the national tournament. Hats off to them. Although I’ve coached high school boy’s hockey teams for almost a decade, a few years ago, I spent two years helping out the very same Michigan women’s hockey team – and I learned a lot more than they did. It’s worth noting that I’m comparing only high...
read moreSuper Bowl Silliness and Sincerity
[Listen to the audio version by clicking here: Bacon_final_2-10-2012_web] It’s been five days since the Super Bowl, just enough time to give us a little perspective on the whole thing. Was it a football game? A concert? A competition for the Clio Award? Or some bizarrely American combination of all three? Let’s start with the least important: The football game. You might have caught bits of it, squeezed between the ads and the show. How could you tell when the game was on? Those were the people who ran really fast, and wore...
read moreThe Nuttiness of National Signing Day
[Listen to the audio by clicking here.] The most important day of the year for a college football coach is not the home opener, the big rivalry game or even a bowl game. It’s national signing day, which falls on the first Wednesday in February. On signing day, the end zone is not grass or Astroturf, but a fax machine tray. Only when a signed National Letter of Intent breaks the plane of that tray does it count. Sounds pretty simple, right? A couple years ago I got a chance to see the sausage get made at close range – and it’s a lot...
read moreIrreconcilable Truths
[Listen to the audio version here: Paterno Obit 1-12] When an 85-year old man dies, you cannot call it a tragedy. Sad, yes, but tragic, no. But Joe Paterno’s passing might be an exception. Born in Brooklyn in 1926, he enrolled at Brown University, where he played quarterback. He still holds a school record — for interceptions — with 14. After graduating, Paterno was supposed to go to law school, but instead followed his coach, Rip Engle, to Penn State. His father was beside himself. “For God’s sake, what did you go to...
read moreThe Beginning of a Great Rivalry
[ Listen to the audio version here: Michigan-Michigan State basketball rivalry] The rivalry between Michigan and Ohio State in football is one of the best in the country. But it obscures the fact that, in just about every other sport, Michigan’s main rival is Michigan State. In men’s basketball, there’s no team either school would rather beat than the other. The problem is, for a rivalry to really catch on, both sides need to be at the top of their game. Think of Bo versus Woody, Borg-McEnroe and, of course, Ali-Frazier, which...
read moreBowled Over
[Click here to hear the audio from Michigan Radio: Getting Bowled Over] The college football bowl season has always been a little crazy – but most of that used to be fun crazy. But lately, it’s been turning bad crazy – and fast. Here’s why. Michigan played in the first ever bowl game against Stanford on New Year’s Day in 1902. The Wolverines won, 49-0 – but didn’t play another bowl game for 46 years. Pasadena didn’t host another game until 1916, and no other bowl games even existed until 1935, when the Sugar Bowl, the...
read moreThose Who Stayed
(Listen to the audio version, just by clicking! Sugar Bowl 2012) The Big Ten is still considered one of the nation’s top leagues, despite its frequent belly flops in bowl games. This year, the Big Ten placed a record ten teams in bowl games – then watched them drop, one by one. And not just in the storied Rose Bowl, but in games like the Taxslayer.com Gator Bowl, the Meineke Car Care Bowl of Texas, and the Insight Bowl. When Iowa got whipped 31-14, I wonder just how much insight they had gained. Until Monday, Big Ten teams had...
read morePost-Publication Q&A on “Three and Out,” Second of Two Batches
Here’s the second batch of the Q&A that appeared in MGoBlog this week. -JUB FIRING PROCESS. What did Dave Brandon say in his 2 hour meeting with Rich Rod the day before he was fired? Everyone including Rodriguez thought he’d be fired so why string it out like that? Good question. Rodriguez told me that night in his home, between the two meetings, that he believed Brandon hoped that afternoon that Rodriguez would make it easy for him by conceding that things hadn’t gone as planned, it was all too much, and Rodriguez was...
read morePost-publication Q&A on “Three and Out” — First of Two
Dear Loyal Readers, First, thanks to so many of you for coming out to see the book tour this fall, and the many folks who helped make it so successful. We finished a 12-state, 33 stop tour, meeting over 2000 people and signing some 2,200 books. THANK YOU! As you more avid Michigan football fans might know, Brian Cook — the Wizard behind MGoBlog.com — solicited questions from his readers about the book post-publication last week. He received some 150 responses, and probably 300-plus questions, which he boiled down to the 12...
read moreThe Year in Sports, 2011: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
Former Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren said, “I always turn to the sports pages first, which records people’s accomplishments. The front page has nothing but man’s failures.” But this year, the sports page had plenty of both. Sad to say, bad news tends to travel faster. So let’s start with some good news. In men’s tennis, the rivalry between Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal, already one of the best in tennis history, was joined by a man named Novak Djokovic, who won three major titles this year on a gluten free diet –...
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