Hello, Loyal Readers! Before we get to this week’s Bacon Blog, on the NCAA finally doing the right thing and freeing quarterback Shea Patterson to play for Michigan this fall, Best of Bacon: Select Cuts, 40 of my favorite stories from my first quarter-century of writing, officially launches on Tuesday, May 8. Makes a great gift for […]

Hello, Loyal Readers! Here’s some news: My tenth book, Best of Bacon: Select Cuts, will be published UM Press on May 8! This is a collection of my 40 favorite stories I wrote between 1992 and 2018, all centered on the state of Michigan. They cover a dozen different sports for a dozen different media outlets, from […]

You can listen to the audio version by clicking the play button. ‘Tis the Season of Our Discontent. Or it would be, if you attached your happiness to Detroit’s professional sports teams. Let’s start with the Pistons. When Bill Davidson bought the team in 1974, the Pistons were bad and getting worse. But Davidson patiently […]

You can listen to the audio version here. The Michigan basketball team beat Loyola last weekend and made it to the NCAA finals. That was a minor miracle in itself. The team had almost no stars, with maybe one future NBA draft pick. They started the season slowly, with very weak defense, while playing one […]

This season, Michigan’s men’s basketball team has enjoyed another great turn-around. After a bad loss to Northwestern in early February, the Wolverines were stuck in the middle of the Big Ten – not the station of Final Four teams. But they haven’t lost since, rattling off a 13-game winning streak. That’s how you get to […]

I can’t recall March Madness starting with more mayhem. In the first round alone, the lower-seeded team pulled the upset in eight of 32 games – fully a quarter. And it only got crazier in the second round, when six of 16 lower-seeded teams beat the favorite – which is fully… more than a quarter, […]