Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua.
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore NAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHH I'm just messing with you.
It's a Johnny Ginter Skull Session. They let me do this once a year, under the condition that I don't ask to do it again for another calendar year. I'll try and keep this thing afloat for the time being, but it'd probably do us all good to check in on DJ:
Committed the six easiest felonies of my life by dancing in public but it was a baby price to pay to loosen the scene.
— Marionaire (@marion_ohio) March 27, 2018
He's doing great!
Less great is the news that Keita Bates-Diop, one of the best stories from all of basketball this season, is leaving Ohio State to see how the NBA treats him. It's definitely one of those "smile because it happened" kind of things, but man he was a joy to watch all season.
Here's the video of his announcement, if you want to get one last glimpse at a guy who kept surprising us all season long. Best of luck my dude, we're all going to be rooting for you in the league.
Oh, and some other cool stuff happened yesterday on the site, here's a perfect time to catch up if you missed out on anything/forgot the internet existed for a day:
- Adieu, Keita! Ol' KBD has earned his reward in the NBA afterlife, and while it's anybody's guess where he ends up, the Big Ten Player of the Year deserves all the scratch he gets.
- Dan put pen to pad to relay what he saw in practice from the Buckeyes.
- Tuf Borland got hurt, but he should still be good to go for the regular season.
- Kyle broke down Ohio State's pass protection scheme, which is important if you're a person who likes to know things about football.
- It kind of seems like the coaching staff is still trying to figure out what the identity of the offense is going to be next season, but it's clear they won't rewrite the whole thing.
Anyway, buried at the bottom of an abandoned quarry in the wilds of eastern Kentucky, I have found a number of quality news items of note with which to start your day. Hit the jukebox for some mandatory fun, it's time to kick it.
MONEY MAKING MONEY MONEY MAKING. Holy hell the Big Ten is rich. I mean, you might think that a guy with a 50 dollar bill is pretty rich, but that's just peanuts to the Big Ten. Rich Exner from Cleveland.com helpfully compiled a list of information for each Big Ten athletic department to allow us to examine exactly how rich everyone is, but first a quick note:
CLEVELAND, Ohio - Big Ten sports are big money - close to $1.7 billion of it in a given year.
No Big Ten athletic department raises and spends more money than Ohio State and Michigan - approaching $200 million each. But none of the programs are small.
So much money is collected from TV, ticket sales and donors that - in a rarity in college sports - some of the Big Ten's biggest athletic programs operate without any subsidy from student fees or other non-athletic university sports.
Among the findings are that Ohio State sponsors more sports than any other Big Ten school (36), like Ohio State, Purdue doesn't take any kind of subsidy from its students (but Michigan does, for some reason?), and that Buckeye sports bring in a whopping 61 million dollars plus from ticket sales alone.
Also: every single school spent at least a million bucks more on coaches' salaries than on scholarships for athletes. Just saying.
JOHNNY C'S EMPTY DINGHY. Who knows what the NBA and college basketball are going to do with their entry rules. Ohio State fans may have bade a sad goodbye to Keita Bates-Diop, but what made it easier was the fact that the dude had a ton of years with the program, already had his degree, and accomplished a ton in his final year with the team.
But imagine being a Kentucky fan (I'm from southwest Ohio, so this isn't too much of a stretch for me), watching as your team gets one-and-donned every single season, and your coach has to tell everyone how Not Mad he is that 95% of his team leaves for the land of milk and honey every April or so:
“My expectation would be that just about every one of them will but their name in the draft to figure out…where that committee sees them going,” Calipari said, citing the NCAA’s recent rule change that allows players to workout with teams and attend the combine but return to school if they don’t hire and agent and don’t receive the feedback that makes them comfortable remaining in the draft. ...
“I’m going to guess one in seven or eight made decisions where I’m not sure you should do this and it probably didn’t work out as well as they thought it would,” Calipari said. “But that’s only been a handful of guys. Probably five, maybe six. Some others, ‘I’m not sure,’ they worked their way in but it took them a couple years…Others, they did not. So it is a decision I worry about and I try to get them information. I try not to tell them you have to stay or you have to leave. They have to make that decision.” ...
“This was hard,” Calipari said. “It was tiring. It was never frustrating. Did you get frustrated? No. It just gets tiring because you’re reinforcing the same things over and over and over and you can’t get frustrated…"
YOU DAMN KIDS! Look, until the NBA figures out this crap, guys like Calipari who market themselves as a stepping stone to the league are going to have to deal with massive turnover every year whether they like it or not. It'll be interesting to see if Chris Holtmann will pursue the same headaches at Ohio State.
THE SHINE HAS COME OFF THE PUDDING CAN. Look, Harbaugh used to be a lot of fun. You can get a lot of mileage out of "Ha ha ha, look at the extremely pale man drink milk and give Jordans to the pope!"
But it turns out, you also have to win games. And though my fingers are trying to reject typing this out, Jim Harbaugh's basketball equivalent at Michigan is absolutely kicking ass. Dennis Dodd has taken notice of John Beilein's consistency versus Jim Harbaugh's... you know, not consistency:
These folks have a standard. There are two types of Michigan fans: opinionated and really opinionated. The base is large (575,000 living alumni), accomplished and prideful. Like Texas, USC, Notre Dame and many others, Wolverines believe their school is the absolute best.
But there is that reckoning to understand. This week isn't just about the Final Four. Michigan's run clashes right up against spring football. And spring football reminds what drives the bus at Michigan and pretty much every FBS school.
What would you rather have, Michigan, the best quarterback of the Harbaugh era or a Final Four?
"It's more important to win a championship," said Richard Watson, a 2009 Michigan graduate.
We'll assume he meant "in basketball."
Okay, in all seriousness, ask a similar question of an Ohio State fan after the Spring Game and you get a treatise on why it's important to have a quarterback that can throw to the boundary with pace. Still, the point here is that Harbaugh isn't just competing against his own expectations or even Urban Meyer; now he's got to worry about looking bad in comparison to the other primary revenue sport at his own school. It's a less than ideal situation.
YEAH I'VE HEARD MICHIGAN HAS PROBLEMS WITH BOWLS. "Michigan man eats cereal from a pothole on the road" is really the only context you need here!
YET ANOTHER BUFF REF TO MAKE ME FEEL BAD ABOUT MYSELF. Everybody loves the Buff Ref. I don't really get it. It's got this weird "a little too proud of the fact that my dad can bench 315" vibe to it. I dunno. Plus, remember back in the day when refs of all sports were derided as nearsighted weiners? Those were some role models that I could live up to.
Nowadays I have to hear about the workout plan of Mike Defee, a Big 12 referee who can beat me up:
Thursday
BackBehind-the-neck lateral pull downs: 3 sets X 10 reps, increasing from 140 to 160 pounds
Front lateral pull downs: 3 sets X 10 reps, increasing from 150 to 170 pounds
Narrow grip seated cable rows: 3 sets X 10 reps, increasing from 130 to 150 pounds
Barbell shrugs: 3 sets X 10 reps, 225 pounds
Nope, I'm not doing that. Plus, I already have my own routine:
For those asking, my training regimen for the basketball season is as follows: 20 laying on the couches, 20 barking at the doors, 20 scratching the backyard door to get someones attentions, and 20 wagging the tail when someone comes homes, x 2 reps a day.
— Air Bud (@AIRBUD) March 22, 2018
Yeah, that's the stuff.
RIDDLE ME THIS MY BROTHER, CAN YOU HANDLE IT? It's Women's History Month, check out how the WAC, SPARS, WASP, and WAVES kicked serious WWII ass... Rick Barry, inventor... Great opportunity to honor Will Smith in the Big Easy... Help the National Archives preserve the history of thousands of African American veterans... Civil War general Dan Sickles was a deeply weird man... Okay now I'm fine with missing the World Cup.
