Spartans 2015 Uniforms

MSU unveiled updated uniforms for the new season today:

I'm not a fan of the alternate look, but the regular uniforms do seem to be an improvement. At least Nike's kept their ridiculous obsession with bronze to only the alternate uniform as it's been removed from the other two. I'd prefer all-green not to be the standard for home games instead of green jerseys with white pants but I guess someone has decided single color outfits are cool. The helmets are now metallic instead of flat green, which I like. In the end, I guess if you can get through a Nike redesign without something eye-meltingly awful you can call it good.

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I'm not much of an NBA fan but I do hear a lot about if since I listen to SVP & Russillo all the time. Luckily, they generally make it interesting even for non-fans. A story they mentioned the other day got my attention. Steph Curry of the Golden State Warriors apparently regularly shoots 100 3-point shots in practice. On Tuesday he made the first 77 in a row, then 94 of 100 total. That would be unreal even for free throws, it's absolutely ridiculous for 3-pointers. I'm not sure I can even wrap my mind around being that good at something that difficult.

Ant-Man

Izzo Best Ever?

If a UM fan isn't proof enough, take it from the guys over at FiveThirtyEight. Great statistical look at just how much Izzo overachieves every year. Basically he wins 3 games more in the tourney than his seed typically performs. Great read.

His and Hers

I've noticed lately that "Mike and Mike" use the hosts of "His and Hers" often on the show. Sometimes they are guests, sometimes they host. Is it just part of their programming, or deep down is the show ("His and Hers") struggling so they are trying to boost their audience and hope ratings go up. I have no idea and I haven't watched any of their shows, but it just seems odd how often they are included into "Mike and Mike," a show that easily stands on its own.

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How do you feel about professional athletes from a region showing up at tourney games and rooting for local college teams that they didn't play for? Say, for instance, Aaron Rodgers being a big Badgers supporter or Matthew Stafford at MSU's game last night? As a Spartan I'm happy to have the Lions QB support the team, but as they beat the Bulldogs in the first game of this run I'm not sure I'd be quite so cool with it if I was a Georgia alum.

"How can you possibly stop me?"

The Ultimate Marvel Marathon

Did you hear about AMC's Ultimate Marvel Marathon? In select theaters (Kansas City, New York, Anaheim, and Orlando, judging by the information on the page) starting on Wednesday, April 29 at 6pm they are going to show ALL of the Marvel Cinematic Universe movies ending with Age of Ultron at 7pm the next day. I'll admit this sounds kind of cool but I can't imagine sitting the in theater through eleven movies in a row. I might do a similar thing myself, but I'll spread it out over multiple days in the comfort of my own living room.

NBA Combine

I don't really care about the NBA, but this took way too long to be figured out. You keep hearing about how much the "one-and-done" hurts the college game/business/product, etc., but at the end of the day, I never felt anyone was really trying to find a solution. In fact, I think I'd put a lot of the blame on the NCAA. It was always my belief that their precious NCAA rules is what was the biggest problem, and agents.

I think the NBA Combine idea is a no-brainer and can't believe it took this long to put one together. If an underclassman doesn't get invited to the combine, guess what, you're going back to college. That's a pretty big clue. They said about 60-70 will get invited. This still probably isn't the perfect solution, but it's a great start. This is too big of a decision without providing the right resources for students and their families to make the best decision. There should have always been more communication from the NBA to the potential players in the draft about their draft chances and position.

I never thought the NCAA tried hard to keep their athletes. It's like they wanted them to hire an agent so they could say, "Oh, sorry, you've hired an agent, so your NCAA eligibility is done."

I don't care so much about the age of a player. I just feel the system wasn't set up properly to help kids make a better decision to declare for the NBA. All it took was some guy on the street to say, "Oh yeah, go for it. You're good enough," and then they never ended up being a top pick or even a 1st rounder.

By the way, it doesn't seem to bother anyone when 18-19 year olds are playing professional tennis, golf, baseball, etc. But, if they are in the NBA, different story. "Wait a second, you're too young to be making millions of dollars." But it's okay in other sports...which also happens to be more of a "white" sport. Then again, those sports are performance sports. They get paid because of their performance. That's how all sports should be. Or, everyone should be on a 1-year contract. Good luck with that headache. Then again, that would make trades and especially free agency a lot more interesting.

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This NFL offseason is insane.

Daredevil

"I'll take that from them first."

Coincidence?

Want to hear something strange? Yesterday I was looking up some information on Transformers toys as I'm thinking about buying some for the nephews. This was the main one I was reading about:

This morning I went shopping at Wal-mart and saw a semi in the parking lot that looked almost exactly the same, which is especially weird since there aren't a lot of cab over trucks currently in use and gray and purple isn't a common color combination.

Sports Analytics

There's been some great articles and videos on espn.com from Nate Silver and the boys over at fivethirtyeight.com, especially this one and this one ranking all the teams from the four major sports.. They've got some great research on what teams are the best in crunching sports data and which teams, like the Jim Leyland Tigers, just throw the advanced research in the trash. They rank all the teams from the four major sports and break them down into categories.

In our last two years of coaching varsity baseball, we decided to use a mom to do all of our score booking duties in the dugout. She had done it the past two years on JV since her son was on the team. I was obviously a little reluctant to give up my old-fashioned scorebook for an app called GameChanger, not to mention a mom sitting in our dugout as we made fun of our players (and occasionally drank shots of hard liquor to get us through the bad nights).

I don't have the time or patience on an iPad to fully explain how I utilized the GameChanger app to gain research and information on our opponents, especially in our post-season successes, but I made it very clear to our scorebook mom that she will NEVER make our team site accessible to ANYONE but her and I. Only two people was going to have access! Again, without getting into a lot of details, knowing what I was able to do with other teams stats, I did not want other coaches to do to me what I was doing to them. It was all legal, they were just idiots for making it public information for anyone who had a GameChanger account. Now, not all teams used GameChanger...well, I don't want to give too many secrets away. Just believe me when I say I'm a big believer in sabermetrics. We without a doubt won baseball games because I put the time into combing through as many stats as possible to gain an advantage.

It also helped that I had a post-season, night-before-tournament ritual of watching "Moneyball" before going to bed. Actually, I just couldn't sleep.

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How do the more serious baseball fans feel about MLB's pace-of-play rule changes? I don't watch a ton of baseball as the Tigers are never on here, but when I do I almost always watch something else at the same time because of the pace of the game. I've found I can pretty easily follow a movie and a game at the same time because of all the down time. I don't see any real drawbacks to the changes and it might get me to watch slightly more.

Inappropriate...but still Awesome

As a parent of two little girls and someone who will not watch this movie, (nor will I watch "Fifty Shades of Grey") this is still funny to imagine happening.

Seriously. Can you imagine taking your kids to see "Spongebob" and at the same time some chick is tied up naked? How do you explain that one to the innocent eyes?

Spider-Man Returns to Marvel

You've probably heard this by now, but if you haven't, Spider-Man is joining the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Sony owns the movie rights to Spider-Man, so the movies they have made previously were not connected to what Marvel Studios was doing with the properties they were in control of, but that changes now. Spider-Man will appear in a Marvel film, most likely Captain America: Civil War, then have his own movie on July 28, 2017 co-produced by Sony and Marvel Studios. Rumors suggest that this will be a reboot for Spider-Man with a new actor playing the role and the last two movies discarded, which is probably for the best since the last movie was garbage.

Confession

Like Tiger Woods, I sometimes have trouble activating my glutes.

Daredevil

RE: Super Bowl Thoughts

This video and the story on the same page is exactly how I feel about the Marshawn Lynch media situation. Talking to the media is part of the job of a high-profile (millionaire) athlete. It comes with the territory. Deal with it. For once, I really enjoyed hearing what Steven A. Smith had to say. I thought it was spot on.

Going into the game, I would not have been surprised by either team winning, but I expected a close game. NE might not win, but you're not blowing out Brady-Belichick. I kinda leaned towards the Pats. You just knew all this talk and "distractions" about Deflategate was only going to fire them up and motivate them even more. I think it worked against the Seachickens.

Again, Seattle is a great team, but I had a hard time seeing Brady-Belichick get beat for a 3rd time in the SB. To me, it was more of the Brady-Belichick factor, not how good Seattle's defense is.

Watching the game at Big Daddy's, we were all yelling for the Pats to let Seattle score. You knew they would, so you're better off getting the ball back with :40 seconds, one Timeout, and only needing a FG. As we're all being arm-chair quarterbacks, at that moment, Wilson threw the pick. Unbelievable play and play-call.

Give the ball to Lynch. Or, design any number of plays involving Wilson scrambling for a running TD. Neither one was going to be stopped. It felt as if Carroll out-coached himself in the situation and didn't want to score too easily/quickly.

Great game.