Good point. I think we will see a rearrangement of the seeding after the first year because of this. The current seeding structure could make losing a CCG a brutal disadvantage, especially for the SEC & B1G runners-up. 

Food for thought--would it be the worst thing to win out but miss the B1G CCG?

Cons: No Big Ten championship this year (obviously a serious negative)

Pros:  near-guarantee of being the 5th seed in the CFP. That means playing the token G5 team in round 1 and either the ACC or B12 champ in round 2 of the playoffs instead of someone like Oregon, Alabama, Georgia, Texas, etc.

Personally I want another crack at Oregon in Indy, but that 5 seed wouldn't be a bad consolation prize. 

Thank you for posting this. My biggest concern going into this game was how Will Howard would perform under pressure and he delivered everything we could have hoped for, including what should have been the game winning touchdown drive on a two minute drill. 

We're disappointed today, but the fact of the matter is we travelled across the country to play in one of the toughest venues in the game against a top 3 team in the country, turned the ball over twice (counting the onside kick as a turnover), watched Dillon Gabriel play the best game of his career, and it still took some ref ball for us to lose by one. 

I was in the same boat, but if you haven't tried the videos yet I encourage you to give them a chance. They really are well made, and the video format makes it easier to understand what Kyle is explaining. 

boom

I have no insight or special information not available to anyone else. 

With that caveat, the big change in the offensive staff from 2022 to 2023 was the loss of Kevin Wilson. It would be reasonable to expect that the loss of Wilson resulted in Day spending more time on the game plan and less time in the QB room. 

I think he's referring to 2020. Hafely signed up for two years and then bailed after one. He took advantage of an absolutely loaded roster and then didn't stick around to help coach the next guys up. 

2015 is probably the answer in recent memory. I think this season will come close, if only because the fan base is hungrier for wins over Michigan and in the playoff than we've probably ever been.

Still haven't seen 2006 mentioned yet though. The hype for that team was off the charts.

RELOAD ME THAT MF CLIP

RELOAD ME THAT MF CLIP

Your "bad hires" list covers a wide spectrum: Coombs turned out to be a terrible hire, Washington turned out to be a bad hire, and the rest were mediocre-to-TBD hires. All of them except for Dennis were widely praised at the time they were made. If you're going to ding him for those hires, you need to give him credit for promoting Hartline before it was obvious to everyone that he was a recruiting genius. 

Which goes to show that identifying and recruiting good coaches is hard. The key is knowing when to cut bait with a bad one and doing so without making it difficult to hire new coaches. 

Day has shown he knows how to do this. This is why I get frustrated with the doom patrol around here. Day has shown over and over again that he is committed to getting the right staff in place by any means necessary, and has a sound and analytical approach to doing so. 

ANOTHA ONE!

In 2011? Money

In 2024? Money. But also there are now a bazillion teams in the conference and realistically it would be quite possible for one team to get a significantly weaker schedule than another team in conference and win a championship without having to ever play the runner up. Shit, that happened back in 2002, when there were only 11 teams and two managed to go undefeated in conference play. 

I'm sorry but you're just wrong. Cooper perpetually looked dazed and and overwhelmed by the moment against Michigan. Neither of those are Day's problem. If Day has a problem against Michigan, it's that he's gotten too tightly wound for this game, with the result that everyone on the team is afraid of making a mistake. Frankly I'm not sure that's even fair, because every single coach gets tight in a big game. No one cares if you're tight if you end up winning.  

Cooper's problem wasn't just losing to Michigan, it was that he lost to clearly inferior Michigan teams. Day has not done that. He's lost to the the first elite Michigan teams since the 1990s. We shitcanned them in 2019, we were about to shitcan them in 2020, and I believe we will shitcan them again next year. Would I have preferred it if we won these last three years? Yes. But the Cooper slurs are slanderous and I won't stand for them. 

I also disagree that we looked flat or like we were going through the motions this year. We played hard, but made a handful of mistakes when Michigan basically played a flawless game. 

But you also can't get around the fact that it feels like he had underachieved compared to Tressel and Meyer.

There it is. I don't think OP is guilty of this, but the "fire Day" wing of the fanbase is so entitled that they think the proper baseline against which Ryan Day is supposed to be measured is "top 3 coach of his respective generation." That's insane, but you know what? Fair game. Insane entitlement is what Ryan Day signed up for when he took the job.  

What's extra double insane is that Ryan Day is mostly living up to that standard, and the lunatic fringe still can't be bothered to hide their crazy when he can't beat Michigan teams that combined their best and most experienced rosters in decades with the most brazen on-field cheating scandal in the history of the sport.

Urban Meyer's speech about respecting the rivalry has got a lot of play around here recently, and rightfully so. The "Fire Day" crowd thinks Ryan Day somehow fails to respect the rivalry when the opposite is true: they are the ones who don't respect the rivalry. They think they are entitled to victory every year, no matter how good Michigan's team actually is. Guess what? We're not. Beating Michigan means something now because Michigan is actually good. It's something you have to earn now. Have some respect for your rival and what they have achieved. 

Those of you howling like a pack of hungry dogs have no idea what you're in for if you get what you want. Any other program would look at the personnel losses we took after last season and say "hey, it's probably a rebuilding year." Ryan Day took that team to 11-1 and was one or two bounces from beating the best Michigan team in decades on the road. You want to get rid of the guy who can do that? For what? Lane Kiffin? Mike "doesn't like recruiting" Vrabel? Firing Ryan Day would be program suicide and some of you dummies would be gleefully loading up the revolver. 

I take heart from the fact that the same lunatic fringe called for Tressel's head on more than one occasion and are now invoking his name as the patron saint of kicking Michigan's ass. As someone who actually remembers the Tressel and Cooper years, I can tell you that losing to one or two games to the likes of Purdue and Illinois and Iowa every year, and then also having a 50-50 shot of getting hamblasted by a superior team in the bowl game, is not, in fact, any more fun than being competitive with the very best teams in the sport every single year. Does it sting to be this close to the top with reaching it? Yes. Is it worse than hanging around in the second tier of the sport like Tressel did after 2006? Absolutely not. 

It's probably selfish of me to say it but Ransom coming back next year would be huge, especially with the KJ Bolden and Caleb Downs misses. 

Assuming Burke goes pro, having Ransom, Styles, Hancock, and Matthews back in the secondary would be enormous to help offset the losses at defensive line and linebacker. 

He's on the active roster, but he's not playing much. ESPN has him third on the Browns' two-deep. 

Togiai is on the practice squad. Another guy who probably should have given us one more year. 

Hinzman has not been good, but it's hard to fault him because he should still be backing up Luke Wypler. 

Wypler going pro a year early is the sort of thing that causes nasty ripple effects because you can't prepare for it. We all know MHJ is going pro next year. We've known it since the middle of his freshman year. The staff has been preparing for it for literally years. 

It's a lot harder for the staff to prepare for a player like Wypler improving dramatically over the course of his second year as a starter and then choosing to settle for being a third-round pick rather than coming back. 

It's not often I hear Bert talk and think, "Man, what a reasonable guy."

We're through the looking glass people. 

In Florida the statute of limitations was just recently changed from 4 years (the statute that would apply to this lawsuit) to 2 years (which will apply to claims that accrue going forward).

Wait I missed it--why is Dasan already out?

Tennessee would be a perfect analogy, especially if they lose a heartbreaker this weekend to Alabama. They could still win out and get to the SEC championship game over UGA

I hope that McCord, the 5-star recruit with a year and half in the system, is the clear number 2 ahead of Brown, the true freshman. 

Let's save next year's QB battle for next year.