Tagged: college football

The term “Michigan Man” probably goes back to the day men arrived at Michigan.

But it’s taken more than a few twists and turns since – and not always for the better.

Fielding Yost gave the term “Michigan Man” a boost when he started using it in his speeches.

But the phrase really took off in 1989, when Michigan athletic director Bo Schembechler announced he was firing basketball coach Bill Frieder, on the eve of the NCAA basketball tournament, because Frieder had signed a secret deal to coach Arizona State the next season.

The University of Michigan football team plays Northwestern in Evanston tomorrow for the first time since 2007.  The undefeated, 12th ranked Wolverines are seven-point favorites, but beating the Wildcats is no longer the easy game it used to be.  Whatever happens this weekend, it can’t match what happened back in 1995 – one of my favorite sports stories.

College conferences are going through a major upheaval – perhaps the biggest in the history of college sports.

In the past year, we’ve seen Nebraska join the Big Ten, Colorado and Utah join the Pac-10, and, this week, Syracuse and Pittsburgh join the Atlantic Coast Conference.  DePaul, Marquette and Texas Christian University just joined the Big East.

Which raises the question: Just how BIG is the East?

Big enough to swallow half the Midwest and a chunk of Texas. 

A lot of people who don’t care much about sports seem to care about this.

Here's some bad news for Ohio State fans.

The university's football team has agreed to "vacate" its wins from the 2010 football season as part of its response to NCAA charges that players received improper gifts and that coach Tressel covered the rules breaches up.

From USA Today:

Ohio State announced it will vacate all its football team's wins during 2010 season, including the controversial Sugar Bowl victory when five suspended players participated.

The punishment is part of the school's response to NCAA charges that players received impermissible benefits in exchange for memorabilia and coach Jim Tressel lied about his knowledge of those violations.

Among the other measures taken are tw0 years of probation and increased resources devoted to compliance and educational programs.

The response, which was made Friday, was scheduled to be made public on July 11. However The Columbus Dispatch obtained a copy. It included the following:

"The responsibility is upon Tressel. No other institutional personnel were aware" of the violations, and the former coach failed in his obligation to report them, the response says. "The institution is embarrassed by the actions of Tressel."

 

Unfortunately for Michigan fans, that doesn't mean that teams who played OSU suddenly receive those wins. Those will remain firmly set in those schools' loss columns.

-Brian Short, Michigan Radio Newsroom

The Jim Tressel era at Ohio State started on January 18, 2001. 

It so happened the Buckeyes had a basketball game that night against Michigan, so it was a good time to introduce their new football coach.  When Tressel stood up to speak, he knew exactly what they wanted. 

He was hired on the heels of John Cooper, whose record at Ohio State was second only to that of Woody Hayes.  But Cooper’s teams lost to Michigan an inexcusable ten times.  Can’t do that.  And you can’t say, “It’s just another game,” either – which might have been his biggest mistake. 

Knowing all this, when Tressel told the crowd, "I can assure you that you will be proud of your young people in the classroom, in the community, and most especially in 310 days in Ann Arbor, Michigan, on the football field.  The place went nuts. “At last,” they said, “somebody gets it!”