Aftermath

Conboy and Tropp have been suspended for the season and dismissed from the MSU hockey program. Comley appeared to leave room for Tropp's reinstatement, but Conboy had already decided to move on. Good. This is exactly the punishment I wanted to see. It's appropriate for the violent assault they perpetrated on Kampfer, but allows Tropp (who doesn't seem to be that bad apart from this incident) a way back into college hockey.

It sounds a lot like Carson Butler's dismissal in March of 2007 (man, that seems like forever ago) following the St. Patrick's Day Nerd Massacre. You're off the team. Prove to me you deserve to earn back your spot. If Tropp keeps his nose clean and runs the 6 AM steps for the next three months, I don't have a problem with seeing him back in the green and white next October. He'll always carry the stigma of this incident, and if he breathes on Kampfer the wrong way he'll get jumped and then tossed from the game. Butler ended up being more trouble than he's worth and he's on his way to the "NFL draft". For his sake, I hope Tropp follows a better path.

There's been this bizarre strain going around how Michigan as a team and as a fanbase hasn't been "classy" about the incident, specifically referring to the language used by the student section in their "F*** you, State!" chant at the end of the game. The State News guy devoted some column inches to it and one of the first comments on the initial MLive story (I know, that's my own fault for reading them) was to the effect of "Stay classy, Ann Arbor". My response: "Classy" isn't even a part of the equation here; "appropriate" is.

I'm going to echo the sentiments of MSC, Yost Built, and MGoBlog. Your concerns pale entirely beside a college kid getting assaulted in front of our eyes. Whether you call the response "appropriate" depends on whether the standard is "safe for network TV" or "justified by the circumstances". Any reasonable person would call this the ideal time to deploy the F-bomb. There are reasons these words exist in the language and this one is there for people other than David Mamet, Fred Durst, and ODB.

Michael Rosenberg's column in the Free Press is kind of a mess. He's trying to humanize Corey Tropp as a local kid who made a bad decision, and brings up Bruce Kampfer's excursion into the locker room as if it's an equal point of comparison. We don't know enough to say much about that. But Bruce Kampfer didn't attack Tropp with a hockey stick while he was possibly unconscious. And Corey Tropp didn't just see his kid have his life put in danger for the second time this season. It doesn't make what Bruce Kampfer did right, not by any means, but the comparison is almost totally useless. The column would've been more effective if he'd only made passing reference to the incident. I can get that Tropp could well be a decent human being without trying prove that not everyone on either side is destined for sainthood.

Finally, security for the visitors' locker room at Yost is a joke. It's a freaking curtain. If the south door is open, it flaps in the breeze and you catch a glimpse of a guy riding the excercise bike. It's encouraging that nothing has happened up to now, but things need to change At the very least, a flimsy wall (with a lockable door) should be built there so you can't just lift the curtain and head on in. I'm hopeful that the NCAA might have a slightly more favorable opinion of Yost if that were to occur.*

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*No, I will not be holding my breath. Thanks for the concern.