HSR Exclusive: Mailbag!

Due to the recent email messages that have come to light, Dave Brandon has taken a leave of absence from responding to his email from various alumni and season ticket holders. In his stead, a number of guest authors have taken his place.


Mr. Brandon,

In the long history of my Michigan fandom, I have never been as disappointed in my alma mater as I am right now.  Not for the on the field product, but rather for the continuing litany of gaffes, both small and significant, that the athletic department seems committed to making on an almost daily basis.  I will not be renewing my tickets next year after 35 seasons as a season ticket holder and donor.

Thank you,
David Sanderson

Mr. Sanderson,

Pray tell whatever gaffes do you speak of for this great Meeechingan of ours?  While mistakes have been made, they have been made doing the great things, trying the bold and the innovative, creating a tradition and a future of which all Meeechigan men can be proud.  We hope that our new commitment to the moral benefits young men receive from playing foot ball will bring you back to Ferry Field next fall.

Sincerely,
F. H. Yost,
Coach
Foot Ball Department
Michigan Athletic Association

[Dictated to an urchin while running down State Street upon disembarking from a train]

Mr. Brandon,

My family and I have been season ticket holders since the early 1970's, and it pains me to say that we won't be renewing them this year. The price of the tickets, plus the "voluntary" donation, is just too much for us to bear on our fixed income, as my wife and I recently retired. Michigan Stadium has been so important to us, but squeezing every last cent out of the fan base has left us cold. We feel left out of the Michigan family.

Sincerely,
James Fairfield


Mr. Fairfield,

DISRESPECT. You feel left out? How dare you. I bet you don't respect football enough to earn the right to buy these tickets. This is a game for men, and men do what it takes to get the job done.

Pride goeth before the fall,
Mark Dantonio



Dear David Brandon,

I've been going to football games at Michigan Stadium since I was a young boy, so I've been through the lean times and the good times. But I can't say I've ever seen such a sorry stretch of football.  The RichRod years were a disaster, and hiring Brady Hoke has just made things worse. Until things change, you won't be seeing me on Saturday and my donations will go somewhere they make a difference.

Raylon Bedwards


Dear Raylon,

I think you're aware of my policy. I'm going to need you to bring me something from the dictionary for us to continue this conversation.

Yours,
Lloyd Carr


Dear Coach Carr,

My word is "autoclave". An autoclave is a pressure chamber used to sterilize equipment and supplies with high pressure steam.

Raylon


Dear Raylon,

Thank you.  I appreciate your letter, and I've given it a lot of thought.  It sounds to me like you and Michigan football aren't on the same page. If you want a situation where you can be #1, maybe you should transfer your allegiances to someplace more suitable. Central or Eastern would definitely appreciate you, or any other non-Big Ten institution would be acceptable to us. I've attached the transfer paperwork to this email.

Yours,
Lloyd Carr

PS: If you change your mind and commit to sticking it out, I have a group of young men who run the stairs every morning. It's tremendous.



Mr. Brandon,

It has occurred to me the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.  So here's to hoping for bowl eligibility.

Sincerely,
Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald

Mr. Fitzgerald,

I suggest, once again, you quit drinking and go to bed.

Sincerely,
Fritz

H.O Crisler
Football Coach
Board in Control of Physical Education
Ferry Field, Ann Arbor
University of Michigan



Dear Mr. Brandon,

I'm sick and tired of the athletic department rolling out these idiotic schemes and then having to walk everything back when the students and the alumni get wind of them. The noodle, the Coke incident, and the student ticket policy were just foolish.  Getting stuck with playing MSU and OSU on the road every other year is actively detrimental to our success and the athletic department's bottom line. Please be less embarrassing.

Thanks,

James Lindgren


Dear Mr. Lind,

Well, the noodle...I haven't been fully informed about that.  The Coke thing was something from the marketing...their marketing department which we never approved. The student ticket policy, I've been told that they're OK, just an ankle thing, though we don't usually comment on injuries. I don't think we're playing them both on the road every year, just this time. We wouldn't do  that every other year. Anyway, it's all part of big boy football.  I love our kids, we're just going to go out there and compete.

Brady Hoke
It's Michigan fergodsakes!



Mr. Brandon,

I think the time has come that you have to let Brady Hoke go. The mismanagement of the Shane Morris injury is the last straw for me. I would say anything less than 8-4 and you have to fire him anyway, but leaving a kid in there after a shot like Morris took is just unacceptable.

Thanks,
Al Stapleton


Mr. Stapleton,

The first thing you have to understand is that Adreain Payne has a child's lungs. He can't go like some of the other guys, he just gets gassed. And Gary Harris is out there playing on a wooden pirate leg.  Drew Neitzel has alopecia, and that lack of self-confidence really impacts his game.  Goran Suton is from a different galaxy and he's just getting used to Earth's gravity, so you have to be patient with him. Draymond Green, he gives everything he's got on every play, but he's playing with seal flippers sewed to his arm stumps.  What I'm trying to say is we're pretty banged up, and the refs don't give us the calls because we're Michigan State.

Sincerely,
Tom Izzo

PS: Next year I'm dressing up as Jason Bateman in Teen Wolf Too! The kids are going to go nuts!



Mr. Brandon,

After all the price increases and embarrassing incidents, I don't think you have what it takes to be the athletic director at the University of Michigan. Do everyone a favor and quit now, so the university can save the outrageous three million bucks in your buyout.

James Anderson


Dear Mr. Anderson,

I regret to inform you that we cannot answer your recent email. Coach Hayes is already quite incensed that it made it past his spam filter and has destroyed several chairs and a down marker; I suspect your use of "bucks" is what allowed it to slip through. He has had me print it out and burn it, his computer, and our servers, after which the ashes will be couriered to the state line and dumped, as Coach Hayes is loathe to pollute our fair Ohio with such detritus from That School Up North. Please accept this letter as my personal apology.

Yours truly,
Rachel H. Phillips
Executive Secretary to Coach W.W. Hayes, The Ohio State University
GO BUCKS!



Dear Mr. Brandon,

For all of Michigan's marketing of "legacy" and "history", the future which you so claim to love looks bleak and foreboding.  What steps are you taking to bring Michigan back to the pride of the good old days?  I hope you have a plan and a vision, because right now, it's as dark as midnight round here.

Hopeful for the future,
Sherman Williams

Mr. Williams,

Sincerely,
Gordon Berenson


Coach Berenson,

I've renewed my football season tickets and applied for hockey season tickets. I cut the grass, did the laundry, cleaned the house, helped my kids with their homework, paid my bills, balanced my checkbook, did my taxes, and rescued a puppy. I hope this is satisfactory.


Sherman Williams

Is There an Adult I Can Talk To?

This morning, David Brandon and the athletic department issued a well-written, cogent statement that addressed almost everything people reasonably expected to know in the aftermath of the Shane Morris incident while simultaneously taking an appropriate tone. We messed up, we can't let this happen again, and we're updating our procedures to address this issue.

However, the statement comes about 24 hours too late. If that statement is issued at 12:52 AM on Monday morning, there's grumbling and some side-eye. At 12:52 AM on Tuesday morning, everything has changed. Michigan has been put under the microscope on not just ESPN, but has crossed all the way over to Good Morning America. You've promised the media a "medical statement" that never really showed up, unless this is it. And you've sent your head football coach up to his press conference to stand there and look like someone's idiot cousin you wouldn't trust to run a doughnut shop, let alone a multi-million-dollar football program where young men risk their health and safety on a daily basis.

To be fair, this may be the case. Brandon's statement says that Morris was diagnosed with a concussion on Sunday. Brady Hoke didn't get in touch with his injured quarterback to ask how he's doing? Or Shane Morris didn't know he has a concussion? Neither of these seem reasonable, and one is more plausible than the other.

At the moment, I'm choosing not to believe that Hoke knew about the concussion and failed to disclose it. For some reason I'm more comfortable believing him to be incompetent than mendacious.

The whole situation has been bungled, from the initial incident through everything after. You have commentators worrying about Morris's safety BEFORE he takes a killshot to the head, then you send the kid back into the huddle for one more play, and even when he's removed no one hides his helmet and tells the coaches he's out. And after all this has happened, nobody thinks "This is going to be a major problem for us. We have to get to the bottom of this and fix what is wrong."

Even if it's somebody thinking only of the bad PR that's certain to come from it, Michigan had a small window to get in front of this. I don't expect more than window dressing from the athletic department, but when I don't even get that I just sputter with anger. How dumb do they think I am? How out of touch are they to not understand that this is a Big Deal? Concussions have been a major flashpoint for *years*. The NFL is on the hook for hundreds of millions of dollars, and the settlement is still derided as insufficient. Whatever intern they have on Twitter had to have noted the explosion of rage when Morris was left in, and that has to be kicked up the food chain to someone with real authority.

At that point, it's all hands on deck. Who saw the hit? Who saw the aftermath? Was this communicated to anyone? Why or why not? Why was Morris allowed to re-enter the game? Who made that decision? How do we make sure this never happens again? Has he been diagnosed with a concussion? Do we have his permission to release his condition?

It takes a while to get answers to all these questions, to process them, and to respond to the additional questions they raise. It doesn't take 55+ hours, and you don't let your statement drop in the middle of the night. Now we're convinced you're hiding something.

We expect smoke, mirrors, and obfuscation when you talk about who's practicing well, how the team is looking, how much respect you have for your next opponent, and even run-of-the-mill player injuries. Someone's got a boo-boo, another guy has a "lower body injury." This is different. This is about ethics, not a player's condition. Craig is right; it's more akin to the dissembling about Gibbons than questions about when Funchess will be back up to speed.

Fort Schembechler is Fort Schembechler, but whether the team is any good will always be settled on Saturday. This is about governance and that nebulous thing that Fielding Yost called the "Spirit of Michigan." One of the better things about the Spirit of Michigan is that it evolves over the years and we expect an ever higher standard of the people who represent us. Yost himself was an old unreconstructed racist* and an anti-Catholic, and we certainly expect better of our leaders today.

The University of Michigan has again been named the top public university in the US, as we were reminded by the video board on Saturday. We expect to be treated like adults, at the bare minimum. We raised ticket prices because we want more money to pay higher salaries and build more buildings. We expect Michigan to compete for Big Ten championships, and we aren't playing like that kind of team. Shane Morris got hit in the head and he should have been removed from the game immediately.

This is not hard. Hard is setting regular ticket prices at the maximum level where fans still feel like more than a revenue stream. Hard is setting a price on student tickets where you get a good amount of value back while giving students an incentive to use their tickets *and* make Michigan football a habit that lasts for life. Hard is sorting through all the available candidates to find a John Beilein and to get a succession plan together when Red Berenson finally decides to hang it up. And if you bungle the easy tasks, we don't trust you with the hard ones.

*At least until Willis Ward joined the team. Yost, of course, still sat Ward against Georgia Tech. Improvement is not always continuous.

The Nussmeter Continues To Be A Top Priority

Based solely on the performance of the players, the Nussmeter would have held steady at 1. But after a game where the Michigan offense actually became a national scandal instead of a mere local embarrassment, we have no choice but to introduce a new level:

Should it become necessary, the Nussmeter can and will start working its way through the negative transfinite ordinals. Unfortunately there is no largest transfinite number, as that would come in handy if a Harbaugh gets hired.

Improper use of the new Michigan logo

The U-M Global Communications Office has just released a new logo, complete with a new custom font called "The Victors," and a new set of logo guidelines. Due to space limitations, they were not able to list all the ways to misuse the logo. We list a few more in this post.

1. To protect the logo from abuse, DO NOT let the logo anywhere near the Rutgers Athletic Department.

2. DO NOT use the logo as part of a fundraising drive to purchase a video of a prominent Canadian politician smoking crack.

3. DO NOT incorporate the logo into animated GIFs involving animals owned by members of the football team.

Above all, DO NOT create presentation templates for students and faculty to use when presenting their scholarly work. The Brand cannot be tainted by association with the academic mission of the university.