It's just so easy

I'm not sure where this came from (other than my email), and it's not quite at the level of the Onion's laugh-at-OSU piece, but it brought me some solid Photoshop lulz:

Hey, Notre Dame has weird jerseys too!

Since I don't spend much of my precious free time in the abyss of places like NDNation, I was unaware that Notre Dame was also unveiling its throwback-ish jersey for the cleverly named "Under the Lights" game at the same time as Michigan's announcement Friday night.

The result (next to Michigan's jersey for comparison):

Not bad. I actually like both quite a bit except for one subtle-but-not-so-insignificant thing: WTF is up with the shoulder stripes? At first I thought it was Michigan's attempt to throw it way back and pay homage to the days when mustaches and fedoras were all the rage, but the out-of-place stripes on the ND jerseys lead me to believe there's some subliminal messaging going on here. (Message to Adidas: You don't need to be like Nike. In fact, we'd prefer it if you weren't. Kthx.)

I couldn't remember if I'd ever seen Notre Dame in a green-on-white uni before, but a quick Google image search turned up these familiar-looking duds from the Rick Mirer/Jerome Bettis era:

Question answered. The one noticeable change to the new unis (other than the excessive striping) is the helmet, which will have the old-school shamrock from back in the '60s -- apparently this is what Brian Kelly was referring to with his comment a couple months ago about the Joe Kuharich era.

And I don't think I mentioned this in my earlier jersey-mania posts, but Michigan will have small numbers on its helmets that seem to reference the same time period (there aren't very many pictures of the old Michigan helmets with numbers on the sides, so I'm not sure of the exact years).

Here's a side-by-side of the new and old:

Very cool.

So anyway ... other than whatever it is that's going on around the shoulder area on both unis, I have no complaints. Excitement meter: Full.

The best team I've ever seen

I started thinking about something last week when USC got its 2004 BCS title taken away -- meaning there's essentially no official record of that team's existence -- and I offhandedly referred to '04 USC as the "the most dominant team of the past 15 years." In a general sense, it probably was -- it's pretty close between the 2004 and '05 USC teams and 2002 Miami, but neither the second USC team nor Miami actually won a national championship, which kind of diminishes their overall accomplishments even if those were the two most talented teams in the history of ever. I guess you could make an argument for any of the three.

But if we're taking a slightly wider snapshot and talking about the best team in (relatively) recent history, there's no question:

The 1995 version of Nebraska's decade-long powerhouse was the best team I've ever seen and arguably the best (at least statistically) in modern history. I have no interest in rewriting the Wikipedia entry to explain Nebraska's awesomeness that year, so I'll just offer some numerical evidence:

• Won all 12 games by at least 14 points.
• Didn't score fewer than 35 points and hit the 50-point mark five times.
• Didn't allow more than 25 points.
• Won by an average score of 52-12 and played just one non-BCS opponent (Pacific).
• Outgained opponents 556.3 yards to 294.1.
• Averaged 399.8 rushing yards per game (lol).
• Posted over 600 total yards in six games.
• Didn't allow a sack all season.
• Played four top-ten teams and beat them by an average score of 49-18 (!!!).
• Absolutely obliterated a previously undefeated and second-ranked Florida team (maybe the best of the Steve Spurrier era) 62-24 in the de facto national title game.

And if numbers aren't really your thing, here's the video evidence:


Ridiculous. I won't argue this one.

Bill Stewart's wild ride is over

A coaching tenure that was WAY more eventful (at least at the beginning and end) than you'd think for a guy with three straight decent-but-not-great seasons has come to an end:

MORGANTOWN, W.Va. (AP) -- West Virginia football coach Bill Stewart has resigned, and a university spokesman said coach-in-waiting Dana Holgorsen will take over.

Athletics spokesman Mike Fragale said athletic director Oliver Luck will discuss Stewart's resignation Friday night and introduce Holgorsen, who was hired as offensive coordinator and eventual successor in December.

So that went exactly as planned ... or something. Holgorsen takes over, West Virginia becomes Oklahoma State East, receivers celebrate, etc.

As for Stewart, his coaching career was somehow both consistently mediocre and all-over-the-map crazy, from his first game to his last gasp at salvaging his job.

He was never really cut out to be a head coach -- he had a brief, crappy stint at VMI in the mid-90s and otherwise was a career offensive assistant who had never even been a major college coordinator before being named West Virginia's interim coach for the '08 Fiesta Bowl against Oklahoma, and even that promotion was only because most of the relevant pieces of Rich Rodriguez's staff had bolted for Michigan. He yelled lots of encouraging things from the sidelines while Pat White and Steve Slaton went ham against a crappy OU defense, everyone cried at the end, and the administration gave Stewart the full-time job while riding a tidal wave of emotion. It was a feel-good moment that didn't make a lot of sense once the tears were wiped away and people realized RichRod wasn't the devil.

I'm sure he was a nice guy and all, but he took a loaded West Virginia team that came up a Pat White broken thumb away from a BCS championship game appearance in 2007-08 and led it to a very "meh" 9-4 finish the next season, then did exactly the same thing the next two years, which was a little more of an accomplishment without White and Slaton.

So he was far from a disaster, but following a 33-5 record in RichRod's last three years, it wasn't a lie when Oliver Luck said (at the time of Holgorsen's hiring), "I didn't believe we had an opportunity to win a national championship with the direction of the program." And a 28-12 career mark seems a little less impressive when considering that the only other legitimately relevant Big East team during those three years was Brian Kelly's 2009 Cincinnati juggernaut (Pitt was pretty good that year too, but not quite at Cincy's level).

Stewart probably would have gone down as a company man who got in a little over his head but gave it a good effort and didn't do terribly ... and then the last two weeks happened.

Sort of like Terrelle Pryor (but with a lot less couch-burning outrage despite being in West Virginia), it's hard to imagine Stewart being remembered as anything other than a slight disappointment with a bizarre and nuclear ending. Any good things he did have obviously been overshadowed by his twisted sabotage plot that's already been established as true in the only place that really matters -- the court of public opinion.

Maybe Holgorsen's eventual awesomeness or crappiness will allow people to forget about the transition chaos and remember Stewart as a guy who got a little crazy at the end but was a decent bridge between two offensive prodigies, but when you have a .700 career winning percentage and that's the best you can hope for, it's safe to say you could have written a better ending.

The Onion wins

Only The Onion could come up with something so simple and yet so, so perfect:

There's so much win in that paragraph, specifically:

"... he embodies what Buckeye football is all about."

Perfect.

The wrong way to reach the right answer

Back when I was in high school math classes (and again in college physics), I used to get docked points on tests because I could do ridiculous things in my head and didn't bother to show my work. I thought that was a stupid penalty -- why take time to write down numbers I don't need to write down when that time could be used to think about the few problems I actually had to think about?

And it's not like there was any dispute about whether I could do the work; I breezed through the highest math class my school offered with a final grade of 106 percent (no joke). The only concern -- at least the way it was told to me -- was that there was no way to know if I was reaching the solution "the right way."

. . . . .

At some point soon -- probably today -- Bill Stewart will resign from or be fired by or "part ways with" West Virginia, making way for Dana Holgorsen to take over as head coach. This should have happened six months ago.

Oliver Luck seems like a smart man -- he's in a powerful position, he has lots of money, his son goes to Stanford, etc. -- but I'm gonna have to assume that he sounds like Bill Lumbergh and that his incredibly awkward conversation with Stewart back in January went something like this:

"Hey Bill, so ... yeahhh ... I just wanted to let you know we're gonna have to go ahead and let you go next year ... until then, if you could just keep doing a swell job, that'd be greeaaaat. Oh, and by the way, I'm gonna need you to go ahead and come in on Saturday to help the new guy ... mmmkay? Greeaaaat."

Dana Holgorsen was hired to be the head coach at a time when a guy who had no say in his hiring was still the head coach and had no plans to leave voluntarily. Why did anyone (especially someone who makes six figures a year) think this would work?

It's thoroughly unsurprising (in a large-scale sense) that Bill Stewart has turned into a 16-year-old girl, Holgorsen has been doing his best Gary Moeller impression on a monthly basis and Luck has been left to clean up the very public, very embarrassing mess he made for himself.

When Holgorsen was hired on a coach-in-one-year deal and everyone was going "ummm WTF," Luck said this ...

"I didn't believe we had an opportunity to win a national championship with the direction of the program. At the end of the day, results matter. And we weren't getting the results."

... and then followed it up with this:

"We went on a great win streak, and I thought (Stewart) deserved the head coaching position for the 2011 season."

So do results matter, or did he deserve to keep his job? Those are mutually exclusive. No comprendo. He should have been fired or re-signed to a long-term deal; leaving him dangling from his noose while Holgorsen fiddled with the rope was the worst possible scenario for everyone.

The funny, bass-ackward thing about the whole situation is that everything will be resolved (messily resolved, but resolved) when Stewart gets his buyout, Holgorsen gets the job he wanted and Luck gets the coach in place that should have been all along.

But it'll be the stupidest, West Virginia-est coaching change in the history of coaching changes, and given the PR mess Holgorsen's already created for himself, Luck better hope for his own job's sake that the next few years are a lot closer to the Rich Rodriguez era than whatever the last few weeks have been.

Uniform panic commences

I generally yield the Michigan-related floor to MGoBlog's Brian Cook, a phenomenal writer who shares pretty much all of my opinions but does so in a much more thought-out and eloquent way than I could.

And I can't say I'm entirely surprised by his reaction to Michigan's not-exactly-a-throwback jersey, which is pretty crazy. The upshot:

Tomorrow we'll enter the ranks of schools that dress up like clowns for a little bit of money from a shoe company. ... This bothers me because it makes it obvious that honoring the program's past doesn't crack the top several reasons they'll put the stripes on this fall, falling behind at least "money," "making Adidas happy," and "allowing Dave Brandon to 'create the future.'"

He goes on to compare the Brandon-era marketing obsession to a publicly traded company's quest to hit its quarterly goals and appease its stockholders with complete disregard for everything else, which would obviously be a pretty poor way to run Michigan's football program but is also an extrapolation taken to a wildly extreme degree.

Maybe I'm just numbed by the fact that Oregon has worn about 2,300 different uniform combinations in the past two years, Nike unveils a different abomination every week and even the Army-Navy game features weird camo helmets and stuff, but on the "things to get worked up about" scale, this strikes me as falling somewhere in between "I wish the band would play more during the game" and "I'm concerned that Brady Hoke doesn't wear a hat on the sidelines like Bo and Lloyd." In other words, it's low.

It's a shirt that will be worn for one game, a game that's intended to be different from every other in the previous bazillion years of Michigan football in Ann Arbor. It doesn't have wings or tread patterns or color-matched half-sleeves, and it's not bright yellow.

Some people will love it and buy a replica, some (like me) will go "meh," and some will roll their eyes until the events on the field distract them ... and then the game will end, the season will continue and nobody looking at the big picture will really care what jerseys were being worn when Michigan played Notre Dame on Sept. 10, 2011.

FWIW, I would've been totally on board with Brian's idea of a 60s-style throwback uni, although like I said yesterday, I still would have taken a few liberties with the jersey (probably something between the one that's existed for the past 80 years and the thing that'll be unveiled Friday). Apparently even the traditionaliest (?) of us have different tastes.