weekend review

I don't know what the weather's been like in your neck of the woods, but up here in New England today, it was kinda cloudy. The humidity's all gone too. Cloudy, breezy, and cooler; and if that doesn't sound like September and the beginning of football season, then we can do nothing more for you here. Time to slide into the football routine with a weekend review. Today's agenda:

- very cursory recruiting board update
- catching up with our recruits' senior (and junior!) seasons
- soccer!
- and finally, some extra credit reading on the ethics of journalism

So, recruiting board. I told you it would be cursory: the only major change is the removal of OT Gifford Timothy, who selected Clemson. This returns our O-line status to Robby Havenstein and Khamrone Kolb. I'm extremely confident one of them will commit to UVA. Our major competition for them is Penn State, and the thing is this: Penn State has openly told them they have room for one more, and then the door shuts. They've mentioned such in interviews. And they don't get recruited in a bubble; each surely knows about the other. If either one was really damn sure Penn State was the place for them, they'd call Paterno yesterday and beat the other to the punch. They haven't. They're both very much alike and I don't prefer one or the other, but if you held a gun to my head and made me pick I'd hope Havenstein committed to Penn State for the simple reason that Kolb's list is smaller, he's sent off slightly more favorable vibes, and would probably drop very soon for us shortly after the door closed at Penn State. Havenstein has laid out more options besides just us than Kolb has. But as for talent, ratings, offers, the stuff you evaluate recruits with? There's so little difference it's pointless.

OK, senior season stuff. Here's how our guys been doin':

TYLER BROSIUS: Much better game than last week. 265 yards, two touchdowns, and one interception on a half-ending Hail Mary. Game ended in a tie, and I'm a little annoyed on principle that Brosius's coach would have an ACC-caliber quarterback on his team and not take any chances with the ball and 1:55 to go. "'The last thing I wanted there at the end was for (Drummond) to get an interception and run it back,' Kiefer said." C'mon, man, show some faith in your quarterback.

ADRIAN GAMBLE: His Independence team won 56-12, but Gamble didn't score.

KEVIN PARKS: Tacked on three more touchdowns to his impressive total in a 33-6 win.

Soccer! The exhibition season went like tthhbbpppttt for the "other" football team, which I dunno, is that worrisome? I say probably not. Gelnovatch can afford to experiment in the exhibition season and experiment he did. Fans have been fretting about the absence of Chris Agorsor, but Jeff White calmed fears earlier this month and put them to rest entirely today. Agorsor is good to go on all fronts, though as White notes, he'll miss the trip to Oregon, not having practiced or played any lately.

There'll still be a planned hole in the lineup though. Brian Ownby will be off to Egypt later this month to compete in the U-20 World Cup. That'll cause him to miss six games, including three conference games - the Cup lasts til October 16, and the Tech game is the day after, so don't expect like he's gonna fly back in from the other hemisphere and play that one either.

All right now. This is where the rant begins. As you know, I'm the only one writing in this space, and that means I get to do what I want. Sometimes that means going off the reservation. As you also know, I'm a Michigan fan, and this was a much better weekend for every other 119 I-A football clubs than it was for Michigan. If foul language and non-Virginia content offend you, it's cool, this is your offramp. Nobody's gonna think any less of you. If you don't like the print media, the following paragraphs may be especially interesting.

As you know unless you went to Afghanistan for the weekend, Michigan got slammed - sucker-punched, you might say - with a laundry list of accusations and allegations regarding mandatory practice time by the Detroit Free Press, and it got picked up by ESPN, Yahoo, Rivals, and probably Us Weekly and TMZ the way things go around Rich Rodriguez these days. I'm not gonna usurp the excellent U-M blog coverage of this stuff, it'd take friggin' days and it's not going to interest you to sit there and have me pick it all apart. Which by the way is eminently doable, because the whole piece reads like something out of the Weekly World News.

So why am I going on about this? What I'm about to put down absolutely fucking disgusts me. It irritated me the first time I read the article and I got angrier and angrier the more I thought about it and realized what happened. By today, as reactions were coming in from all over, I was livid. Furious. Completely revolted. And I have a soapbox and damn if I'm not gonna use it.

At the risk of giving hits to the website, the offending article is here. It is written by Michael Rosenberg and Mark Snyder of the Detroit Free Press. The article sources quite a few players (mostly former, I'd guess) and parents. As the article mentions,

The players and parents agreed to talk only if they were not identified because they said they feared repercussions from the coaching staff.

Every source that speaks directly about Rodriguez's program is anonymous. Except for two.

At the school’s news media day, the Free Press asked freshman Brandin Hawthorne what winter conditioning was like. Hawthorne, a linebacker from Pahokee, Fla., enrolled in January.

“It’s crazy,” said Hawthorne, who was not complaining about his coaches and was apparently unaware of the time-limit rules. “I work out at 8. We’ll work out from, like, 8 to 10:30. We come back later, have one-on-ones, seven-on-sevens, a little passing. Then I’ll go watch a little film.”

The Free Press also asked freshman receiver Je’Ron Stokes about Michigan’s off-season program. Stokes, from Philadelphia, arrived at the Ann Arbor campus in June.

“Hooooo!” Stokes said. “A typical week is working from 8 a.m. in the morning to 6 or 7 at night, Monday through Saturday.”

And that was starting in June?

“Yes, sir,” Stokes said. “We do the weight room at least three times a week, and seven-on-sevens and one-on-ones. Speed and agility on the other days. Every day we have something new to get ready for the season. The coaches have done a great job of stressing the importance of getting us ready for the big season that we’re about to have.”

Stokes was not complaining. Like Hawthorne, he apparently was unaware of the rules.

Placing the article in further context, which would start to get pretty bulky so you'll just have to read it, will reveal that passage to be one of the highlights of the entire argument. It's one of the two crucial pieces to the whole thing, that being We Work Really Long Days. (The other one being They Were Mandatory And They Shouldn't Have Been. Take either leg out of the argument and there is nothing to talk about.)

Je'Ron Stokes and Brandin Hawthorne were interviewed, as it says, at media day for the team, and were asked innocuous questions about their workout regimen. Pretty obviously, they were never told what article they were interviewing for. Now they are the star witnesses in an exposé that was considered so damaging, all the other sources would only agree to speak anonymously to protect them from "repercussions." And the Free Press agreed to give everyone their anonymity - except for the most vulnerable of the sources, the 18-year-old kids who are potentially in the most direct line of fire for repercussions.

They answered these questions respectfully and honestly. And their reward? Shoved under the bus with the rest of the program. Disgusting.

And I'm not the only one angry about it. Stokes's dad's not too pleased either. The senior editor of the New Republic thinks Rosenberg should be fired, in part for:

(filling) his article with quotes from Michigan players describing how hard they work. It's meaningless. It's as if he set out to expose an epidemic of rape, and came back with an article mainly describing the conjugal relations of happily married couples.

Journalists and aspiring journalists, if you ever write a piece like that and treat your sources that way, you are an ethics-devoid scum-sucking piece of shit. Period. Fortunately, there's a happy ending as Rodriguez sticks up for his blindsided players:

When I have two young freshmen that come into my office yesterday upset, saying, "Coach, what did I do? What did we do? We just said we worked hard, and it was harder than it was in high school and we were committed to helping win a championship." I said, "You didn't do nothing wrong. You did nothing wrong."

Bravo, coach.

yeah, man. random pianos

Finally the truth comes out: Maryland is just jealous of our random pianos. The ones that Marc Verica likes to play which seem to be scattered around Grounds. (I'm sure there's one in Old Cabell since it's the music department building, and I'd actually not be surprised to find there's one sitting in some room somewhere in Newcomb. And who hasn't stopped in behind the Chemistry Building to hammer away at the piano that was left there in the Great Piano Prank of '57 and never removed?) Anyway, you heard it from a Maryland grad, who freely admits Maryland is "a barren, dark university" with random acts of violence instead of random pianos.** And apparently no music department.

Anyway, the news today is fantastic. I'll let soccer coach George Gelnovatch do the talking here. Take it away, George, just how good is the news?

“The good news is that all four [knee] ligaments weren’t torn,” said Gelnovatch, whose Cavaliers (3-3, 1-0 ACC) travel to Blacksburg to take on Virginia Tech on Friday night.

Sometimes the silver lining really only looks that way because the rest of the cloud is just that dark. The subject ligaments belong to the left knee of wunderkind Chris Agorsor, who - thank heaven for itty-bitty, tiny, squinchy little miracles - tore merely two of the ligaments in his left knee against CCSU. Instead of all four plus whatever tendons so that his knee could hang by the skin - yay.

We'll go back to McFarling (the Maryland grad) again, over at the Roanoke Times, who provides all sorts of ammo for the Why Is Vic Hall Not Playing Quarterback crowd at TheSabre. Vic Hall could very well be a better quarterback than any presently or formerly on the roster, but the problem is how thin we are at corner. Seriously - there is nobody. Hall and a healthy Dowling would be fine if we could get a healthy Dowling. Chris Cook would have been even nicer. The depth there, however, is weak.

**(Note: This is as good a time as any to point out that I am not Main Stream Media and therefore am perfectly within my rights to selectively quote and drag things so far out of context as to be unrecognizable by their own mothers.)

weekend review

I still have not actually watched the UConn game. I'll most likely do that tomorrow, albeit in fits and starts on the TiVo, and mainly for the purpose of doing my review of Verica's performance. I have no desire to sit there like I don't know what's gonna happen next and watch our defense get gashed for half a mile of rushing yardage.

Let's start this thing off with some good news for once. The soccer team showed signs of life on Saturday by thrashing NC State. They've struggled, but did very well in the ACC opener against a team that isn't exactly an ACC contender. Let's hope there's a parallel there for the football team. What we've seen from the soccer team so far is what you'd expect from a very young team with supreme talent, which happens to be what they are. Of the 14 goals scored this season, just 3 are from non-freshmen: 2 from sophomore Jimmy Simpson and 1 from junior Matt Mitchell. Chris Agorsor and Tony Tchani are bound and determined to have a knock-down drag-out fight (figuratively speaking, thankfully) for the goals lead this season; Tchani leads 5-4 at the moment.

Next up: Central Connecticut State, who has rolled up a 4-1-1 record against largely second-tier competition. Fun fact: CCSU is basically Little Britain, with 6 fellows from jolly old England, and that doesn't count the guy hailing from the Isle of Man.

Now back to football and the gloomcloud that comes with it. The RTD today does a nice job of reminding us who we're missing for whatever reason: academics, shenanigans, injury, transfer to other sports, or some combination of the above. The toll is thus: 2 quarterbacks, 2 defensive ends, 2 cornerbacks, 3 linebackers, and a wide receiver, including at least four players (Cook, Fitzgerald, Gottschalk, and Lalich or Sewell) who'd be starters and more who'd be in the two-deep. I won't expound on this much. You know as well as I do what we're missing here.

Oh looky here. A recruiting board. And it looks much the same as it did last week. Nobody committed or narrowed their list or anything. The updates are:

- Added some actual schools for Bernardo Nunez. He claims no leader (Rivals $) at the moment, but mentioned a number of different places he wants to go on visits to. So those schools are piled up under his name.
- Put Michigan and Duke back in Brennan Williams' top 5.

QB Kevin Newsome
- VT, PSU, Mich., UNC, WVU
RB Tavon Austin
- Md., WVU, UGA, Mich., Neb., Tenn., Ill.
RB De'Antwan Williams
- Bama, VT, BC, Md., Rutgers, WVU
WR Justin Brown
- PSU, VT, NCSt., S.Car, UNC
WR Sean Farr
- Md., WVU, Akron, EMU
WR Timothy Smith
- L'ville, S.Car, WVU
WR Antone Exum
- SCar., VT, WVU, PSU, Md., Tenn., Purdue, L'ville, CU, Wake
TE Logan Thomas
- VT, Clemson, WVU, UNC, Wake, Tenn., FSU, PSU
OT Morgan Moses
- pretty much everyone east of the Mississippi
OT Oday Aboushi
- Iowa, Md., Rutgers, PSU, Mich., BC
DE Brennan Williams
- BC, Wake, Mich., Duke
DE Michael Buchanan
- Purdue, Ill., Cal, Vandy, KU
DE Lanford Collins
- VT, PSU, Tenn., WVU, Md., NCSt., UNC, BC, Ill.
DE Garry Gilliam
- UConn, PSU, Temple, Pitt, Akron
DE Will Hill
- UConn, Mich., S.Car., Tenn., Md.
DE Bernardo Nunez
- OU, Md., Oregon, Pitt, ECU, NCSt., Rutgers
DE DeAntre Rhodes
- VT, Md., Clemson, Tenn.
DE Pat Muldoon
- Cincy, BC, Wisc.
OLB Jelani Jenkins
- everyone and their aunt
CB Travis Hawkins
- who isn't interested?
S Javanti Sparrow
- Clemson, UNC, PSU, VT, WVU
DB Joshua Evans
- 28 other schools. for real.

Now for the high schools.....

DOMINIQUE WALLACE: Carried 14 times for 113 yards and three touchdowns in Chancellor's 40-13 win over Riverbend. Wallace is the area's rushing leader with 528 yards and 6 touchdowns in four games.

CONNOR MCCARTIN: 4 carries, 28 yards; 2 receptions, 29 yards in 42-14 Fauquier victory over Mountain View. McCartin is a linebacker recruit.

COREY LILLARD: Ran for 69 yards and a TD in Liberty's 41-32 win over Stafford. Lillard is a DB recruit.

ROSS METHENY: Completed 8-of-10 for 89 yards and 2 TD's in Sherando's 55-7 stomping of Warren County. Metheny has yet to play every drive for his team in a full game, because Sherando is 3-0 by scores of 37-10, 49-0, and 55-7.

PERRY JONES: Scored twice in Oscar Smith's blowout win over Great Bridge. 50-14, in case you're wondering. Oscar Smith is a fucking machine.

KEVIN ROYAL: Scored on a 45-yard pass, but Brunswick lost to Hopkins, 27-12. Fun fact! Kevin Royal is from Greenwich, CT, where the local newspaper (from which all Royal links come) is aptly called the Greenwich Time.

The week was a good one for the ACC: UVA did not play, so the conference did not lose any nonconference games. Which is nice.

- Georgia Tech rolled Mississippi State 38-7. Georgia Tech Sports was in attendance and rather obviously liked what he saw.

- NC State beats ECU* 30-24 relinquishes the title of Sorriest-Assed Team In All The ACC (SATIATA), which I would be really happy for them for doing except guess who gets to pick up the crown? And we need only lose to Duke to jam that mother squarely on our head and go streaking. State Fans Nation hates him some ECU fans and loves him some Russell Wilson.

- Maryland crushed Eastern Michigan 51-24. Eastern is the direction-est of all the D-I Directional Michigans, and has a really hard time in football because they share a county with a football behemoth.

- Boston College handled UCF, 34-7. BC Interruption is not mollified by the lopsided score and senses a quarterback controversy a-brewin' in Chestnut Hill.

- Clemson beat SC State. By a lot.

- VT won another 20-17 game, over UNC this time. Gobbler Country wonders how on earth. Tareye or Buckheel didn't seem to notice, because Yates Yates Yates. One can hardly blame the Heel faithful if they're more worried about the next six weeks than the last one.

- Miami did their part against the power conferences (if not exactly the power teams therein) by beating Texas A&M 41-23. It was not a good week for maroon-and-white teams against the ACC.

- Lastly, Wake Forest looked half-assed against FSU (no thanks to three missed FGs from their All-Galaxy kicker) but fortunately for them FSU looked like complete and total ass, as Wake got out of Tallahassee with a 12-3 win. Old Gold & Blog looks on the sunny side and praises the defense, which got three straight picks against two different Seminole quarterbacks to quash any comebacks. Take possession, pickoff. Take possession, pickoff. Take possession, incomplete, incomplete, pickoff. lollerskates. At least Christian Ponder threw two passes into oblivion before his interception; Richardson just got right down to business and threw two straight first-down picks.

There it is - your weekend in review. Your last little tidbit of info: The Maryland game on 4 October will be at 7:00 (night game, yay! I have fond memories of these, which is surprising considering the usual effect of 10 hours of pregaming on one's memory) and will either be on ESPNU or ESPN360, which would mean either I have to shell out for GamePlan, or I just put on my TiVo recording of last year's thrilla in College Pazilla and pretend Chris Long is still in orange and blue, blowing up quarterbacks.

we don't care about the football stuff

"In an interview session that was mostly devoted to football," the RT's Doug Doughty managed to not care about what the interview session was mostly devoted to. Shenanigans were the order of the day in the resulting article, or more importantly the denial thereof. We're talking of course about Peter Lalich, who denies using marijuana, or any illegal drug at all, during his probation. All this he-said-he-said stuff, ayyyy. It's easy for a guy to deny stuff and not that hard for reporters with nothing better to do to find evidence of it anyway, but I believe Lalich here. If he says he didn't, he didn't, and I feel fairly confident in saying that because it seems likely Al Groh feels the same way - the guy played against Richmond after all.

Press conference highlights are very non-highlighty. No, we didn't learn anything about UConn from playing USC, because they have a very different scheme, and the talent level WHOA hold on let me catch myself right about the place Plutoid Ralph should have stopped. No, we didn't learn anything about UConn from their last game because the rain was literally coming from the ground up. Got their players' numbers memorized real good though, check this out, I even got their left tackle. Oh, and Denzel Burrell roolz.

UVA Notes from the RTD, summarized as only I can:

- You can pay more than you would for an actual basketball game to hear the heavenly words of Jim Calhoun at the coaches' clinic.
- Ryan Benincasa has been beating everyone we can throw at him in the faceoff circle in lacrosse practice. This places him on par with our opponents, who also beat everyone we threw at them.
- Groh's looking for chances to play Steve Greer and Cam Johnson. They didn't play against Richmond because "the game was real tight, and the guys out there were doing a good job." (Groh's words.) Also, Groh didn't want to have to face any questions about why we lost to a I-AA team and flushed our Congressional Bowl hopes down the toilet with two true freshmen on the field at his favorite defensive position with two perfectly healthy seniors on the bench. (My words.)
- Zane Parr and J-K Dolce did in fact play against Richmond, which I couldn't help but notice because they made life mad difficult for Eric Ward.

Lastly there is this article from ESPN regarding soccer coach George Gelnovatch. Specifically, it hints at a hot seat and unhappy alumni, it was printed September 5, and it's a highly ironic article because the other thing that happened September 5 was the school's announcement that Gelnovatch has been extended through 2012. I am the least qualified person ever to comment on Gelnovatch's suitability for coaching this team, although I will say that the sideways comparison to Bruce Arena in the ESPN article is slightly unfair - if we are going to look for a coach that measures up to Arena, we will be looking for a long time. The team did knock off George Mason and Hofstra this weekend to recover their record to 2-2; both opponents are more or less patsies. Chris Agorsor scored goals in both games and seems to be well on his way to living up to the bevy of accolades he got coming out of high school. Next is VCU, who hasn't beaten anybody of note and has lost to our ACC brethren, UNC and Wake.

Tomorrow: the year's second Blogpoll Roundtable!