VB started in the winter of 2005, primarily because I was tired of copy-and-pasting my preview of the Nebraska game onto various Michigan-related message boards. Over time, I eventually got my first link from MGoBlog (as I scouted an IM basketball game featuring various football players – and wrongly predicted Johnny Sears would blow up in 2007), added Paul as a writer/technical guy, moved from Blogspot to a self-hosted domain, spilled my guts about missing the days of 2006, and added Formerly Anonymous to the repertoire to blog about baseball. Along the way, Varsity Blue became the second-most popular Michigan blog out there, and one of the more popular college sports blogs in general. I couldn’t have done any of it without the readers, and I thank all of you for the support you’ve given me over the nearly 4 years of this site’s existence.

Paul & Tim at Penn State

Like most Michigan bloggers, I was inspired by Brian, and I’m certainly honored to join MGoBlog, but that doesn’t mean I’m not sad to leave VB. I hope to see some of this site’s readers follow us over to the mothership, and it’s been a fun, fun ride.

The fans have spoken and have selected last year’s team MVP to get a push to become the second defensive player or all time to win the Heisman trophy. Only 31 votes separated the two players. The final was Brandon Graham 337 and Brandon Minor with 306. Congrats to both Brandons for getting to the finals and thanks to the readers who voted and commented.

-T

After a round of alpha testing, the Varsity Blue Forum is ready to go live. There are categories for the main topics we cover here on Varsity Blue, including Football, Basketball, Baseball, and recruiting. You can also hit up the general discussion and off-topic areas to talk about other things.

Check it out, start a thread or two, participate in a couple others, and hopefully this thing can get rockin’ and rollin’.

Also: don’t forget to listen to the WTKA remote at Spring Practice today, from 3-6 on 1050AM in Ann Arbor, or WTKA.com anywhere else.

Mailbag

Guys–

What makes new e-blog design so much better than old design? Love the analysis, you guys are awesome.

I’ll hang up and listen,

Barry

———

Barry- Great question! New design has following features:

• Layed out in a convinient, tabular way.
• New stylish, blinking, text based banner.
• High contrast, maize and blue color scheme.
• New scrolling marquee for important news at top of page!
• Awesome animated flame .gifs!
• Netscape 4.0 compliant!

We believe it is important to put STRONGEST content in position to MAKE IMPACT. New e-blog will help achieve this goal for ENTIRE SITE.

If you guys have any issues with the new site (I’ve heard there’s some problems in Mosaic), let me know in the comments. Also, if you know why the midi file I embedded isn’t playing, let me know. That’s a key feature that currently is working.

• Ricky Barnum has sprained his ankle, and will miss a few spring practices to get wrist surgery. His wrist was (apparently) pretty damaged, and he was working through it before. While it sucks that he’s sustained another injury, at least it gave him the opportunity to get the wrist taken care of.
• Denard Robinson has claimed the 2nd-fastest 100m dash time in the country so far this year for high-schoolers. The incoming QB ran a 10.44 time, and expects to run in the 10.3s when track season gets underway in earnest. (Photo by Tom Ervin for the Miami Herald).
• Devin Gardner plans to publicly commit to Michigan either Thursday or Friday. He apparently did so silently at junior day, but wanted to finish out his basketball season before worrying about dealing with the press.
• Darryl Stonum has debunked the rumors that he’s intending to transfer from Michigan at the end of spring practice.
• SPRING GAME WOO GET AMPED.
• VB (Paul and Tim, at least) plans to be at todays 3:05 PM baseball game at the Fish. Feel free to say hello to us.

And, in site news: If you take a look at the top of the right sidebar, the subscription options have changed slightly. You can still subscribe via RSS, but there are now other possibilities. There is now an official VB Twitter account to which you can subscribe @VarsityBlue. You can subscribe via e-mail, which will inform you whenever there is a new front page post on Varsity Blue. And, perhaps what we’re most excited about, we’re going to start rolling out a VB Newsletter, which we’ll send out once a week (you can help us determine which day when you sign up), and will include a recap of the week’s action on Varsity Blue, along with a bit of information that may not have made it to the front page, and even a preview of what is coming in the next week. It might start out a little spartan in design (no pun intended), but we’ll be beefing it up in short order.

In other site news, we plan to debut a couple new features on VB in the coming weeks, though they’re not quite ready for public consumption yet. I’ll keep you posted when everything is ready to go live.

Important games today:

• Michigan baseball home opener 3:05 EDT at Ray Fisher Stadium. The Wolverines take on IPFW. Paul and I will be in the house, so stop by and say hey.
• Michigan hockey in the CCHA semifinals against Alaska. Yost Built has 10 Things to Know about the Nanooks.
• Michigan lacrosse against Eastern Michigan in their CCLA conference opener. 8PM at Oosterbaan Fieldhouse. Come support an awesome club varsity team. $3/6 for students/non.

Hockey Sophomore Louie Caporusso has been named a finalist for the Hobey Baker award. Great honor for the young player, though his torrid goal pace from the beginning of the year didn’t hold up.

Michigan Sports Center has your first glimpse at the 2009 student football shirt. For the record, I don’t mind the slogan on the back, more as a reminder to those who wear them than as decoration for other people to see.

Saturday’s basketball game against Oklahoma will take place at 5:50 PM EDT. Don’t forget to check out last night’s victory post, and I’ll have your preview of the Sooners coming tomorrow.

Speaking of posting previews on the weekend and such, I know the semi-regular schedule around here has gravitated toward “hectic and random” of late, but it’s a fairly busy time, what with the basketball team in the Tournament and all. Once they bow out, the football-centric Varsity Blue you know and love should return.

Recruiting Update coming this afternoon.

Tim and I will be at Ashley’s by 5am. Wish us luck.

The Michigan Class of 2009, Current Michigan Depth Chart, and Michigan Eligibility Chart are still around, but they’re now lumped together under one item called “Personnel HQ.” Soon, I’ll also be putting the finishing touches on the Eligibility Chart by Class, and that will fall under that category as well. The only thing that’s tricky to find is the 2009 Recruiting Board, which can be found on the Class of 2009 page, which is newly spruced up.

New to the site is the “About Varsity Blue” section, which gives a brief synopsis of how Varsity Blue came to be, and links to bio pages for each member of the VB staff. If you’d become accustomed to seeing an invite to follow Paul on Twitter in that left sidebar, fear not, as you can now find that information on his bio page. The same information for the other two of us can also be seen on our respective pages (Tim and FormerlyAnonymous).

The 2010 Recruiting Board is still linked on the left sidebar, and probably will be until around this time next year, after most members of the class sign with Michigan. There are also a few slight adjustments to the site’s design coming along a little further down the road, so be on the lookout for those. For now, feel free to check out some of the new pages and get a feel for the new structure.

If anything is broken, missing, in need of update, etc., or if you have a suggestion for something that you’d like to see, let us know in the comments of this post or the relevant page. I apologize for the abundance of links in this post, but I’m pretty excited to have people checking out all the new and/or updated content.

Unfortunately, we didn’t have a lot of time to actually talk about Michigan, so I got to discuss things like the Pistons and Synchronized Youth Figure Skating (seriously). It was still a lot of fun though, and hopefully I’ll have an opprtunity to do it again sometime.

Recruiting Update coming later this afternoon.

So, be sure to tune in to 1050AM in the Ann Arbor area or WTKA.com outside of it around 3:30 today.

Football offseason posts will continue, though they might be slightly more theory-oriented until spring pratice begins and there’s actual news to talk about. While on the topic of spring practice, I should have a bonanza of information up during that period, and it should be a fun time to be around here. I’ll spread news about some of those items as they get a bit more solidified.

I’m hopefully going to get the podcast up and running again, since we haven’t really made one since the end of football season. Possible topics include the end of basketball season, football and recruiting (obviously the bread and butter here at VB), or baseball. Let me know how much interest there is in each of these things (and a podcast in general).

Baseball coverage will continue to go strong with new contributor FormerlyAnonymous, who never got a proper introduction. Without further ado: FormerlyAnonymous is the newest member of VB, bringing the total to 3. He’ll bring the baseball coverage, making Varsity Blue the #1 site for Michigan Wolverines baseball coverage.

Recruiting update #1 for the week should be coming tomorrow. Sorry for the delay, but baseball season has left VB up to our ears in content, and I want to make sure every post get the attention that it deserves.

Thanks for bearing with us at a (surprisingly) busy time for the blog.

Finally, Tim will be appearing on the Big Show with John U. Bacon on WTKA at 4pm (listen live online here).  He’ll be talking about blogging and recruiting. It should be interesting, or at least something different.

Tomorrow we switch gears to basketball and talking about Michigan State. If you don’t want to wait until tomorrow, Dylan at UMHoops.com is off and running, including a chat with KJ at SpartansWeblog.  We’ll have a limited UFR (just the plus/minus) from the Penn St. and UConn games as well as the standard preview of the opponent.  There will a be a live blog on MGoBlog (maybe cross posted here).

Wednesday we’ll have reaction to the basketball game and hopefully be ready to run some of the player interviews from the signing day press conference.  Standard caveat of all great plans of mice and men, etc., but that’s our tentative schedule. Should be an exciting week.

The apparently offensive photo is via Spawn of MZone. It shows graduating 5th year and two year starter Morgan Trent with stickers from other teams, including a buckeye sticker, on his helmet. It seems that leading up to the game the players trade these stickers for fun and to show some sportsmanship. It’s some fun that people 21-24 are having in one of the last football games where they will make an impact.

Maize & Blue Nation lives up to it’s reputation of any blog with “Nation” in its name (obvious a gross generalization. See Burnt Orange Nation) hoping that Morgan Trent fails in the pros.  The post on Spawn of MZone is less offensive but managed the same misplaced indignation. WLA as per usual has responded in their… unique… way.

I really can’t imagine that people actually care about stickers on Trent’s helmet.  Yes, Michigan does have the best helmet in college football; it’s an icon. But really?  It’s just Morgan having some fun with guys he’s meeting who have gone through a common experience.  I’ll bet most of the backlash is due to the fact that Trent gave up more big plays than any of us would have liked and wasn’t as good this year as he was last year.

Personally, I never understood disliking players that aren’t good.  There’s only so much a player can do in order to become good.  Sure working out, practicing hard, etc., make a difference, but a lot of it is god-given talent.  Some players just can’t become as good as we’d like them to be.  That doesn’t mean they aren’t working their asses off for their 4 to 5 years at Michigan.  The players that I tend to disregard more are those that have huge talent and don’t do what they need to.

I know we like to pretend that every opinion is a precious, unique snowflake, but that’s not true, especially on the Internet.  While WLA may make their point in a offputting way, that doesn’t change the fact that they’re right.  It’s not about controlling all thought on the Internet or propagating a particular message. It’s a difference between right and wrong, smart and stupid, fan of Michigan and Michigan Man™.  Trent worked his ass off for 5 years. Maybe he wasn’t the CB we wanted him to be or the WR he planned to be as a freshman, but it’s the journey not the destination that makes someone a non-ironic Michigan Man.  He’s earned that distinction and busted coverages and helmet stickers can’t take that away from him.

Recruiting update this afternoon. Thanks for bearing with us.

Recruiting post this afternoon, and Illinois UFR coming tomorrow.

Regardless, here’s what’s coming up in the immediate future on Varsity Blue:

• Recruiting post later today, concentrating on the quarterback situation.
• Other recruiting news has been coming in fast and furirous, so there should be a couple more recruiting-heavy posts in the upcoming days.
• After that stuff is out of the way a bit, I’ll start getting into the off-season posts, and looking forward to next year.
• On the basketball side of things, I’ll hopefully be posting the Oakland UFR-like substance rough draft-ish thing up soon, and will keep updating on basketball.

As always, if any breaking news happens, we’ll have it up ASAP.

Unfortunately, Notre Dame ruined my early gift, but I’m sure there will plenty today to make up for it.  Drive safely and have a merry Christmas.

We’ll be back in action come Monday, and from there, Paul and I will see what the schedule around Christmas is going to look like. Thanks for sticking around.