Really, his holier than thou attitude boils down to a Michigan alum having to deal with his university being slandered in the media. So he reacts with the same emotional outburst that he denounces in the original piece. Obviously, the difference is in the nature of the respective piece, but it is still humorous to see the qualities that one man hates manifested in himself (or, by extension, his work.)

I agree that there are a host of interesting aspects to the Michigan story, but the claim by Chait about journalistic ethics is totally bogus. Chait has his panties in a wad about allowing some sources to be anonymous. Are you kidding me?! Remind me to go back and google all of Chait’s criticisms of the NY Times for using anonymous sources to break the law in tipping off our enemies about effective anti-terror prgrams which they admit were all proper. Uh huh.

And the Detroit paper has no ethical obligation to try to investigate other programs. The Detroit paper wrote about one of the local teams and had plenty of evidence to back up the story. The rules are clear and their sources said that the rules were broken. Period. So what if other programs did it? If Chait wants to write about them, he can. But Chait’s desires do not create ethical obligations for the paper.

We have a few season passes on our TiVo: The Unit, 24, Fringe, The Penn State Football Story…but there’s a tie for my favorite between Mad Men and Breaking Bad. Interestingly, they’re both AMC originals.

It must have worked: MSU 20 USC 17.

You know, it’s funny that you’d assume that: I’m not a Michigan man, and the Wolverines are far, far, far from being “my team.”

I have mixed feelings about the case. I think there’s a few things going on. One, if Rodriguez, et al. broke rules, then there are penalties, and that’s how it will go down. Second, I think the Free Press thought they had a “Michigan story” or a “Rodriguez story,” but they really had a national story — college football players practice and prepare like it is a full time job, everywhere. This isn’t to say that maybe it was worse at Michigan, but I think Chait has a point when he said that the better view would have been to at least figure out what was going on at Ohio State, Florida, etc.

Yet, I still agree that “everybody is doing it” is a terrible defense. And yet further if the NCAA has been winking and nodding at this, across the football spectrum, then it makes it more difficult for the NCAA or anyone else to single out one particular program.

I think the larger issue is the problem of calling the kids “student-athletes” when they are employees of mulit-million dollar businesses. You put on a 20 hour “cap,” call everything else “voluntary,” and try to have it both ways: put out a professional product but operate under the theory that it is just a glorified hobby for these kids.

In any event, I don’t really care what happens to Michigan or Rodriguez, qua them. I do care about the practice-time limits, how every major program blows through them with the old adage “workouts are non-mandatory, but so is playing time.” And if Rodriguez and co. really did just bust through the rules (it is as yet ambiguous, we have reports coming out), then I am pretty confident Rodriguez will be out of a job.

Finally, I posted the Chait thing because I thought it was funny, and it was pretty evident that the Deadspin person didn’t grasp Chait’s initial point. I pointed out that he’s a Michigan guy so take what he says with a grain of salt. We’re all big enough to figure out who or what we think went on. Indeed, I think I generally have been pretty harsh on the view that if Rodriguez broke rules he really has little he can say, as the “everybody is doing it” defense won’t get him home. That doesn’t mean there are not larger themes.

At the end of the day, it’s a blog and I write about things I find interesting. I’ve dumped all of these thoughts into posts entitled either “Michigan…” (only one) and a couple in “Smart Notes” which covers whatever I find interesting that day.

I just think this is a very fascinating story, with many currents, covering journalism, the student-athlete distinction or disharmony, Rodriguez’s tumultuous tenure at Michigan where nothing has seemed to go right, the expectations of players across the country, and whether the NCAA has sat idly by on this story, and whether it has any moral authority to prosecute now. I believe both that rules are rules, and that it is difficult to make a judgment without the full set of facts. Beyond that, I have no idea how it will turn out.