I just discovered Reddit. I am a luddite. Here’s the Reddit Version of MSU’s Offensive Performance this season.

During fall camp, it was concerning that we had very little history to compare Maxwell against. It made me a bit edgy as a Michigan State blogger.

But the coaches were all, it’s cool man.

The Le’Veon hurdled that dude and MSU beat Boise State. And most fans managed to overlook some pretty serious flaws.

MSU went on to kick CMU in the nads 41-7 and all was well until Notre Dame.

And now Maxwell couldn’t throw…

The receivers can’t catch because the ball is too slippery.

And the whole offense was generally on fire.

Aaron Burbridge started against Indiana and things improved.

But things did not improve by a lot and fans spent the bulk of the season discontent with the offense.

It got better as the season went on and finally kind of coalesced into this:

And now the Offensive Minds have set to work for 2013 and we remain hopeful.

The end.

Most Darren Rovell tweets make you dumber. This one does not, just sadder.

A booster’s lawyer once called @davebrandonad to ask how much it would cost to be entombed in the Michigan Stadium tunnel. Answer? $10M

— darren rovell (@darrenrovell) November 9, 2012

Ed: Dave Brandon actually responded on Twitter. I C&P his reply below. He says it was a letter vs a call and that he didn't reply. I don't think this invalidates the post, but in the interest of truth, there's that.

Rich people are weird. Very weird. Don't believe me, give the Great Gatsby a read or listen to a Kevin Smith podcast. I cannot imagine the thought process that goes into inquiring such a thing. No really, try to work through it logically and see if you can come up with a reasonable train of thought in which you're ok with being laid to rest underneath the tunnel into your stadium of choice. C'mon man if Bo didn't get that "honor" you sure as shit don't deserve it.

There were two things that bothered me about Brandon's answer. The first, is that 10 million dollars isn't anywhere near a high enough number to make sure that this guy didn't actually try to do it.

The second and much more disturbing, is that in College Athletics, all things are apparently for sale. Not in an obvious NFL kind of way in which you're going to get nickel and dimed throughout your gameday experience. It's much more subtle, in the way of donations and fundraisers, opportunities to meet the team for a 200 dollar donation. "We're going to raise your ticket prices through a mandatory donation." The definition of a donation typically includes the words "gift" and "benefit", neither of those words have a place in the NCAA business model.

The relationship between the NCAA,the business of making money and educating student-athletes has become increasingly fuzzy in recent years. Not surprisingly, that fuzziness has increased alongside with the increased TV contracts. Remember when not every game was on TV? Me neither. So you have these weird situations that crop up where everyone leaves the Big East, so the Big East gobbles up San Diego State so they still have a product for Saturdays. UConn vs San Diego State for all the marbles! Or we don't pay athletes because they've earned a scholarship and we make damn sure that they don't see a dime off the video games and jerseys attached to their likeness. I'm sure everyone buys a Le'Veon Bell jersey this year because it's a popular number that everyone likes. In fact the only people in the world guaranteed not to make money off of Le'Veon Bell's jersey are Le'Veon Bell and his family. 

Here's the thing that really matters. Tom Lewand would laugh that Michigan fan off the phone because he doesn't need to bury dead people in the tunnel of Ford Field to make money. The goal of the NFL is to make money. They do so on gameday, through TV contracts and through brilliant merchandising. Because that objective is clear, we don't end up with these goofy-ass scenarios where the NCAA pretends to give a shit about the student-athlete because it needs to protect it's free labor.

If a school can't make money in athletics it shouldn't keep overspending it's budget. At a time where educational funding is as hardscrabble as it has been in a long time, it's flatly irresponsible for schools to keep asking for more money and then turning around and spending it on the Football Arms Race. When you borrow General Fund money to support your athletics department, you're missing the point for your students and your unpaid athletes.

Dear NCAA, the United States is a safe place. One of the safest in the world for a group of people who just want to make a few hundred million bucks. You could focus on making all of your members profitable and allow the dollars to stay in education instead of supporting another losing season at Eastern Michigan. You can make sure that Dave Brandon can handle a Michigan Stadium Entombment Request with some dignity and he can politely respond that "We're doing well enough at Michigan that we don't need to bury people here."

If the NCAA doesn't watch it, it might just be able to help students and athletes by dropping the notion of serving the student-athlete.

Travis Jackson went down in the first half of the Ohio State game and with him any hope of a run game between the tackles this year. Drive charting the last two games since is not something I have time for, but it’s obvious to me that the interior run game has descended back into 2011 levels. This isn’t a sign of a terrible Offensive Line, there just isn’t an offensive line in the Big Ten that could take the loss of two full-year returning starters in Jackson and Fonoti and not struggle afterwards.

The good news is that an offensive identity is emerging. The bad news is that Coach “Run the ball and stop the run” Dantonio is probably not going to like it. MSU looks to have a legitimate offense in their no-huddle, dink and dunk offense.

In all of the games where MSU gets behind, they resort to a no-huddle, 5 WR/4WR and Bell passing look. AND THEY PROCEED TO MOVE THE BALL. When asked why they moved away from this look in the Notre Dame game Dantonio replied:

"I felt like we needed to change the tempo on the third quarter, which we did," he said. "From my perspective, I felt like we should probably have changed back and went with a more traditional offense after that, at least one or two more times. We sort of stayed in that mode too long. … We kept trying to force the issue instead of doing it more the conventional way.”

The conventional way? The conventional way is to have a QB who can run like Denard Robinson, Braxton Miller, Nathan Scheelhasse, MarQuies Gray, Kain Colter and T-Magic. Pocket passers are unconventional in college football. The rest of the pocket passers all run spread offenses, so playing pro-style football is decidedly unconventional these days. Who runs a pro-style offense anymore in CFB? Alabama? Central Michigan? MSU fans should all give Mark Dantonio a hug and tell him it’s ok to throw 65 percent of the time if that’s what wins games.

At the end of the Boise State game, Andrew Maxwell had 0 TD’s and 3 picks, only one of which was a terrible throw and even that came with 7 seconds left in the half. At the close of yesterday, Maxwell had 6 TDs and 0 picks in the other five games of the season. If MSU can move the ball in a five wide hurry up look three or four times a game, Maxwell has earned the right to run that offense. More importantly he seems to have the mental stuffin’s to do the job.

There’s gold in mixing two or three heavy passing quick series into the first half before MSU is down significant points. If MSU can pick up 7-10 points off of three no-huddle series in the first half that would lower significantly the odds of having to come from behind.

The offensive identity has emerged. It’s just that it’s come out the anti-Dantonio. We’ll see how he handles it.

Apologies for the light posting this week. Life is getting in the way of blogging. However, I'm reading Mike Leach's "Swing Your Sword" and it is absolutely a fascinating book. Leach is a bit clunky as a writer, but I love his approach to solving problems. It's an entertaining and poignant book by a man who is incidentally entertaining.

Kentucky bought won the national title last night. Don't make the poor maintenance dude get up into the rafters and hang that up, he's going to have to take it down by the end of the week. 

Back tomorrow with a X's and O's type post, my favorite kind.

Movin' right along in search of good times and good news,
With good friends you can't lose,
This could become a habit!
Opportunity knocks once let's reach out and grab it (yeah!),
Together we'll nab it,
We'll hitchhike, bus or yellow cab it!
(Cab it?)

Welcome to our new home. This has been a project a few months in the thinking and a few weeks in the doing. The idea to move to an independent website was actually fourth on my offseason “to-do” list. Items One, Two and Three are as of yet untouched. I wanted to move to an independent website for a few reasons which I’ll bore you with after we get you settled.

Getting Settled

There are a few ways that you can get involved with the site right away.

Register to become a member of the site

Update: I'm a crappy salesman. Registering for the site gets you the ability to post in the forums. Also, if you're interested in being a contributor it'll be a must. It’s free. We keep our data collection to a minimum. E-mail,username, password and display name are all that are required. We will not sell your personal information to anyone, ever. I’m still working on a Privacy Policy, but some things can wait until summer. If you’re really worried about me misusing your information hit the ‘Contact Us’ e-mail up in the menu and let me know about it.

Update your RSS feed

The RSS subscription process is a bit different than it was on the old site. To subscribe here, you click on the RSS button next to where the blog says “With This Shield Or Upon It…”. This will take you to a pop-up screen. Copy and Paste that address into your RSS reader of choice. Or just use this link: http://www.shawlanespartans.com/DesktopModules/LiveBlog/Handlers/Syndication.ashx?mid=497&PortalId=0&tid=56

Update #2: Some people have reported that the RSS feed looks weird when click to subscribe in Chrome. If it does try to paste the address bar info into your RSS reader anyway. If that doesn't work, flip me an e-mail.

Follow the Shaw Lane Spartans Twitter Account

My kids are adorable little koala bears(cute from a distance, but might kill you up close), but that’s not what you want to read about when you sign up for my twitter feed. If you want straight unadulterated(my heart says steamy, but not really) Spartan talk, follow us on Twitter at our new account. We’ll keep the personal chatter to a minimum there.

We have a Facebook Page too

You can find it at this link. I have my own opinions of facebook, but lots of people still use it. And if everyone told me to jump off a bridge, I may well do it.

To Bookmark this Page

- In Windows, hit Ctrl + D to add this page to your bookmarks.

- On an Apple, you hit ⌘ + D to add this page to your bookmarks.

Interested in becoming a Contributor?

Send me an e-mail. There are plans in the works to make simple blogging something everyone can do just by registering for an account, but for now I’m keeping things tightened down a bit. I am on the look for daily contributors, subject matter contributors and the occasional poster who can kill a post but is a very important person in real life. If you think this is you, hit me at the e-mail link above.

Why make the jump?

First, the Blogger platform, it’s rigid and doesn’t lend itself well to true user interaction, the format is very much “I blog, you react or don’t.”. I wanted to move to a platform that encouraged more user interaction and this website gives us that opportunity. Adding contributors is easy to do administratively and we have created a forum for people to talk about MSU, sports or whatever they want. The best part, we’ve barely scratched the surface of what this new framework allows for us. There are hundreds of thousands of ways we can modify the site to allow for better user interaction.

Second, there’s something to be said for the idea that any content uploaded to this site belongs to it’s proprietors and isn’t sitting out somewhere in the Google Cloud. It’ll end up in the Google cloud anyway, but there’s something comforting about knowing that the modicum of control I have over what happens to this site and it’s content are solely in my less technically competent but more concerned hands than the Google in the Sky.

Finally, here comes the hubris. I just wanted to try my own hand at a site. As many of you either know or have surmised, I’m a web developer by day and a blogger by night, there’s nothing technically challenging about putting a site like this one together. I spend lots of time assisting people with their data-driven analytics and trying to make the green profit bars bigger than the red expenditure ones, it’s nice to work on a site that’s just for MSU Sports Blogging. There’s not mountains of dollars to be made, it’s a sports blog for crying out loud.

So that’s it. Tomorrow, it’s back to pumping out content instead of site notes, announcements, etc. As for the future here, expect more deep dive football content in the summer and fall. That’s going to be the centerpiece of the blog going forward. The goal of this new site though is to be an excellent MSU Sports community that happens to have picture pages and deep-dive football analysis on the blog. Thanks for your readership so far and I look forward to building this site with all of you.

Go Green,

Jim