EVA

Come on, man. Stanford was on a run of 5 straight losing seasons before Harbaugh got there, and had 7 or 8 out of 10 losing seasons at that point. That's a substantially different situation than Michigan finishing a game under .500. He built Stanford up from nothing. Whatever Michigan's problems are, they're all significantly less severe than "being Stanford." And he was clearly a winner right from the start there. In his first year, he took a 40-point dog into Top 5 USC's homefield and won. In 2009, the breakthrough year, he beat Oregon and USC (the infamous "What's your deal?" game). I think he also beat a little team you might know of, effectively ending their run of dominance in the series. I think you also have to give him a lot of credit for the success Stanford had after he left, as they were clearly just following the template he created and utilizing the players he recruited.

Thus far, A&M/WVU is everything I hoped it would be.

I bet you could go back to January 2007 and find the exact same sentiment being expressed regarding Saban to Bama. (Shit, I'm sure Neal McCready's infamous "Alabama Has Been Passed" article is archived somehwere.) I think that's worked out okay. Harbaugh has won everywhere he's been. I can't imagine why people would think things will go any differently at Michigan.

So I'm finally getting into season 2 of SLEEPY HOLLOW, two episodes thus far, and I haven't seen a drop-off so far. That said, I feel like coming up with a gimmick that makes Headless's face visible and allows him to have conversations with Katrina is a mistake. He was way more interesting as an unknowable force of mayhem and destruction. What are his feelings, his motivations? We can't know, he doesn't have a fucking head! Now we get to hear him piss and moan about Ichabod all damn day. But the Franklinstein monster kinda makes up for it. That is EXACTLY the sort of stupendously absurd stuff I signed up for with this show.

Brady Hoke must be a legendary moron to do as poorly as he did this year then. Wow. He was terrible at either evaluating or developing skill position players. Literally, the only difference maker he brought in his whole time there was the TE/WR Funchess. Everybody else has been a dud, serviceable player at best. They have no dynamic athletes on offense.

Harbaugh is a professional football coach. Let's not pretend he has a happy marriage to begin with.

In his first year at Stanford, he took a 40+ point underdog to LA and beat a Top 5 USC team.

If they don't get Harbaugh, the Michigan media is going to look like a bunch of fools. They're all covering it like its a done deal.

A few days ago I hit the point in the second half of the game where you get the "brand" ability that allows you to take enemies under control, and damn if that isn't incredibly fun, especially the "combat brand" ability. Going into a big shmozz with a ton of uruks and slowly turning it into a gang war is pretty crazy. There was a story mission where I had to carry a wounded woman out of a stronghold while under attack, and I could only imagine how frustrating that would be under normal circumstances. Fortunately, I was rolling with a posse of about 10 uruks who did a lot of work for me. I do wish your slave uruks were a little easier to direct outside of combat, as they tend to wander off if you travel without getting into combat too long. BUT I'm impressed that the game remembers all the random uruks you enslaved, even after you've been separated. There've been countless times where I've stumbled across one of my dudes just chilling somewhere, ready for me to give em the word.

Not sure how this slipped between the cracks, but HBO kicked off their marathon of the HD remaster of THE WIRE today. It does look weird on the full screen.

I'm game-to-game on the present day stuff. I liked the 1st person puzzle game in REVELATIONS. And even though I didn't like being ripped out of pirate times in 4, I did enjoy the hacking minigames a good bit. I don't really care for the ones where the present day stuff is just more of the same type of platforming but with way fewer abilities at your disposal.

It takes the violence from the Jackson movies to the next level. There's a lot of head exploding. And it's awesome.

A little thing that impresses me about MORDOR is how quickly it loads. You can jump into a game incredibly quickly, and the load time on fast travel (which was a joke in UNITY) is almost non-existent. That makes it a perfect "got 30 minutes or so to blow" game.

Their 7th loss came in the MW championship game. There's an exemption that protects 6-6 teams from missing out on a bowl because of that scenario. I want to say UCLA went to a bowl at 6-7 after losing the PAC-12 title game a few years back.

So for some reason I kicked off my holiday binge watching with the 1st season of Amazon's new show MOZART IN THE JUNGLE. It was...passable. But at only 10 half-hour episodes, by the time you realize it's never going to get much better than that, you're halfway through, so fuck it, you watch the whole thing. I kinda feel like it has the same problem as HOUSE OF CARDS, in that it's a TV show made by people with no experience making TV shows. Gael Garcia Bernal tries REAAAAALLLLYYY hard to elevate things when he gets a chance, though. Maybe too hard some times.

Colorado State has tabbed Georgia OC Mike Bobo to replace Jim McElwain. That's a weird one. It appears to be a done deal that Pitt will hire Pat Narduzzi, which is probably the biggest possible splash hire they could make.

Well, yeah. It was obvious from the beginning that he didn't really want to direct these movies. I don't know how much more clear he could've made that without saying it outright.

Old people. It's a free service, so it is inevitably the thing your parents get the most excited about when you introduce them to the world of Roku or Fire TV.

Every time I hear about Crackle, it makes me think of that Mitch Hedberg joke. "In Hollywood, it's all about who you know, and I know CRACKLE."

The Big 10 would secede from the NCAA before giving up Purdue for fucking Northern Illinois.

Don't see how that would've tracked anyway. Quill's mother said his father was composed of "pure light" not pure lard.

In other Pelini news, I urge you to seek out the transcript of his spectacularly profane and unprofessional final speech to his Nebraska team. It's probably not too late for Youngstown to back out of that deal...

The GOP has Hollywood shook.

Don't let James Franco win.

Going to reach back to a discussion that was going on in the Conference Championships thread re: the effect an expansion of the playoffs would have on the regular season. I said: Bill Thompson replied: Now CBS Sports reports: 2014 college football attendance lowest in 14 yearsTo act like college football's regular season is an unassailable instituation that will just keep on chugging along no matter what would be a grave mistake.