Last Monday Of July...Two A Days Have Begun!!!

Last Monday of July and Football players have reported for pre-season camp.  4 weeks of practice leading up to the first game. 

Wojo interviewed DB for the DetNews.  You can read it all here, but if you don't have the time or just want the juicy stuff, a few excerpts:

Q: You’ve said 7-6 is unacceptable, so the perception by some is that Hoke’s job is on the line this season. What’s your response to that?

A: It’s not. Every football coach in America lives under enormous pressure, so I don’t need to apply any more. We’re the winningest program in the history of college football, we know what the expectations of our fan base is. Nobody has to tell Brady that. And I have all the confidence in the world that he’s bringing in the right kids, that he continues to do the right thing in terms of getting his staff lined up. I’m convinced we’re heading to a very, very good place.

Q: The regents’ vote was viewed by some as a shot across your bow. Did you take it that way?

A: No. No. If I took things like that personally, I couldn’t function in this job. You know what, I’m happy to accept their decision and move on. We can’t always do everything we want to do.

Q: How much pushback do you get from older Michigan fans and alums?

A: I don’t get nearly as much as you might think. I don’t pay a lot of attention to the social media stuff because I don’t know who those people are and what their motives are. You can’t be in this job and do a litmus test with every decision and find out what’s the most popular thing

Q: How did that happen, two straight trips to Michigan State?

A: There’s no conspiracy, although people want to think that. There’s a computer firm in Chicago and the Big Ten has this algorithm, and you plug in all the variables and the computer spits out what’s do-able.

They sent me the schedule and I called and said, ‘Is this some kind of mistake? Have you people lost your mind?’ Well, then you dig a little deeper, and Minnesota’s coming here two years in a row and they’re not too happy. Everybody is a little bit sore about something, and that was our thing to be sore about

Q: Michigan has a streak of 251 straight games of 100,000-plus attendance. Are you concerned that could end this season?

A: No. That’s why we’re marketing tickets. We’ve had a little slippage in our season tickets, but not a lot. We lost about 1.5 percent, only a little bit more than we normally have.

Our season-holder ticket base is predominantly fine. The difficulty we have is with our student section. It went from just under 20,000 last year, to we’re projecting around 12,000. That creates capacity in the seats above the student section, but we don’t want to sell those as season tickets because we have a strong feeling next year (the demand) is going to be different.

We’ve heard from the students, and No. 1, they’re always impacted by the momentum of the team, so 7-6 didn’t help. They’re clearly impacted by strength of schedule. And the third thing is, last year we implemented general admission seating and they hated it.

In an effort to try to solve a problem – they’re either arriving late, or some games we had 5,000-7,000 no-shows – we found out what other stadiums were doing, and they were all doing general admission. It was an incentive to get students there earlier, to get a better seat.

Big Ten Media Days - Are in Full Swing in Chicago.....You can check out a link to that here and here.

There's A New President In Town - And you can read about what he has to think here...

And Finally:

Here's what Hail looks like when enough falls that you can shovel it.  Happened Sunday Afternoon in White Lake...We camped out in the Tiki Bar (which survived!) and we we're getting pelted with ricochets!!!  Wild Storm...