Well, this was inevitable. In response to the Michigan academic scandal series, Brian at MGoBlog fights back the only way he knows how: taking shots at Notre Dame to arbitrarily shift the focus away from his own dirty program. His defense has become so formulaic and predictable that he didn't even bother writing a new smear. He just recycled his ND bashing, verbatim, from the time when Jim Harbaugh publicly accused Michigan of funneling players into bullshit majors.

You remember… it's the one where he accuses ND of being just as bad as UM by erroneously claiming that something like half of our team is enrolled in the business school. Rather than taking the time to respond again to the exact same article, I'm just going to copy and paste my old reply:

Before I tackle the logic, I’m going to tackle the math. Brian asserts that “about half the team is in the Mendoza School of business.” I don’t know if this statement was intentionally misleading or if Brian just sucks at math, but I wouldn’t rule out either possibility. If you divide the number of football players enrolled in the business school (31) by the number of players on the team (99), the actual ratio comes out to 31%, which is a far cry from “about half.” This correction obviously affects Brian’s subsequent claim that “a randomly selected football player is three times more likely to be enrolled in Mendoza than a non-football player.” In reality, a randomly selected football player is 1.7 times (31% / 18%) more likely to be enrolled in Mendoza than a non-football player. Sure, there’s a small variance, but does Brian actually expect a sample of less than 100 to precisely mirror the attributes of a population whose size exceeds 8,000?! Someone needs to tell Mr. Cook that just because 19% of a large population exhibits some trait, that doesn’t mean that precisely 19% of any small sample of that population will exhibit that trait. Come on Brian, this is high school level statistics. Quite frankly, I’m surprised that the variance isn’t even higher, considering the homogeneous nature of the sample population.

Now, if you want to talk about a statistically significant difference, let’s talk about the University of Michigan. Less than 1% of Michigan’s student body is enrolled in general studies, yet nearly every single football player who declares a major at all ends up there. In fact, over 10% of the students enrolled in general studies are football players. This is deplorable, and I have no idea how it can be compared to Notre Dame’s slightly above-average enrollment in the business school.

OK, now let’s go after the logic. Let’s go ahead and disregard the last 2 paragraphs. In fact, let’s take it a step further. Let’s pretend that less than 1% of ND’s student body was enrolled in the business school, yet almost all of the football team flocked there. This fictional scenario still wouldn’t be comparable to UM’s general studies situation because business is a much, much, much, much, much, much, much, much, much more demanding major than general studies. Now, I’m not saying that business is hard. I would classify accounting and finance as medium difficulty, harder than liberal arts and easier than the sciences. Marketing and management, on the other hand, are very easy majors. However, as I pointed out in a prior post, general studies takes “easy” to a new level. Need we go over the quantitative reasoning requirement again? I mean come on! You’re required to convert degrees Fahrenheit to degrees Celsius… and they provide you with the conversion formula!!! Race & Ethnicity?! That one sounds like a real ball buster. If you can’t pass general studies then I doubt you’ve even discovered your thumbs yet. Say what you will about management and marketing, but the business school at ND provides you with at least some marketable skills. A degree in general studies constitutes mere recognition of the fact that you took a bunch of introductory courses from random subjects and never learned anything in-depth. Congratulations, and good luck finding a job converting Fahrenheit to Celsius, dumb-shit.

OK, back to the present. Brian did add one new sentence to his focus-shifting diatribe:

"Suffice it to say that guys with 6th to 8th grade reading levels apparently average a 3.5 at ND; they're probably not taking astrophysics."

First of all, I have no idea where he's getting the 6th to 8th grade reading level nonsense. Second of all, the 3.5 GPA is another prime example of Brian lying about numerical facts that are incredibly easy to verify. The ND football program average GPA has been at an all-time high under Weis… recently registering at 3.072. The previous all-time high was 2.911. So, not only has the ND football team not averaged a 3.5 recently… they have never, in 100 years of football, been even close. If you're going to make the argument that ND gives out easy A's to athletes just like Michigan, you should at least check your facts. The frequency with which Brian makes these errors leads me to believe that they aren't errors at all. I think he's just so desperate to shift the focus from Michigan's scandals to Notre Dame that he is just pulling numbers out of thin air to make his case.

Asshat of the decade is looking like a one-horse race right now.

UPDATE: More shenanigans from MGoAsshat….

Shifting the Focus to Notre Dame: "The only group of people dumb enough to believe you can take star athletes whose uninspiring high school GPAs are almost entirely fraudulent already, give them a full time job, and then get those star athletes to graduate without hijinks are dickwad Notre Dame fans driven mad by their program's 15 years of total irrelevancy."

KG Response: Pure vitriol and not worth responding to. Nothing of any substance in this paragraph. He's just trying to get people riled up about Notre Dame so they can debate how delusional ND fans are instead of how corrupt Michigan has become. Bottom line: intentionally off-topic.

Rationalization: "College football itself makes millions from the efforts of undercompensated individuals who would otherwise never attend college. It therefore has many responsibilities to those individuals, who it has trapped in a hypocritical system. One of these responsibilities is to, within reason, ease their academic passage so that they can attempt to use their standout skill to make a living."

KG Response: This is one part sad and two parts hilarious. Hey, we're the good guys here! We're looking out for these guys! We owe it to these kids to funnel them into classes where they learn how to use a day planner and fill out a calender. In fact, it is our RESPONSIBILITY TO EASE THEIR ACADEMIC PASSAGE! That way, when they don't graduate or make it into the NFL, they'll at least know how to write down "collect trash" in every box on their calendar for the rest of their lives.

I've seen a lot of crazy logic from Brian. His previous mind-blowing argument that ND's higher grad rate signifies lower academic integrity comes to mind. However, the notion that Michigan somehow OWES their players a fraudulent and useless academic experience really takes the cake. This guy is the biggest homer in the history of sport. He would blindly justify anything Michigan did to its players, and the sad part for Michigan athletes is, he's got a hell of a lot to blindly justify.