Today is the day: Varsity Blue is coming to an end. Starting Monday, yours truly, along with Paul and Formerly Anonymous, will join the world of MGoBlog.

VB started in the winter of 2005, primarily because I was tired of copy-and-pasting my preview of the Nebraska game onto various Michigan-related message boards. Over time, I eventually got my first link from MGoBlog (as I scouted an IM basketball game featuring various football players – and wrongly predicted Johnny Sears would blow up in 2007), added Paul as a writer/technical guy, moved from Blogspot to a self-hosted domain, spilled my guts about missing the days of 2006, and added Formerly Anonymous to the repertoire to blog about baseball. Along the way, Varsity Blue became the second-most popular Michigan blog out there, and one of the more popular college sports blogs in general. I couldn’t have done any of it without the readers, and I thank all of you for the support you’ve given me over the nearly 4 years of this site’s existence.

Paul & Tim at Penn State

Like most Michigan bloggers, I was inspired by Brian, and I’m certainly honored to join MGoBlog, but that doesn’t mean I’m not sad to leave VB. I hope to see some of this site’s readers follow us over to the mothership, and it’s been a fun, fun ride.

Posted under Blog News

The fans have spoken and have selected last year’s team MVP to get a push to become the second defensive player or all time to win the Heisman trophy. Only 31 votes separated the two players. The final was Brandon Graham 337 and Brandon Minor with 306. Congrats to both Brandons for getting to the finals and thanks to the readers who voted and commented.

Posted under Blog News, Football

My vacation is nearly complete (a hearty round of applause in the direction of Formerly Anonymous for rockin’ the weekend posting), but I’ll still be unavailable until tomorrow. Everything should start getting back to normal tomorrow, and the second round of the Heisman Campaign should be ready to get going over the weekend.

-T

Posted under Blog News

After a round of alpha testing, the Varsity Blue Forum is ready to go live. There are categories for the main topics we cover here on Varsity Blue, including Football, Basketball, Baseball, and recruiting. You can also hit up the general discussion and off-topic areas to talk about other things.

Check it out, start a thread or two, participate in a couple others, and hopefully this thing can get rockin’ and rollin’.

Also: don’t forget to listen to the WTKA remote at Spring Practice today, from 3-6 on 1050AM in Ann Arbor, or WTKA.com anywhere else.

Posted under Blog News

In ongoing effort to make Varsity Blue not only GREAT e-blog but also PLEASING site, Tim and me took in STRONG web design seminar on e-blogs.  VBe-B has new feature help no just for READERS but also for BROWSERS, no sugar coat… just our epinion.

Mailbag

Guys–

What makes new e-blog design so much better than old design? Love the analysis, you guys are awesome.

I’ll hang up and listen,

Barry

———

Barry- Great question! New design has following features:

• Layed out in a convinient, tabular way.
• New stylish, blinking, text based banner.
• High contrast, maize and blue color scheme.
• New scrolling marquee for important news at top of page!
• Awesome animated flame .gifs!
• Netscape 4.0 compliant!

We believe it is important to put STRONGEST content in position to MAKE IMPACT. New e-blog will help achieve this goal for ENTIRE SITE.

If you guys have any issues with the new site (I’ve heard there’s some problems in Mosaic), let me know in the comments. Also, if you know why the midi file I embedded isn’t playing, let me know. That’s a key feature that currently is working.

Posted under Blog News

I swear, I’m really trying to avoid doing these posts with any regularity.

• Ricky Barnum has sprained his ankle, and will miss a few spring practices to get wrist surgery. His wrist was (apparently) pretty damaged, and he was working through it before. While it sucks that he’s sustained another injury, at least it gave him the opportunity to get the wrist taken care of.
• Denard Robinson has claimed the 2nd-fastest 100m dash time in the country so far this year for high-schoolers. The incoming QB ran a 10.44 time, and expects to run in the 10.3s when track season gets underway in earnest. (Photo by Tom Ervin for the Miami Herald).
• Devin Gardner plans to publicly commit to Michigan either Thursday or Friday. He apparently did so silently at junior day, but wanted to finish out his basketball season before worrying about dealing with the press.
• Darryl Stonum has debunked the rumors that he’s intending to transfer from Michigan at the end of spring practice.
• SPRING GAME WOO GET AMPED.
• VB (Paul and Tim, at least) plans to be at todays 3:05 PM baseball game at the Fish. Feel free to say hello to us.

And, in site news: If you take a look at the top of the right sidebar, the subscription options have changed slightly. You can still subscribe via RSS, but there are now other possibilities. There is now an official VB Twitter account to which you can subscribe @VarsityBlue. You can subscribe via e-mail, which will inform you whenever there is a new front page post on Varsity Blue. And, perhaps what we’re most excited about, we’re going to start rolling out a VB Newsletter, which we’ll send out once a week (you can help us determine which day when you sign up), and will include a recap of the week’s action on Varsity Blue, along with a bit of information that may not have made it to the front page, and even a preview of what is coming in the next week. It might start out a little spartan in design (no pun intended), but we’ll be beefing it up in short order.

In other site news, we plan to debut a couple new features on VB in the coming weeks, though they’re not quite ready for public consumption yet. I’ll keep you posted when everything is ready to go live.

Posted under Baseball, Blog News, Football, Personnel, Recruiting, Spring Coverage

…because I’m pseudo/fully lazy.

Important games today:

• Michigan baseball home opener 3:05 EDT at Ray Fisher Stadium. The Wolverines take on IPFW. Paul and I will be in the house, so stop by and say hey.
• Michigan hockey in the CCHA semifinals against Alaska. Yost Built has 10 Things to Know about the Nanooks.
• Michigan lacrosse against Eastern Michigan in their CCLA conference opener. 8PM at Oosterbaan Fieldhouse. Come support an awesome club varsity team. $3/6 for students/non.

Hockey Sophomore Louie Caporusso has been named a finalist for the Hobey Baker award. Great honor for the young player, though his torrid goal pace from the beginning of the year didn’t hold up.

Michigan Sports Center has your first glimpse at the 2009 student football shirt. For the record, I don’t mind the slogan on the back, more as a reminder to those who wear them than as decoration for other people to see.

Saturday’s basketball game against Oklahoma will take place at 5:50 PM EDT. Don’t forget to check out last night’s victory post, and I’ll have your preview of the Sooners coming tomorrow.

Speaking of posting previews on the weekend and such, I know the semi-regular schedule around here has gravitated toward “hectic and random” of late, but it’s a fairly busy time, what with the basketball team in the Tournament and all. Once they bow out, the football-centric Varsity Blue you know and love should return.

Recruiting Update coming this afternoon.

Posted under Baseball, Basketball, Blog News, Hockey

Posting will be light-ish tonight, but a new recruting update will be posted this afternoon. Also check out the preview of Eastern Michigan baseball posted earlier today..

Tim and I will be at Ashley’s by 5am. Wish us luck.

Posted under Blog News

If you’re a particularly astute observer, you may have noticed the “Quick Links” box on the left sidebar has seen a few layoffs of late. That’s partially because of a bit of infrastructure redesign we’ve been working on for a little while. Everything that you’re used to accessing on Varsity Blue should still be around (if something’s not, let us know in the comments), but we’ve also added a couple more items.

The Michigan Class of 2009, Current Michigan Depth Chart, and Michigan Eligibility Chart are still around, but they’re now lumped together under one item called “Personnel HQ.” Soon, I’ll also be putting the finishing touches on the Eligibility Chart by Class, and that will fall under that category as well. The only thing that’s tricky to find is the 2009 Recruiting Board, which can be found on the Class of 2009 page, which is newly spruced up.

New to the site is the “About Varsity Blue” section, which gives a brief synopsis of how Varsity Blue came to be, and links to bio pages for each member of the VB staff. If you’d become accustomed to seeing an invite to follow Paul on Twitter in that left sidebar, fear not, as you can now find that information on his bio page. The same information for the other two of us can also be seen on our respective pages (Tim and FormerlyAnonymous).

The 2010 Recruiting Board is still linked on the left sidebar, and probably will be until around this time next year, after most members of the class sign with Michigan. There are also a few slight adjustments to the site’s design coming along a little further down the road, so be on the lookout for those. For now, feel free to check out some of the new pages and get a feel for the new structure.

If anything is broken, missing, in need of update, etc., or if you have a suggestion for something that you’d like to see, let us know in the comments of this post or the relevant page. I apologize for the abundance of links in this post, but I’m pretty excited to have people checking out all the new and/or updated content.

Posted under Blog News

Apologies for the lack of posting today, as I’m on the road. In the meantime, take a look at this uncharacteristically heartfelt (though characteristically well-written) basketball post by Dex at WLA, and Dylan’s Minnesota preview at UMhoops. My preview will probably be coming later this afternoon, so roll back around later tonight.

Posted under Blog News