Thoughts for the Day, December 11, 2025: Sad
Sad
Sad is the word I keep hearing from friends and in my head as more information surfaces about the firing of Sherrone Moore as U of M’s football coach and his subsequent arrest.
I struggle with trying to understand the “why’ of it all. Why throw a promising career away? Why destroy your family? Why disappoint the players who look up to you? The “whys” go on and on and the public will never know all the answers and nor should we. This is a personal matter that is now national news.
Tomorrow is going to be a media frenzy if Moore is arraigned as expected. More information will come to light. Questions will be asked to everyone associated with Moore, especially Athletic Director Warde Manuel. Players will be asked about what they knew and whether they will be staying at Michigan or entering the transfer portal. ADs around the country will be worrying about whether U of M will try to kidnap their prize coach out from under them.
This story will not go away, any more than the firing of former MSU head football coach Mel Tucker has gone away for MSU.
It is sad story that will not have a happy ending.
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We got hit in the face with a maize and blue shovel. We shouldn’t be surprised.
Here are excerpts from Mitch’s column today. No one is above anything.
If you haven’t learned that by now in the new world of college football, learn it today. Schools aren’t above bad behavior. Players aren’t above bad behavior. Coaches aren’t above bad behavior.
The only surprise left is that anyone is surprised at anything, anymore.
The sudden firing of coach Sherrone Moore — who less than two years ago was being celebrated as the right man at the right time — only proves that what you see and what you get can be two different things in college sports today.
Moore was characterized as a strong-willed, disciplined young leader, who in his introductory press conference said, “I coach hard, but I love harder.”
That once admirable statement will now become a punchline…
Or maybe it’s just a shock to folks who still believed that being the leader of a major college team implied responsibility, decorum, self-discipline and role-model behavior. Silly us. No one is above anything.
Now, it must be said that, as of this writing, no one has heard Moore’s side of the story….But Moore’s side will eventually be forthcoming. And I’m guessing it won’t match Michigan’s….we all should wait until both sides have clearly stated their cases.
In the interim, the lesson here is simple: Don’t brag and don’t gloat. Because your school could be next….There are no universities above any behavior. ….No one is above anything. No school. No team. No player. Not anymore.
If Moore did what the school announced he was fired for, he would only join a long list of coaches — including, but not limited to Bobby Petrino at Arkansas, Rick Pitino at Louisville, Hugh Freeze at Ole Miss and even Rich Rodriguez (who used to have Moore’s job at U-M) at Arizona — all of whom were accused of sexual misconduct on the job.
It’s clearly the low country for men, with mostly good behavior but too often bad. It’s a tapestry of the Jerry Sandusky abuse at Penn State, a hazing scandal at Northwestern and accusations of players betting on their own action at Iowa and Iowa State and MSU had 14 wins in 2023 and 2024…vacated for recruiting violations. Michigan, with Moore sitting in a jail cell Wednesday evening, just scribbled its name back on the list.
….So cynical has college football become that people are already whispering that perhaps this was a good thing for Michigan after Moore’s eight losses in two seasons. Others are murmuring that it’s open season on Michigan’s stars —such as freshman quarterback Bryce Underwood-- to be wooed away by other schools and their NIL money.
….What we do know is that none of this should surprise you. No one is above anything. The sooner we accept that, the sooner we’ll stop feeling like we just got hit in the face with a maize-and-blue shovel.
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Pirates of the Caribbean-Captain Jack Sparrow is alive and well.
Excerpts from Mary Geddry’s Substack Blog.
Good morning! The country woke up today acting less like a constitutional democracy and more like a particularly wealthy pirate guild with a central bank…. The Guardian’s live blog captured the vibe perfectly: a U.S. helicopter landing on a sanctioned tanker off Venezuela’s coast, FBI agents and the Coast Guard pouring out like the world’s least relatable action movie, and Pam Bondi uploading the raw footage to X as if the Justice Department had decided to pivot into content creation, followed minutes later by DHS releasing its own hype reel, complete with LL Cool J, just in case anyone missed the point.
Trump, asked about ownership of the ship, said only: “We’ve just seized a tanker… the largest one ever seized actually,” and then, when pressed about what happens to the oil, delivered the line that will live forever in the annals of imperial honesty: “I assume we’re going to keep the oil.” In past eras, presidents at least pretended to respect maritime law; today we get the rhetorical equivalent of Captain Jack Sparrow in a red tie.
The White House insists that everything is under control, that this is merely a maritime enforcement action, that no one should use the word blockade because that would imply something irreversible. But Reuters is already noting that Venezuela exported more than 900,000 barrels a day last month, and experts are openly saying that going after oil shipments marks a fundamentally new phase. Seize a tanker once and the markets twitch; seize another and the region recalibrates; seize a third and the world wakes up one morning to discover that a naval blockade has begun without a single vote in Congress or a single honest briefing to the American public. Blockades are acts of war, even when no one wants to say the word. Sometimes especially then.
Trump has spent months flooding the waters around Venezuela with U.S. firepower, an aircraft carrier, fighter jets, guided-missile destroyers, and the biggest naval deployment in the region since the Cuban Missile Crisis. More than twenty airstrikes have been carried out on so-called drug boats, killing over eighty people, many of them in murky, contested circumstances that human rights experts warn may already constitute war crimes. And now, with this tanker seizure, the pattern completes itself like the final click of a long-set trap. The administration is no longer merely rattling sabers at Nicolás Maduro; it is testing how far it can go, how violently it can squeeze Venezuela’s economy, before anyone stops it.
What we are witnessing now feels like a prelude, the overture to something darker that has not yet been acknowledged aloud. A president obsessed with oil, with dominance, with theatrics, and with punitive spectacle has now opened the door to a conflict that could swallow tens of thousands of lives. And I sit here, at my desk, reading the statements and the careful denials and the evasions, and all I can feel is that old familiar tightening in my throat.
Tonight, I am sick to my stomach not because I fear what Venezuela might do, but because I fear what my own country already has done and plans to keep doing. A tanker seized here, a strike justified there, a doctrine of hemispheric dominance spelled out in bureaucratic prose. The distance between “enforcement action” and invasion is far smaller than the government wants you to believe. And once the machinery of war begins to move, it rarely remembers how to stop for the sake of someone else’s children, or our own.
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This is scarry
From the NY Times today; Over the past 35 years the Navy has commissioned more than half a dozen new kinds of ships, from small combat vessels to large destroyers. Nearly all of them have flopped, running billions of dollars over budget and years behind schedule and failing to perform as promised, leaving the military reliant on a fleet designed largely in the Reagan era.
Recent efforts to build fighter and bomber aircraft have similarly disappointed. It takes, on average, 12 years to produce a war-ready jet, ship or tank, and the Air Force is retiring planes faster than it can replace them. America’s defense industry, like so much of the economy, has lost the ability to build quickly and effectively.
That has left the United States at risk of falling behind China, which has embarked on one of the biggest peacetime military expansions in history. Beijing now operates the world’s largest naval force, with over 370 warships compared to America’s 296. It has several types of ship-killing hypersonic missiles, while the United States has deployed none. Most of all, China is making all this at speed: It currently produces more than three warships for every one the United States makes, and nearly 200 commercial ships for every American boat.
Rebuilding America’s defense industrial base is crucial to preventing wars from starting and winning them if they do. If the United States can’t make what it needs to prevail in a long war — one lasting months or years — its adversaries are more likely to attack. As the military maxim goes: Industrial might is deterrence.
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Quote of the Day: Trump, asked about ownership of the ship, said only: “We’ve just seized a tanker… the largest one ever seized actually,” and then, when pressed about what happens to the oil, delivered the line that will live forever in the annals of imperial honesty: “I assume we’re going to keep the oil.”
Orchid of the Day: The Detroit Red Wings. With their win last night, they took over first place in the Atlanta Division of the Eastern Conference.
Onion of the Day: No Onion today
Question of Day: Did you have any idea that China’s naval force was much bigger than the U.S.? It was news to me.
Lyrics of the Day: Once bitten and twice shy
I keep my distance, but you still catch my eye
Tell me, baby, do you recognize me?
Well, it’s been a year, it doesn’t surprise me
“Happy Christmas,” I wrapped it up and sent it
With a note saying, “I love you,” I meant it
Now I know what a fool I’ve been
But if you kiss me now, I know you’d fool me again
If you think you know the answer, post your response in the comment section of the blog.
Lyrics of the Day for December 10, 2025. Jingle Bells
Video of the Day: José Feliciano - Feliz Navidad with Daryl Hall (Live From Daryl’s House)
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