You know how I know you're Michigan? | by Pat

Quoth Michigan athletic director Bill Martin last week at a Michigan golf charity event about the Notre Dame-Michigan series:

"It's the highest-rated television preseason game in college football," Martin said. "Those are the two winningest programs in college football history. It's the game that all of our fans want and all of the Notre Dame fans want. It's hard to drop that series. They don't want to drop it, I don't want to drop it; I want to simply fine-tune it a little bit. We've been talking about taking off an odd number of years so we can accomplish that (schedule maneuvering), but then that doesn't do what they want,"

This could be like the first conversation of three conversations that leads to Michigan dropping Notre Dame.

Like...there's this statement, and then in a year it's like, "Oh you know, I kinda wanna, ya know, get that contract extension worked out, but I think I might want to try playing other teams". And then there's the big, "Oh, yeah, we're dropping ND now."

So Michigan wants to change the schedule with the Irish so they don't play both ND and Ohio State at home in the same season. But ND doesn't want to switch because that means playing both Michigan and Southern Cal at home in the same season (and probably more importantly, both on the road in the same season). The current ND-UM series contract runs out in 2011. It will be interesting to see who flinches first in the game of scheduling chicken.