In addition to yesterday’s
winners, the following winners have been announced today:

And now for the Best Big 10 Blog Award. Nominees:

Best Big Ten Blog

And the winner is . . .

Mighty, mighty MGoBlog. Brian flexed Big Ten muscle in all facets of the game this season. Let game speak for game: Brian, like Ted Ginn, did everything:

–The Blogpoll
–Unverified Voracity
–Upon Further Review, THE comprehensive review of anything and everything that happened on the field to a single team on a fall Saturday.
–The phrase “Hennebriated.”

Span, scope, unabashed passion, reptilian cool…if it all weren’t put together with the precision of an engineer’s hand, we’d identify it as early adulthood-onset schizophrenia. The numbers, gadgetry and formatting all belie someone we identify not just as an archetypical football fan, but as the Platonic Ideal of the Big Ten Fan: history-haunted, seemingly speaking from beneath a seamless sky of lead-grey clouds in alternating fits of whimsy and fury, vacillating between a traditionalist’s rage for order and the logician’s cry for pure reason.

(We’re not lying. We really think of most Big Ten fans in exactly that type of flowery language. Complex creatures, all of ‘em.)

Most importantly: Brian, even when he’s not taking it personally, takes it personally. This differentiates him from journalist, blogger, or simple observer. MGoBlog is ostensibly about Michigan sports, but is ultimately the story of someone blessed with an outsized brain matched only by his outsized passion, which often puts aforementioned brain in check via gloriously constructed overrides against Notre Dame, the NCAA, Ohio State, and anyone else who dares short-circuit the suit of intellectual armor Brian wears against his rage.

Who else could go from this:

To Eleven Swans, a eulogy for Bo Schembechler on the eve of the Michigan/OSU game that began with Columbus, Ohio and ended up somewhere between Armageddon and the afterlife? (MGo’s having some archive problems. As soon as they’re resolved, we excerpt.)

Brian, thank you for writing. We still find you horribly, admirably partisan. And that has been a gift to us all. Congrats.