Turnovers and fouls nearly derailed a 23-point halftime lead, but No. 5 Indiana hung on to come away with an 88-81 win against No. 8 Minnesota.

Senior guard Jordan Hulls had 19 points and iced the game for IU with multiple trips to the line in the final minutes. Junior guard Victor Oladipo led IU with 20 points.

As has seemingly become routine in games this season, the game stayed close in the early going. IU controlled the board in the opening minutes, but 3-point jumpers by Minnesota’s Andre Hollins kept it even until other Gopher’s found their touch on layups.

IU responded by feeding the ball inside to sophomore forward Cody Zeller. Though he passed out to open teammates on several occasions, Zeller still scored 6 of IU’s first 14 points.

Minnesota pulled within a single point at 16-15 before one of IU’s customary scoring sprees began, starting with 10 straight IU points.

After an early miss, Hulls hit several 3-pointers, including one from several feet beyond the arc. He finished with four 3-pointers by halftime.

In other cases, the defense forced turnovers that bred quick offense for IU. At one point, Zeller reached out his long arm to steal a pass and start a fast break.

Moments later, Oladipo seemingly barreled through a Minnesota ball handler, emerging with the ball on his way to a score.

IU closed the half on an 36-14 run overall during the final 11:03 to enter the half leading 52-29.

Much as IU fed off its defense in the firs thalf, Minnesota took advantage of four IU turnovers early in the second period to cut its deficit to 13.

The game’s pace changed as the second half wore on as Minnesota dictated more half court sets. When IU had the ball, Minnesota often had a defender on the IU point guard before he reached half court.

The referees were more active as well, further slowing down the half. After only nine toal fouls called in the first half, it took just 6:54 to reach that mark in the second.

IU could not capitalize on its chances from the line, though, shooting 26-of-40 for the game, a regression after improved play on free throws.

This allowed Minnesota to continue to chip away at the lead. With 5:55 remaining, the Hoosier lead was down to 12. By the 2:48 mark, it was down to nine, single digits for the first time in just under 25 minutes.

A Minnesota steal threatened to make it a two-possession game before an Oladipo rebound and two timely free throws made it a 10-point game once again and appeared to ice the win for IU.

However, two more 3-pointers by the Gophers, including Hollins’ fifth, and several fouls against IU near the Minnesota basket sliced the lead all the way down to four.

Hulls hit one of two free throws, but a controversial foul call on IU with 19.5 seconds remaining allowed Minnesota to pull within three points. Free throws by Hulls and Watford finally iced the win for IU.

RALEIGH, N.C.—Coming into the 2012-13 college basketball season, preseason ACC favorite N.C. State had a motto for the year—“Our State”—in hopes of winning the ACC title over Triangle rivals Duke and North Carolina, who have maintained a firm grip on the conference crown for much of the past decade.

And on Saturday, it was the Wolfpack’s state. A deadly fastbreak attack paced by senior floor general Lorenzo Brown—who finished with 12 points and dished out all 13 of N.C. State’s assists in the game—combined with powerful inside forces Richard Howell and C.J. Leslie were too much for the shorthanded Blue Devils to overcome, as N.C. State earned the 84-76 victory.

“Their transition is what really won the game for them,” Duke head coach Mike Krzyzewski said. “And [Howell] is just a beast.”

Playing its first true road game of the year in a hostile environment of more than 19,000 Wolfpack fans and without senior forward Ryan Kelly, No. 1 Duke (15-1, 2-1 in the ACC) looked as if it was in position to take No. 20 N.C. State (14-2, 3-0 in the ACC) to the wire at half when it only trailed by two points.

From the onset of the second half, N.C. State looked poised to earn a signature conference win over the top team in the country by starting the half with a 8-2 run, owning the glass and forcing Duke to take difficult shots. From there, the Wolfpack had control the rest of the way.

“We drew some energy off our fans, no question about it,” Wolfpack head coach Mark Gottfried said. “Our guys played really hard, they knew this was a big deal. Our ability to finish defensive possessions with rebounds in the second half helped us. The best offense we could run was getting on the boards and scoring.”

Senior Richard Howell—a bruising 6-foot-9, 257-pound big man—punished Duke on the boards, grabbing 18 rebounds and scoring 16 points. Junior C.J. Leslie, his running mate in the frontcourt, showed why he was voted the preseason ACC Player of the Year—finishing with a game-high 25 points on 9-of-16 field goal shooting and 7-for-8 at the charity stripe. Making those stats even more impressive, Leslie was guarded by Mason Plumlee—Duke’s best player and National Player of the Year hopeful—for much of the contest.

“C.J. was unbelievable,” Gottfried said. “I think in the second half he made his mind up and down the stretch offensively he was nearly unguardable. He showed a lot of resilience just to keep attacking the rim.”

The Plumlee-Leslie matchup was arguably the most intriguing of the afternoon. Plumlee was able to muster 15 points and 11 rebounds against perhaps the most formidable froncourt he has faced this season.

Despite fighting admirably all game-long when N.C. State was often on the verge of pulling away in the second half, the Blue Devils could not catch the breaks it needed to keep its perfect record in tact. Senior guard Seth Curry was consistently clutch all day by hitting timely shots to keep Duke within arms reach of the Wolfpack for much of the day. The senior netted a team-high 22 points on 5-of-10 shooting from three-point range.

Unfortunately for Duke, Curry slipped on the court and was forced to leave the game with an ankle injury in the closing minutes of the game.

“[Curry] played well,” sophomore point guard Quinn Cook said. “He’s the best shooter in the country. He made it rough for their defense to guard him.”

Coming off the bench against the squad he nearly picked over Duke last May, freshman forward Amile Jefferson—who played well with 10 points and four rebounds in just nine minutes of action—fouled out of the game at the 8:07 mark with Duke down just 62-57.

Jefferson fouling out proved to be one of the turning points in the game. From that point on, Leslie and Howell continued to overwhelm Duke in the paint down the stretch, while the Wolfpack’s athletic fast break was able to finish when it needed to, allowing them to build a double-digit lead 67-57 with 7:07 left to play. To seal the victory, N.C. State held off the Blue Devils by converting from the free throw line as the game drew to an end.

Like Jefferson, junior guard Tyler Thornton—a defensive-orientated guard, who Krzyzewski used over starting freshman guard Rasheed Sulaimon for much of the second half—was riddled by foul trouble against a dynamic N.C. State backcourt, and fouled out in the closing seconds of the game.

“[N.C. State is] a great team,” said Cook, who finished with 17 points and seven assists. “They are very athletic. Purvis and Brown in transition are very tough to stop… They got going in the second half.”

With Kelly out of commission, the Blue Devils have struggled considerably. The team is just 4-5 when he is out of the lineup, dating back to last season.

Josh Hairston, who celebrated his 21st birthday today with his first start of the season in place of Kelly, finished with eight points and five rebounds.

“Amile and Josh played well,” Krzyzewski said. “We got 18 and 9 from them. They just don’t know the defense and execution of the offense as well as Ryan [Kelly]. We’re not a great team with Ryan, we’re a really good team, but we’re better than our parts when we have them all together.”

COLUMBUS — A win would have made Michigan the No. 1 team in the country for the first time since 1992.

A successful showing in Columbus would have made the Wolverines 17-0, their best start in program history.

Beating Ohio State would have given Michigan coach John Beilein his best start to a season as a coach anywhere, at any level.

Maybe most importantly, a win would have proved that the relatively untested Wolverines could compete with the best teams in the country on the road, and it could have made the upcoming gauntlet that is the Big Ten seem a little more manageable.

But in its biggest game of the season, on its biggest stage, No. 2 Michigan was outmatched, outplayed and beat up for most of the contest in a 56-53 loss to No. 15 Ohio State on Sunday.

Sophomore point guard Trey Burke, a Columbus native who grew up wanting to play for the Buckeyes, started the game off with a confident 3-pointer. This was the Michigan fans had seen all season — bold, strong and at times, cocky. This was expected.

The Wolverines not scoring for the next seven minutes and 44 seconds of game time was not. By the time freshman forward Glenn Robinson III hit Michigan’s second bucket, a 3-pointer, Michigan trailed 16-6. The Wolverines couldn’t move the ball against Ohio State’s physical perimeter defenders and struggled to get the ball even close to the key.

“This team — and (Ohio State coach Thad Matta’s) teams have always been this way — but this one, the perimeter defense in particular is exceptional,” Beilein said of the Buckeyes. “Why? They’ve been doing the same shell drills for two, three, four years. They really work at this and they are really good at it.”

Michigan’s swagger slowly evaporated — shots that were usually taken from deep weren’t taken, passes into the lane were timid and drives to the basket led to turnovers more often than not.

It all came down to turnovers: the Buckeyes capitalized by forcing 13 of them against a team that averages 9.3 a game. Michigan had nine in the first half alone, and ten minutes into the game, the Wolverines had more turnovers, seven, than points scored, six.

In five games different this year, the Wolverines have committed less than seven turnovers. On Sunday, they had seven less than 11 minutes into the game.

“They came out and beat us up a bit,” junior forward Tim Hardaway Jr. said. “We have to know how to control the pressure and play better.”

Michigan looked lost offensively in the first half, unsure of what to do against the contact and pressure of the home team. It scored just 22 points in the first half — a season low — and even that was after a 14-5 run to close the half.

All in all, starting the second half down 12 was pretty reasonable considering how poorly the game had started for the Wolverines.

Slowly, Michigan started to chip away in the second half. Cutting down on the turnovers helped — it committed just four in the second half — but it also started to crash the boards with a little more ferocity and to take some of those shots it was passing up earlier.

“In the second half, I think we came out the way we should have came out in the first half,” Burke said. “It was too late. It was two or three possessions too late.”

Going into the game, the big matchup was between Burke and Ohio State point guard Aaron Craft, who is regarded as one of the best defenders in the country. Burke played fine, ending with a team-high fifteen points, but he also had four turnovers to go along with just four assists. He wasn’t able to drive as well as usual, and Craft was in his face all night.

“Craft is as good as there is, as good as I’ve ever seen,” Beilein said. “He’s tremendous.”

Added Craft: “Any time you get to play against a great guy like (Burke), you have some incentive to go out and see what you can do. Our defense did what it needed to do today, and that really helped.”

Still, Michigan found other ways to score. Burke’s backup, freshman Spike Albrecht, contributed seven first-half points, and Hardaway contributed 12.

But Hardaway needed 15 shots to score those 12 points. Burke needed 13 shots to score his 15 points. Freshman forward Nik Stauskas, who averages almost 14 points a game, didn’t score.

As a team, the Wolverines made less than 40 percent of their shots, in a season where they average more than the 50 percent from the floor.

“We had five freshman play almost double-digit minutes, and they did not have a freshman see the floor,” Beilein said. “It’s adversity. At this time of the year, we are seeing our first top-level teams on the road.”

It was close at the end. Michigan got to within one point with more than six minutes left in the game. Then, a fast break, one-handed alley-oop by Ohio State forward Sam Thomson lit the crowd on fire. Robinson, calmly, sank a three at the other end to tie the game.

But Buckeye forward Deshaun Thomas, who led all scorers with 20 points, responded with a dunk of his own at the other end to put Ohio State back in the lead, and that was the closest Michigan got.

Even to the bitter end, Michigan never stopped clawing. Burke had the ball with a chance to win the game, down two with 20 seconds left. He shot a deep three — again, with Craft in his face — as the shot clock was winding down and eight seconds left in the game. The shot went halfway in, but spun and rattled out. Ohio State made its free throws down the stretch to seal the game.

Burke and the Wolverines had a chance at the end, in a game that looked out of hand from the beginning, but couldn’t finish in their quest for the nation’s top spot.

The lifespan of a cup of coffee epitomizes Judd Apatow’s “This Is 40.” First, it’s too hot: overambitious, hit-or-miss humor nested in Viagra jokes and incredible spouse dynamics. Next, it’s just right: Strong performances emerge and the title validates. Last, after sitting paralyzed for two hours, it’s a cool stool sample: Drawn-out sequences get lost in a scrawling script that begs for sympathy. The laughs are there but devoid of variety and form.

Apatow is a predictable filmmaker. Not unlike Dane Cook — the Ryan Reynolds of standup — Apatow makes self-respecting funnies angled for a millennial audience. Biggest concern? Longevity. His stamina will continue to be challenged. But guess what: “Predictable” can be a good thing. You know what you ordered when one of his films open. “This Is 40” is no exception. With recycled actors and congruent plot frameworks, his semi-sequel scores through the uprights, but never quite reaches the end zone.

Congratulate Pete and Debbie (played by Paul Rudd and Leslie Mann, “Knocked Up”). Unsurprisingly, they are approaching the 40-year mark. In Debbie’s mind, she’s turning 38 again, not 40. This is further backed during a scene at the gynecologist when two nurses inquire why her birth year climbs higher each visit. Pete, however, remains honest to his Tour de France biking club jerseys and his covert cupcake fetish. They loosely make a pact to exercise daily, revamp diets and rectify relationships with their respective fathers (Albert Brooks, “Broadcast News,” and John Lithgow, “The Campaign”). We follow the pair as they fight, rekindle, jest and fume.

Professionally, Rudd operates a suffocating record label while Mann manages a clothier that’s missing an unexplained $12,000. Supporting, Chris O’Dowd and Megan Fox add pizzazz and mountainous cleavage (respectively) as coworkers. Even Jason Segel, an Apatow veteran, is thrown in the mix as the prescient, womanizing personal trainer. Fox’s character brainlessly answers, “I’m just young,” as Debbie cops a feel of her supple juggies.

Several elements work in “This Is 40.” Primarily, the film tackles precisely what its title suggests: oncoming menopausal behavior, overprotective guardians, receding hairlines and Generation Y-technology cluelessness. In this sense, the film’s grounded reality and honesty appear refreshing. In the past, Apatow has excelled in depicting life’s inevitable encounters that people pretend don’t exist. You have everything from the graying virgin to a comic’s misery.

Mann kills while Rudd weakly follows. To be fair, Debbie is structured stronger than Pete, but we fail to sympathize for Pete the way Apatow hopes. His crippled business marries with his inability to refuse his broke father monthly checks. Ideally, you want to pat weaker characters on the back and ensure them it’s going to be OK. That never happens.

“This Is 40” pigeonholes itself as an older person movie. Unless younger viewers have parents with overlapping traits and empathies, it’s tough to resonate. With an overlong runtime, the film eventually feels like it’s working on fumes, and many unnecessary scenes bog down the script’s momentum.

Thankfully, though, Apatow specializes in one important category: handcrafting a unique, relevant perspective on harmlessly contentious subject matter …

In this case, it’s enduring the discovery of gray pubes.

There were about 2,500 U. Oregon students in Matthew Knight Arena Thursday night, and by the end of the game all of them wanted a spot on the court. The Ducks came away with the 70-66 upset to take down the first top 5 team to play at Matthew Knight Arena, but that didn’t always look like it was in the cards.

Arizona started hot, and the Ducks started flat and out of nowhere the Ducks trailed 11-0.

“We weren’t quite ready to start that game,” head coach Dana Altman said.

But as soon as the Ducks got on the board, the sold-out student section made its presence felt and it didn’t take long — less than two minutes, actually — for the Ducks to level the score and take their first lead on a Damyean Dotson jumper.

Arizona wouldn’t give up the lead without a fight and led again by as many as five points midway through the first half, but Oregon ended the half on a 21-5 run, sending Matthew Knight Arena into a frenzy at halftime.

The Ducks were quick to credit the fans post-game.

“The fans were unbelievable tonight,” E.J. Singler said. “The student section, the Pit Crew, was on fire. It really made a difference in this game.”

Singler had no small role in the Ducks victory, either. The lone senior on the Ducks to have played his entire career in Eugene finished with a team-high 14 points and added seven rebounds and seven assists. Much of that production came in the first half, with Singler on triple-double pace going into the interval. Playing in what he called the biggest game of his Oregon career, Singler showed that he isn’t being bothered by the knee injury that plagued him at the start of the season.

The forward from Medford played with a lot of emotion too, perhaps never more apparent than after he made a layup with contact after a coast-to-coast drive and let out something of a primal scream, and it wasn’t lost on his teammates.

“Every time I see E flex,” Johnathan Loyd said, “I flex too. That gets me hyped.”

Maybe it was Singler’s emotions, maybe it was the Pit Crew’s excitement, but something in the Matthew Knight Arena air Thursday night got the Ducks’ entire team going. Eight different Ducks scored, four finished in double figures, and Oregon racked up 17 assists as a team. The Ducks bench outscored their counterparts 17-6, and every Duck who played more than one minute found the scoresheet.

“Our team tonight was really unselfish,” Singler said. “We really made a lot of different plays for a lot of different people.”

As good as the Ducks’ win was, it’s just their second game of conference play, and that means there’s a lot of season left.

“It’s not our high point,” Singler said. “We got a lot of season left, and we got some goals we want to accomplish.”

What are those goals?

“Win the Pac-12,” Singler said.

I was sitting outside of Nordstrom in the Clackamas Town Center, chewing my cheese bagel, gossiping about coworkers and griping about a customer who wanted us to gift wrap eyeliner. Just then, a loud clap-clap echoed through the building. No one moved. No one reacted. I gleefully thought that someone had knocked over the onerous train on the lower level of the mall — the one I had to dodge while beelining to the bathroom when I took a break from my job at the makeup counter in Nordstrom.

Then six distinct claps echoed and were coming closer — someone was shooting a gun. Shoppers began running, chairs hit the ground. I stood up slowly. Looking around, I remember not really reacting the way I should. It was as if someone had told me there was a water balloon fight going on in the downstairs lobby. A voice came over the intercom announcing the obvious.

“There’s a gunman in the building,” the voice announced. “We’re on lockdown.”

People streamed into nearby stores as security gates were drawn down. Several customers and employees, including myself, headed into the back storage area of Nordstrom, waiting for the intercom to say something other than “There’s a shooter.”
Nordstrom’s security then led us into the café in the back of the store, where we would wait for the next three hours until police had swept the mall and assured the gunman was in custody — or dead. It’s funny the things a person remembers about a time like that. I wondered why, in all the chaos, I was still holding my empty coffee cup, not realizing it was in my hand until I felt the hot liquid on my skin.

It’s an obvious statement that we all come from different backgrounds. That day, in that room, none of that mattered — not politics or age or finances. We were all scared and angry. We all desperately wanted to go home.

Those shots didn’t sound like the ones from the movies when John Wayne chases the bad guy. It sounded like shattering glass. Other things are so loud, like the screaming voices and scrambling footsteps of people running. Confused children wondered why they had to go anywhere. The shots grew closer.

When Jacob Tyler Roberts walked into the Mall on Monday, Dec. 10, he carried a stolen semiautomatic AR–15 across his chest and wore a white hockey mask to hide his face. He walked into the JCPenny, past a family with young children and a Salvation Army Santa.

“I am the shooter,” he shouted when he reached the food court, according to the people who were there. Then he unloaded more than 40 rounds.

Steven Mathew Forsyth was 45; he worked at a kiosk and was from my hometown of West Linn.

Cindy Yullie was 54; she was finishing her Christmas shopping.

Both of them were killed.

Kristina Shevchenko was 15. The bullet that tore through her chest missed vital organs and her ribs, according to a post on her sister’s Facebook page.

Jacob Tyler Roberts was 22. And after he killed two grown-ups and shot one teenage girl, he turned the gun on himself.

I think about those people who tried to hide under chairs or tables. While inside the shuttered café, a little girl next to me asked her mom, “What’s going to happen to Santa?”

In the days following the shooting I sat curled on the couch with my little dog, Geffin, listening to press conferences and media analysis. Reporters described Roberts’ strained relationship with his aunt and lack of relationship with his mother. Friends talked about how his personality changed in early December. Everyone tried to make sense of something that made no sense.

Just five days later it was Friday and another young man 3,000 miles away in Connecticut shot his gun too, killing 20 children and 7 adults.

I never saw Roberts that day, but when I saw his picture on TV, it made my chest get tight and my stomach fill with an irrational fear that rose clear to my throat.

State College Defense Attorney Joe Amendola testified Thursday — during a hearing in which Jerry Sandusky was asking for a new trial — that there was nothing he would have done differently in defending the former coach, even though he said the defense team was “overwhelmed” by the amount of material given to them before trial.

Sandusky, clothed in a red prison suit, entered the courthouse smiling Thursday afternoon — his wife Dottie and other supporters also attended.

Amendola said during his 45 minutes of testimony at the Centre County Courthouse in Bellefonte that the defense was given more than 12,000 pages of material from the Pennsylvania Attorney General’s office, beginning in January 2012 and ending in June 2012.

Amendola said even though there was material he was unable to review before the June trial, the circumstances would not have affected the way he defended the former Penn State defensive coordinator.

Senior Judge John Cleland did not rule on any of the motions for a new trial at Thursday’s hearing.

Sandusky’s defense team was also given flash drives that held thousands of photos and several disks with information that was seized from Sandusky’s computers, Amendola said.

Amendola said that he didn’t have enough time to review much of the material and said that he “glanced over” most of it. Amendola also said that he didn’t have enough time to analyze the material before the trial date.

Norris Gelman, another of Sandusky’s attorneys, said after the hearing that a “structural error” occurred when the court did not allow Sandusky’s defense team ample time to prepare for trial.

“When a vast amount of material comes in at the eleventh hour, your ability to prepare suffers, and we say it suffers greatly,” Gelman said during the hearing.

Amendola also said that because he was not able to read all of the material, he couldn’t adequately represent Sandusky. He filed a petition before the trial began to be released from representing the former coach, Amendola said.

He said that he filed the petition out of frustration because he didn’t have enough time to be thorough in reading the documents.

Amendola said during his testimony that even now — six months after the trial took place — he has not read all of the material given to the defense before the trial.

Gelman also argued during the hearing that the jury charge was insufficient in that Cleland didn’t make it known to the jury that there was an extended period of time between when each of the people Sandusky was convicted of abusing came forward with their abuse claims.

Gelman argued that the omitted statement could potentially have brought some reasonable doubt into the minds of the jurors.

Prosecutor Joe McGettigan, representing the Office of the Attorney General, said after the hearing that Sandusky’s defense team was given more than enough time to prepare for the defense adequately, and that the defense was “overcome by true victims’ testimony.”

Prosecutor Frank Fina also said after the hearing that a ruling by Cleland should come within 30 days.

“The people of Pennsylvania should be confident that [Sandusky’s] conviction will stand,” Fina said.

Sandusky was convicted on 45 counts of sexually abusing boys he met through his charity, The Second Mile. He is currently serving a 30 to 60 year prison sentence.

On Thursday, Kathleen Kane, Pennsylvania’s attorney general-elect, also announced she will appoint a deputy attorney general to conduct a probe into the Sandusky investigation conducted by the state.

At some point in a long phone conversation with Jake Long, the former Michigan offensive lineman and No. 1 overall pick in the NFL draft, Michigan tackle Taylor Lewan just wanted an answer. Stay or go?

Long told Lewan he couldn’t make that decision for him. And so Lewan leaned on the past. What did you do, Lewan asked. Long had stayed, and over the course of 30 to 45 minutes, he told Lewan all the reasons why.

And so after weeks of perceived hints, Lewan declared Wednesday in a surprising announcement that he will stay at Michigan for his fifth-year senior season, forgoing a shot at the 2013 NFL Draft. Heeding the custom set by linemen like Long, and even the mantra of late Michigan coach Bo Schembechler, Lewan chose Michigan tradition over NFL riches.

“Offensive lineman here, they stay,” said Michigan coach Brady Hoke at a press conference. “And there’s been a tradition of that.”

He continued, referencing Long and former linemen Jon Jansen and Steve Hutchinson: “Jake and Jansen, and you could go back through it. Hutch and all those guys.”

ESPN analyst Mel Kiper Jr. had listed Lewan as the No. 15 player overall on his most recent Big Board Wednesday. Lewan was considered by most to be the second-best offensive tackle on the board, behind Texas A&M tackle Luke Joeckel.

Scouts Inc. ranked Lewan No. 13 on in its top-32 players in the 2013 draft, and Lewan said the NFL Draft Advisory Board rated him as a high first-round pick. Were he taken as the 13th pick, he could’ve expected a similar contract to last year’s 13th pick, Notre Dame wide receiver Michael Floyd.

Floyd signed with the Arizona Cardinals for just less than $10 million guaranteed over four years, with a team option for a fifth year. Players selected in the top 10 last year earned four year deals worth an average just less than $16.5 million (two players, selected Nos. 4 and 5 overall, did not report their contracts).

Lewan said he plans to take out an insurance policy, which could mitigate the financial sting if he suffers an injury before the 2014 NFL Draft. He has not yet signed the paperwork, and even an insurance policy would not offset any financial losses he might incur if his draft stock were to plummet.

Still, Lewan said, “it really was a no brainer at the end.”

Lewan’s decision came after a phone call to the Long and an eye toward the future. He has started in 28 consecutive games at left tackle for the Wolverines, and his departure would have further decimated an already underachieving offensive line.

With Lewan back, Michigan will return both starting tackles — right tackle Michael Schofield will be a fifth-year senior for 2013 season — but the Wolverines will graduate the entire interior of the line as well as their top blocking tight end, Mike Kwiatkowski.

Michigan will likely field a young line on the inside. Though much can change, 2013 redshirt freshman Kyle Kalis is the best bet to start at guard, and the center position should be redshirt sophomore Jack Miller’s to lose.

“Kyle Kalis and (freshmen linemen) Ben Braden and Erik Magnusen, I want to be a part of their lives for one more year and help them to develop into something where they can possibly be in my position in a couple years,” Lewan said.

The other guard position is more open, with redshirt freshman Blake Bars and redshirt sophomore Chris Bryant as likely options. Redshirt junior guard Joey Burzynski is the only upperclassman with a strong shot to win the job, and he is the only option who has seen game action — he played in seven games as a backup in 2012 and appeared in four more in 2011.

Lewan’s return means added continuity, and it is a blessing for quarterback Devin Gardner, who will rely on Lewan to protect his blind side. Throughout the process, though, Lewan kept his teammates in the dark. He waited until just 20 minutes before his announcement, at a team meeting, to break the news.

The room erupted in cheers.

Still, when asked if he was surprised by Lewan’s decision, Hoke responded with a simple “no.”

To that, Lewan turned toward his father, who attended the press conference, and whispered, “Oh my god, he’s lying,” with a laugh.

Most in Ann Arbor expected Lewan to declare for the draft.

“I think my Dad predicted me to leave too,” Lewan said.

At first, Lewan consulted with others and just wanted an answer. It is a big decision, he explained, for a 21-year old. Ultimately, he decided that the chance for one more year at Michigan, one more shot at a Big Ten Championship, was worth it.

“If you play at the University of Michigan, whether it’s basketball, hockey, football, there’s a tradition here and there’s something that you want to be a part of,” Lewan said. “And if I do what I need to do, I’ll be able to play in the NFL for however long, but you only get one more year of college.”

While you were spending your winter break lazing around in your pajamas and watching the same season of a show for the fifth time in a row, Netflix was gearing up to change the federal law to make it possible for everyone to know you spent a month watching “Family Guy” or “Say Yes to the Dress.”

On Dec. 20, 2012, Senate quietly passed a reform bill to change the Video Privacy Protection Act (VPPA) to let Netflix integrate with Facebook. This means Facebook users will soon have the opportunity to see exactly what their friends are watching, guilty pleasures and all.

Just as a fun fact, according to Ars Technica, the VPPA was originally created in the middle of U.S. Senate debates over whether to confirm Robert Bork to the Supreme Court. A journalist went to Bork’s local video store and later published an article featuring many of Bork’s past rentals (which included 12 Alfred Hitchcock movies, “Pretty in Pink,” “Sixteen Candles,” British costume dramas like “The Private Life of Henry the Eighth,” and so on). The incident served as a sort of wake-up call for Congress, which then passed the VPPA.

The new amendment to the law allows users to give consent online for access to their video-watching history and the amendment will also allow for that consent to apply to a long period of time (up to two years).

Some don’t think it’s an inappropriate invasion of privacy, others do. Jules Polonetsky, the director and co-chair of the Future of Privacy Forum, doesn’t think the law requires companies to be clear with their users about how and when their rental history will be shared.

“This is about the sharing of your records of video rental history, as opposed to on a clear, permission basis, enabling people to key-in sharing mode,” Polonetsky said to ReadWrite. “Sharing should be in a clear opt-in basis.”

That’s all great, but what does this mean for the everyday user? It means that, unless you opt out, Netflix and other video-rental services can have the right to share your rental history after getting your permission just once.

But it also means Netflix is going to start incorporating social features into its service and you’ll be able to use Facebook to get Netflix recommendations. And then you can watch your friend’s favorite show five times.