UM Football Recruiting - by WM Wolverine

[SeattleLionsFan]

App State 2014 is not app state of 2007.

Pound them by 40 points and exorcise the demon.

You can't exorcise that demon by doing what is expected.

[paul daugherity]

That was a spot on post by Talent. A pretty recent example of firing a coach who was winning, but not WINNING, is Frank Solich at Nebraska. I am sure the NU fans can provide more info. As an outsider who did not follow them, I remember that his teams had winning records, but were not dominant like they had been under Osbourne. As I recall, NU got a fair amount of flak for letting him go. Personally, I thought that firing him was the correct move. The hiring of Callahan was the mistake.

[whodean]

UM Football Recruiting - by WM Wolverine

You can't exorcise that demon by doing what is expected.

Sure you can. End if an era so to speak

[Hannibal]

It can't be undone. Beating them by 80 wouldn't do it.

[Jeff Buchanan]

I think M is still in an extremely advantageous position vis-a-vis most other CFB programs. .... However, that advantage has shrunk considerably over the past 30 years. ..... Michigan is still Michigan. It's still has as much potential as any program in the country. But mediocre coaches won't get it done. They can "win" at M, but they can't WIN at M. And therein lies the connudrum that Buchanan (and others) have been preaching forever. Is M really committed to WINNING?

Some good points made in that post.

It isn't that M isn't committed to winning. It is that winning is defined differently at M than it is at other programs such as most of the SEC schools, MSU (now) and to a certain extent osu although, despite what we might mouth as M fans and osu haters, has an excellent academic reputation.

The deciders within the University are probably made up of people who are a lot like the geeks in HS we knew who were members of the chess club ...... bright, intellectual, without any interest in sports, unless it was field hockey or something like it.

I also don't think Hoke is the main problem. Brandon is although Hoke is a symptom of failed leadership on Brandon's part. M football won't get better until he is gone. The Nussmeir hiring is kind-of odd. The controlling boards had to OK his hiring and his compensation but, frankly I see that as the Board members saying, "take these crumbs, Dave, and stop bothering us, we have more important things to do."

Dave, being the boot licker he is, left the room, after the appropriate amount of brown-nosing. He is not capable of forging a pathway for Michigan football to compete amongst the nation's CFB elite. That has to be perfectly obvious by now.

If and when Brandon leaves, The Controlling Boards might hire someone who is capable of doing that but its more likely that, if they hire someone like that, it will be by mistake or on account of an oversight. Michigan has more important things to do than win on the Gridiron or the Hardwood.

Those defining M's character by their policy and hiring decisions are more concerned about where M sits among the academic and research elites of major public universities and, by design, less concerned about college sports and the mega-bucks, accompanied by the potential for a lot of dirt, circulating around them these days.

[SeattleLionsFan]

I know you say that Jeff and in my heart I fully agree. But... How is that manifested in the football program. Hoke and Co. Are paid as well as any staff in the country and I can't remember a single player (other than Burbridge) that M had a legit shot at that they stopped or slowed recruiting for academic or character reasons. Iam is right about one thing, M would have taken every single buckeye commit. Happily.

[Jeff Buchanan]

Maybe I'm not expressing myself clearly. It's almost like the chicken and egg thing. You have to win to recruit well, to win you have to recruit ..... IMO. it all begins with putting the right coaching staff in place.

Brandon chose a nice guy, with Michigan roots to run the football program with absolutely no track record of being nationally competitive with the metric for that being both building teams that win against tough competition and win in most recruiting battles.

On the Hardwoods, Beiline appears to be a good coach. Brandon had nothing to do with that hire and he shit canned a football coach who had a lot more potential to be good than Brady Hoke has now or ever will have (multiple qualifiers placed here - you all know them by heart, yada, yada). His 'process" that brougt Brady Hoke to Ann Arbor, and again if on field results are a metric of that, was so fatally flawed that it begs a reasonable explanation ..... which has not so far or, IMO, ever will be given.

Hoke and company will remain as long as Brandon is AD. End of that story. And with that story, M football will only be just good.

Now here's the important part. If the members of the Controlling Boards gave a shit about Athletics at Michigan, Brandon would be under a tremendous amount of pressure right now. He's not. Why is that? IMO, because he is an appeaser and a compromiser and fits pretty much the picture of an AD the Board members are comfortable with. He is not a strong leader at all capable of developing and then forging a path for M football to get much better than it is now, which by the Controlling Board's standards is good enough.

Can you imagine Don Canham doing this. No way. Canham took a moribund Michigan football program and through a good deal of political maneuvering, positioned himself with enough power within the U so he could see his plan through. Two things here. Brandon doesn't have the balls to do anything like that and he is facing 20 years of decay within the Boards where other things have become more important than football as measures of what constitutes The Leaders and The Best, Champions of the West.

[SeattleLionsFan]

Ahh. That makes sense. Brandon doesn't care about winning and the eggheads don't care about sports.

[Jeff Buchanan]

..... and I'd go a step further. If I have Brandon figured out, he cares only about his legacy. His legacy is going to rise and fall on the guy he hired to run the football program .... Brady Hoke.

He CAN'T afford for him to fail. Thus, all the diarrhea that flows from his mouth (and his mouth pieces) .... "we're on the right track," blah, blah, blah.

He better hope Brady can produce. I don't think he can. I've not seen a single thing that makes me thing he can succeed either in the area of recuriting elite talent or in beating your rivals or winning close games against good competition. No one is as pissed as I have been over Hoke's comments that, "well, we practiced well," or, "I was proud of how our team fought."

Who gives a shit about how you practiced or how hard you fought. That is loser talk and the M football program has become immersed in loser, excuse making rhetoric. I'm sick of it. That's on Hoke. No escaping that.

So, the conundrum emerges for anyone who loves M football. Do you continue to support the moron that is running it into the ground? Do you do this just to support your team and be a loyal fan and keep buying tickets to go watch the shit that is the current state of M football? Or do you take action and not let Dave Brandon use you because he knows, just like Pizza, you'll keep buying it? Don't feed the monster is my take on this.

[hack]

Hoke and company will remain as long as Brandon is AD. End of that story. And with that story, M football will only be just good.


We were just that sure about Borges two months ago. Whilst I probably agree, I'm a lot less certain now. Brandon knows that you're only as good as your last headline, and if he makes the right hire in his second go-round no one will really crucify him long-term for making the wrong one and fixing that mistake. I'm not saying it's likely, but I no longer think the evidence supports that level of certainty.

[Jeff Buchanan]

I'm willing to give some latitude here. But I've been burned so many times in the past with an undeserved level of optimism in whatever, I'm a lot less optimistic going forward than I have probably ever been.

It is true that surrounding yourself with good people, can lift you beyond what you'd be capable of alone. But, I'm not convinced Mattison has what it takes to coach at an elite level based on what I've seen over three seasons. Nussmeir in Ann Arbor is a big unknown. Can he coach DG to the point he reaches his ceiling? I think Borges was a stupendous failure doing that ..... he failed to advantage the offense with Gardner's skill set, he squandered his opportunities for development, he trashed the offense to do his thing .... which turned out to be terrible. I have no idea if Nussmeir can do better.

Then we have Hoke. He has repeatedly demonstrated he is in idiot when it's crunch time. From clock management to providing ill advised input to his coordinators. What in hell is there to be optimistic about?

[hack]

Not necessarily the current coaching staff, but that someone was held accountable! That's unusual for cozy and contented Ann Arbor. A head rolled, and it wasn't the head of a supposed rough-hewn outsider like RR. It was the good buddy of the Michigan Man of the moment. That in and of itself is great news! All too rare.

Also, we have John Beilein, and that's evidence that Michigan is still indeed a place where if reasonably competent people make reasonably competent decisions in a reasonably functional organisational atmosphere, good things happen. Like Bill Martin's coaching search that brought us Beilein.

BTW, Damien Harris was at the game last night.

[Rob F]

BTW, Damien Harris was at the game last night

...as a guest, though, of the Urban Liar.

I wondered, as I watched the bucknut fans leaving in droves early (in fact, even earlier than that shot posted in juxtaposition with Craft's badly-airballed 3 attempt)---how does Urbz explain away all those empty seats to Harris? heh

[Rob F]

Some good points made in that post.

It isn't that M isn't committed to winning. It is that winning is defined differently at M than it is at other programs such as most of the SEC schools, MSU (now) and to a certain extent osu although, despite what we might mouth as M fans and osu haters, has an excellent academic reputation.

The deciders within the University are probably made up of people who are a lot like the geeks in HS we knew who were members of the chess club ...... bright, intellectual, without any interest in sports, unless it was field hockey or something like it.

I also don't think Hoke is the main problem. Brandon is although Hoke is a symptom of failed leadership on Brandon's part. M football won't get better until he is gone. The Nussmeir hiring is kind-of odd. The controlling boards had to OK his hiring and his compensation but, frankly I see that as the Board members saying, "take these crumbs, Dave, and stop bothering us, we have more important things to do."

Dave, being the boot licker he is, left the room, after the appropriate amount of brown-nosing. He is not capable of forging a pathway for Michigan football to compete amongst the nation's CFB elite. That has to be perfectly obvious by now.

If and when Brandon leaves, The Controlling Boards might hire someone who is capable of doing that but its more likely that, if they hire someone like that, it will be by mistake or on account of an oversight. Michigan has more important things to do than win on the Gridiron or the Hardwood.

Those defining M's character by their policy and hiring decisions are more concerned about where M sits among the academic and research elites of major public universities and, by design, less concerned about college sports and the mega-bucks, accompanied by the potential for a lot of dirt, circulating around them these days.

While I agree in general with what you're saying in this and other posts, and in what Talent and a few others posted directly above, I'm not 100% in agreement of all the minute details. I'll get back to that----in particular the parts regarding Brand-On---later.

What you wrote regarding Hoke and how he fits with the meme of win vs. WINNING struck a chord with me. From things you've written in the past, Jeff, it's pretty apparent that you're not a Detroit Tigers fan or even much of a baseball fan. What is relevant to this discussion, though, is this---the Tigers back in 1979 faced a very similar situation on the sidelines to what the general perception is of Hoke and his limitations.

Directly from his Wikipedia page, here's (very briefly) the story of one Les Moss, a career assistant coach who had just started his MLB managerial career:

Moss succeeded Ralph Houk as manager for the 1979 Detroit Tigers. In his time with the Tigers he went 27–26.[9] He actually was not fired for cause or because he was ineffective, but rather because Sparky Anderson had unexpectedly become available. Moss was named manager soon after the 1978 season concluded. However, the Tigers had not counted on Anderson being fired on November 27, 1978 by the Cincinnati Reds. Moss was a victim of bad timing, as the Tigers came to a deal to bring Anderson to the Tigers after the first third of the 1979 season. Dick Tracewski coached four games as interim manager until Anderson's arrival.
Moss finished with a managing career, other than a couple brief stints as interim manager elsewhere, one game over .500. Though he continued to coach until the mid 1990's, he never again was hired to manage.

Now, while it's highly likely neither you nor Talent (nor possibly some others actively involved in this discussion) have ever heard of Moss, it was a lot like what we're seeing right now with the Michigan Football Program. Those Tigers of the late 70's had turned the corner, had some good young talent on the team (Jack Morris, Alan Trammell, Lou Whitaker, Lance Parrish, and an apparently finally-healthy star in Mark Fidrych) and moving through the farm system (Dan Petry, Kirk Gibson), and many baseball experts and fans thought it was a team on the verge of being a contender again.

The Tiger franchise had enjoyed a pretty good run since the mid-50s, with only 4 losing seasons over 20 years until suffering thru 4 more in a row from '74 thru 77, but only one World Championship to show for that period. Les Moss was felt by many back in 1979 to be a weak hire and his hiring left a lot of fans PO'd at the Tiger Front Office. Sound familar? Michigan has had a good run since the late 60's but only one National Championship; until the DickRod Reign of error, the worst season over that stretch was 6-6 in '84. And, like the Tigers of '79 and their front office, a lot of fans of Michigan felt in 2010 that Michigan could and should do a lot better than "settling" for Hoke. 3 seasons later, that assessment seems to be totally correct, but Hoke still roams the sidelines and likely will for awhile.

So the big question is: will Michigan stay with their Les Moss-level hire and pass on the opportunity to reach their potential as a program if it comes along, or will Michigan someday soon have a Sparky Anderson moment and hire a proven winner, someone much more likely to take them to the promised land?? Though it took a while longer than expected for it to pan out for Detroit with Sparky, not winning a World Series until '84, that's the kind of home run hire most of us want and expect, to be on a level playing-field again with the ohios and Alabamas and LSUs of CFB.

[hack]

...as a guest, though, of the Urban Liar.

I wondered, as I watched the bucknut fans leaving in droves early (in fact, even earlier than that shot posted in juxtaposition with Craft's badly-airballed 3 attempt)---how does Urbz explain away all those empty seats to Harris? heh

That's my point about that.