toughness

[Patrick Barron]

UFR is delayed. It's due to crippling bouts of ennui. I'm sure you understand. Anyway, let's have some fun!

The situation. A follow-up from the stat on the podcast about how Michigan has failed to cover the last six spreads by at least two touchdowns from Dimitri Nakassis:

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On the bright side, when you click to the big version of an image on twitter and save it, twitter no longer gives you a ".jpg-large" file that has to be renamed before you can actually use it. So I got to skip that step while inserting the neat summary of a half-season stretch in which Michigan has vastly underperformed expectations.

Oh God I just remembered why this graph looked strangely familiar.

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RIP, Prevail and Ride. Also us.

[After THE JUMP: surely it gets more cheerful!]

I got a pile of email, so this is really long and still leaves out a number of missives. Apologies if yours wasn't selected.

A fairly comprehensive coaching-firing email.

I got a lot, obviously. This one touches all of the bases.

Brian,

I'm currently operating under the following two assumptions:

1) Brady Hoke is done unless Michigan at least wins at least the Big Ten East with wins over both rivals on the road, which currently seems about as likely as two nuclear missiles turning into a sperm whale and a bowl of petunias and one of them telling our coaching staff how to coach offensive football before they plummet to earth.

I don't think it is that cut and dried yet. If Michigan goes 7-1 in the Big Ten with a loss to MSU and ends up 9-3 and going to the Citrus Bowl or something, that is a weird way to get to what people expected before the season. I think any 8-4 record is a hard sell that might induce a decision that we all hate and 7-5 is 100% dumped. (This is not what I'd do; unless he runs the table before the OSU game I would give him the Earl Bruce pre-Game firm handshake. This is what I'm guessing the athletic director would do.)

But yeah, going 7-1 in the Big Ten seems about as likely as the bowl of petunias thing. I am thinking "oh no, not again," tho—we solved it! The bowl of petunias is a Michigan fan.

2) That Dave Brandon will make a comically inept hire of either a warmed over retread with a tenuous connection to the past (Cam Cameron!), a mediocre young coordinator with a tenuous connection to the past (Scott Loeffler!), or a flashy idiot who must be great in interviews even though he's a moron coaching a football team (Lane Kiffin!)

Given that, how long would it take to set up and execute a reasonable search committee for a new athletic director?  And is there any chance at all the university leadership acts decisively to remove the fundamental problem?  It seems like the answer to those questions are too long and no at the moment.

The timing is bad. Schlissel just got in and has no frame of reference, so is he going to make a serious move? Does he even care about it, or is it something that's 11d on the agenda at a random meeting? And is he going to do it now-now-now, like he'd probably have to?

The answers to these questions are probably no. I think we're stuck with Brandon. If Michigan did make a move now there are a number of obvious candidates: Jeff Long is Arkansas's AD, Brad Bates is Boston College's, Warde Manuel is UConn's.

Long hired Bobby Petrino when Petrino bugged out on the Falcons, and then replaced him with Bret Bielema. Both are impressive hires from a football perspective and odious from a "you want me to root for THIS guy?" perspective. Manuel hired Turner Gill at Buffalo, was handed interim basketball coach Kevin Ollie (who then hired himself by winning a lot), and executed a logical search when UConn replaced Paul Pasqualoni, first trying to grab Pat Narduzzi and then going with Notre Dame DC Bob Diaco.

And while we're contemplating the fundamental horror of being Notre Dame, is Hoke Davie, Willingham, or Weis?  Seems to me he recruits like Weis and coaches like Willingham, which is somehow worse than either of those guys.  Or at least more frustrating.

Davie. His recruiting is better than Willingham and he's not a deliberately offensive, off-putting goon. Davie was an amiable man who couldn't organize a footbaw team.

Of course the real problem is that there really doesn't seem to be an upwardly mobile candidate at the right level to actually go after.  I mean obviously you'd take a shot at Sumlin, but no way A&M doesn't match that offer.  Which sort of leaves you hoping the Ravens' front office semi-criminal dickishness makes John Harbaugh quit and then you hope you can outbid like 15 NFL teams who would immediately jump at the shot to hire him.  Not a great situations.  Only name I can maybe come up with at a realistic level is Craig Bohl, who is unfortunately 56 and in the first year of his new job at Wyoming.  That juggernaut he built on North Dakota State is impressive though.

Basically I think we're doomed.  Are we doomed?

Andrew

It looks fairly doomy, but we were all laughing about Ohio State's coaching search when they settled on the previously-obscure Jim Tressel. There are guys out there. You mention Bohl, who I have also wikipedia-stalked to my disappointment. Michigan may as well take a run at Sumlin types, but realistically any SEC school is going to match the money, and if you're crushing it in the SEC what is the motivation to move?

There is a name out there that I think might work: Dan Mullen. He made a previously awful team competitive in the brutal SEC. Nobody's been able to win much of anything at Mississippi State in 20 years—Jackie Sherrill had one ten-win season in 1999 and was otherwise bouncing between 8 and 3 wins. The Bulldogs have gone from winning a quarter of their SEC games under Sylvester Croom to winning 42%, and they've gone to four straight bowls for the first time ever. That's a James Franklin-like resume.

Mullen grew up in Pennsylvania, so he'll have some useful recruiting contact, he's 42—good long term upside if he works out—and he was Urban Meyer's OC for Florida's run of dominance there. He just beat LSU on the road. If Mississippi State goes 9-3 or better this year he'll be a very attractive candidate.

The problem is that Florida is going to be looking as well and I have bad feels about competing with them given our current situation and Florida's proximity to bounteous talent.

[After THE JUMP: more stuff like this, and an Ondre Pipkins Q.]