Schlissel Interview
Nice Q&A with Schlissel, where he covers a lot in regards to athletics and Hacketts interim tag. He answers a question regarding Brandon. Goes over how athletics is not the mission of the University but recognizes that is a very big part of the culture at Michigan.
Q: Was there ever a point when you though that it was the right thing to let former Athletic Department Director Dave Brandon?
Schlissel: The university in a position where the athletic director recognized he was no longer serving the best interests of the university, he stepped aside. What's happened since then really speaks to the character of the institutions. One of our prominent alumni, Jim Hackett had been involved in helping and advising the university for decades … I was fortunate that he was available to step up and serve when Dave stepped away.
He stepped into a challenging circumstance, to be sure. He had to evaluate a football program that was having a difficult year, make a decision about leadership and he arrived at a decision to change leadership after a very thoughtful process. He made those changes in a remarkably sensitive and high-integrity way. The departing coach, Coach Hoke, was a great guy. He was treated fairly and respectfully. Then he (Hackett) took on the challenge, I asked him to, of conducting a search for a successor for the football program and he did that. We ended up in a very strong position where we attracted a new coach that's probably the best coach out there, professional or college. He has the added advantage of being an alum who's well known and loved and connected to the university. He also the experience of running a college football program at one of our peer institutions, Stanford University, with very high academic standards. He's a guy of great integrity.
http://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/education/2015/01/10/schlissel-um…
January 11th, 2015 at 3:52 PM ^
The don't call him Schlissel the Bissel for nothing.
January 11th, 2015 at 4:04 PM ^
Sent from MGoBlog HD for iPhone & iPad
January 11th, 2015 at 4:05 PM ^
Sent from MGoBlog HD for iPhone & iPad
January 11th, 2015 at 4:10 PM ^
January 11th, 2015 at 4:57 PM ^
No you're thinking of my nickname for David "Dirty Whore" Brandon.
January 11th, 2015 at 4:12 PM ^
My Yiddish consultant (my wife, who learned all the Yiddish she knows from her Yiddish-fluent mother) says "bissel" is Yiddish for "little." "Schlissel" is Yiddish for key. "Schlissel the Bissel" = "the little key."
Maybe "Bissel" in this context is some idiom unknown to the Yiddish speakers from Odessa? Or maybe it is some other language.
January 11th, 2015 at 4:16 PM ^
Correction: My wife saw my message and said the reference was probably to the Bissell cleaner. She said she has always thought that was a funny name because it translated into "little cleaner."
January 11th, 2015 at 4:28 PM ^
This is the most curiously esoteric conversation-with-oneself I've ever read on Mgoblog...which is really saying something.
January 11th, 2015 at 4:47 PM ^
January 11th, 2015 at 7:25 PM ^
best part is the 3am posting time...
this is one hell of a fucking site.
January 11th, 2015 at 5:59 PM ^
Considering he's explaining exactly what the words mean, I would say that it really isn't esoteric at all.
January 11th, 2015 at 8:41 PM ^
Correct me if I'm wrong.
Sent from MGoBlog HD for iPhone & iPad
January 11th, 2015 at 4:08 PM ^
January 11th, 2015 at 4:00 PM ^
Sent from MGoBlog HD for iPhone & iPad
January 11th, 2015 at 4:05 PM ^
That being said it's always nice to have a change of pace every so often.
January 11th, 2015 at 4:08 PM ^
Sent from MGoBlog HD for iPhone & iPad
January 11th, 2015 at 4:08 PM ^
The small cluster of Coleman-haters (who remain the exact same group of people) just never shut the fuck up. I mean, you're stating some things that are just patently false.
January 11th, 2015 at 5:45 PM ^
and it has nothing to do with her halftime speech or sports for that matter.
Like any leader of a large group, certain decisions will have a negative effect or at least the illusion of one. My issue(s) with her were fairly small and not something of overall interest to this blog.
She was a GREAT fundraiser which very unfortunately is basically all that matters.
January 11th, 2015 at 4:09 PM ^
Except for that whole $3 billion Michigan Difference campaign, the largest-ever fundraising project for a public university, which blew past the fundraising goal by almost a third.
MSC had one bad moment at a microphone, and you're calling her incompetent?
January 11th, 2015 at 4:13 PM ^
January 11th, 2015 at 8:31 PM ^
In 2002, we were #22 in US News undergrad rankings overall.
Now, we are #29.
That's a 30% decline.
Sure, there are other metrics. But I don't get the MSC love. I really don't. She was pretty bad.
January 11th, 2015 at 8:54 PM ^
That's a 30% decline.Holy fucking fuckballs. I...I can't even address the inanity of this pointless nonsense.
January 11th, 2015 at 9:18 PM ^
Sent from MGoBlog HD for iPhone & iPad
January 11th, 2015 at 9:45 PM ^
If you believe that the US News and World Report rankings are indicative of much of anything meaningful. It's a barometer completely out of touch with reality, yet gets enough press to make people think it means something.
January 12th, 2015 at 12:09 PM ^
Sent from MGoBlog HD for iPhone & iPad
January 12th, 2015 at 3:16 PM ^
It is asinine to suggest that US News rankings do not matter.
January 11th, 2015 at 4:14 PM ^
Q: Regarding Interim Athletic Director Jim Hackett, is it possible the interim may be dropped from his title? Schlissel: I don't know. Since he began, two months ago, he went through an evaluation of the football program and complicated search and recruitment of a coach and now we can catch our breath. I need to talk to Jim about his observations about the rest of our athletics program. I have my own thoughts about the direction we might go in the years ahead.
that's the interesting part to me re: his thoughts about the direction going ahead
January 11th, 2015 at 4:14 PM ^
Sent from MGoBlog HD for iPhone & iPad
January 11th, 2015 at 4:18 PM ^
January 11th, 2015 at 5:22 PM ^
January 11th, 2015 at 4:34 PM ^
The nose knows.
January 11th, 2015 at 4:37 PM ^
Hackett is an alum and a former player under Bo. Does anyone really think he hadn't already "evaluated" the program long before he "stepped in?" At any rate, it has all worked out for the best. Schlissel and Hackett both did what needed to be done.
January 11th, 2015 at 7:04 PM ^
Everything is about timing. Schlissel becoming POTUM this past summer and the unfortunate FB season this fall, DB imploding, and Jim Hactett stepping in. Especially Harbaugh timing & circumstances of the 49ers season. I think that in the longterm it is better Harbaugh comes now after experiencin the NFL than before like in 2010.
January 11th, 2015 at 4:42 PM ^
Athletics is no different. If we are going to do it, we have to strive to excel. It costs a certain amount of money to do that. We're in a very fortunate position of the athletics program being able to generate the revenue to cover those costs. So although the transitions in leadership in the athletics department cost a lot of money, those resources come from the athletics department.
This is more or less the theme which he seemed to want to develop from the beginning anyway, that he wanted excellent both on and off the field. Part of that might be practically driven by the idea that the department can generate the revnue to do what it needs / wants to do, but I do think that Schlissel genuinely understands just how important athletics is to Michigan's identity, or at least how most fans and alums perceive that. I know people fretted about this in the beginning, whether or not he wanted us to become an "Ivy" when it came to athletics, but I think that his schooling - which perhaps sadly came in the turmoil of this past fall - taught him much of what he needed to know about Michigan and sports.
January 11th, 2015 at 4:53 PM ^
Yeah, I never understood people's fears about him turning Michigan into more of an Ivy/D-III style school as it pertained to athletics. He wouldn't have accepted the post at UM if he didn't understand that, and nothing he's done except say that he questioned how much press was being put around the coaching search relative to its overall importance seems inconsistent with that awareness. And at least with Hoke and Beilein, you had guys who develop(ed) and recruited players to do well enough in the classroom, to try to be scholar-athletes as much as possible within the confines of high-end sports, that he won't have to deal with the rot and ugliness you see at other schools.
He seems like a good president. I honestly never had a big issue with Coleman, but again she was just coming in when I was leaving UM. But beyond a couple of people wondering if she was drunk/tired during one public appearance, I'm not sure what she did that offended most people at UM. And for all the talk about academic rankings "dropping", that seems as much the product of a 5th-rate magazine having a flawed school ranking system that UM just isn't exploiting as much as other schools. That's why when you see rankings from non-US publications, or ones that focus on specific disciplines, UM is much higher regarded.
January 11th, 2015 at 10:19 PM ^
he has expressed dismay that the financial independence of the athletic department "separates" the athletic department and the student athletes from the rest of the univeristy.
Only after those comments and the fallout with various alumi and others did he start to talk about the advantages of a self funding althletic department.
Maybe, after a lifetime in academia, he's had an epiphany in four or so months. Color me skepical. Don't get me wrong, I'd love to believe this spin, but I need to see at least five years of action that live up to this. In the meantime...
January 12th, 2015 at 3:45 PM ^
His employment by Michigan is at the pleasure of the Regents. He would be fired pretty quickly if he tried to screw with athletics in any meaningful way. At least FB and BB.
January 11th, 2015 at 4:54 PM ^
January 11th, 2015 at 5:29 PM ^
As far as Hackett-as-permanent-AD goes, sure he nailed the coaching search, but I'm interested to see how he further changes the toxic atmosphere around the AD, deals with the donor base, reverses some of the DB-inspired additions to the gameday experience, etc. before I'm ready to fully anoint him as Canham, Jr. There's more to a guy than his ability to lock down Jim Harbaugh.
All that said, I really like what I've seen so far.
January 11th, 2015 at 6:02 PM ^
I can't describe how much I enjoyed listening to the bands play during the FCS title game. I hope that is a priority.
January 11th, 2015 at 5:49 PM ^
I feel like we're at the point now where Schlissel can step back and deal just with academics. Hackett's extremely competent at his job and he should be left to do what he wants unless he gets out of line or something.
January 11th, 2015 at 8:25 PM ^
Agreed. And nobody is happier about this than Schlissel.
January 11th, 2015 at 8:52 PM ^
What a misleading headline. The News took something Schlissel said in a subordinate clause ("Although (athletics) is not the mission of the university") and made it the headline, thus creating the false impression that this was Schlissel's main point. It wasn't. His main point immediatedly followed: "it is certainly a large part of the culture of the university." If his main point had been that athletics is not the university's mission, he would not have preceded it with "although." But because of the headline, that is what people will remember from this.
January 11th, 2015 at 11:07 PM ^
January 12th, 2015 at 1:17 AM ^
January 12th, 2015 at 11:26 AM ^
January 12th, 2015 at 5:12 AM ^