Unverified Voracity Wishes To Be A Fierce Pragmatist

Probably a good call...people will still be up in arms whenever he says anything vaguely non-positive and I doubt this is the last time he'll have to explain himself in such a ridiculously blunt way. Hopefully people start to learn how to read because this is already starting to get old. 

that alot of people on this board seem to be becoming what they previously hated?  Football games will be played, we can judge the success or failure of this hire at that point.  Until then, Go Blue!  *Proud cotton picker here*

DB just comes off as being so full of himself. I don't like the signs he's given in the early part of his tenure. Put the debacle of a coaching search aside for a second. Even the twitter thing is a put off. Plus the fact that he watches game tape with the coaches on Sundays bothers me. The Jerry Jones alarm goes off in my head. I'm waiting for the day that he walks up to Hoke with plays drawn on a paper and says "Just some ideas I had. I think they might work."

One of the tSIO fans I work with suggested that we hire Mike Leach the other day (before Hoke was announced).  I lol'd.

Good thing I quit next week :-)

Jury remains very much out on Chizik if you ask me.

I would dispute Moeller.  Once Bo's players graduated, he ended up with two disappointing mediocre 8-4 seasons.  He got fired before we could see whether that was an anomaly but I would argue that it probably wasn't.  He was a great playcaller, recruiter, and developer of talent, but his last two teams frequently played flat and emotionless. 

You list two coaches in your successful category that shoudl not be included: Gary Moeller and Pete Carroll.

Gary stood on the shoulders of greatness and each year the program got further from Bo, the worse it performed.  Add to it that player attrition was high during his tenure and he was losing the support of the fans and alumni quickly.  

Pete Carroll won a lot of games, but leaving your program on probation and left with the worst sanctions since SMU does not qualify as successful.  Under those guidelines, Steve Fisher was a fantastic basketball coach at Michigan.

Here's the issue with your assertion. None of those guys you mentioned had their middling .500 records in the MAC/MWC. All of them either had them at a major conference school or the NFL(and Carroll won a division title too if I remember correctly). I have seen months upon months of people claiming that your record is what is says you are and Hoke's record indicates a mediocre head coaching career so far. I love the Blackjack analogy from Braves and Birds about taking a hit with 15 and the dealer showing a 6. This move might work out and I will be overjoyed if it does,  it just doesn't seem to be the high probability move and that is what makes it a poor choice.  

I don't understand how the RECORD of a head coach is a "yawn" argument.  That's the ultimate thing the head coach is responsible for.  Even the 10 remaining RR loyalists admit that.

People are dissatisfied not because, as you claim, Hoke was the best qualified candidate, but because by any measure that doesn't involve "coached here already" or "seems nice" he was not a particularly qualified candidate.  That doesn't make him a terrible coach, or anything other than a great guy.  But when DB sits there and calls me stupid for thinking a process that ended this way was conducted in an inappropriate manner, it makes me think he's a cocky and irrational douche.  That's not unreasonable or, apparently even worse here lately, EMO.

Did you randomly go through and pull out coach names for this list?

- Mack Brown was 69-46 at Carolina and coming of two Top 10 finishes before going to Texas

- Les Miles was 28-21 before going to LSU; put another way, if you take Les' 4 year record and double it to be 8 years, he was 17 games better than Brady Hoke

- Gene Chizik (who the jury is still out on) had only two years as a HC

- Ara Parseghian was at freaking Northwestern, a school w/ serious recruiting disadvantages in the 50s, when he went .500. Before that, he went 39-6 at Miami (Ohio).

- Pete Carroll had coached two of his three previous NFL teams to the playoffs, not an easy thing to do

- Don James is actually kind of close, in terms of record.  But even he had a) won a MAC title (and it was the only MAC title Kent State has EVER won and b) he was 42 years old.

I wish Hoke success too, but I've failed to come up with someone with his profile who has gone on to be wildly (i.e., frequent Top 10 or so finishes) successful. You're just grasping at straws.

You're only saying that because you're a Lloyd Lloyalist.

Mixing truth with lies, claiming to unite Wolverine Nation while also insulting them and encouraging factions, and completely blowing the hiring process altogether?  He's a plant.

He nearly ran Domino's into the ground for years.  Then, just when Michigan is hiring an AD, he says, 'hey, let's make less horrible pizza!' and is heralded as a corporate genius, making him a viable candidate.

His plan is to destroy our program from the inside, whereupon Dave 'Bucky' Brandon can return to Columbus a hero, and receive his life-sized pair of gold pants (which I hear are being sculpted as we speak).

Well played, Buckeyes.  Well played.  Getting even for that whole John Cooper thing, I reckon.

I agree with this and Erik_t's banner suggestion.  By adding that in the post the author put up the deflector shields in anticipation of the members who would say "UGG!  LLOYD CARR AND JANSEN AND SHEA AND RAY AND ... BLAH BLAH BLAH KNOW MORE ABOUT FOOTBALL IN SMALL APPENDAGE THAN ANY OF US WILL EVER AARRGGGHHHH!!!"

When did Brandon "make it quite clear" that he felt compelled to interview others to placate certain factions? I must have missed that.

is paved with CEOs who waltzed into the sporting world thinking "I made $X million/billion/trillion succeeding in some other field, so it can't be that hard to do the same in sports."

Sadly, some of those jerks ran teams that were both highly profitable and highly unsuccessful, and given that they tended to care more about the former than the latter, the fans were really the only ones who saw it this way.

Here's hoping that Brandon doesn't blow up the football program learning that lesson. I don't really care whether the team wins despite his incompetence or wins because he learns how to build a winner, as long as it wins and does so the right way.

He presided over a great decade of Michigan football.  If those losses against Ohio State had been spread out evenly people would be calling him Bo with a national championship.  Bo was 11-9-1 against the Buckeyes, Carr was 6-7.  Bo had 13 Big ten titles in 20 seasons, Lloyd had 5 Big ten Titles in 13 seasons in a much deeper big ten.   The 2006 team was one of our best in the last 30 years, possibly better than 1997, they just happened to run into a buckeyes team that was similarly excellent.  Lloyd had a great run here, he wasn't just some unworthy placeholder.

off-field incident has cost him a coaching job.  He may run a pro-style offense but he was aggressive, innovative coach.  He was ahead of his time IMO.  He sure can recruit and brought in a lot of great athletes.  It's a shame that he had an big off-field incident because he still would have led Michigan to a NC IMO and an even greater height.