Bacon said something interesting on 105.1

Submitted by M Gulo Gulo on

He said his souces wouldnt go on record so it is not in Endzone, but a caller brought up that Bandon made personel recommendations when he came in to watch film on Sundays with the staff (so not cool) and said he was thinking of firing Hoke midway through last season and bringing in Greg Schiano. Did anyone else hear about this or have any more information? 

As mentioned Bacon said he couldnt go into it but the way his voice sounded it wasnt difficult to tell there had to be some truth behind it.

SF Wolverine

August 25th, 2015 at 5:05 PM ^

every year (and that seems to be the case), it's pretty hard to imagine anything he would not do.  This sounds like just about what I'd expect from that knob.

Walter Sobchak

August 25th, 2015 at 5:09 PM ^

Oh god,no Schiano! Further evidence we go 9-3 regular season this year. Brandon really did break everything.

evenyoubrutus

August 25th, 2015 at 5:18 PM ^

I wonder if Hoke still defends him after this. Anyway I have wondered for a while if Hoke may actually be a decent coach in a mid major program if given autonomy, and that a big reason things got as bad as they did was due to Brandon meddling.

Gentleman Squirrels

August 25th, 2015 at 5:26 PM ^

Aren't Brandon and Hoke friends? Even if he was crap, Brandon was liked by most of the athletic department and student athletes. I'm sure Hoke will still stand up for him if asked.

From the way Hoke sounds in interviews recently, I wouldn't be surprised if Hoke thought that everything was going fine and that he just needed one more year to field a winning team. He did say that you need 5-6 years to properly implement a system. Even without Brandon's meddling, I don't think Hoke could have succeeded at Michigan. He didn't seem to have that killer instinct you need to drive a fire under your players and beat top-10 programs.

alum96

August 25th, 2015 at 5:37 PM ^

Agreed.  Hoke sounds like he thinks everything was very close and if not for a few key turnovers last year and a few young players he had to play, it would have been 10 win year and this year would have been special blah blah.   Delusional for a team who couldn't put 11 guys on the field for ST, and whose arch rival won the NC with a ton of young guys...

Hoke has 14 million reasons to love Brandon.  He set up 3-4  generations of his family.

MGoUberBlue

August 25th, 2015 at 5:16 PM ^

Contemporary college athletics have changed so dramatically over the years.  It used to be that the university would hire a former standout coach. 

UM was very fortunate to have Don Canham for 20 years as he had a tremendous athletic background and was an astute businessman.  We haven't had that for a while and thought that DB would fill the bill, but the guy never got the "sports should be fun" aspect and put forward a program that was all about business.

His screwups from the standpoint of both makes one wonder how this guy became CEO of Domino's.

He are all very fortunate that he is gone.

Go Blue!

 

grumbler

August 25th, 2015 at 5:45 PM ^

From everything I have seen, Michigan's astudent-athletes would disagree with you that Brandon "never got the 'sports should be fun' aspect."

Brandon's big problems were (1) an ego that let small problems become big problems, and (2) a failure to properly evaluate the long-term consequences of short-term optimizations.  These often overlapped; case in point: student seating.  The solution to the problem of students showing up late worked for one season pretty much the way he wanted, but in the long term just made students stop buying tickets.  He allowed his ego to dictate a solution that essentially punished the laggards, without considering that the alternative was to not have the laggards come at all.

umbig11

August 25th, 2015 at 5:19 PM ^

Hard to imagine he didn't offer his opinions. Just a sad state of affairs if he was going to bring Schiano in midway through the season. Now, both Hoke and Brandon look like they were in over their heads. So happy to be where we are today!

stephenrjking

August 25th, 2015 at 5:20 PM ^

This is a bit vague in the OP--it sounds like a caller (who could be anyone) said this, and all Bacon said was that he couldn't get into it. If so, that's a pretty flimsy thread to hang a theory on. Which is not to say that it is implausible, just that fourth-hand information like this is pretty corruptible even from reliable sources. I do put a lot of stock into things Bacon does say. He has enormous credibility within our niche, built upon years of strong reporting and validated through multiple pull-no-punch books that have given close and (so far) uncontradicted glimpses into the deepest recesses of the program. That both proves that he reports good stuff, and provides a natural shield against him engaging in baseless speculation, since there's no way he will blow years of cred to float theories that aren't backed by real facts. So when Bacon talks, we listen. Interested to get clarification on what he actually said here.

ppudge

August 25th, 2015 at 5:23 PM ^

All of these reports on Brandon reinforce the beliefs I already had about him as an incompetent AD. And they also make me think Mary Sue Coleman must have been high when she recommended him for the position. She gets some blame as well.

MainStreetMagic

August 25th, 2015 at 10:09 PM ^

So I had no idea about the Mary Sue halftime speech until recently, and finally Googled it.  Holy hell, she was bombed out of her mind.  Kind of mind-boggling that nobody had the sense to keep that from happening, but then again, this is Michigan athletics we're talking about here.

allintime23

August 25th, 2015 at 5:34 PM ^

Well, it all started with Martin. To say he wasn't almost as bad as Brandon would be foolish. Brandon just had the arrogance every MSU fan dreamed of. The last eight years was the perfect storm to damage Michigan Football to the core. Unfortunately for the pals down south and the buds up north Hackett was the perfect resolution. Next week the train gets back on track.

stephenrjking

August 25th, 2015 at 5:43 PM ^

Disagree. Martin wasn't perfect, but he's not even on the same planet as DB. People still hold some leftover hard feelings from the 2007 coaching search, and that might be where this comes from, but knowing what we now know about it, I believe Martin managed to salvage it pretty well. Of course, RichRod turned out not to work, and Martin erred in not paying assistants properly, but would I go back in time and get Les Miles, knowing what we know? No. Absolutely not.

stephenrjking

August 25th, 2015 at 6:46 PM ^

Lets have some fun here. For starters, contra a couple responses, Martin wasn't fishing. He was sailing on his Santa Cruz 70 racing yacht. But I have no doubt whatsoever that he knew exactly what he was doing when he boarded Stripes that week. He did not want to hire Les Miles. He had to deal with the different pressures in a smooth way. And he did it by vacating the premises. And he was right. Would Miles have been the right fit here? A man who openly disregards any sort of genuine discipline for players known to be involved in violent altercations? A coach who takes brilliant offensive talent and produces offenses that cannot score (hey, sounds familiar). A coach who thrives in the ultra-corrupt SEC at the head of a program that is as likely to be rife with cheating as any in the country? Two scenarios were available: he came to Michigan, cleaned up to honor Bo, and was exposed as a so-so coach who couldn't win without the rich SEC talent advantages; or, he came to Michigan, continued to flout the rules, and got fired either for protecting a domestic abuser (not cool in places like Ann Arbor) or blatant violation of NCAA rules, whichever event the not-as-compliant-as-the-South local media came across first. I believe that, based upon what was known at the time, Rodriguez was the best choice for the position. I think Martin's unorthodox and flawed search eventually wound up in the right place. And I believe Martin was, overall, good for Michigan.