Download the Bo->A&M story from HTTV 2016

Agreed.  All this "I can neither confirm or deny" crap that Harbaugh has been saying lately reeks of cowardice.  He may be more forthright with his team and coaches, but if he is we have no evidence of it.  I can only go by what I've read and what I've seen.

By now it is clear that his desire to coach in the NFL was/is bigger than his desire to do so at Michigan.  He doesn't owe any of us anything, but a little transparency throughout this process would have been nice.  Most of us would have understood.  If he leaves tomorrow then he's gone about this in the worst way possible.  The whole thing has an underhanded nature about it.

Couldn't give one fuck what Bo thinks frankly. I'm pissed at Jim but he's at least never done anything scandalous. 

Who fucking cares what Bo thinks? No one should be using him as an example of doing things the right way. Michigan can move forward without bringing up their former coach who looked the other way when his players were getting sexually abused. He has been an anchor on the program since he retired, but some of you still refuse to toss him overboard. 

Said it before and I'll say it again. Bo would just pretend this isn't happening.

Yeah and Robert Anderson

This is a really good point, and the reality is I'm not sure any coach really can be. We'll come to find out once the impact of NIL fully absorbs into the DNA of college football. For now, we're just coming out of an era where college football has become a billion dollar industry, where college football coaches have become the highest paid public employee in their respective state, and conferences are signing nine figure TV contracts, but technically the players should not see a dime of that money (wink, wink of course). 

When Bo Schembechler was coaching in the prime of his career, only the B1G Champion was eligible to make a bowl game.Some big time, prime time players were looking to get paid of of course, but the infrastructure and pay roll system didn't exist then like it does now. Basically, what Bo was trying to avoid then at A&M is how the game is played now in big time college football, and the marketing machine for coaches, for players and for recruits is not even comparable now to what it was then. 

Comparing Bo Schembechler or any coach of that era to today's coaching environment is like comparing Henry Ford and Elon Musk (whatever you think about him); same relative industry, completely different model. 

I'd like to think Hoke and Harbaugh and apparently so is Brian Flores.

If he’s gone, I’ll certainly be disappointed because I’ve really liked having him as our coach.  But a coach leaving college for the pros is a very different thing than, say, Brian Kelly or Lincoln Kelly leaving for another college job.  He won’t be competing against Michigan; he’ll be coaching on another level of football.  As with Beilein, I don’t think this should be regarded as some kind of betrayal, but simply him deciding to do something else with his life.

When you throw in that Harbaugh has previously coached in the NFL and was extremely successful doing so - he has one of the highest winning percentages in NFL history and was one score away from winning the Super Bowl - maybe it wasn’t realistic to expect him to never think about that again.

(That said, I wonder: if he had beaten his brother in that Super Bowl, would that have satisfied him with his NFL tenure?)

I’m happy at any rate that he came here at a brutal time for the program (we were 5-7 in 2014; OSU was the national champion and MSU was a year off a Big Ten title) and, despite a heartbreak in 2016, got us over the hump this year.  

McCartney had a few player issues in Boulder, as well. 

Hard pass on Bill, based on when I was in grad school at CU and he was the coach.

Maybe his trajectory would have been better if he had inherited the position at Michigan and only had to build on established success rather than build it out of primordial ooze. OTOH, he did show up to my graduation (Macky. not Folsom)

With Bo and Anderson both dead, we'll never know the full story. So of course it's possible that Bo knew more and covered it up. But there is a huge difference in both sexual assault awareness and the questioning of medical authority in 1982 vs. 2022. Anderson was a predator who used the pretext of his job to abuse countless people. And that's a tragedy. But from Bo's perspective, if we have to read tea leaves, isn't it at least possible that Bo thought those players were complaining to him about required prostate exams in a required physical (which obviously aren't pleasant even if required and given correctly) rather than complaining about sexual assault? Players weren't supposed to be receiving prostate exams during physicals even back then (and Anderson of course went far beyond normal exams). But Army physicals did require them at the time, and that may have been non doctor-Bo's frame of reference when hearing from those players. 

Any coach now should know that difference and what's involved in a physical, but that was a very different era where I doubt the medical side of college athletics was questioned much at any program. The UM Hospital/UHS/Medical School is another story because they received more detail and were actually in a position to know Anderson's actions were criminal. But I just don't see the connection from Bo to Anderson's abuse, at least from the facts out there now. And again, if we're trying to read tea leaves, I think it's only fair to look at how Bo handled another scandal where wrongdoing was alleged and he actually knew it. He literally called an FBI agent into his office to talk to Garland Rivers about an organized crime-affiliated agent who tried to bribe him. And Bo eventually testified at the trial to the point where the defense declined to cross-examine him.

Of course Matt Schembechler's accusation is a big deal. And obviously, if it's true, then any trace of Bo should be gone. But I just don't think he's credible. He had a bad relationship with Bo including multiple lawsuits. And both his brother and half-brother vehemently disagreed with the accusation. If it's true, I don't understand why it wouldn't be in the Wilmer Hale report. Nor do the facts add up that a brand new (and somewhat unknown at the time) coach would be able to go over the AD's head to protect a doctor before he even coached his first game. And before you jump down my throat, my dad played around that time and had to get physicals from this scumbag. I fully understand how shameful of a scandal this was, I grieve for the victims, and I acknowledge that a lot more is possible given what we don't know. But from what we do know, I think it's fair to question Bo's actual connection to Anderson's abuse. I'm sure many of you will point to Bo's Enron quote about even if you say you don't know, you should know. But there's a big difference between sticking your head in the sand and not realizing that a crime was even alleged.

JUB wrote a good piece on everything, and I agree with a lot of his points.

https://johnubacon.com/2021/06/dr-andersons-abuse-and-um-athletics-what-we-know-and-dont-know/